Chapter VI: Boadicea (3)

This was the period of the first _renaissance_, with its charms and imperfections, at once timid and capricious, imitating the models of antiquity in their details, but utterly mistaking the proportions which are the essential, while succeeding brilliantly in the accessories and ornaments borrowed from the ancients and used in profusion with some endeavor to adapt them to the ideas and needs of the period. The fundamental principle of architecture, which requires that the exterior should express or respond to the use for which the interior is destined, was unknown to Pintelli.

To break the monotony of the lines, the façade of any given building was, as it were, framed, decoration was freely used, and the object was to please the eye, no matter by what means. At that day, the architect was also the painter, and the majority of artists were both. The first _renaissance_ obtained its apogee toward the year 1500. In the nature of things it had then outlived its day, and a change became indispensable at the risk of degradation.

Fortunately Bramante was ready to answer the call. He was from Umbria, and Raphael was his nephew. He had studied in the north of Italy, where, amid plains devoid of stone, the architect was forced to use brick. Hence the novelty of combination introduced by him in Rome, whose inexhaustible stone quarries were such ancient monuments as the Coliseum. It is from the absence of heavy building-stone and the contrast of the German taste of the Longobards with the Byzantine style of Ravenna that the Lombard style is begotten. It brought with it precisely what the _renaissance_ most needed, namely, its exquisite sentiment of proportions, and it forms the transition between the two schools of the _renaissance_, the latter of which formed the golden era of architecture in Italy.

Its reign in Rome has left indelible traces. Its productions--and among them are the court of St. Damas, the Belvedere, the galleries of the Vatican, the Giraud palace--were the pride of the age. They taught the comprehension of proportions, the calculation of perspective, the culture of harmony of detail and _ensemble_, reformed false taste, and created an epoch in profane architecture. With increase of public security, even the Roman barons began to understand that the greatest beauty of the architectural art might be found elsewhere than in a high tower or a battlemented block-house. Even the _mezzo-ceto_, or middle class, began to contract a taste for something beyond the absolutely necessary, and sought to adorn even their modest habitations. A private dwelling-house built at this period and exclusively _bramantesque_ may still be seen in Rome on the _strada papale_, opposite the _Governo Vecchio_. It yet bears the date of its construction (1500) and the name of its builder.

After the death of Bramante appeared Raphael, Michael Angelo, Giulio Romano, and Balthasar Peruzzi, who, prodigal of their treasures of genius, created a golden age.

Romano's Villa Madama became the type of the country-seat; Peruzzi's Farnesina, that of the modern palace. Raphael, more as painter than as architect, composed the designs of the palace Vidoni. It was the great epoch of the culture of simplicity in grandeur, of disdain for the small and the superfluous, of faithful and noble expression of the idea conceived.

The models of antiquity were still followed, but they were transformed. The architect translated modern conceptions into the sonorous but dead and strange language of the old Romans. In interior ornamentation, however, the artist could give free rein to his inspirations, and throw off the trammels of the severe rules scrupulously followed as to the façade and the general composition of the design. Alas! it was here they planted the germs of degeneration and decay. Public taste--never a safe guide--seized upon and clung to these prodigalities of an exuberant and fantastic imagination supposed to be inexhaustible. At Florence, in his work on the chapel of the Medicis, Michael Angelo was the first to enter this flowery but treacherous path.

We see and admire these niches, windows, and ornaments, charming indeed to the eye, but which have no _raison d'être_. It was at a later period, under the pontificate of Paul III., that the painter of the "Last Judgment" and the sculptor of "Moses" revealed himself at Rome, as an architect stamped his work on the Farnese palace, and astonished the world by reconstructing St. Peter's. Soon this style gained the upper hand. Simplicity yielded to riches; logic to caprice; unrestricted liberty succeeded the voluntary curb which the great masters of the epoch had imposed upon themselves. Presently came pauses. Halts were made. As in all human affairs, action and reaction succeeded. Not so much in details as in _ensemble_, Vignoli in Rome, Palladio at Vicenza, and to a certain degree Scamazzi in Venice, brought back architecture to the sobriety of the commencement of the century.

But the death of Michael Angelo appeared to have completely demoralized the architects who survived. For thirty years he had reigned supreme. In him alone had the popes confidence; and upon architects employed by them, they imposed the obligation of following him. Piero Ligorio, architect of St. Peter, was dismissed because he manifested an intention to put aside Michael Angelo's plans. In thus officially guarding the manes of the dead master, they apparently hoped to transfer his genius to those who succeeded him. But it was a sad and fatal mistake.

The amount of building effected in Rome during the last third of the sixteenth century has never, probably, been exceeded. In examining the productions of that epoch, the struggle between the servile imitators of Buonarotti and the men of progress, desirous, but through lack of originality incapable, of emancipating themselves, is readily discerned. But let us leave this retrospect, descend the steps of the Pincian Hill, and, traversing the Piazza di Spagna and the Via Condotti, enter

THE CORSO AGAIN,

at the points where to-day's tourist sees the Via della Fontanella, by which he goes toward the bridge of St. Angelo, on his way to St. Peter's. Here our travellers of 1585, passing under the arch of Marcus Aurelius, which separated the Corso into two distinct parts, and was afterwards swept away by Alexander VII. to straighten and widen the thoroughfare, find themselves really in Rome. On either side are solidly built houses without windows or balconies, covered with frescoes, and so high that the sun reaches the pavement only at mid-day. Looking down the Corso, the traveller perceives at its extremity, above the _palazetto_ of St. Mark, the battlemented convent of _Ara Cœli_, and the tower of the Capitol. Leaving the Colonna place and the Antonine column to the right, our travellers soon reach the place and palace of St. Mark, with its immense battlemented façades, surmounted by a colossal tower built of stone almost entirely taken from the Coliseum. With the exception of some few modifications in the windows of the façade fronting on the Via del Gesú, and in the roof of the tower which formerly projected, this palace--now known as the Austrian--to-day appears to us as the traveller saw it three hundred years ago. Near by is the Church and Convent of the Apostles, where in after-years were shown the cells occupied by the two friars who became respectively Sixtus V. and Clement XIV. (Ganzanelli). When the monks of this convent called in a body upon Sixtus V. to felicitate him on his accession, the cook of the community went up alone to the pope at the close of the audience. "Holy Father," said he, "you doubtless remember the wretched repasts of which you partook when with us?" Sixtus replied that the expression "wretched repasts" perfectly described the meals in question. "Well," continued the cook, "the cause was the want of good water--give us water."

Sixtus declared that this was the only reasonable demand yet made of him, and immediately ordered the construction in the ancient court of a beautiful fountain, which, although much injured by time, yet exists.

Still progressing towards the Capitol, our travellers pass the _Gesú_. In the small house adjoining it Ignatius Loyola died, and St. Francis Borgia has but lately expired there. And now they ascend to the Capitol by the _cordonata_ of Michael Angelo. Looking still onward, they catch a glimpse of the Forum (_Campo Vaccino_), enlivened only by droves of browsing cattle and here and there a searcher of buried antique statues. Beyond the Arch of Titus all is silent solitude.

The modern, active, living

ROME OF THAT DAY

was within the triangle bounded by the Corso, the Tiber, and the Capitol. Our travellers turn their faces towards the St. Angelo Bridge, and approach it by long, narrow, and crooked streets, nearly corresponding with the Via Giulia and the Monserrato which we to-day traverse. This was the Faubourg St. Germain of the period, full of palaces, but stately and silent. The strangers find the activity, movement, display, and exuberant activity of Rome in the street now known as the _Banchi_, then lined with the residences of wealthy bankers, in the rich Spanish quarter beyond the Piazza Navona, in the _Tordinone_ and _Coronari_.

From the rising to the setting of the sun, throngs of people fill these badly paved thoroughfares, which are more thickly lined with palaces as they approach the bridge. Our strangers are impressed with the great crowd of people, and are of the opinion that it exceeds that of the Marais in Paris, and is second only to the throngs they saw in Venice. About the Pantheon and the Minerva are the houses already mentioned where travellers and visitors to Rome find furnished suites of apartments--the Fifth Avenue and St. Nicholas Hotels of the period. A few years later (1595), on beholding this, the Venetian ambassador writes that "Rome has reached the apogee of its grandeur and prosperity."

With difficulty a passage through the crowd is effected, and the task is rendered even dangerous by the large number of carriages in circulation.

In 1594, there were eight hundred and eighty-three private carriages in the city. They were almost an essential. The great St. Charles Borromeo said, "There are two things necessary in Rome--save your soul and keep a carriage." And a singular-looking carriage it was to our eyes. In shape resembling a cylinder open at both ends, with doors at either side, knocked and tossed about in a sort of basket on four clumsy wheels. The elegants and beaux of the day usually had an opening in the top of the vehicle through which, as they progressed, they admired fair ladies at their windows. "They make an astrolabe of their carriage," thundered a preacher in denunciation of the practice. The crowd increases as the St. Angelo Bridge is approached, and it equals the human pressure of the period of the jubilee as described by Dante:[94]

Come i Roman, per l'esercito molto,
L'anno del giubbileo, su per lo ponte
Hanno a passar la gente modo tolto;

Che dall' un late tutti hanno la fronte
Verso 'l castello, e vanno a Santo Pietro;
Dall' altra sponda vanno verso 'l monte (Giordano).

_Dante_, _Inferno_, ch. xviii.

No ladies are seen. They seldom go out, and then only in carriages. We find the modern Italians highly demonstrative. Their ancestors were more so, as our travellers noticed at every step. Men meeting acquaintances in the street exchanged profound bows. Friends embraced "with effusion." People threw themselves on their knees before those of whom they had favors to ask.

DINNERS AND BANQUETS

for invited guests were sumptuous and of long duration. The culinary art of that epoch--as we learn from a work of Bartholomew Scarpi, the _Grand Vatel_ of the sixteenth century and head cook of the saintly Paul V., whose personal meals cost sixty cents a day, but who, in state receptions, entertained magnificently--was something wonderful, according to our modern ideas. For grand dinners, there were four courses. The first consisted of preserved fruits and ornamented pastry, from which, on being opened, little birds flew out, making it literally a _vol au vent_. Then came the other courses composed of a multitude of the most diverse dishes, poultry with all the feathers on, capons cooked in bottles, meat, game, and fish, alternating with sweet dishes in confused pell-mell, utterly subversive of all our modern gastronomic ideas. Some dishes were prepared with rose-water, and substances the most heterogeneous and contradictory were mingled in the same preparations. The sublimity of the style was to effect the sharpest possible contrast of materials and odors.

The wines most in favor were the heady wines of Greece, the Malvoisy, and the great Neapolitan brands, the Lachrima and the _Mangiaguerra_, described as black in color, powerful, spirituous, and so thick that it could almost be cut. So, at least, reports the Venetian Bernardo Navagero, writing from Rome in 1558: "E possente e gagliardo, nero e tantospesso che si potria quasi tagliare."

Before the dessert, the cloth was removed, the guests washed their hands, and the table was covered with sweet dishes, highly perfumed, preserved eggs, and syrups.

Both before and after the repast, distinguished guests used what we would now call finger-bowls and mouth-glasses, demonstratively and even noisily. On arising from table, bouquets of flowers were distributed among the guests. From contemporaneous statements as to the cost of various entertainments of that period, we should judge that the Roman provision supply was much cheaper than we to-day find it in those marvels of modern architecture, the Washington and Fulton Markets. Thus, for instance, a wedding-supper, given by a Roman nobleman (Gottofredi), and which was at the time (1588) noted for its beauty as well as its extravagance, cost five hundred crowns, equivalent, allowing for the difference in specie values, to about nine hundred dollars of our money.

THE HORSE-RACES ON THE CORSO,[95]

during the carnival, are, of course, witnessed by our travellers. These races were formerly one of the traditional holiday amusements of the Piazza Navona, which is on the site of a Roman amphitheatre, and they were transferred to the Corso by Paul II. (1468). Seated in the small room of the corner of the Palazetto of St. Mark, whose windows command a view of the entire length of the Corso, this good-natured pontiff, who was fond of promoting the innocent amusement of his subjects, witnessed the running, and had the _barberi_ (little horses) stopped at that point. The poor governors of Rome have ever since borne and still bear the servitude of this tradition. Four hundred years have gone by since Paul II. sat at the window on the Corso, but to this day the Governor of Rome, clothed in the official robes, whose cut and fashion have not varied a line in all that time, must, in the very same room and at the very same window, witness the running and have the horses stopped at the same points. Under Gregory XIII. these races had somewhat degenerated. Buffaloes of the Campagna, as well as horses, were run, and races were even made for children and for Jews. Sixtus V. reformed all this and made new regulations, which, with slight modifications, are to this day in force.

LITERATURE AND THE THEATRE.

At the period of which we treat, there existed a decided taste for the drama--such as it then was--but it was a taste exercised under difficulties. During the carnival of 1588, permission was obtained, as a great favor, from Sixtus V. to allow representations by the Desiosi troupe, at that time the most celebrated in Italy. But the license was hampered with the following conditions:

_First._ The representations should take place in the daytime.

_Second._ No woman should appear on the stage.

_Third._ No spectator should be admitted with arms about his person.

Such a public edifice as a theatre was at that time unknown in Italy. True, many princes had halls constructed in their palaces for dramatic representations, and the Olympic Academy of Vicenza erected a building for the purpose, which was completed on the designs of Palladio.

As for the dramas represented, it is easy to understand their inferiority when we know that Guarini's _Pastor Fido_ gained a reputation not yet entirely lost, by reason not of its merit, but because of the inferiority of every dramatic production of the time.

The costumes, decorations, and _mise en scène_ formed the main attractions, but the plays themselves loudly proclaimed the decay of literature. They possessed neither originality, invention, nor poetry. When we contemplate our own elevated and purified stage of the present period, with its bouffe, Black Crook, blondes, and brigands, how profoundly should we not pity the benighted Italians of 1585!

About this time, the first edition of Tasso's _Jerusalem Delivered_ made its appearance. Issued without the author's consent, it was both defective and incorrect. In spite of the enmity of the Grand Duke Francis and, what was more to be feared, of the opposition of the Della Cruscan Academy, the _Jerusalem_ at once achieved an immense success--a success purely due to its beauty of diction. Contemporary criticisms of Italian poets whose names have since become immortal read strangely now. Tasso was sneered at, Ariosto's merit seriously contested, and Dante absolutely condemned.

"This poet," says Giuseppe Malatesta, a distinguished writer of that day, "has borrowed the wings of Icarus to remove himself as far as possible from the vulgar, and, by dint of searching for the sublime, he has fallen into an obscure sea of obscurities. He is both philosopher and theologian. Of the poet he has only the rhyme. To measure his hell, his purgatory, his paradise, one needs astrolabes. To understand them, one should constantly have at hand some theologian capable of commenting upon his text. He is crude and barbarous; he strives to be disgusting and obscure when it would really cost him less effort to be clear and elegant, resembling in this certain great personages who, possessed of an admirable calligraphy, nevertheless, through pure affectation, write as illegibly as possible."

FOOTNOTES:

[93] The materials for this article are found in the learned work of Gregorovius (_Geschichte der Stadt Rom_), the publication of which, commenced at Stuttgardt in 1859, is not yet fully completed; in Baron Hübner's _Life of Sixtus V._; Burckhardt's _Cicerone in Italy_; and Von Reumont's classical work on _Middle Ages Rome_.

[94]

Even as the Romans, for the mighty host,
The year of jubilee, upon the bridge,
Have chosen a mode to pass the people over.

For all upon one side towards the castle
Their faces have and go into St. Peter's;
On the other side they go towards the mountain.

_Longfellow's Translation_

[95] The reader will, of course, remember that these were races of horses without riders.

THE MOTHER OF PRINCE GALITZIN.[96]

In presenting our American Catholic readers with a notice of the _Life of the Princess Amelia Galitzin_, it would be sufficient apology to mention that this illustrious lady was the mother of the great religious pioneer of Pennsylvania--that worthy priest whose services in the cause of Catholicity in our country have endeared his name to the American church and have kept his memory still alive in the filial love born of a new generation whose fathers he evangelized.

But even if this apostle-prince had never landed on American shores; never sacrificed an opulent position and a brilliant career, to labor as a humble missionary in the wild western forests of Pennsylvania; never indelibly engraved his name, as he has done, on that soil, now teeming with industrial and religious life, there is that in the life of the princess, his mother, which would amply recommend it to our interested attention.

Her career was beyond the common run of lives. It was wonderful in its blending of the ordinary with the extraordinary. It is the story of a great, strong mind--a high-principled soul, entrammelled in circumstances commonplace, disadvantageous, and entirely beneath it, struggling for ascendency to its own level above them. A notice, then, of her life possesses a double interest for our readers--its own intrinsic interest, and that which it borrows from the foreshadowing of the great and useful life spent in our country, with which we have already been made acquainted, and of which, we are glad to learn, we are soon to have a more extended account.

The Princess Amelia Galitzin was born at Berlin, in August, 1748. Her father, the Count de Schmettau, a field-marshal of Prussia, was a Protestant. Her mother, the Baroness de Ruffert, was a Catholic. This difference in the religion of the parents led to the understanding that the children of the marriage should receive, according to their sex, a different religious education. Amelia, the only daughter, was destined, then, to be educated in the Catholic faith. For this purpose she was sent, at the early age of four years, to a Catholic boarding-school at Breslau.

It seems that at this establishment the religious as well as the secular training was sadly defective; for, at the end of nine years, the young countess left the _pensionnat_ with no instruction, little piety--even that little of a false kind--and with but one accomplishment, a proficiency in music, the result of the cultivation of a great natural talent. As for literary acquirements, she scarce could read or write. Another school was now selected for her, and this selection reveals the negligent character of her mother, who, from failing to use a wise discretion, or to exert that softening and moulding influence that mothers hold as a gift from nature, may be held accountable for the troubled darkness and painful wanderings of mind that afflicted her daughter in her curious after-career. At thirteen she was placed at a kind of day-college, in Berlin, directed by an atheist. Such a step would have been a dangerous experiment, even with a child of the most ordinary mind, whose impressions are easily effaceable, but with the self-reliant spirit and keen intellect that were destined to be developed in Amelia, it was more than dangerous, it was a ruinous trial. The results of her eighteen months' attendance at this school were not immediately apparent, at least they were but negatively so. At scarcely fifteen years of age, she left this atheist school to become a woman of the world, by making what is technically called her entrance into society. What that entailed on a member of a noble house, and in a gay capital like Berlin, especially the Berlin of the eighteenth century, we may well surmise. There was another feature in its society worth attention, beyond the stereotyped round of _lévées_, _soirées_, and midnight revels of high life. The great dark cloud of incredulity had just settled on sunny France. France then stood at the head of the western nations. A reflection of her brilliancy was found in surrounding societies. Imitation of her tastes, literary and material, was deemed no disgrace. Even her quick, dancing, musical language was ludicrously set, by fashion, to the rough, guttural tones of the Teutonic tongue--so great was her fascinating influence. No wonder, then, that the thick shadows of that dark cloud in which she had shrouded her faith should have fallen heavily around her. They fell on Prussia, and fell heaviest when Voltaire became the guest of Frederick. The fœtid, contagious atmosphere floated in on the society of her capital. To be rational was the rage, when rational meant incredulous. Statesmen became skilled in the new philosophy. Since the king had turned philosopher, grand ladies suddenly found themselves profoundly intellectual and controversial, and their drawing-rooms became like the _salons de Paris_--no longer the frivolous halls of pleasure, the depots for the lively gossip of the _niaiseries_ of life, but private school-rooms, inner circles in aid of the grand revolt of reason against God which had already begun throughout Europe.

In such society, then, did this young girl, fresh from an atheist school, find herself at the age of fifteen, with no arm of a Christian to do battle for her soul; neither the "shield of faith" nor "the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God." But, happily, that society was not immediately to possess her young heart. An _ennui_--a nameless weariness--intensified by a morbid self-love, now settled on her mind. And it was in this trial that her defective instruction first began to tell against her. The only relic of its early impressions left her was a confused notion of the horrors of hell and the power of the devil, which now rose before her but to increase her misery. Beyond that, she believed in nothing, hoped for little in this life, and saw not the next. True, she accompanied her mother to Mass on Sunday, but to her it was as an idle show. She understood as little about the ceremonies as about the text of the delicately-bound French prayer-book she was obliged to hold in her hand. She could find nothing in what she knew or saw of religion to fill the void that caused the weariness of her heart. She determined to seek relief in reading. Her father's library was scant. So she sent rather a confiding request to the proprietor of a neighboring reading-room to supply a young lady who was anxious to improve herself with useful books. This gentleman's ideas of improvement and utility were somewhat singular, for he forthwith dispatched a large packet of sensational romances. With the same confiding spirit she accepted the selection, and novel after novel she fairly devoured, devoting night and day to her new occupation. That the frivolities of a gay society had no attractions for her as a resource in her extremity, that they could not "minister to her mind diseased," shows a soul of no ordinary mould, and shows, too, that it was not through the senses, but through the intellect, that its cravings were to be allayed. Comparative peace of mind returned, for she made her reading a very preoccupying labor by keeping a diary of its results and impressions. Music, always her favorite pastime, she now made her recreation.

She was just beginning to taste the sweets of living in a little peaceful, busy world within herself, when a young lady, who had been an intimate friend of hers, was admitted to a share in her occupations. This resulted in not only breaking her utter isolation from society, but in leading her to mingle in it once more. The calm of the previous months was not entirely undisturbed. At intervals the thoughts of her utter irreligiousness would conjure up again those appalling images of Satan and hell, and their recurrence became more frequent as she relented in her labors. But now in the gay drawing-room assemblies she met many ladies of her own rank who, professing to be Catholics, did not hesitate to express freely, in their brilliant conversations, the sentiments of incredulity which filled her own mind. In their example she found her self-justification. She believed it fashionable to think and act as other ladies, and so, dismissing what she now deemed her idle fancies, she permitted herself undisturbed to glide into the easy way of unbelief.

But an unseen mercy followed on her path, and soon again cast before her warning signs of her danger. Her fears of the supernatural grew again; and this time, in spite of every example, in spite of every effort to treat them as fancies that could be laughed away, they increased to such an extent that her health became endangered. Once more she formed a plan of escape from her terrors of mind and the weariness they entailed--this time an unaccountable and for her an unexpected one. She resolved to devote herself to meditation, that, as she said in her journal, "by force of thought she might raise herself to union with the Supreme Being," and thus neutralize the effects of the frightful pictures of eternal punishments which wearied her imagination. We cannot help seeing in this effort a noble struggle of a great mind, untutored in childhood, and left in early youth without guidance or encouraging support.

She immediately entered on her new project, and made great and persevering efforts; but she groped in the dark and made little progress in meditating. Yet these efforts were not wholly unavailing. She succeeded by her bare strength of thought in impressing deeply and thoroughly on her mind the dignity of a highly moral life, which led her to the conviction that everything gross or vile was utterly unworthy of the noble soul that dwelt within us.

What child of sixteen have we ever known or heard of whose young life presents a history of mind so curious and so wonderful? Few even of riper years have ever displayed a mere, bare natural power of soul at once so strong and so refined as that which led Amelia to so beautiful a conclusion.

Be that as it may, it was for her a saving result in the change that was now about to come over her position in life. It was arranged at this time, by her parents, that the young countess should join the court, in the capacity of lady robe-keeper to the wife of Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia, brother to Frederick II.

If we called the court society of that epoch gilded corruption, we believe we would be epitomizing the detailed chronicle of its character. Yet, armed with her high-souled conviction, Amelia glided untainted through its seductions and scandals, though her youth and beauty and the affectionate simplicity of her manners made her the object of much attention.

From the character of her mind we may well imagine that she had little relish for her new duties. To any one of a high order of intellect, and consequent intellectual aspirations, the mean, material duties of arranging a wardrobe, sorting dresses, seeing them set out in their respective turns, and changed with every changing fashion--in a word, being a mere waiting-maid to any one, no matter of what rank, must necessarily be irksome and distasteful. And though we will not draw the exaggerated sarcastic picture that Lord Macaulay gives of Frances Burney's life at the court of England, yet the fact that the young countess stole many an hour from her irksome post and still more wearying ceremonious court-pleasures to enjoy the instructive conversation of elderly men of known literary tastes and acquirements, gives us full ground for at least compassionating her in a position so evidently unbefitting her gifted and aspiring mind.

In her twentieth year she accompanied the princess on a summer trip to the waters at Aix-la-Chapelle and Spa. It was during their residence at the former place she first met and received the addresses of the Prince Dmitri Galitzin. The story of their love does not seem to possess anything above the ordinary interest, and even extended over a much shorter period than is usual before marriage. All we learn about it is, that the match seemed very advantageous in the eyes of her protectress the princess and her brother, General Count de Schmettau (her mother, long extremely delicate, having died during her residence at the court), and that the marriage ceremony was performed with great _éclat_ in August of the same year in which the proposal had been made and accepted.

Almost immediately after her marriage she had to set out with her husband for the court of St. Petersburg, of which he was an attaché. Her sojourn, however, in the Russian capital was very brief, for soon after his arrival the prince was sent as ambassador to the Hague, in Holland. Five years previously he had filled the same post at Paris, where he became the intimate friend of Voltaire and Helvetius. For the latter he paid the expenses of the publication of his famously infamous work, _De l'Esprit_. He himself seems to have been quite a _littérateur_. He contributed, while in Paris, to the _Journal des Savants_, and published two or three works of a scientific and political character. But to return.

A new life now opened for Amelia at the Hague. She became the star of the brilliant society that daily filled the halls of the palace of the Prince Ambassador of Russia; she lived in courtly splendor, and received the flattery of homage that queens might have coveted.

She had now resided two years in Holland, and had given birth to two children, a daughter and a son. It may be naturally expected that now the duties of a mother would bring her life and her mind to the level of ordinary interest. Not so. The routine duties of her station had all along been tasteless to her. The constant round of pleasures which engaged her, the flatteries she received, in which meaner minds would have loved to live and revel, had for her no soothing or beguiling influence; not even the total change of existence and occupation which married life induces wrought any change upon her spirit. An aching void was still within her heart, and, seeing nothing around her with which to fill it, she began to pine away. At length a strong inclination seized her, one of those yearnings for some one project which swallows all our thoughts and to which all else must yield; we may call it a humor precisely in Ben Jonson's sense:

"When some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man that it doth draw
All his effects, his spirits, and his powers
In their confluxions, all to run one way,
This may be truly said to be a humor."

This humor was nothing less than entire abandonment of the world and its cares. Notwithstanding the obligations of her married life or those of her position in society, she determined to retire to some solitary spot, and there engage her mind in hard study of difficult and dry subjects.

Alarmed for her health, and probably deriving little comfort from such a moody consort, her husband consented to her retiring to live in a small country villa a few miles from the Hague. She engaged a distinguished professor of the city, named Hemsterhuys, to give her lessons in Greek, with a view to following under his guidance, too, a course of Greek philosophy.

Strange to say, the moment she entered with ardor on this uninviting task, her mind became completely calmed, and she felt a peace and contentment which for years she had not known.

Besides the seeking of her own peace of mind, the resting the weariness of her heart, she had another object in view--to prepare herself to be doubly the mother of her children by imparting to them herself a thorough education. In the six years that she toiled in this seclusion, this was the great sustaining motive of her labors.

When the children grew to the years of discretion, she relented in her harder studies to devote herself with no less assiduity to their early instruction. Everything was made subservient to that end. Even the recreations requisite for herself, and the amusements necessary for them, the pleasure excursions away from home, all were designed to open and mature their young minds.

But in these respects Holland had but poor resources. One quickly wearies of its changeless lowlands. It can boast of no wild scenery which grows new at every gaze and invites repeated visits, and it has few places of any peculiarly instructive interest. It was this consideration that determined the princess to remove to the more picturesque and favored land of Switzerland, where her husband owned a country-house near Geneva.

Her preparations for this change of residence were nearly completed, when news reached her of the projects of the Abbé de Furstenberg for a reform in the method of public instruction.

This Abbé de Furstenberg was one of the most remarkable men of that day in Germany.

Of noble birth, he received a thorough civil and ecclesiastical education, and at the age of thirty-five found himself chief administrator, spiritual and temporal, of the principality of Münster, under the prince-bishop. His administration was attended with most marked success, and had brought the little state to an unequalled degree of prosperity, not only religious and political, but even commercial and military. His latest labor was his educational reform regarding the method of teaching. To mature this scheme, he had studied, consulted, and travelled much during seven years. When, at length, he published the result of his researches, it was received far and near with much applause, whose echoes had now reached the Princess Amelia in Holland on the eve of her departure for Switzerland. She at once indefinitely deferred this journey, and resolved to lose no time in making the acquaintance of this accomplished ecclesiastic, in order to master under his own guidance the details of this new method of instruction. For this purpose, in the May of the year 1779, she set out for Münster, intending to pay only a short visit. She remained nineteen days, and, though the greater part of the time was spent in the company of the learned abbé, she found it impossible in so short a space to take in the result of his experience. This, and probably a certain charm which his great conversational powers exercised over her, made her determine to return again, and, with the permission of her husband, remain a whole year in Münster before setting out for Switzerland. Consequently, in the same year, she took leave of her husband and her old preceptor Hemsterhuys, purposing not to return to the Hague, but to pursue her Swiss project after her year's sojourn at Münster. But this programme was never to be carried out. Any one who has ever felt the influence of our affections on our plans and schemes--how plastic they are beneath them, how readily they yield in their direction--will easily divine the cause of this. In fact, so strong had grown this intellectual friendship between the princess and the Abbé de Furstenberg that every idea of going to Switzerland yielded before it; so much so that, before the end of the year, she had purchased a house in Münster, and engaged a country-château for the summer months of every year.

All this time she had kept up a frequent correspondence with her husband and her old professor, and she had made them promise to come and spend as long a time as they could spare every summer at her country-seat.

She was yet in the unchristian portion of her life. In her conversation and communications with Hemsterhuys, she had worked out a complete scheme of natural virtue and happiness, which she embodied in a work entitled _Simon; or, The Faculties of the Soul_. While we must admit that this is a curious specimen of a mere human, religionless view of a virtuous and happy life, yet we cannot allow that it could have been drawn up had not some faint remembrances of early Christian teaching still lingered in the mind of the authoress; much less can we grant that it could have been realized in any life without the sustaining aid of divine grace. Even if it were practicable, its practicability would, from its very character, be necessarily limited to a few rarely gifted minds; consequently, lacking the generalizing principles of the truly Christian code, which makes a life of Christian virtue accessible to all, the lowly and the great, the rude and the wise alike, it is assuredly a failure.

She now applied herself with great assiduity to her children's education. Not content with imparting the mere rudimentary portion, she aimed at giving them a higher and more thorough course of instruction than most of our graduating colleges can boast. It was a bold task for a woman, but the order of her day at Münster shows us how little its difficulty could bend the will or weary the mind of one who could unswervingly follow the regulations it contained.

The household rose early every morning. Some hours were devoted to study before breakfast, and soon after the lessons of the day began. To these she gave six hours daily. With the exception of classic literature and German history, for which she engaged the services of the two distinguished professors, Kistermaker and Speiskman, she gave unaided all the other lessons.

She had competent persons to superintend the studies of the young prince and his sister while she was engaged in her own, but she reserved the teaching exclusively to herself. She very often spent entire nights in preparation for the morrow's instruction. After the labors of the day, she always devoted the evenings to conversation. It was then she received the visits of Furstenberg and a number of his literary friends, among whom was the Abbé Overberg, with whom she was afterwards to be so intimately related. Her old friend Hemsterhuys sometimes made one of the party, and he was the only one of her guests at that time who was not a Catholic.

This was the beginning, the nucleus of that brilliant literary circle which, a little later, became so famous throughout Germany.

Invitations to the literary _soirées_ of the princess soon began to be coveted as no common honor. The most distinguished Protestant authors and _savants_ sought introduction to that Catholic society, and even infidels who did not openly scoff at religion were soon found among its members. It would have been a sight of curious interest, standing aside unseen in that drawing-room on any evening of their reunions, to watch that strangely mingled crowd. The Princess Amelia is evidently the ruling spirit, and the marks of respect and homage which her distinguished visitors pay her on their arrival tell plainly that her presence is not the least among the attractions of that pleasant assembly. Scattered through the room are men of the most varied minds and opposite views. There were many there who had already acquired literary notoriety of no mean degree. There were many more, the history of whose minds would have been the story of the anxious doubts and bold speculations of unbelief which swayed society in the waning of the eighteenth century.

In the charm of that literary circle, Jacobi found rest from his restless scepticism. There Hamann could quiet his troubled mind. The cold infidelity of Claude thawed in the presence of venerable ecclesiastics and before the influence of their dignity and learning. Even Goethe himself confessed that the pleasantest hours of his life were passed in the society of the Princess Galitzin. During three years, these reunions were a literary celebrity.

Though the princess had not allowed her mind to be tainted by the impious philosophy of her time, and had formed, with the assistance of Hemsterhuys, a better philosophical system of her own, founded on the idea of the divinity, yet in all her views she was completely rationalistic, rejecting all positive religion. And she had to confess, too, the defectiveness of her system in its practical bearing on her life; for at this time she complained feelingly, in one of her letters, that instead of growing better, according to her idea of virtue and happiness, she was daily growing worse.

In the spring of 1783, she fell dangerously ill. Furstenberg took this first opportunity to persuade her to taste of the consolations of religion, and to try the virtue of the sacraments of the church. But, though he actually sent her a confessor, she declined his services, alleging that she had not sufficient faith, promising, however, at the same time, that, if her life were spared, she would turn her thoughts seriously to the subject of religion. It was spared, and she kept her promise; but it was a long time before her reflections took any definite shape or had any practical result. This was undoubtedly owing to a want of direction, and we cannot divine why, among so many distinguished clerical friends, one was not found to do her this kindly office. Yet so it was, and, most likely, the fault was all her own.

The time had now come when her children were of an age to receive religious instruction; and, this being a part of the self-imposed task of their education, she determined not to shrink from it. But what to teach them, when she herself knew nothing, was a most perplexing question. Hitherto her own researches only plunged her into a restless uncertainty of soul which betrayed itself even in her sleep. Her conscience would not allow her to impart to her children her own unbelief, nor yet permit her to instruct them in a religion of whose truth she herself was not convinced. She relieved herself from this perplexity by deciding not so much to instruct them in any religion as to give them a history of religion in general, abstaining from any comments that might betray her own incredulity, or be an obstacle to the choice she intended they should subsequently make for themselves.

To fit herself for this task, she commenced the study of the Bible. This was the turning-point in her destiny; she held in her hands, at length, what was designed to be for her the instrument of divine grace. Long years ago, when a child, at the Breslau boarding-school, it had been remarked that, when nothing else could curb her proud and self-willed nature, an appeal to her affections never failed of its effect. That tenderness of her young heart was to be her salvation.

She opened the sacred text to seek there only dry historic facts, which she was to note down and relate to her children. For aught that concerned herself, the study was undertaken with a careless, incredulous disinterestedness. But as she went on and on through the sacred volume, and the sublime character of the Almighty was unfolded before her in all the beauty and tendernesses of his mercies, and shining in all the brightness of his wisdom, her soul was moved, her heart was deeply touched; she bowed down before the omnipotent Creator, and, for the first time, felt herself a creature. She read on still; she came to the Gospel, that record breathing love--compassionate, prodigal love--on every page, and before its charm her heart melted, her pride of intellect faded away, her life came before her as a useless dream, and her tears flowed fast upon the sacred page; for now she not only felt what it was to be a creature, but had realized what it was to be _saved_.

Her work now became a labor of love. She not only taught her children, but she instructed herself. With her usual intrepidity of intellect, she was soon acquainted with every mystery of our holy religion, and with every duty of the Catholic life. From the knowledge to the fulfilment of her duty was always with Amelia an easy step; consequently, she began immediately to prepare herself for a general confession. After a long and serious examination of her whole life, she at length made it, on the feast of St. Augustine, 1786, and, a few days later, approached the holy communion, for the first time, with feelings of deep and tender devotion.

From this moment, a complete change was wrought in her whole manner. Her habitual melancholy gave way to a cheering serenity, which was as consoling as it was agreeable and charming to all around her. Her children and her many friends were greatly struck with the visible effects which divine grace had so evidently produced in her soul.

She now wished, for her more rapid advancement in perfection, to place her conscience entirely under the direction of the saintly Abbé Overberg. She was not content to have him merely as her confessor, but she wished to enter on the same relations--to have the same intimate friendship with him--as existed between St. Vincent de Paul and Mme. de Gondi, St. Francis de Sales and St. Jane de Chantal, St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa. Though she had written to him several times on the subject of her direction, yet she never dared fully to propose her project to him, lest he might reject her request altogether. However, she took courage at last, and, to her great joy, she was not disappointed.

This holy priest took up his residence in her palace in 1789, and remained there, in the capacity of chaplain, even after her death.

In the following year, Hemsterhuys, her old friend and preceptor, died; and in this year, also, the young Prince Dmitri, having finished an education which would have fitted him for any position or profession in life, took leave of his mother, to commence, in accordance with the fashion, his post-educational travels. For what particular reason he turned his steps toward the New World does not appear. It was during the voyage that he resolved to embrace and profess the Catholic faith. But Providence had designed for him more than a visit to the United States; his life and his labors in our country have made the name of Galitzin a familiar and much-loved word to American Catholics.

In 1803, the husband of the princess died suddenly at Brunswick. This loss she felt most keenly. He had ever been to her a good and indulgent husband, yielding, with even an abundance of good nature, to all her plans, and never interfering with the various projects of her life. We may suppose, too, that her grief was deepened as his unexpected death suddenly blighted all her hopes for his conversion.

But sore trials of another kind yet awaited her. The property of the prince, which, by the marriage contract, should have reverted to her in trust for her children, was seized by his relatives. Penury threatened her for a time, but her appeal was, at length, heard by the Emperor Alexander, and the property was restored.

Meanwhile, she began to suffer from a painful malady which produced hypochondria. The patient, plaintless manner in which she bore her pains; above all, the calm of mind which she preserved in that terrible physical malady which poisons every pleasure and clouds every brightness of life, shows what a high state of perfection she had already attained. Religion was now her solace and her succor. By the perfection of her resignation to the divine will, she not only succeeded in concealing from her friends her painful state, by joining cheerfully in every conversation and pastime; but she cheered the melancholy and depression of others without once evincing that she herself was a victim to its living martyrdom.

With equal fortitude, she was bearing at the same time yet a harder trial. It is always wounding enough to our feelings to have our actions misappreciated, our whole conduct misunderstood, by persons merely indifferent to us. But what is there harder to endure in life than to be misunderstood by those to whom we were once tenderly devoted, to whom we were bound in the closest friendship of intimacy, and to bear their consequent coldness and slights, and sometimes cruel wrongs? Yet this pang was added to the other trials of Princess Amelia. But her great charity checked every human feeling. She was never heard to complain of any neglect, or even the annoying treatment of false friends, and she never sought to soothe the sorrow of her tender heart by any human consolations. In a letter regarding the Abbé de Furstenberg, she described beautifully the rule of charity she followed in this sorest of her trials. Whenever the memory of her slighted friendship would send a pang through her soul, her love of God was her first resource; then she resolved never to intensify the sorrow of the moment by indulging in any dreams of the imagination with regard to an irremediable past, or in any speculations whatever on the subject which would strengthen her sorrow or tend to an uncharitable feeling.

Thus, in these purifying trials, were passed the last years of her life; and when, at length, the gold of her merits was made pure enough in the crucible to be moulded into her crown of glory, she rested from her sorrows.

In 1806, she died the death of the holy, and, at her own request, she was buried beneath the chapel of her country-house at Angelmodde, near Münster.

Were we right in saying that her life displays the struggle of a great soul for its own level above disadvantageous circumstances? She struggled above the sad defects of early training, then above the commonplace routine of ordinary lives in the world, and finally above the clouds of infidelity and ignorance of divine things, to the bright, clear atmosphere of the faith, where the love of her ardent heart was sated, and her yearning aspirations found their lasting rest.

It may be, too, that we now have an easier clue to the wonderful character of the Apostle of Western Pennsylvania since we have become better acquainted with the _mother of Prince Galitzin_.

FOOTNOTE:

[96] _Particularités de la Vie de la Princesse Amelie Galitzin._ Par Theod. Katerkamp Münster. 1828.

_La Princesse Galitzin et les Amis._ Schücking: Cologne. 1840.

EGBERT STANWAY.

If Germany was the cradle of the Reformation, England can claim to have been its nurse, and to have fostered in it many phases even at present unknown to the land of its originators. In its last-born and perhaps most dangerous outgrowth, Ritualism, we see the English spirit that was already timidly visible long before, now fully flowering in delusive self-existence, uniting in this novel combination the cherished independence of Rome, that Englishmen are taught instinctively to regard as the only palladium of national freedom, and those æsthetic aspirations which come down to them, we venture to think, as instinctively, from their forefathers of "Merrie England" and the "Island of Saints."