mixed admiration to any character
which moral shadows overhang. Henceforth we require, not greatness only,
but goodness; and not that goodness only which begins and ends in
conduct correctly regulated, but that love of goodness, that keen pure
feeling for it, which resides in a conscience as sensitive and
susceptible as woman's modesty.

So much for what seems to us the philosophy of this matter. If we are
right, it is no more than a first furrow in the crust of a soil which
hitherto the historians have been contented to leave in its barrenness.
If they are conscientious enough not to trifle with the facts, as they
look back on them from the luxurious self-indulgence of modern
Christianity, they either revile the superstition or pity the ignorance
which made such large mistakes on the nature of religion--and, loud in
their denunciations of priestcraft and of lying wonders, they point
their moral with pictures of the ambition of mediaeval prelacy or the
scandals of the annals of the papacy. For the inner life of all those
millions of immortal souls who were struggling, with such good or bad
success as was given them, to carry Christ's cross along their journey
through life, they set it by, pass it over, dismiss it out of history,
with some poor commonplace simper of sorrow or of scorn. It will not do.
Mankind have not been so long on this planet altogether, that we can
allow so large a chasm to be scooped out of their spiritual existence.

We intended to leave our readers with something lighter than all this in
the shape of literary criticism, and a few specimens of the biographical
style: in both of these we must now, however, be necessarily brief.
Whoever is curious to study the lives of the saints in their originals,
should rather go anywhere than to the Bollandists, and universally never
read a late life when he can command an early one; for the genius in
them is in the ratio of their antiquity, and, like river-water, is most
pure nearest to the fountain. We are lucky in possessing several
specimens of the mode of their growth in late and early lives of the
same saints, and the process in all is similar. Out of the unnumbered
lives of St. Bride, three are left; out of the sixty-six of St. Patrick,
there are eight; the first of each belonging to the sixth century, the
latest to the thirteenth. The earliest in each instance are in verse;
they belong to a time when there was no one to write such things, and
were popula