of Placentia," peace was proclaimed between all the powers of Italy, so that the prophetic sentences seemed fulfilled-behold the days of desired felicity succeed: it is a time of delight for us. Let all that flourish rejoice with me. Wars cease; love reigns, every one crowned with flowers exults: and then the joy of the people of Placentia corresponded to the peace; and the Lord looked down benignly from heaven upon our city, and we began to construct a new church, and the bishop came in procession with all the clergy and people, and solemnly laid the foundations: and the next day there was a wondrous office for the souls of the dead who had been buried under the old church, and such was the multitude of persons bearing tapers in their hands, that from the fragments which remained after the office, five hundred pounds of wax were collected *." Similarly as soon as Milan found herself at peace under Azo Visconti, the historians of that city are filled with admiration at the beautiful churches, towers, and cloisters, which were immediately commenced t. How remarkable is it to observe whole nations actuated like one man by the spirit of the wise king, who said, "Now Jehovah gave peace, therefore I thought to build a house to his name ." Thus was verified the sentence of Richard of St. Victor, that "by prosperity, which dissolves evil men into themselves, and deprives them of God, the good are nourished to good things, and protected from evil §." Some modern authors would make us believe that the French sophists of the last century, 66 were the first to advocate those profound and permanent interests of the human race, which are inseparably connected with a love of peace; that they, above all the earlier teachers, stripped the image of war of the delusive glory, which it took in the primitive ages of society, and turned our contemplation from the fame of the individual hero to the wrongs of the slaughtered millions." It is to be lamented, that men of ability should thus fall into the style of those writers, who possess no other qualification than a deplorable facility of making vague and sonorous sentences. Annales Placentini, ap. Mur. Rer. It. Script. tom. xx. † Gualvanei de la Flamma de Reb. Gest. ap. Il. xii. + 1 Reg. v. § De Contemplatione, ii. c. 19. We shall know how to estimate the justice of such accusations, before arriving at the end of this book; but even already we can discern the imprudence of the zeal which prompts them, regardless of the terrible field for recrimination, supplied in the tendency of modern opinions, and in the facts which attest their power. For if the guides of men in ages of faith were to ask in the words of Eschylus to his rival, those who now direct the public mind, on what account they consider that a poet should be admired? they might indeed reply, like the pedantic moralist, on account of his making men better citizens," but assuredly the former with the strictest justice could then repeat the great tragedian's words, and say, "this you have not done, but on the contrary being good and generous, you have made them unholy, adulterers, fond of glory and of war, and of insurrection. You did not receive them from us such. Unlike what they are now, they were then breathing piety and love, and less qualified for war than for peace *"" "We were at all times," they might continue, "forpeace: you began with insurrection; the very hymns of your chiefs sounded like a war-song under the vaults of Worms. The old cathedral trembled at the new sounds of that Lutheran tumult, which terrified the birds in their obscure nests at the top of the towers. We founded and maintained, you have divided kingdoms; and upon the heights encircling towns, where we placed churches and monasteries of brethren, who were to pray for peace, you have mounted your artillery, turning into batteries the walls that were for abbeys reared. Are mountain valleys under your government? They present nothing but fortresses and citadels-magazines and men of arms. Are ancient cities? Their venerable sanctuaries of peace, adorned with all the precious works of contemplative art, are converted into barracks for your legions. We knew the calamities of war from the invasion of barbarians, and from the local quarrels of petty tyrants openly wicked, who waged it on a small scale, not for glory or for empire, but, like the Ursini's and Colonna's, for life+. You inflicted them through system, as the result of national and honourable struggles, though your victories were not the solid joy of happy men, as St. Augustine * Aristoph. Ranæ. + Carpesani Comment. suor. Temp. iii. says, "but the vain solace of the miserable, incitements to the restless, to perpetuate other evils *. Our wars, when not necessary and just, were the result of passion, and denounced, stigmatized as evil. Your wars are systematic. You make war by system upon distant countries, for some frivolous pretext, in order to preserve your own citizens from rebellion; you wage wars by system, to maintain an equilibrium of nations, which would otherwise, thanks to the effects of your revolutions, prey upon each other. Truly our neighbours, since you have taught them your philosophy, can help us to a comment on the text. What a contrast is there between the genius which presides over these palaces, in which the battles of every age are represented in order, as an inscription on their front declares, to proclaim all the glories of France, and the mind which imagined and admired that poor coin of the middle ages, containing the figure of St. Elizabeth, holding a church in her hand with this motto, Sancta Elizabeth, gloria reipublicæ ?? Alas, I doubt if the warlike fame of these sons would now rejoice the dead, according to the Homeric notion +." How vain is modern rhetoric before the reality of things! Europe was then covered over with pacific, as it is now with military institutions. "Whither have fled the sounds that soothed life then-the mystery and the majesty of religion, the joy, the exaltation, and the peace?" We have seen by what forms the youthful mind was then moulded. Images or symbols of peace, the festival of the boy bishop, or of the prince of youth, with his processions sanctioned by the clergy, or the decoration of little altars on certain days of universal joy, seemed not opposed to the cultivation of that heavenly childhood to which Christ has promised the kingdom of heaven; but rude men scorned the Church for accepting with love whatever puerile decorum prompts; and now the child, ere he can lisp his mother's sacred name," as Cowper says, "swells with an unnatural pride, and lifts his baby-sword. This infant arm becomes the bloodiest Scourge of devastated earth; whilst specious names, learnt in soft childhood's unsuspecting hour, serve as the sophisms with which manhood dims bright reason's ray, † Od. xi. 450. 66 De Civ. Dei, iii. 17. and sanctifies the sword upraised to shed the blood of hapless men." Trugæus, who could not hear a boy make use of the word spear, without crying out ̓Ασπίδας; οὐ παύσει μεμνημένον ἀσπίδας ἡμῖν ; . and who quarrelled with him when he heard that his father's name was Lamachus, because it resembled in sound ̓Ανδρὸς βουλομάχου καὶ κλαυσιμάχου τινὸς υἱὸς, could seldom have a respite from irritation now*. Our public spectacles-our palaces—our museums-our paintings, would all seem to announce war either present or impending. The τεχνῖται τῶν πολεμικῶν, and the arts which minister to the vilest luxuries, are alone in great repute. A nation may thus appear, like the Athenians of old, as described by the Corinthians, "bold and daring beyond their power, and full of hope in dreadful emergencies +;" but Christians, in ages of faith, desired not such renown. Curious it is to find the heathen poet representing Minerva, as exhorting the Furies to refrain from infusing the martial spirit, like the heart of cocks, into her chosen citizen Μηδ' ἐξελοῦσ ̓ ὡς καρδίαν ἀλεκτόρων, Ἐν τοῖς ἐμοῖς ἀστοῖσιν ἱδρύσης "Αρη Εμφύλιόν τε καὶ πρὸς ἀλλήλους θρασὺν †, when we behold the image of that bird that most delights itself in war, now chosen to supplant the lily, which betokened peace, as the emblem of nations. Assuredly it is difficult to believe those pacific, who so proclaim themselves. Their guides often resemble men described by Peter of Blois in these terms: "they pretend peace, and nourish hatreds: they speak of fraternity, and excite enmities: they are full of anger, contention, envy, detraction: they say peace, peace, and there is no peace §." And are we to believe that these are the men who first stripped the image of war of delusive glory? What skills their protestations or the panegyrics of their admirers, when we see them every day verifying what the prophet long ago announced *Aristoph. Pax, 1291. + Thucyd. i. 71. of them? "Mordent dentibus et prædicant pacem." When we see the fruits of their sowing to be injuries, suspicions, enmities, treasons; when if they ever desire peace, it is only with the powerful, as when Abimelech came to Isaac on seeing him prosperous, when if they can triumph they make a solitude and call it peace. It is in modern times that man, after perfecting the arts of destruction, has learnt to name all hurtful things, as formerly while continuing in charity, he had imposed names on all the innocent creatures of the sanctified muse, and had taught the office of each choir of angels whom he knew familiarly by their titles, their employments, and their beauty. That Great Britain always gains by war is a maxim that we have not inherited from Catholic times, when the desire of every people was that expressed in the old line 66 Pacem, felicitatem, sanitatem per omnia sæcula tribuat Deus *." But we need not leave modern literature to find proof of what I advance here. "For who has not remarked the scorn, and the bitter taunts with which Catholic nations were spoken of by men of the new discipline, for the very reason that they were not trained to war! Such travellers in their descriptions of them adopted the very words of Satan in disdain of the angels, of whom he said in mockery— "Whose easier business 'twere to serve their Lord, High up in Heaven, with songs to hymn His throne, Truly the heroes of their predilection are not exactly imitators of an angelic type. Daniel Heinsius can hardly find words adequate to express his sense of the warlike glory of Gustavus Adolphus. He says, "that Mars shines in his countenance; that he is the offspring of Mars, and Augustus, greater and better than Alexander; that he was never a child, never a youth, but always a king; and that he is an object of admiration, like the sun ." Indeed, the men who teach philosophy to kings of the new religions, formally eulogise Alexander, whom Dante placed with Dionysius, where the souls of tyrants given Ap. Goldast. Alemannican. Antiq. tom. iii. præfat. † Par. Lost. iv. |