must be resisted. Possibly it was from the influence of fear that so many attacks came on at dead of night. Waking in the night, and thinking what might be so near one, disposed persons to accept the surrounding infection.

Of course, sitting up through the night could only be done occasionally. The great demand for nurses made it in general impossible. A sad process it was. The hot, infectious atmosphere of a small room, with one, or perhaps two cholera patients in it, is very oppressive; so that even the chloride of lime burnt with vitriol after death to kill infection, was a relief. During collapse or insensibility of the patient the heavy eyes of the watcher closed from time to time; he would wake with a shock that made the heart beat quick. It was the large Dutch clock striking; gradually the eyes would doze again. During the last stage of the sufferer's life, when he was quite, or almost insensible, few accompanying circumstances were more painful than the flies: it may seem strange that so small a matter should be observed, but an awful solemnity and stillness reigns round such a death-bed as this; the conscious self of the sufferer is not there, where then, one ponders, is it gone? or what is it now going through? These few silent hours what unnumbered sins may not be disappearing from the score, under the intensity of his chastisement! And the extreme solemnity of such ideas seems mocked or insulted in a way by these crowding insects, that creep in and out of the eyes, nose, and mouth, which are unconscious of the intrusion, or have no power left to resist it. They are anticipating death, when these things will be theirs.

By midnight, or one o'clock, the ordinary day might be called over. Sometimes it was an hour earlier. Altogether it was exhausting work. Yet a summons was not unfrequent at that hour, and at times out of the parish, to a distance; and this usually led to two or three others, the relatives waiting outside in the street. Not often can the knock at a door tell such a tale as did that vicarage door handle at the various hours of the night. The tired ear listened almost nervously for its summons as the limbs were flung, or rather fell, like lead upon the welcome mattress. Perhaps at that moment would come a startling knock. Selfishness was ready for a moment's pause. It was only fancy. No; there it was again. It was not fair to let another be roused from sleep when so much needed, if indeed one or two others were not on their night-work still. So the clothes were slipped on,-the window opened for a brief parley,-in a few minutes he was again below,-the unextinguished gas jet was turned up: medicine was forwarded, and shortly followed by the priest himself. There were not many nights in which all were undisturbed by a summons. It was happy if only one had been

needed. But what a blessing a clear sleep of several hours!to have thoughts of self, even to feel the vilest wants rising into competition with the grandest duties, how humbling a consciousness!-Alas, how often to be realised!

At

So passed the days and weeks of this distressing season. the close of each week, when the Registrar's Report was heard, inaccurate as it was, hope would be experienced that at any rate the worst must now be over,-thirty, forty, fifty, had died in the week in the parish. It could not be worse. Next week, at least, must see a change for the better; and as the disease increased, while towns and localities, in which its commencement had succeeded that in their own, were already gradually emerging from the storm, hope got smaller, and that in proportion to the decay of the physical strength in the Clergy. Evening by evening somewhere about five, and from that till after dark, might be seen the single-horse hearse carrying off the bodies of the dead. Always along the same road from which numerous small streets branched off, these mournful conveyances found a daily occupation. Above a low wall nodded the black feathers-slowly passing on and on. It was like a perpetual stream. It is the custom of some religious bodies external to the Church, for relatives and others to accompany the corpse of the better circumstanced on foot, singing wild, and not unmelodious hymns and dirges. These added to the general gloom brooding round the place. Something there is peculiarly chilling in the wildness of these wailing sounds. It was like the hopeless cries of a Mussulman funeral rather than the sobriety due to a Christian man's last sleeping place. Men, women, and children were thus taken from sight. The old, on the whole, fared better than the young. Those in the prime of life both suffered most and died in the greatest numbers. One of the Clergy caught it, but was instantly attended to. It did not get beyond the premonitory stage. Another, a guest, was attacked in the midst of celebrating the Eucharist in church, but recovered soon; and one young man who lived in the house, who also recovered after 150 drops of laudanum. All parties were subject to occasional qualms.

At length, by the end of September, the disease began to abate; a fast-day was appointed by the Bishop of the diocese, and to the services of the day crawled many a wasted form that had last entered the church very differently. Again the cholera broke out, and for some time raged violently-and at last again subsided.

It will perhaps be thought that those who witness such visitations as these gain nothing but what is pure and elevating from their familiarity with woe; yet then only, perchance, is it

ness.

that the inner vilenesses of self-love are brought to light. The reader pictures to himself glowing embodiments of pure and high devotion in those whose vocation brings them in contact with so much sorrow. It would seem as though the contemplation of 'wan faces, lamentations, and loud moans,' can but chasten and refine; yet, a sudden demand for a high course of action, for which we are not prepared,-like the sudden demand for interest from the king's servants, which is not forthcoming —what a tale of recklessness, negligence, estrangement of heart, does it reveal!-the confounded soul is enlightened, without expecting it, to its poverty, its lameness, its blindness, its nakedInconceivable are the smallnesses of character, sickening the intricacies of self-love which will rise on those dread occasions to the surface under which they have long lain unknown and unsuspected. How often must he who has to play the judge's part feel the smiting consciousness that Justice demands a change of place between himself and his suffering penitent! We console at times the doubting spirit with the thought, that when occasion comes, the Divine mercy will raise and enlarge the heart by a special gift of fitness. 'As thy day is, so shall thy strength be,'-holy and blessed truth in itself, but how false as applied by the effortless religion of feelings and sympathies, fair words, and decencies of the day! No; that religion which has walked humbly in action and denial of self, will prove itself to be a something genuine in that day. Whatever is true, whatever false, in these perilous days of enlightenment, when knowledge grows apace, must come out; though the confines between true and false once broad and distinct would seem now shrouded round in mist impenetrable. However disputed questions of true or not true may be to be decided—real work, self-preparation and discipline, exercise in humbleness and charity-these are a certain foundation; they are the preparatives for seeing, as in a bright mirror, all that now may perplex those that love justice and are seeking rest for themselves.

One word in conclusion. It is under calamities and visitations that mutual animosities are softened, difficulties cleared, controversies forgotten. The love of opponent sides to a common centre is an approach to the love of each other; if that centre be sufficient for both, if it be boundless and eternal in itself, sooner or later in loving it, will all other aims and affections be merged, and cease to be. As in eternal predestination the only force to which the will of men bows is the drawing of love, so will that resistless power prove itself stronger than those influences which now divide communions, however deep and long-lived the causes from which those divisions rose and grew. In this country we stand outwardly

opposed to a great and powerful communion, which advances a claim we cannot admit. As the sides have withdrawn in sunder, so have the things that darken the evidences of former identity multiplied between us. Yet are they like the two that had been friends in youth,' and 'stood aloof, the scars remaining like cliff's that have been rent asunder,' &c. A dreary sea indeed flows between, but in times like those of war or pestilence these parted masses of the Rock recognise unwittingly the traces of unity, broken as they may seem to the eyes of outward observers. The Roman and the English priest find their work in the hospital, and can work under their own Master without interference or jealousy. And common fairness towards the Roman priesthood demands no less than a testimony to its fidelity on such occasions as the one we treat of. However unacceptable her claims in controversy, rarely does the Roman Church fail in act under the emergencies of pestilence or infection. Whether it be the shores of Cochin-China, or the barricades of Paris, or the hospitals of our crowded towns of Liverpool or Leeds, one phase of her character is shown to the full-self-devoted charity. In the last-named place three Roman priests in the summer of 1847 met their deaths in rapid succession from the putrid fever raging amongst the Irish population. One by one, in the crowded ward, or the solitary cell, knelt at the bed-head to receive without murmur the double legacy, the burden of the conscience, and with it deadly infection. When last the cholera visited Rome the Jesuit fathers walked up and down the worstinfected streets, to answer instantly any appeal that might be made. An episcopal city during the present year, in the southwest of England, suffered very severely :-the Bishop took the charge of the cholera-hospital on himself. For once at least, every rank, and all sides and differences find a temporary level. Here at least they may journey side by side, and find a road open to that City of Peace which, wherever we shall at last find it, will be reached by the way of humility and self-renounce

ment.

187

ART. VI.-Dante's Divine Comedy, the Inferno; a literal Prose Translation, with the Text of the Original. By J. A. CARLYLE, M.D. London : 1849.

THE 'Divina Commedia' is one of the landmarks of history. More than a magnificent poem, more than the beginning of a language and the opening of a national literature, more than the inspirer of art, and the glory of a great people, it is one of those rare and solemn monuments of the mind's power, which measure and test what it can reach to, which rise up ineffaceably and for ever as time goes on, marking out its advance by grander divisions than its centuries, and adopted as epochs by the consent of all who come after. It stands with the Iliad and Shakspere's Plays, with the writings of Aristotle and Plato, with the Novum Organon and the Principia, with Justinian's Code, with the Parthenon, and S. Peter's. It is the first Christian poem; and it opens European literature, as the Iliad did that of Greece and Rome. And, like the Iliad, it has never become out of date; it accompanies in undiminished freshness, the literature which it began.

We approach the history of such works, in which genius seems to have pushed its achievements to a new limit, with a kind of awe. The beginning of all things, their bursting out from nothing, and gradual evolution into substance and shape, cast on the mind a solemn influence. They come too near the fount of being to be followed up without our feeling sensible of the shadows which surround it. We cannot but fear, cannot but feel ourselves cut off from this visible and familiar world-as we enter into the cloud. And as with the processes of nature, so is it with those offsprings of man's mind, by which he has added permanently one more great feature to the world, and created a new power which is to act on mankind to the end. The mystery of the inventive and creative faculty, the subtle and incalculable combinations by which it was led to its work, and carried through it, are out of the reach of investigating thought. Often the idea recurs of the precariousness of the result:-by how little the world might have lost one of its ornaments-by one sharp pang, or one chance meeting, or any other among the countless accidents among which man runs his course. And then the solemn recollection supervenes, that powers were formed, and life preserved, and circumstances arranged, and actions controlled, that thus it should. be: and the work which man has brooded over, and at last