"non-resistance to the higher powers," which Macaulay treats with such wealth of statement, argument, and illustration, in his "History of England," are in this sermon discussed with equal earnestness, energy, brilliancy, fulness, and independence of thought. If all political sermons were characterized by the rare mental and moral qualities which distinguish Jonathan Mayhew's, there can be little doubt that our politicians and statesmen would oppose the intrusion of parsons into affairs of state on the principle of self-preservation, and not on any arrogant pretension of superior sagacity, knowledge, and ability. In the power to inform the people of their rights and teach them their duties, we would be willing to pit one Mayhew against a score of Cushings and Rhetts, of Slidells and Yanceys. The fact that Mayhew's large and noble soul glowed with the inspiration of a quick moral and religious, as well as common, sense, would not, in our humble opinion, at all detract from his practical efficiency.

Works of Charles Dickens. Household Edition. Illustrated from Drawings by F. O. C. Darley and John Gilbert. The Pickwick Papers. New York: W. A. Townsend & Co. 4 vols. 12mo.

We have long needed a handsome American edition of the works of the most popular English novelist of the time, and here we have the first volumes of one which is superior, in type, paper, illustrations, and general taste of mechanical execution, to the best English editions. It is to be published at the rate of two volumes a month until completed, and in respect both to cheapness and elegance is worthy of the most extensive circulation. Such an enterprise very properly commences with "The Pickwick Papers," the work in which the hilarity, humor, and tenderness of the author's humane and beautiful genius first attracted general regard; and it is to be followed by equally fine editions of the romances which succeeded, and, as some think, eclipsed it in merit and popularity. We most cordially wish success to an undertaking which promises to substitute the finest workmanship of the Riverside Press for the bad type and

dingy paper of the common editions, and hope that the publishers will see the propriety of adequately remunerating the author.

It is pleasant to note that years and hard work have not dimmed the brightness or impaired the strength of Dickens's mind. The freshness, vigor, and affluence of his genius are not more evident in the "Old Curiosity Shop" than in "Great Expectations," the novel he is now publishing, in weekly parts, in "All the Year Round." Common as is the churlish custom of depreciating a new work of a favorite author by petulantly exalting the worth of an old one, no fair reader of "Great Expectations" will feel inclined to say that Dickens has written himself out. In this novel he gives us new scenes, new incidents, new characters, and a new purpose; and from his seemingly exhaustless fund of genial creativeness, we may confidently look for continual additions to the works which have already established his fame. The characters in "Great Expectations" are original, and some of them promise to rank among his best delineations. Pip, the hero, who, as a child, "was brought up by hand,” and who appears so far to be led by it, thus illustrating the pernicious effect in manhood of that mode of taking nourishment in infancy, is a delicious creation, quite equal to David Copperfield. Jaggers, the peremptory lawyer, who carries into ordinary conduct and conversation the habits of the criminal bar, and bullies and cross-examines even his dinner and his wine,-Joe, the husband of "the hand" by which Pip was brought up, Wopsle, Wemmick, Orlick, the family of the Pockets, the mysterious Miss Havishham, and the disdainful Estella, are not repetitions, but personages that the author introduces to his readers for the first time. The story is not suffi ciently advanced to enable us to judge of its merit, but it has evidently been carefully meditated, and here and there the reader's curiosity is stung by fine hints of a secret which the weaver of the plot still contrives to keep to himself. The power of observation, satire, humor, passion, description, and style, which the novel exhibits, gives evidence that Dickens is putting forth in its production his whole skill and strength.

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CHAPTER V.

IL PADRE FRANCESCO.

THE next morning Elsie awoke, as was her custom, when the very faintest hue of dawn streaked the horizon. A hen who has seen a hawk balancing his wings and cawing in mid-air over her downy family could not have awakened with her feathers, metaphorically speaking, in a more bristling state of caution.

Spirits in the gorge, quotha?" said she to herself, as she vigorously adjusted her dress. "I believe so,-spirits in good sound bodies, I believe; and next we shall hear, there will be rope-ladders, and climbings, and the Lord knows what, I shall go to confession this very morning, and tell Father Francesco the danger; and instead of taking her down to sell oranges, suppose I send her to the sisters to carry the ring and a basket of oranges?"

"Ah, ah!" she said, pausing, after she was dressed, and addressing a coarse print of Saint Agnes pasted against the wall,—-“you look very meek there, and it was a great thing no doubt to die as you did; but if you 'd lived to be married and bring up a family of girls, you'd have known something greater. Please, don't take offence with a poor old wom

an who has got into the way of speaking her mind freely! I'm foolish, and don't know much, so, dear lady, pray for me!" And old Elsie bent her knee and crossed herself reverently, and then went out, leaving her young charge still sleeping.

It was yet dusky dawn when she might have been seen kneeling, with her sharp, clear-cut profile, at the grate of a confession-box in a church in Sorrento. Within was seated a personage who will have some influence on our story, and who must therefore be somewhat minutely introduced to the reader.

Il Padre Francesco had only within the last year arrived in the neighborhood, having been sent as superior of a brotherhood of Capuchins, whose convent was perched on a crag in the vicinity. With this situation came a pastoral care of the district; and Elsie and her grand-daughter found in him a spiritual pastor very different from the fat, jolly, easy Brother Girolamo, to whose place he had been appointed. The latter had been one of those numerous priests taken from the peasantry, who never rise above the average level of thought of the body from which they are drawn. Easy, gossipy, fond of good living and good stories, sympathetic in troubles and in joys, he

had been a general favorite in the neighborhood, without exerting any particularly spiritualizing influence.

It required but a glance at Father Francesco to see that he was in all respects the opposite of this. It was evident that he came from one of the higher classes, by that indefinable air of birth and breeding which makes itself felt under every change of costume. Who he might be, what might have been his past history, what rank he might have borne, what part played in the great warfare of life, was all of course sunk in the oblivion of his religious profession, where, as at the grave, a man laid down name and fame and past history and worldly goods, and took up a coarse garb and a name chosen from the roll of the saints, in sign that the world that had known him should know him no more.

Imagine a man between thirty and forty, with that round, full, evenly developed head, and those chiselled features, which one sees on ancient busts and coins no less than in the streets of modern Rome. The cheeks were sunken and sallow; the large, black, melancholy eyes had a wistful, anxious, penetrative expression, that spoke a stringent, earnest spirit, which, however deep might be the grave in which it lay buried, had not yet found repose. The long, thin, delicately formed hands were emaciated and bloodless; they clasped with a neryous eagerness a rosary and crucifix of ebony and silver, -the only mark of luxury that could be discerned in a costume unusually threadbare and squalid. The whole picture of the man, as he sat there, had it been painted and hung in a gallery, was such as must have stopped every person of a certain amount of sensibility before it with the conviction that behind that strong, melancholy, earnest figure and face lay one of those hidden histories of human passion in which the vivid life of medieval Italy was so fertile.

He was listening to Elsie, as she kneeled, with that easy air of superiority which marks a practised man of the world, yet

with a grave attention which showed that her communication had awakened the deepest interest in his mind. Every few moments he moved slightly in his seat, and interrupted the flow of the narrative by an inquiry concisely put, in tones which, clear and low, had a solemn and severe distinctness, producing, in the still, dusky twilight of the church, an almost ghostly effect.

When the communication was over, he stepped out of the confessional and said to Elsie in parting,-"My daughter, you have done well to take this in time. The devices of Satan in our corrupt times are numerous and artful, and they who keep the Lord's sheep must not sleep. Before many days I will call and examine the child; meanwhile I approve your

course."

It was curious to see the awe-struck, trembling manner in which old Elsie, generally so intrepid and commanding, stood before this man in his brown rough woollen gown with his corded waist; but she had an instinctive perception of the presence of the man of superior birth no less than a reverence for the man of religion.

After she had departed from the church, the Capuchin stood lost in thought; and to explain his reverie, we must throw some further light on his history.

Il Padre Francesco, as his appearance and manner intimated, was in truth from one of the most distinguished families of Florence. He was one of those whom an ancient writer characterizes as "men of longing desire." Born with a nature of restless stringency that seemed to doom him never to know repose, excessive in all things, he had made early trial of ambition, of war, and of what the gallants of his time called love, — plunging into all the dissipated excesses of a most dissolute age, and outdoing in luxury and extravagance the foremost of his companions.

The wave of a great religious impulse -which in our times would have been called a revival swept over the city of Florence, and bore him, with multi

tudes of others, to listen to the fervid preaching of the Dominican monk, Jerome Savonarola; and amid the crowd that trembled, wept, and beat their breasts under his awful denunciations, he, too, felt within himself a heavenly call, the death of an old life, and the uprising of a new purpose.

The colder manners and more repressed habits of modern times can give no idea of the wild fervor of a religious revival among a people so passionate and susceptible to impressions as the Italians. It swept society like a spring torrent from the sides of the Apennines, bearing all before it. Houses were sacked with religious fervor by penitent own ers, and licentious pictures and statuary and books, and all the thousand temptations and appliances of a luxurious age, were burned in the great public square. Artists convicted of impure and licentious designs threw their palettes and brushes into the expiatory flames, and retired to convents, till called forth by the voice of the preacher, and bid to turn their art into higher channels. Since the days of Saint Francis no such profound religious impulse had agitated the Italian community.

In our times a conversion is signalized by few outward changes, however deep the inner life; but the life of the Middle Ages was profoundly symbolical, and always required the help of material images in its expression.

The gay and dissolute young Lorenzo Sforza took leave of the world with rites of awful solemnity. He made his will and disposed of all his worldly property, and assembling his friends, bade them the farewell of a dying man. Arrayed as for the grave, he was laid in his coffin, and thus carried from his stately dwelling by the brethren of the Misericordia, who, in their ghostly costume, with mournful chants and lighted candles, bore him to the tomb of his ancestors, where the coffin was deposited in the vault, and its occupant passed the awful hours of the night in darkness and solitude. Thence he was carried, the next day, almost in

a state of insensibility, to a neighboring convent of the severest order, where, for some weeks, he observed a penitential retreat of silence and prayer, neither seeing nor hearing any living being but his spiritual director.

The effect of all this on an ardent and sensitive temperament can scarcely be conceived; and it is not to be wondered at that the once gay and luxurious Lorenzo Sforza, when emerging from this tremendous discipline, was so wholly lost in the worn and weary Padre Francesco that it seemed as if in fact he had died and another had stepped into his place. The face was ploughed deep with haggard furrows, and the eyes were as those of a man who has seen the fearful secrets of another life. He voluntarily sought a post as far removed as possible from the scenes of his early days, so as more completely to destroy his identity with the past; and he devoted himself with enthusiasm to the task of awakening to a higher spiritual life the indolent, self-indulgent monks of his order, and the ignorant peasantry of the vicinity.

But he soon discovered, what every earnest soul learns who has been baptized into a sense of things invisible, how utterly powerless and inert any mortal man is to inspire others with his own insights and convictions. With bitter discouragement and chagrin, he saw that the spiritual man must forever lift the dead weight of all the indolence and indifference and animal sensuality that surround him, — that the curse of Cassandra is upon him, forever to burn and writhe under awful visions of truths which no one around him will regard. In early life the associate only of the cultivated and the refined, Father Francesco could not but experience at times an insupportable ennui in listening to the confessions of people who had never learned either to think or to feel with any degree of distinctness, and whom his most fervent exhortations could not lift above the most trivial interests of a mere animal life. He was weary of the childish quarrels and bickerings of the monks, of their puerili