their wives, for better or worse, and until death. These are our professions, and these are our honest and heart-felt sentiments. Mr. Froude, however, in spite of his maxim that men must be judged by their professions, refuses to admit that we can be loyal to our country; and with his well-known courage he proceeds to prove to us that he is right. "The American Constitution," he says, "is the political expression of the principles which the Pope has violently condemned." This, of course, is false. No pope has ever condemned the American Constitution, even by implication. "But," insists Mr. Froude, "the Syllabus says that men are not free; that they are not capable of taking care of themselves; that the laity in the most important matters must be guided and governed by the clergy; that the press ought to be under censorship; that the Catholic religion being true, all others are false, and therefore ought not to be tolerated." The Syllabus is a list of eighty propositions which Piux IX., at various times during his pontificate, declared to be errors; but there is not one of them which asserts the principles which Mr. Froude would have us believe the Pope has condemned, and it is difficult to imagine that any one who has read that document could be capable of writing the sentence which I have just quoted. Getting his arguments as his facts at second hand, he has confused the Syllabus with the Encyclical of December 8, 1864, in which Pius IX. condemned the following proposition: "All citizens have the right to an entire, unlimited liberty to manifest and declare publicly, by voice or the press, or in any other way, their thoughts—whatever they may be—and no authority, either ecclesiastic or civil, can in any way restrict this liberty." This the Pope declares to be an error, but so does common sense. There is no government on earth which could stand the strain of such a doctrine as this. Does our own grant entire and unlimited liberty to publish libel, or to print and circulate obscene writings, or to utter seditious and rebellious speech? Political society necessarily supposes that each member of it renounces a portion of his natural liberty in exchange for benefits without which liberty itself is a doubtful good; and the error which the Pope here condemns is that of the Socialists, who would overthrow all authority, human and divine. Mr. Froude himself, indeed, at the end of his concluding article, openly takes sides with the Pope in this matter. "A state of things," he says, "in which the action of government is restricted to the prevention of crime and statutable fraud, and where beyond these limits all men are left to go their own way-to be honest or dishonest, pure or profligate, wise or ignorant, to lead what lives they please and preach what doctrines they please-may have been a necessary step in the evolution of humanity; but, as surely, if no other principle had ever been heard of, or acted on, civilization would have stood still, hardly above the level of barbarism. As surely, unless the wheel of progress is to turn backward, and we are to decline as we have risen, the natural superiority of truth to falsehood, and right to wrong, will recover, in some shape or other, the form of practical authority; and it is this principle of authority which Romanism has all along insisted on." Mr. Froude, then, and the Pope are friends at last; and, while the curtain falls upon the tableau, I shall beg leave to say but another word. Authority and liberty are as essential to the order of the social world as the centripetal and centrifugal forces to the harmony of the universe. Excess of authority is tyranny, and excess of liberty is anarchy; and tyranny begets anarchy, and anarchy ends in tyranny. In Christianity religion is organized into a separate power, and endowed with the highest moral authority which has ever influenced the destiny of mankind. Henceforth Church and state : are for ever distinct and the Church leans more to the side of authority, and the state more to the side of liberty; and, in proportion as man attains to greater freedom, he ought more and more to recognize the divine authority of religion. The Catholic Church is the highest representative of this authority which the world has ever known; and it is surely not rash to think that she has a great and beneficent mission to fulfill in an age and a country in which the individual has attained to the possession of the fullest liberty. JOHN LANCASTER SPALDING, Bishop of Peoria. RECENT BIOGRAPHY, ETC. The Life and Works of Gilbert Stuart. ONE of the most striking literary features of the last decade of years has been the number of interesting biographies, memoirs, etc. Lives of artists, men of letters, soldiers, statesmen, distinguished women, men of all professions- the recently dead and the long buried-have been published by scores; yet the public, like Oliver in the novel, ask for more, and the "cry is still they come." "The Life and Works of Gilbert Stuart " is perhaps the most ambitious biographical work that has ever appeared in American literature. The subject is singularly interesting, not only to artists and scholars, but to all American readers. Gilbert Stuart was, beyond all question, the greatest headpainter this country has yet produced, and one of the most wonderful colorists of modern times. He lived at a period full of extraordinary events. Born December 3, 1755, he was a young man during the American Revolution; in middle life he saw Europe convulsed by the French Revolution; he witnessed the rise of Napoleon, his dazzling career of military glory, his final downfall at Waterloo, and his death at St. Helena. Love of art was inborn in Gilbert Stuart, and, at an age when other boys are playing marbles and flying kites, he was filling the sides of his father's barn with chalk and charcoal drawings. At the age of thirteen he painted portraits for money. Fortunately for the young genius, he was able to go to England and to become a pupil of Benjamin West, who, pleased with his precocious talents, treated him with paternal kindness. He remained abroad seventeen years, during which time he established his reputation as a portrait-painter of the first class. He painted George III., the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Northumberland, and other eminent persons. He lived splendidly, for he had as many sitters as he could paint, and charged nearly as much for his pictures as Sir Joshua Reynolds. In 1792 Stuart abandoned the brilliant career that was before him in England, and returned to America. The character of Washington had filled him with the most enthusiastic admiration, and an intense desire to paint a portrait of the Father of his Country was the principal object that he had in view when he left England. The wish of the artist was gratified in the winter of 1794-'95, when Washington sat for his portrait in Philadelphia. We have a very pleasing description of Stuart's studio during the time he was painting Washington: General Knox, General Henry Lee, Louis Philippe, the Viscount de Noailles, Miss Nellie Custis, Miss Harriet Chew, and Mrs. Washington were frequent visitors. After he had finished the picture of Washington, Stuart was overrun with orders for portraits. Among his sitters at that time were Mrs. Washington, Mrs. Madison, Mrs. Lawrence Lewis (Nellie Custis), the Marchioness d'Yrujo, and other beautiful women who adorned the republican court. It was said of Gilbert Stuart that, when he painted a beautiful woman, the angels inspired his pencil. He expended his genius upon the head of his subject; the dress and its accessories he always treated with indifference. Upon one occasion, when asked by a lady to make some change in the drapery of her picture, he testily replied, "I am not a milliner." When we read of the wonderful achievements of Stuart's pencil -of the illustrious men and lovely women telling with mute but touching eloquence the power of his art, and made almost to breathe and live again by the magic of his brush; when we read of his pictures being so natural and lifelike that one feels half afraid of violating the rules of good breeding by staring directly into their faces-when we read of these things, and turn to the portraits in this volume, we confess a feeling of disappointment comes over us. We see only shadows; the harmonious blending of light and shade is not there. We are told that, during Lafayette's visit to this country in 1824, he was shown one of Stuart's portraits of Washington, when he exclaimed, "That is my noble friend indeed!" We do not think he would have been so enthusiastic at sight of the Washington portrait reproduced by the photogravure process which forms the frontispiece of this volume. Stuart's portrait of Miss Elizabeth Willing (Mrs. Jackson) is one of the loveliest ornaments of the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts; but, when we examine the picture in the work before us, we fail to discover anything attractive. We view the canvas from which Madame Bonaparte's dainty head, in triple pose of loveliness, smiles in unfading witchery," and then, turning to the "counterfeit presentment " given in this book, we see the ghost only of that enchanting beauty which moved the hearts of captains and of kings. The arrangement of this book is defective; too much space is given to a list of the works, and too little to the life of the artist. About one half of the bulky volume is made up of a catalogue of the portraits painted by Gilbert Stuart, giving the biographical sketches already alluded to. This latter feature of the book is excessively annoying as well as uncomplimentary to the reader, who is supposed to know at least the rudiments of American history. He does not wish to be told when and where John Adams was born, and that he died on the 4th of July, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Every American schoolboy knows that fact. Such trite historical statements are childish, and should not have been printed in this pretentious volume, even for the purpose of "padding." If the list of Stuart's works had been compressed into one tenth the space they now occupy, if the life had been expanded to three times its present size, and a careful selection of his historical and female portraits had been reproduced on steel, a beautiful and entertaining duodecimo volume would have been the result; instead of which we have an unhandy quarto, the binding of which suggests the temporary covers put on books belonging to Sunday-school libraries. We did not expect much from "The Letters of Charles Dickens," and were not disappointed. Yet, as a revelation of his own character by one of the most popular authors of this century, it is one of the most remarkable works that has appeared since “The Life and Letters of Byron" delighted the world fifty years ago. The book has been eagerly anticipated wherever the English language is spoken. The public were not satisfied with Forster's "Life of Dickens," which only contained in full the correspondence of the novelist with his biographer. We are told that, when Robert Burns made his appearance in the fashionable drawing-rooms of Edinburgh, his fascinating conversation carried duchesses off of their feet. After this transient gleam of social success, the poet naturally hated to return to the obscurity and poverty of his home. The fortunes of Charles Dickens were very different. He, too, had known poverty, want, and suffering, but, from the moment that the "Pickwick Papers" es |
