THE ECLECTIC REVIEW. W. M.DCCC.LVIII. JULY-DECEMBER. (1859) Um NEW SERIES. VOL. IV. LONDON: WARD AND CO., 27 PATERNOSTER ROW. OLIPHANT AND SON, EDINBURGH: 'G. GALLIE, GLASGOW : THE ECLECTIC REVIEW. JULY, 1858. ART. I.-THE MODERN PAPACY. 1. Recollections of the Last Four Popes. By Nicholas, Cardinal Wiseman. 8vo. London: Hurst & Blackett. 1858. JUST forty years ago, in 1818, Nicholas Wiseman, an ingenuous young Briton, of approved morals and hopeful talents, entered the city of Rome, after a probation at St. Cuthbert's, Ushaw, in order to prosecute his studies at the English College, with a view to the Romish priesthood. Little did the wellgrown stripling expect that some two-and-thirty years later he should be issuing pastorals from the Flaminian Gate that would thunder and lighten in our ecclesiastical sky, with a portentous power which moved the very throne of this empire with indignant commotion, and raised such a stir of angry protest and clamour as was unknown in England since the Nonconformist Ejection of 1662. Little, probably, did he in the most sanguine dreams of youth anticipate that the stranger from distant lands would ever be so domesticated and adopted into the very bosom of the Church at Rome, that he should become one of its most favoured sons, and only leave the bounds of the capital a mitred prelate, prince, and cardinal of the Church. Dr. Wiseman describes in the following pleasant terms his first view of the sacred domicile, which was to be his home for so many years, and which, by its studious and friendly seclusion, well-improved, has contributed so largely to his fame: "A long, narrow street, and the Pantheon burst full into view; then a labyrinth of tortuous ways, through which a glimpse of a N.S.-VOL. IV. B church or palace front might be caught occasionally askew; then the small square opened on the eye, which, were it ten times larger, would be oppressed by the majestic, overwhelming mass of the Farnese Palace, as completely Michel-Angelesque in brick as the Moses is in marble, when another turn and a few yards of distance placed us at the door of the venerable English College.' Had a dream, after all, bewildered one's mind, or at least closed the eager journey, and more especially its last hours, during which the tension of anxious expectation had wrought up the mind to a thousand fancies? No description had preceded actual sight. "No traveller since the beginning of the century, or even from an earlier period, had visited it or mentioned it. It had been sealed up as a tomb for a generation; and not one of those who were descending from the unwieldy vehicle at its door had collected, from the few lingering patriarchs, once its inmates, who yet survived at home, any recollections by which a picture of the place might have been prepared in the imagination. Having come so far, somewhat in the spirit of sacrifice, in some expectation of having to 'rough it' as pioneers for less venturesome followers, it seemed incredible that we should have fallen upon such pleasant places as the seat of future life and occupation. Wide and lofty vaulted corridors; a noble staircase leading to vast and airy halls succeeding one another; a spacious garden, glowing with the lemon and orange, and presenting to one's first approach a perspective in fresco by Pozzi, one engraved by him in his celebrated work on perspective; a library airy, cheerful, and large, whose shelves, however, exhibited a specimen of what antiquarians call 'opus tumultuarium' in the piled-up, disorganized volumes, from folio to duodecimo, that crammed them; a refectory wainscoted in polished walnut, and above that, painted by the same hand, with St. George and the Dragon ready to drop on to the floor from the groined ceiling; still better, a chapel, unfurnished, indeed, but illuminated from floor to roof with the saints of England, and celestial glories, leading to the altar that had to become the very hearthstone of new domestic attachments, and the centre of many yet untasted joys;-such were the first features of our future abode, as, alone and undirected, we wandered through the solemn building, and made it, after years of silence, re-echo to the sound of English voices, and give back the bounding tread of those who had returned to claim their own. And such, indeed, it might well look to them when, after months of being 'cribbed, cabined, and confined' in a small vessel, and jammed in a still more tightly-packed vettura, they found in the upper corridors, wide and airy as those below, just the right number of rooms for their party, clean and speckless, with every article of furniture, simple and collegiate though it was, spic and span new, and manifestly prepared for their expected arrival. One felt at once at home; it was nobody else's house; it was English ground, a part of fatherland, a restored inheritance. And though, indeed, all was neat and trim, dazzling in its whiteness, relieved here and there by tinted architectural members, one could not but feel that we had been transported to the scene of better men and greater things than were likely to arise in the new era that day opened. Just within the great entrance-door, a small one to the right led into the old church of the Holy Trinity, which wanted but its roof to restore it to use. There it stood, nave and aisles, separated by pillars connected by arches, all in their places, with the lofty walls above them. The altars had been removed; but we could trace their forms, and the painted walls marked the frames of the altarpieces, especially of the noble painting by Durante Alberti, still preserved in the house, representing the Patron-Mystery, and St. Thomas of Canterbury, and St. Edward the Martyr. This vision of the past lasted but a few years, for the walls were pronounced unsafe, and the old church was demolished, and the unsightly shell of a thoroughly modern church was substituted for the old basilica, under the direction of Valadier, a good architect, but one who knew nothing of the feelings which should have guided his mind and pencil in such a work. "It was something, however, to see that first day, the spot revisited where many an English pilgrim, gentle or simple, had knelt leaning on his trusty staff, cut in Needwood or the New Forest; where many a noble student from Bologna or Padua had prayed in formâ pauperis, as he was lodged and fed, when, before returning home, he came to visit the tomb of the Apostles; and still more, where many and many a student, like those now gathered there, had sobbed his farewell to the happy spring days and the quiet home of youth, before starting on his weary journey to the peril of evil days in his native land. Around lay scattered memorials of the past. One splendid monument, erected to Sir Thomas Dereham, at the bottom of the church, was entirely walled up and roofed over, and so invisible. But shattered and defaced lay the richly-effigied tombs of an archbishop of York and a prior of Worcester, and of many other English worthies; while sadder wreckage of the recent storm was piled on one side-the skulls and bones of, perhaps, Cardinal Allen, F. Persons, and others, whose coffins had been dragged up from the vaults below, and converted into munitions of war. And if there was required a living link between the present and the past, between the young generation that stood at the door and the old one that had passed into the crypt of the venerable church, there it was, in the person of the more than octogenarian porter, Vincenzo, who stood all salutation from the wagging appendage to his grey head to the large silver buckles on his shoes, mumbling toothless welcomes in a yet almost unknown tongue, but full of humble joy and almost patriarchal affection, on seeing the haunts of his own youth repeopled." Of the English College at Rome we are in a position to furnish a few items of information which Dr. Wiseman has not supplied, probably supposing most of his readers familiar with the history of its foundation. It was established by Pope Gregory XIII., in the year 1578, and had for its first rector Dr. Maurice Clenock, bishop elect of Bangor, in the reign of the unhappy |