hope clasps the cross; hope yearns onward for the crown; hope justifies; hope sanctifies; hope feeds faith; hope nurses charity; hope breeds good works; hope consecrates hearts, and purifies the fleshly temples of the Spirit; hope interprets Sacraments; hope saves souls, and for that they let not go of hope, Churches reform themselves."

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"You have promised," said I, "to tell me your own view of our English Church, and the light in which it would have been regarded by the men of your times." Nay," said he, "not now, and not here. You say you are sure that they of the six first centuries would have acknowledged your catholicity, and received you into communion, although some of your characteristics would have been distasteful to them. Be content with that at present, if you are sure about it. Some day I will apply to you the habits of thought and the ecclesiastical feelings of the Middle Ages, and see what comes of it. Be sure I shall not judge harshly of the Church of Lanfranc. But it must not be now. Talking on politics produces a roughness of spirits, which ill fits us for discussions, at best melancholy and humiliating, and calling for a tender heart. I came to speak to you of other things, but you have led me into politics."

As he said this, he entered the church. I followed him. He was standing under the pulpit which rests upon the tomb of Stilicho, near a pillar on the north side of the church. He was excited; and when he

saw that I had followed, and was watching him, he seemed angry, and disappeared.

He had advised me never to think about his conversations directly after they were over; but to forget them for awhile in other occupations, and then recall them. Following this admonition, I passed forth from San Ambrogio into the streets.

The streets of Milan, like those of Paris, have witnessed several scenes of fearful interest. The powers of famine and pestilence have enacted many a dark drama there. The Strada Pescheria, the crooked arch by the square de Mercanti, the Cordusio, and other localities, are celebrated by Manzoni in the Promessi Sposi, where the famine is so vividly related, and the tumultuous assaults upon the bakers' shops. It was a bright, sunny day, and the houses and shops shone brilliantly; yet I could almost see those same streets, silent and grassgrown, with here and there some of the terrible monatti taking the corpses down from the windows, and the silence broken from time to time by the harsh bells of the apparatori, warning the passenger to retire before the cart of the dead; and then the carts seemed to pass before me, as described, one and then another, and then a third: "the monatti walked by the side of the horses, urging them on with their whips and with oaths. The bodies were for the most part naked, some were half covered with rags, and heaped one upon another; at each jolt of the

wretched vehicles, heads were seen hanging over, the long tresses of women were displayed, arms were loosened and striking against the wheels, thrilling the soul of the spectator with indescribable horror." Then might be seen, as represented in the common frontispiece to St. Charles's Life, the good archbishop moving along the streets close to the houses, administering the Lord's Holy Body to hundreds, who leaned from the lower windows to receive It; when the magistrates forbade their assembling in the churches, lest it should aggravate the pestilence. It was then that Milan saw the spirit of St. Cyprian revived again in her great prelate. What wonder was it they should love him almost to idolatry?

It was said of the Borromean family, that one of them belonged to heaven, another to hell, and the rest to earth. But Frederick must be associated with St. Charles in the love and admiration of the faithful. He, too, when the pestilence was once more unchained in Milan, and raged along the streets, acted with undaunted calmness and most affectionate solicitude. His mandate to his clergy was, "Be disposed to abandon life rather than these sufferers, who are your children and your family; go with the same joy into the midst of the pestilence, as to a certain reward, since you may, by these means, win many souls to Christ." souls to Christ." Frederick firmly resisted the clamors of the people, when they demanded that the remains of St. Charles should be

carried in procession through the streets. He felt

it to be an improper boldness, and dreaded the increase of irreverence consequent upon the failure of such an improper means of supplicating the mercy of Heaven. At length, however, the violence of the people prevailed, and the archbishop yielded to their cries and entreaties. Now followed one of the most striking scenes which the streets of Milan ever witnessed. Before the dawn of June 11, the gates of Milan were closed, by order of the magistrates, to prevent any concourse of strangers from the country, which might increase the power of the pestilence. Several houses were condemned by the Tribunal of Health as infected, and they might be seen in every street nailed up. At sunrise the great procession left the cathedral. It was composed principally of women their faces were masked, their feet. bare, and many were clad in sackcloth. Behind them came the trades of Milan, each in colored dresses and with symbolical banners. The religious fraternities followed, and the clergy in canonicals, each bearing a lighted candle. Encircled with a glare of torches, beneath a rich canopy that swayed with the tread of the bearers, and gleamed as it swayed, was borne the crystal coffin of St. Charles. His episcopal vestments and mitre shone through the crystal, and sufficient traces were left upon the face, whereby some of the more aged beholders could recognize their sainted prelate. Behind the precious remains of St. Charles came the good archbishop Frederick, his cousin, whose feelings may not be described. The

train closed with clergy, magistrates, and nobility, all bearing torches, and whose diverse habiliments betokened the opposite feelings which men of different dispositions might entertain on such an occasion. Some were clothed in sumptuous splendor, as though by their magnificence to do honor to the presence of the holy relics; others went in rude sackcloth, as though in their minds they had not dared to give entrance to another thought but of their own sins and corruption, whose chastisement they recognized in the presence of the fearful Angel doing God's behests in their unworthy city. All along the streets reigned a deathlike stillness, except when the sick in their chambers, wrestling with the dark Angel for life, might hear the swell of the loud canticles from the distant procession, like the surges of a faroff sea, gifted perchance, as those surges are, with something of a tranquillizing power upon the minds of the agonized sufferers.

Alas! the procession did indeed produce the effect which Frederick Borromeo had anticipated. Presumption and, as Manzoni terms it, a fanatical assurance took possession of the people. Humiliation, at all times irksome to the natural mind, passed off in the outward act, and with the actual chanting of the penitential psalms. In the midst of this unhallowed confidence, the pestilence broke out with horrible fury in every street, well-nigh in every house at once. It could not be called speedy; the awful visitant was ubiquitous. The lazaretto was instantly