this great work has been resumed
in this middle of the nineteenth century. I have before me the ninth
volume for October, embracing the twentieth and twenty-first days of
that month, and containing about as much matter as the five volumes of
Macaulay's History. On the 21st of October there is, to be sure, a very
heavy job to be got through in St Ursula and her eleven thousand
virgins, whose bones may be seen in musty presses in the Church of the
Ursulines in Cologne; but still as it moves forward, it is evident that
the mighty work continues to enlarge its proportions. The winter is
coming on too, a period crowded with the memorials of departed saints,
as being unpropitious to men of highly ascetic habits, so that those who
have undertaken the completion of the Bollandist enterprise have their
work before them.

There is a marvellous uniformity in all the arrangements of this array
of volumes which have thus appeared at intervals throughout two
centuries. They dealt with matter too sublimely separated from the
temporal doings of men to be affected by political events, yet could
they not entirely escape some slight touches from the convulsions that
had recast the whole order and conditions of society. When October was
begun, Belgium, where the work is published, was attached to the
Austrian Empire, and the French Revolution had not yet come. The
Jesuits, though not favourites among monarchs, profess a decorous
loyalty, and the earlier volumes of the month have portraits of the
Empress Queen, and others of the Imperial family, in the most elaborate
court costume of the days before the Revolution; while the later
volumes, still loyal, are illustrated by the family circle of the
Protestant King of constitutional Belgium, whose good-natured face and
plain broad-cloth coat are those doubtless of the right man, though one
cannot help imagining that he feels himself somehow in the wrong place.

The crowds of saints who come sometimes swarming in on a single day to
these teeming volumes, give one an almost oppressive notion of the
quantity of goodness that must have, after all, existed in this wicked
world. The labours of the Bollandists, not only in searching through all
available literature, but in a special correspondence established with
their Jesuit brethren throughout the world, are absolutely astounding.
Their conscientious minuteness is wonderful; and many a one who thinks
he is master of the ecclesiastical lore of his