value of the property was sure to double itseif in ten years. It was the wisest act of her life in another sense: she had always derived exquisite pleasure from the senses of sight and touch, which alone were perfect in her, and she had never been at home with nature before, and she had never been her own mistress. Her character softened and expanded in the sunshine; she held herself a little aloof indeed from the local gentry, but her intercourse with her poor neighbors was thoroughly genial and happy, and the large circle of intimates who shared her hospitality found her thoroughly motherly and full of fun and merriment. The transition from restraint to freedom and the introduction of a new element into her life, must be taken into account in all explanations of the complete change of her opinions in the first five years of her renewed health. Another influence was her journey to the East in 1846. She was under the impression that she had mastered the question of the origin of Egyptian, and Jewish, and Christian, and Mahomedan religion. What she had done was to master a few text-books, some of them admirable, some of them inadequate, and some of them obsolete, and to realise on the spot some of the broad permanent conditions which determine life and belief; and to have done this was enough to place her at a standpoint which few bibiical critics of the most radical school have reached. She regarded theology as a department of anthropology, which apologists may perhaps some day recognise as the only scientific point of view. But the strongest influence of all was personal; ever since her first experience of mesmerism she had been coming into closer and closer relation with Mr. Atkinson-who at last became her oracle-as Father Gracian became the director of Saint Theresa. His admirers would find it hard to maintain that he was her equal; but the very fact that his nature had never been tasked or trained as hers had been, made it easier to leap to large conclusions in an impressive way. A hierA hierophant ought to have a rich and unexhausted nature, and it is not an unmixed misfortune that, in an age when thorough training is almost always exhausting and very frequently perplexing, a mind of the calibre of Mr. Atkinson's should retain NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXV., No. 6

enough fresh self-confidence to undertake the guidance of a mind of the calibre of Miss Martineau's. Of course Miss Martineau's appeal to Mr. Atkinson for guidance was seized upon as a palmary instance of the credulity of unbelievers. The truth is that the credulity of unbelievers tells in favor of belief in a way which believers hardly recognise. Α professed unbeliever is commonly a disinherited mystic, whose faith is not quite strong enough to live through a time when tradition and science are drifting apart. Such an one is too preoccupied with spiritual questions to take refuge in a confused and silent compromise which commends itself to worldlings; people with a natural susceptibility for mysticism, like Paulus, Strauss, and Renan, or a natural capacity for asceticism like Baur, or natural gifts in both directions like Miss Martineau, cannot resist the temptation to explicit denial of what they can no longer affirm, and then they expose themselves to the pity or contempt of believers by showing how ready they are to affirm when their knowledge does not stand in the way.

The especial mysteries of which Mr. Atkinson was the hierophant have only an historical interest for the readers of Mr. Herbert Spencer's First Principles and Professor Tyndall's Belfast Address, but in 1850 it required a certain originality to seize the antitheological side of Bacon's philosophy, and pass at once to a purely objective conception of the universe, in which mankind appeared merely as a product of general laws, and a term in a series of phenomena which did not exist for their sake, while full weight was given to the half-conscious life which underlies and sometimes dominates consciousnesses.

The effect of the doctrine upon Miss Martineau and upon her public deserves more attention than the doctrine itself. To her it was a great deliverance to accept a teaching which enabled her to lose her own life in the life of the world; as the teaching of Hartley had nerved her for self-conquest, the teaching of Mr. Atkinson nerved her to a completer selfrenunciation, which brought its reward in the gaiety with which she went about her duties and in the rapture of her midnight worship of the silent splendor and mystery that had once a voice for

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patriarchs and psalmists. The press was unanimous in condemnation, but the press hardly represented the public; when a ground-swell is rising, light craft drift from their moorings before vessels that are better found, or at all events, more heavily laden.

Miss Martineau's own account of the storm which followed the publication of "Letters on Nature and the Constitution of Man," was that it dissolved all false relationships and strengthened all true: she was a little too much surprised that the orthodox who were sure of their own ground, were not more perplexed by her peace and happiness, and were content that she should inherit the promises made to a life like hers in the name of the Providence which she denied; perhaps she had forgotten the boldness of one of old who said, "I was found of them that sought me not." Her outer prosperity was on a level with her inward peace she was by no means so conspicuous a figure in the literary world as she had been, but this did not trouble her; she was satisfied to find herself in full employment upon useful and remunerative work, and it was at this period that she produced the most permanently valuable of her writings, her masterly condensation of Comte's Positive Philosophy, which, condensed as it is, preserves the sober unction as well as the substance of the original. Her bulky History of the Peace will be consulted for the account of the commercial crisis of 18251826, and for Mr. Buller's contributions to the secret history of Lord Durham's Canadian Government; but the plan of a work which described Sir Robert Peel's fall without mentioning Mr. Disraeli is obviously incomplete. Besides these great undertakings she wrote a series of Game Law Tales, which failed perhaps because of the Irish Famine, perhaps because the public had grown fastidious; and an admirable work on Household Education, which after all demands too much of the educators, most of whom are and will be rather dull and rather lazy, with more or fewer inveterate faults which those who grow up with them must learn to bear. She wrote largely for Household Words, till the anti-catholic partisanship of the conductors offended her sensitive conscience; and till 1866

she contributed largely to the Daily News.

The successful republication in 1869 of her biographical sketches in that journal was the last event of her literary life. Many of them repeat, with here and there an added stroke of severity, what she had written already in the autobiography which was completed in 1856, and the survey of literary life in London, in which most of the coincidences occur, is often severer than the diary which she kept at the time. The severity is rather indiscriminate; it often falls on those who, like Whately and Blomfield, were useful and did their best, because too much had been expected of them, and an irritable reader might complain that her generous delight in the goodness of others, always dearer to her than her own, was sometimes capricious in the selection of objects for admiration. It was almost as provoking as a caprice when Miss Martineau, who had, like Mill, given her name and influence to an agitation with which few of her admirers sympathised, declined to act on the committee of the Mill Memorial, professedly on the ground of her health, really because she disapproved of Mill because he was as impressionable as a woman! From the first she had as steady an interest as Mill's in "Woman's Rights;" though her convictions were tame to his, she thought women ought to be allowed to do, without hindrance, whatever they may be found capable of doing, but she had a horror of women who make their domestic misfortunes an argument for reconsidering the position of the sex; and the doctrine which she preached by example and precept, that the happiness and dignity of every true woman depends upon making a home for others, tells strongly in favor of the traditional training which is intended to fit average women to accept their conventional career in advance, instead of magnifying idiosyncrasies which may or may not warrant the abandonment of domestic life for social, or industrial, or literary enterprise. Her own attitude in the matter was something less than consistent : she resented the conventional "chivalry" with which women are treated as a bar to frank and serious intercourse, but she

was not disposed to waive a woman's claim to special forbearance and courtesy. In 1855, in the height of her prosper ity, she went up to London on business: it was in some ways a melancholy journey before her return her friend Mr. Hunt, the editor of the Daily News, died; some alarming symptoms led her to consult Dr. Latham, who gave her to understand that her heart was too weak for its work and very much enlarged. Her constitutional despondency led her to accept the sentence of death, which was not executed for more than twenty years, as irreversible. She went home light-heartedly to die, with an unabated. relish for whatever might be left of life, if anything keener, because its cares proved lighter when she looked to leave them soon. For good or evil she had left behind the temper for which she reproached herself in the essays in Life in a Sick-room, the mystical temper which can hardly be patient under weakness, and is exultant under pain; death for her had neither terror nor mystery; it was nothing but an end, passing away to leave room for others. The same temper

which made her pronounce the first cause unknowable made her pronounce a personal immortality impossible. This clear tranquil negation dispensed her from all sympathy with Feuerbach's intense preoccupation with the thought of the end which overshadows life only to hallow and to heighten it, and with Comte's idealization of all that the dead are to the living.

She had lived for others and had been happy; she neither desired nor expected to live in others. She set her house in order; she printed her autobiography and got the illustrations ready; she wrote a candid, not to say harsh, obituary of herself for the Daily News; she worked while she could with needle and pen for the causes that interested her; she was careful for others to the last, and her growing "ineffectiveness" was the chief thing that distressed her when death really was at hand. She was tired out before she bade the world good-night, and she passed away in the joyful contemplation of eternity, the eternity of the world and the race.- Fortnightly Review.

Ir is agreed on all hands that the Conclave on the death of the now aged Pope will be one of the most important in history. It is not a day too soon to inquire what are the greater questions which must then emerge.

I. In order to arrive at these we may pass with comparatively little notice some minor changes in the costume and surroundings of the Conclave changes which obviously result from the loss of the Temporal Power. Yet these will in some respects be striking and suggestive. From the moment when the Cardinal Cammerlengo, tapping with gilt mallet at the door of the death-chamber, and calling upon the Pope by name, receives no answer and proclaims that the Holy Father is departed, there is a long series of observances, many of which must now be changed either externally or in their ancient significance. Formerly the great

bell of the Capitol announced to the Romans that their sovereign was dead. Now, its peal from the towers of the King of Italy will only announce the demise of the head of the Latin Church. Formerly its tolling signified that the whole machinery of government was suspended, and the gates of the prisons were thrown open for the departure of all prisoners, or, at least, of all light offenders. Now the Italian Government will receive, with all respect, the news of the demise of the Chief Pontiff to whom the laws secure "sovereign honors," and even

Church." One change will be the return of the Conclave, on the present occasion, to its own ancient and famous locality. Ever since Pope Pius. VII. died, in 1823, its meetings have been held in the Quirinal. But the Vatican was from 1303 down to this century the ordinary home of the Conclave, and as in strictness it ought always to be held where the Pope dies, and his Roman residences are now the Vatican and the Lateran, there can be little doubt that it will next be held in the Pontifical palace where the Ecumenical Council sat in 1870. Probably the whole of the first floor of the Vatican will again be shut off for the accommodation of the Cardinals and the small population of attendants who share their imprisonment till an election is made. It cannot be supposed, however, that any of these arrangements can be made without the sanction and intervention of the civil power. Yet, subject to the possible emergence of the greater questions afterwards to be considered, the civil power may be said already to have made provision for the Conclave and its arrangements in the famous statute known as the Guarantees Law of 13th May, 1871.

As the clauses of this law which refer to the Conclave will be of some importance in our subsequent discussion, it may be well to give here the exact words:

"The dotation shall be inscribed in the Great Book of the public debt, in the form of a perpetual and inalienable revenue in the name of the Holy See; and during the vacancy of the seat it shall continue to be paid to supply all the proper occasions of the Roman Church during that interval."

One of these occasions is certainly the holding of the meeting which is to terminate the vacancy. Three things therefore may be held to be guaranteed by the law of 1871-the expenses of the Conclave, so far as the dotation may be applied to it; the personal freedom of all Cardinals while it lasts; and their freedom from intrusion when met for electoral purposes. More than this the statute does not secure; and although this part of it has the general rubric "Prerogatives of the Chief Pontiff and of the Holy See," those conceded to the Pontiff are much more distinct than any (not already mentioned) which may exist during an interregnum. Thus, by Article III., the Pope has the power of retaining guards for his person and the keeping of his palaces, and by Article IV. he may maintain them out of the alreadymentioned dotation. But there is no power given to the Conclave, or to the Church in the absence of its head, either to have their own guards or to support them from the Church dotation. So far as the law of 1871 is concerned, it is open to the kingdom of Italy to take the whole charge of the external safety of the Conclave upon itself, and indeed the latter part of Article VI. already quoted rather implies that it is to claim this Whether function as properly its own. it will go farther, and, for example, supersede the Cardinal Cammerlengo* in his ancient duty of inventorying and sealing up everything in the Apostolic police on the death of the Pope, will depend no doubt rather on the terms of courtesy which happen to subsist between the Papacy and the civil government at the

*A telegram of 17th January, 1877, announced that Cardinal Simeoni has been appointed Cardinal Cammerlengo, and the same announcement speculates on his chief duty as being the management and care of the "Peter's Pence," the voluntary offerings from the Catholic world, which, no doubt, may properly fall to purely ecclesiastical care-even when the palaces in which it is contained are guarded by the State, whose property they are, though it concedes the

use.

time than on any restrictions which the law imposes. It rather seems that no privileges are granted to the Conclave and its members except those which are properly spiritual or ecclesiastical. Thus it does not appear that the rights which this statute gives to the correspondence and telegrams between the Pope and foreign bishops, of being sent in separate and closed bags sacred from examina tion, will belong to the Conclave or its members. These seem, however, individually to share in the benefit of the Tenth Article, which declares that

The ecclesiastics who officially take part in Rome in the publication (emanazione) of the acts of the spiritual ministry of the Holy See, shall not be subject on account of their doing so to any molestation, investigation, or calling to account, on the part of public authority."

II. But the provisions for the expenses of the Conclave and the external liberty of its members yield in interest to the properly constitutional questions which may arise-questions, for example, as to the power of an existing Pope over the assembly which is to elect his successor. Some of these are not new, and one of them was laid before the English public some years ago with great clearness by Mr. Cartwright, in his most instructive book "On the Constitution of Papal Conclaves." It arose then in the case of Cardinal Andrea, but it is a point of such general interest as most appropriately to introduce the higher problems of the future. The Western Church has always shown the greatest jealousy of allowing any Pope to influence directly or indirectly the election of the next. Yet it is obvious that if the existing holder of the Papal chair has the unlimited power of appointing, and also of deposing, the electors, the election is virtually left in his hands. Accordingly Roman lawyers have hitherto held, that there is at least one limit to the plenary power of the Pope-he cannot prevent any one who has been made a Cardinal from giving his vote. He may censure, suspend, interdict-in a sense degradehe may even excommunicate him; but he cannot prevent him from coming to vote for his successor. This became the acknowledged law of the Church by the Bull of Clement V. in the year A.D. 1310, which, no doubt instigated by the

scandalous sentences of Boniface VIII. thirteen years before, against the two Cardinals of the house of Colonna, provides that for the future "no Cardinal may be expelled from the said elections. on the ground of any excommunication, suspension, or interdict whatever." The law laid down so many centuries ago has been confirmed since then by Pius IV. and Gregory XV., and has never been violated, though Leo X. attempted to do so in two cases which never came to an issue. Its great confirmation was in the case of Cardinal Coscia, the corrupt favorite of Benedict XIII., who on that Pope's death, being convicted of a course of the worst malversation and peculation, was sentenced by Pope Clement VII. to ten years' imprisonment, and to degradation from the rank and privileges of the Cardinalate. The sentence went on to provide that every election in which the degraded Cardinal interfered, should be, ipso jure, null and void, every power and faculty being taken away of calling the said Cardinal Coscia to give his vote in such election on the ground of any claim or motive specified in canon law, or in virtue of any constitution whatsoever of Pius IV., Gregory XV., and other our predecessors." But this very distinct attempt to dispense, by plenary authority, with the existing law, was withdrawn a few years after by Pope Clement himself, in a chirograph which states that he had reflected on the bad consequences that might follow on such annullations and invalidations :

"Wherefore we declare that it has never

been our wish or intention to prejudice the

canonical election of our successor, or the supreme dignity and authority of the Church, which, after our fdemise, shall be lawfully vested in the person of him who has been chosen with the accustomed forms, it being neither according to reason nor equity that the transmission to his person of a penalty attaching to the delinquent be assumed capafall the freedom and union of the Apostolical ble of occurrence, and that injury should beCollege in its so needful mystic body." *

Accordingly the previous sentence was abrogated, so far as regarded the Cardinal's vote (though not as to his right to be voted for), and Coscia, in 1740, upon his own demand, actually took his share

* I quote from Mr. Cartwright's translation, p. 138.