worthless, uninteresting; but such read- | fluenced by moonlight or by starlight, by ers can, unhappily, find a sufficiency of mountain or by sea. the work that they can after their fashion understand and enjoy.

Diderot tells us a little apologue. It seems that a cuckoo and a nightingale once referred the question of the rival merits of their singing to an ass. Of the nightingale's song the ass remarked, with grave disgust, "I don't understand a word of it; it strikes me as being bizarre, incoherent, confused; but he (the cuckoo) is more methodic, and I'm all for method." The ass, of course, decided wholly in favor of the cuckoo. The readers that we are now considering can find and can prefer many a cuckoo-like piece of manufacture, repeating mechanically a few wellworn notes; but Mr. Shorthouse's song will be to such judges a distracting and repellent nightingale song-"bizarre, incoherent, confused."

A predecessor of Mr. Shorthouse, in the field, however, of the philosophical novel, rather than romance, is George Eliot. Her art, in its later development, became subject to the cold constriction of her joyless and astringent theories; her creations lost in spontaneity; and her humor thickened into often cumbrous raillery. Her art is really great, her thought is really wise, chiefly when both act in freedom from the restrictions of her laming doctrines, which robbed human life and effort of the comfort and the impulse and the nobleness of the divine. Her leading theory of pagan Nemesis excluded all idea of divine pity, love, or forgiveness, and left human life the passive victim of a blind and ruthless scientific fate. Both George Eliot and Mr. Shorthouse have written works in which art is the handmaiden of philosophy, but there is no real affinity between these writers. Any superficial similarity is likeness through unlikeness. They aim at very different objects. The one is cramped by science; if the other fails it is in hitting an art-target which is placed so very high. "He shoots higher that threatens the moon, than he that aims at a tree," says George Herbert. It is noticeable that there is in "John Inglesant" no hint of humor, no suggestion of satire; but then humor or satire would be as much out of place in "John Inglesant" as they would be in "Laodamia." The sweet, grave, tender flow of Mr. Shorthouse's narrative would receive a jar from a touch of drollery, and his graceful earnestness is incapable of the savagery of sarcasm. A soft and brooding sadness hangs over the tone of the whole story, like tender shadows on pure sunlit snow. The sorrows of the soul are rarely soothed by laughter; and Mr. Shorthouse wants to depict only so much of human life as may subserve his main philosophical purpose. The

It will be worth while to devote a few words to the relation of a new great writer to his peers in literature. A parallel must not be pushed too far, as then it would cease to be a parallel, and would tend to become an identity; but it may be fairly argued that the writer whom Mr. Shorthouse, in aim and tone, most nearly resembles, is Hawthorne. By both writers events and occurrences are used in nice dependence on essence of character or condition of soul. Of Hawthorne, Mr. Shorthouse says, It is only with difficulty that we perceive how absolutely every character, nay, every word and line, is subordinated to the philosophical idea of the book." To this extent there is a parallel to be drawn between Hawthorne and Mr. Shorthouse; and the work of Hawthorne which should more especially be subjected to critical examination for the purpose of investigating this qualified resemblance is "Transformation," the grave, fantastic romance of Monte Beni. The minds of the two authors are sympathetic, though their gifts and powers are sufficiently diverse. Every sensitive grotesque would be absolute destruction artist of culture is undoubtedly influenced, to some extent, by other similar artists of originality and of mark; but in such influence there is nothing mean or slavish, as there is nothing abject in being in

to his ethereal aim and delicate style. When the rapt Ferdinand and Miranda, audience fit though few, witness the masque summoned up for their delight by the magic art of Prospero, they exclaim,.

We call ourselves free agents; was this slight, delicate boy a free agent, with a mind and spirit so susceptible that the least breath affected them; around whom the throng of natural contention was about to close; on whom the intrigue of a great religious party was about to seize, involving him in a whirlpool and rapid current of party strife and religious rancor?

"This is a most majestic vision;" and | but Esmond was too virile to remain perthough, like an insubstantial pageant manently in subjection to any Jesuit; faded, the exquisite vision leaves not a while the weaker and more docile John wrack behind, yet, when the airy figures Inglesant voluntarily abnegated his will, have spoken, moved, and vanished, the and accepted an almost lifelong yoke. charmed imaginations of the young lovers of the enchanted isle retain a deep impress in memory of the graceful drama which existed only in their magically in fluenced fancy. And so we, readers and not spectators, feel, as the music of "John Inglesant" dies out of the listening air, that our memories will be haunted forevermore by the cunning vision and by the witching strain. The music lives in The Jesuit soon acquired complete as. long reverberating echo: the pageant cendancy and unlimited influence over the exists still in spellbound memory. There ardent, enthusiastic boy. A priest lends is a wrack left behind by such glorious Inglesant "The Flaming Heart; or, The phantasies. The opening of the book Life of Sta. Teresa," which half attracts strikes its fine minor keynote finely. The and half repels the inquiring and metachild is father of the man, and the lonely boyhood and first youth of John Inglesant are a fitting preparation for the days and actions of his manhood. His boyhood at Westacre is surrounded by all sweet influences of nature, by country quiet, by solitary leisure, by fields and woods, by clouds and stars, by

The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills. Thoughtful, imaginative, sensitive, introspective, impressionable, the boy grows up, ripens, and develops. The father of John Inglesant resembles in some degree the father of Edward Waverley; but Inglesant has a twin brother, Eustace, and the boys are, while boys, singularly alike; though their different characters and diverging paths in life destroyed, in later years, the once close resemblance. From one of his teachers John Inglesant "imbibed the mysterious Platonic philosophy." Eagerly receptive, the lad drew teaching from all sources, and, in his dreamy solitude, pondered all things in his heart.

When John was fourteen one of the most determinant events of his life occurred. He became acquainted with Mr. Hall, or Father Sancta Clara, a Jesuit emissary busy in England in pushing the interests of his Church and of his society. In Thackeray's novel, Esmond was, at first, strongly influenced by Father Holt,

physical youth. Doubts and "obstinate questionings " begin to arise in the young but already perplexed mind. He asks advice and seeks help from all available dream of the supernatural life. Then St. sources, and lives in a half-superstitious Clare, who, for political reasons, has withheld Inglesant from joining the Church of Rome, begins to use the tool that he has sharpened. "Death nay, the bitterest torture — would be nothing to him [Inglesant] if only he could win this man's approval, and be not only true, but successful, in his trust." We pity the susceptible, tender boy, whose very nobleness and fineness are being warped to ignoble ends, as he and Father St. Clare ride up together to London; before John Inglesant commences the life of qeeen's page and Jesuit instrument, and becomes the page of Henrietta Maria, and the servant of Father St. Clare. Inglesant entered London in August, 1637. And now, for the young, country-bred lad the quiet, contemplative, speculative life of dreaming youth has ceased, and John is launched upon the great, strong current of a fierce crisis in history. Real life and stormy action drown for a time the still, small voice of introspective thought and metaphysical dreaming. The passionate yearning for the face of God; the longing for the beatific vision; the intense striving after truth, are disturbed by the

splendors, the showy cavaliers and lovely | rode into Jerusalem, besides hundreds which, ladies, the many high and beautiful things for common decency, no man in any case To look on these, I seen by young eyes at court. And yet would so much as name. the exquisite fitness of Inglesant for an say, on one side, and on the other to see those instrument of Jesuit use is only further frightful and intolerable cruelties, so detestable developed. But John Inglesant, true to have been tormented by this holy and pure that they cannot be named, by which thousands the keynote of his essential nature, grows Church, has something about it so grotesque weary of pomp and pleasure, and longs and fantastic that it seems to me sometimes again for retirement and for wanderings more like some masque or dance of satyrs or in the secret paths of thought. He steals devils than the followers of our Saviour Christ. aside to the " peace unspeakable" of the quiet, religious life of Little Gidding; and meets there that noble Mary Collet, who is to be the young man's first love. He woods her through religion, he loves her in mystic ecstacy. There is between the twain more spiritual affinity than healthy human passion; and yet both are fair, are noble and are young. Their love was a shy romance which seemed to reveal the infinite.

In 1639, Inglesant, acting, as he always did, under the direction of the Jesuit, purchased the place of one of the esquires of the body to the king. He had just lost his father. The Jesuit more and more dissuaded Inglesant from joining the Church of Rome; and even infused into the mind of his pupil as large an element of rational inquiry as Inglesant could bear without a shock to his religious sense. Inglesant began to unite a certain activity of thought with reverence for religion, and with entire submission to his spiritual director; but while acquiring obedience he lost something of instinctive, happy, trustful faith, and his tone of soul became imperceptibly lowered.

The king, at this stage of the story, appears always as a picturesque and stately figure, graceful and touching in the "splendor and the pathos " of Van Dyck's glorious art. St. Clare is always pictured as a patient, powerful influence, acting to the ultimate ruin of his clients as a motor behind the events which he at tempts to instigate and seeks to control. England was no field for Jesuit intrigue and rule. St. Clare even introduces Inglesant to Mr. Hobbes, that human problem in philosophy, whose conversation produces a fresh fluctuation in the mobile mind of the theological cavalier. Mr. Hobbes tells him:

There seems to me something frightfully grotesque about the Romish Church as a reality, showing us on the one side a mass of fooleries and ridiculous conceits and practices, at which, but for the use of them, all men must needs stand amazed; such rabble of impossible relics the hay that was in the manger, and more than one tail of the ass on which Christ

Speaking of the Society of Gesù, Mr. Hobbes adds, "What they seek is influence over the minds of men: to gain this they will allow every vice of which man is capable." Had Inglesant joined the Church, he would have become an obscure priest, of no use to St. Clare, who wanted his pupil for the sore strain of deadly danger. Many causes tended to lessen the eagerness in the pliant and wavering mind of Inglesant towards divine things, when the great Civil War broke out, and the occasion for which the Jesuit needed his finely trained instrument was fast approaching.

The able Jesuit says, in one of his better moods, "nothing but the infinite pity is sufficient for the infinite pathos of human life;" and that infinite pathos is soon to occur in the lives of Inglesant, of Strafford, and of Laud.

Strafford is impeached, condemned, executed; and the miserable weakness of the craven king is made manifest to all men. Two nights after the execution of Strafford, the palace of Whitehall is under the sole command of Mr. Esquire Inglesant. In answer to the challenge of the yeoman of the guard, "a voice, calm and haughty, which sent a tremor through every nerve, gave back the word "Christ!" and the terrible apparition of Strafford the man himself in dress, mien, step-in his very habit as he lived drew back the hanging of the privy chamber and disappeared from the astonished guards to appear to the terrified king. This episode of the apparition of Strafford is told with few touches but with a master's power.

Very finely does Mr. Shorthouse describe the last short time of revel and of gaiety of the court of Charles at Oxford. With a certain fitness of things, John and Eustace Inglesant play before the court the brothers Antipholus in the "Comedy of Errors." The Inglesants were still held to be exactly alike, and on the stage they must have seemed so; but we find a great and growing moral and mental difference between the brothers. Eustace is worldly, a gay and even somewhat liber

tine gallant; John a combination of cour tier and of monk. In love with Mary Collet, with a nature to which self-restraint was easy, John Inglesant was pure in his life, and kept himself unspotted from vices, or even levities. With a soul which strove toward a holy life, but which yet was so full of so great weakness, Inglesant has no sensual sins of youth. Indeed, young in years, he is scarcely youthful; and he would, perhaps, be somewhat nearer to our humanity if he had a touch of occasional thoughtless frailty.

of Parliamentarians; but, at the risk of alienating his own best supporters, the king is intriguing with the Papists for a contingent of ten thousand men from Ireland. Brave Lord Biron, a gallant Royalist, says, "Ten thousand Irish Papists and murderers in England, Mr. Inglesant, is not what I should like to see."

In order to realize how repulsive such a proceeding as this would appear to the whole English nation, it is necessary to recollect the repeated professions of attachment to Protestantism on the part of the King, and of his determination to repress Popery; the intense hatred of Popery on the part of the Puritan party, and of most of the Church people; and the horror caused in all classes by the barbarities of the Irish massacre.

Eustace contracts his ill-omened marriage of interest with the eccentric Lady Cardiff. A soldier only by accident, John Inglesant is yet engaged, fighting, of course, on the Royalist side, at Edgehill, at Cropredy Bridge (where he receives a For such work secret agents only could wound in the head by a sword-cut), and be employed; agents who could be repuafterwards at Naseby; but martial hero-diated and sacrificed if the nefarious plan ism is not a strong point in his dreamy should fail. Glamorgan had his reasons character. "He had the restless outlook as a Catholic; John Inglesant is actuated of the artistic nature, its tenderness and only by blind obedience to the Jesuit susceptibility, its quick apprehension of cause and to St. Clare. His loyalty to unseen danger, its craving for affection, Charles meant disloyalty to his country; its sensitiveness to wrong.' By no means his devotion to Jesuitism meant foul wanting in courage, he had not the talent treachery to abstract truth and right; but or the gifts of the captain; and was as Inglesant never hesitated. Mary Collet little of a warrior as was Falkland himself. reminds him of what he owes to another, Inglesant, by the Jesuit's order, is pres-" to one who knew you before this Jesuit;' ent, on the very scaffold itself, when Laud but she pleads in vain. suffered. Afterwards, he again sought peace in the retirement of Little Gidding; but while engaged with the family and Mary Collet at evening prayer, he saw, "standing in the dark shadow under the window, the messenger of the Jesuit, whom he knew. He got up quietly and went out. From his marriage feast, nay, from the table of the Lord, he would have got up all the same had that summons come to him."

The short letter of the Jesuit ran: "The time for which we have waited is come. The service which you and none other can perform, and which I have always foreseen for you, is waiting to be accomplished. I depend on you."

The service required of Inglesant is, indeed, a dark and dangerous one. Mr. Shorthouse has here made able use of one of the obscure passages in the history of Charles I. He has selected a transaction which exemplifies the profound per fidy and callous cruelty of the king; and which illustrates in the strongest way the result of Jesuit training on Inglesant.

It is the time at which the frightful massacre, by the Irish, of English, and of Protestants, had awakened the hatred and the indignation both of Royalists and

"Then if I fall into the hands of the Parliament," Inglesant said to Hall, "my connection with the king will be repudiated?"

"If the necessities of the State demand it, all knowledge of this affair will be de. nied by the king," replies the Jesuit. The eyes of each must have been meaningly and steadfastly fixed upon the other dur ing the speaking of this question and

answer.

Inglesant receives a secret letter of written instructions in the king's own hand. Charles says later, with a feeble, irritated consciousness of his own baseness, when the plot has failed, to St. Clare, "No; there is no fear of John Inglesant, I believe you. There is no fear that any man will betray his friends and be false to his order, and to his plighted word, except the king! - except the king!"

The plot fails; the Irish do not come, and Chester is surrendered. The king repudiates his agents, and Inglesant denies that the king's letter is the king's. The position of the faithful emissary becomes truly terrible. The Council itself, the Tower, and the dread of approaching death cannot shake the fidelity of the Jesuit-bred gentleman; but when Presby.

terian minister and Catholic priest both | Yes; but across that calm desire comes condemn his conduct, and refuse him abso- the fierce thirst for vengeance on the aslution, then the terrors of death, without sassin. Laertes could be revenged "most the sacrament and without sacerdotal sup- thoroughly" for his father; but finer port, gather darkly round a sorely troubled Hamlet was unfit for the stern task of mind. The author never depicts his hero vengeance, and, in spite of supernatural as moved by conscience. The Jesuit has incitements, could let go by the important developed in John Inglesant some quality acting of the ghost's dread commands; which takes the place of conscience; but and John Inglesant will never, we feel, the Jesuit has also created in him a firm take vengeance upon his brother's murness which will not blench before death. derer. Fate, or accident, will interfere to The morning of execution arrives, and save the gentle avenger from the deeds Inglesant is about to die with a lie in his which were too strong for his soft nature. mouth. On a high scaffold at Charing Cross, Colonel Eustace Powell, dying by lot for having broken parole, passes out of life amid the prayers and tears of the spectators; but when Inglesant mounts the same scaffold, the justly indignant people receive him with a terrible roar of execration. The scene must have been indeed awful for the desperate chief actor in it. Inglesant is saved. "You stood that very well. I would rather mount the deadliest breach than face such a sight as that," says the officer to the rescued man, who, with reeling brain and dizzy senses, is conducted back to the Tower.

It is recorded of John Inglesant, at this time, that it is "doubtful whether, except perhaps once or twice in College Chapel, he had ever read a chapter of the Bible to himself in his life. Certainly he never possessed a Bible himself; of its contents, excepting those portions which are read in church, and those contained in the Prayer-Book, he was profoundly ignorant. It was not included in the course of studies set him by the Jesuit." He was "ignorant of doctrine and dogma of almost every kind; "but he felt a strong "attraction to the person of the Saviour." Going to Italy, he will there, surely, beSmall wonder that the man who, with come a member of the Church of Rome? the headsman by his side, had faced that Passing through Paris, chance leads him raging mob, should have mind and brain to the death-bed of Mary Collet, whose so affected that he never afterwards "beautiful eyes were about to close forwholly recovered the shock. ever on the things of love and earth and After the death of Charles, Inglesant time. Holding his hand, the dying girl had but little tie to England; but, before said, "And that mission to the Papist he quits his native shores, he has to un-murderers, Johnny — you did not wish to dergo the loss of his brother Eustace, bring them into England of your own acmurdered miserably by one Montalti, an cord, but only as a plot of the Jesuits? Italian hanger-on of Eustace's wife, once Surely you were but the servant of one Lady Cardiff. whom you could not discover."

On that ill-omened ride to Oulton, a fatalist would have seen the hand of destiny in the seeming accident of the casting of a horse's shoe. John Inglesant saw "ghostly phantoms of his disordered brain." He was suffering from a "weariness and dullness of sense, the result, no doubt, of fatigue acting upon his only partially recovered health. As he rode on his brain became more and more confused, so that for moments together he was almost unconscious, and only by an effort regained his sense of passing events." Arrived at the inn, on the white hearthstone — his hair and clothes steeped in blood — lay Eustace Inglesant, the Italian's stiletto still in his heart."

And so John Inglesant stands alone in the world. The sacred tie of kinship to a much-loved brother is bloodily severed, and he has no other relative. Henceforth he will live solely for things spiritual.

...

"Will you serve your Heavenly Master as well as you have served your king?" Then love follows brotherhood to the undiscovered country; and John Inglesant stands alone-alone with the yearning for faith, and with the desire for vengeance.

There is but little pathos in the emotion of bereavement which follows his great loss. The "ethereally bodied " Inglesant is not capable of the passion of love in all its noble strength and mighty fulness. We find him next trying, in vain, to gain assured faith in revelation, and a right guide to the conduct of his life from Father de Cressy, a convert to the Church of Rome. Every fluctuation in his mind. or soul, whether intellectual or spiritual, whether of opinion, or of struggle towards the light, is amply indicated for us by our most subtle guide and author.. Italy! Inglesant has left the stern north, in