instance, some special saints' days of its own, which differ
from the practice throughout the rest of Catholic Christendom. Some
saints, too, have been shifted about from day to day by authority. Queen
Margaret of Scotland, the wife of Malcolm, whose real source of
influence was that she represented the old Saxon line of England, had
two great days,--that of her deposition on July the 8th, and that of her
translation on July the 19th; but, by a papal ordinance immediately
after the Revolution, her festival was established upon the 10th of
June. This was rather a remarkable day in Britain, being that on which
the poor infant son of the last of the Jameses, afterwards known in
Parliamentary language as the Pretender, was born. The adjustment of
Queen Margaret's day to that event was a stroke of policy for the
purpose of rendering the poor child respectable, and removing all doubts
about warming-pans and other disagreeables; but it is not known that the
measure exercised the slightest influence on the British Parliament.

Bollandus, who was the first seriously to lay his hand to the great work
called after him, was a Belgian Jesuit. He had got through January and
February in five folio volumes, when he died in 1658. Under the auspices
of his successor, Daniel Papebroch, March appeared in 1668 and April in
1675, each in three volumes. So the great work crept on day by day and
year by year, absorbing the whole lives of many devoted labourers,
conspicuous among whom are the unmelodious names of Peter Bosch, John
Stilting, Constantine Suyskhen, Urban Sticken, Cornelius Bye, James Bue,
and Ignacius Hubens. In 1762, a hundred and four years after January,
September was completed. It filled eight volumes, for the work
accumulated like a snow-ball as it rolled, each month being larger than
its predecessor. Here the ordinary copies stop in forty-seven volumes,
for the evil days of the Jesuits were coming on, and the new literary
oligarchy, where Voltaire, Montesquieu, and D'Alembert held sway, had
not been propitious to hagiology. A part of October was accomplished
under the auspices of Maria Theresa, the Empress Queen, but for some
reason or other it came within the category of rare books, and was not
to be easily obtained until it was lately reprinted.

Whatever effect such a phenomenon may have on some denominations of the
religious world, it can afford nothing but pure satisfaction to all
historical investigators to know that