JESUS CRUCIFIED

READINGS ON THE PASSION OF
OUR LORD.

By FATHER ELLIOTT, Paulist

"This is an extremely devotional and edifying series of meditations on the Passion of our Lord, the ripe fruit of a life-long devotion to Christ Crucified. It is well adapted for readings to the people during the Mass in the Lenten season."— Am. Cath. Quarterly.

"The pious faithful will find it an admirable book for spiritual reading, and it will help priests both at the prie-dieu and in the pulpit. The treatment of the subject is fresh and interesting."--The Irish Monthly.

"It has the power of drawing one close to the cross. It broadens and deepens one's understanding of the great mystery of suffering."-- The New Century.

"There is a clearness and simplicity in Father Elliott's treatment of his subject that is very attractive. The child as well as the mature adult may read it with profit." -Catholic Advance.

"How beautiful, indeed, are the meditations on the divine passion found on nearly every page in this book, so full of love for our dear Lord--true pearls beyond price."-Intermountain Catholic.

"This volume carries with it the fervor and conviction of a messenger who has received his inspiration close to the cross."--Catholic Universe.

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THE COLUMBUS PRESS,

T has frequently been proclaimed, and still more convincingly demonstrated, that the writing of verse is the best possible recipe for a good prose style. We find in the poet's use of prose not only an habitual delicacy and picturesqueness (that we should have foreseen), but also a notable precision and sense of proportion-as though the use of wings had taught him all the possible graces of walking. It was thus with Aubrey de Vere; whose venerable head shared the glory of a great prose epoch as it had that of a rare poetic revival, and perhaps even more transcendently. We do not claim for him the superb distinction and vitality of Newman's unforgettable prose; nor the musical and emotional qualities of Ruskin; nor the stimulating if pugnacious vigor of Carlyle. But we do submit that his intellectual breadth and seriousness, his poetic sensibility and critical acumen, coupled with his infallibly pure and strong English, and that gracious versatility which we think of as Irish (when we know it is not French), render Aubrey de Vere worthy of a throne beside any one of them-when they shall come to judge the scribes of their Island Israel!

It was very characteristic of the de Vere household that, at eighteen, Aubrey and his beloved sister used to drive about the woods of Curragh Chase in their pony cart, reading the poetry of Keats, Coleridge, and Walter Savage Landor. Cul

Copyright. 1907.

THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.

ture had become a tradition of the family. But an older and even higher tradition was patriotism-which in Ireland meant love of the people. And so it was equally characteristic that young de Vere's first prose work should have been upon no literary or speculative theme, but upon the pressing political needs of the day. "English Misrule and Irish Misdeeds, Four Letters from Ireland addressed to an English Member of Parliament," appeared in 1848, while the famine was still an appalling reality, and English relief measures had about proved their inefficiency. The book is probably little known in these days, although it roused much comment, both favorable and adverse, at the time of its issue.

We should look far indeed for a calmer yet more burning statement of Irish wrongs, or a more masterly arraignment of that baser side of England, which for six centuries "kept vigil for Ireland, while for the rest of the world it generally slept." There is nothing melodramatic in these letters; although that heart-stirring outburst upon the causes of Irish poverty in Letter II, and the later apostrophe to England, with its reiterated burden: "It was your duty- It was your duty-" are noble examples of political eloquence. But for the most part the volume is a simple if impassioned statement of conditions, an inquiry into causes, and a series of suggestions for bettering those conditions. These eleven recommendations of de Vere -including as they do a plan of State aided Emigration and Colonization, Amendment of the Poor Law, Agricultural Education, improved Sanitation for the Towns, et cetera-prove how practical an idealist the poet and littérateur could be upon occasion. But he was no partisan. He believed in union (provided that union meant equality) and he wrote as one attached profoundly, reverentially, and sorrowfully to both countries"-and as nowise disturbed if his statements excited the hostility of either side. Year after year he continued these political writings: pleading as he knew so well how, upon philosophical as well as sentimental premises, against the secularization of Ireland's Church Property; discussing Proportionate Representation (1867, 1868), Constitutional and Unconstitutional Political Action (1881), and so on.

De Vere had from youth been an apostle of Edmund Burke, and in his later years he was no doubt considered rather ultra