t knew more about the
hermits of the Church than most divines at his time of life; he had read
much thereon at the monastery near Tergou, had devoured their lives
with wonder and delight in the manuscripts of the Vatican, and conversed
earnestly about them with the mendicant friars of several nations.
Before Printing these friars were the great circulators of those local
annals and biographies which accumulated in the convents of every land.
Then his teacher, Jerome, had been three years an anchorite on the
heights of Camaldoli, where for more than four centuries the Thebaid had
been revived; and Jerome, cold and curt on most religious themes, was
warm with enthusiasm on this one. He had pored over the annals of
St. John Baptist's abbey, round about which the hermit's caves were
scattered, and told him the names of many a noble, and many a famous
warrior who had ended his days there a hermit, and of many a bishop and
archbishop who had passed from the see to the hermitage, or from the
hermitage to the see. Among the former the Archbishop of Ravenna; among
the latter Pope Victor the Ninth. He told him too, with grim delight, of
their multifarious austerities, and how each hermit set himself to find
where he was weakest, and attacked himself without mercy or remission
till there, even there, he was strongest. And how seven times in the
twenty-four hours, in thunder, rain, or snow, by daylight, twilight,
moonlight, or torchlight, the solitaries flocked from distant points,
over rugged precipitous ways, to worship in the convent church; at
matins, at prime, tierce, sexte, nones, vespers, and compline. He
even, under eager questioning, described to him the persons of famous
anchorites he had sung the Psalter and prayed with there; the only
intercourse their vows allowed, except with special permission. Moncata,
Duke of Moncata and Cardova, and Hidalgo of Spain, who in the flower of
his youth had retired thither from the pomps, vanities, and pleasures of
the world; Father John Baptist of Novara, who had led armies to
battle, but was now a private soldier of Christ; Cornelius, Samuel,
and Sylvanus. This last, when the great Duchess de' Medici obtained the
Pope's leave, hitherto refused, to visit Camaldoli, went down and met
her at the first wooden cross, and there, surrounded as she was with
courtiers and flatterers, remonstrated with her, and persuaded her, and
warned her, not to profane that holy mountain, where no woman for s