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and went upon her way with indescribable grandeur. Even little Rosa felt the change, where she sat at the window looking out. The little vain creature no longer felt it possible to believe, as she looked after them, that she ever could be anything to the Miss Wentworths except a little girl in a shop. It shook her confidence in what people said; and it was as well for her that she withdrew from the window at that conjuncture, and so had an opportunity of hearing her aunt come upstairs, and of darting back again to the penitential darkness of her own chamber at the back of the house-which saved Rosa some angry words at least.

you'll believe me, ma'am, it's nigh broken Miss Leonora swept her sisters out before her, my heart. She's neither flesh nor blood o' mine," cried the aggrieved woman; "there would have been a different tale to tell if she had belonged to me. I'd have-murdered her, ma'am, though it ain't proper to say so, afore we'd have gone and raised a talk like this; it ain't my blame, if it was my dying word," cried Mrs. Elsworthy, relapsing into angry tears; I'm one as has always shown her a good example, and never gone flirting about, nor cast my eyes to one side to another for the best man as ever walked; and to think as a respectable family should be brought to shame through her doings, and a gentleman as is a clergyman got himself talked about-it's gone nigh to kill me, that's what it's done," sobbed the virtuous matron; "and I don't see as nobody cares."

Miss Leonora had been woke up suddenly out of her abstract occupations; she penetrated to the heart of the matter while all this talk was going on. She transfixed her sister Dora, who seemed much inclined to cry like Mrs. Elsworthy, with a look which overwhelmed that trembling woman; then she addressed herself with great suavity to the matter in hand.

As for Miss Leonora Wentworth, she said nothing to her sisters on this new subject. She saw them safely home in their own apartments, and went out again without explaining her movements. When she was gone, Miss Wentworth listened to Miss Dora's doubts and tears with her usual patience, but did not go into the matter much. "It doesn't matter whether it is your fault or not," said Aunt Cecilia, with a larger amount of words than usual, and a sharpness very uncommon with her; "but I daresay Leonora "I suppose this poor little foolish child has will set it all right." After all, the confibeen getting herself talked about," said Miss dence which the elder sister had in Leonora Leonora. "It's a pity to be sure, but I dare- was justified. She did not entirely agree ssy it's not so bad as you think. As for her with her about the "great work," nor was laying snares for people above her, I wouldn't disposed to connect the non-licensing of the be afraid of that. Poor little thing! It's gin-palace in any way with the faithfulness not so easy as you think laying snares. Perhaps it's the new minister at Salem Chapel who has been paying attention to her? I would not take any notice of it if I were you. Don't let her loll about at the window as she's doing, and don't let her go out so late, and give her plenty of work to do. My maid wants some one to help in her needlework. Perhaps this child would do, Cecilia?" said Miss Leonora. As for her snares, poor thing, I don't feel much afraid of them. I daresay if Mr. Wentworth had Sunday classes for the young people as I wished him to have, and took pains to give them proper instruction, such things would not happen. If you send her to my maid, I flatter myself she will soon come to her senses. Good morning; and you will please to send me the books -there are some others I want you to get for me next week," said Mr. Elsworthy's patroness. "I will follow you, Dora, please," and

of God: but she comprehended in her gentle heart that there were other matters of which Leonora was capable. As for Miss Dora, she went to the summer-house at last, and, seating herself at the window, cried under her breath till she had a very bad headache, and was no use for any purpose under heaven. She thought nothing less than that Leonora had gone abroad to denounce poor Frank, and tell everybody how wicked he was; and she was sure her poor dear boy did not mean anything! She sat with her head growing heavier and heavier, watching for her sister's return, and calculating within herself how many places Leonora must have called at, and how utterly gone by this time must be the character of the Perpetual Curate. At last, in utter despair, with her thin curls all limp about her poor cheeks, Miss Dora had to go to bed and have the room darkened, and swallow cups of green tea and other nauseous

flectiveness. She was not thinking of the

compounds, at the will and pleasure of her maid, who was learned in headache. The licensing magistrate of St. Michael's, nor the poor lady sobbed herself to sleep after a time, beautiful faith of the colporteur. Other ideas and saw in a hideous dream, her sister Leo- filled her mind at the moment. Whether nora marching from house to house of poor perhaps, after all, a man who did his duty Frank's friends, and closing door after door by rich and poor, and could encounter all with all sorts of clang and dash upon the re- things for love and duty's sake, was not about turning prodigal. "But oh, it was not my the best man for a parish priest, even though fault--oh, my dear she found it out herself. he did have choristers in white surplices, and You do not think I was to blame?" sobbed lilies on the Easter altar? Whether it might poor Aunt Dora in her troubled slumber; not be a comfort to know that in the pretty and her headache did not get any better not- parsonage at Skelmersdale, there was some withstanding the green tea. one ready to start at a moment's notice for the help of a friend or the succor of a soul— brother to Charley who won the Cross for valor, and not unworthy of the race? Some strange moisture came into the corners of Miss Leonora's eyes. There was Gerald, too, whom the Perpetual Curate had declared to be the best man he ever knew; and the Evan

Miss Dora's visions were partly realized, for it was quite true that her iron-gray sister was making a round of calls upon Frank's friends. Miss Leonora Wentworth went out in great state that day. She had her handsomest dress on, and the bonnet which her maid had calculated upon as her own property, because it was much too nice for Miss | gelical woman, with all her prejudices, could Leonora. In this imposing attire she went to see Mrs. Hadwin, and was very gracious to that unsuspecting woman, and learned a few things of which she had not the least conception previously. Then she went to the Miss Wodehouses, and made the elder sister there mighty uncomfortable by her keen looks and questions; and what Miss Leonora did after that was not distinctly known to any one. She got into Prickett's Lane somehow, and stumbled upon No. 10, much to the surprise of the inhabitants; and before she returned home she had given Mrs. Morgan her advice about the Virginian creeper which was intended to conceal the continual passage of the railway trains. "But I would not trust to trellis-work. I would build up the wall a few feet higher, and then you will have some satisfaction in your work," said Miss Leonora, and left the rector's wife to consider the matter in rather an agreeable state of mind, for that had been Mrs. Morgan's opinion all along. After this last visit the active aunt returned home, going leisurely along George Street, and down Grange Lane, with meditative steps. Miss Leonora, of course, would not for kingdoms have confessed that any new light had come into her mind, or that some very ordinary people in Carlingford, no one of whom she could have confidently affirmed to be a converted person, had left a certain vivid and novel impression upon her thoughts. She went along much more slowly than usual in this new mood of re

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not in her heart deny it. Various other thoughts of a similar description, but too shadowy to bear expression, came in spite of herself through Miss Leonora's mind. "We know that God heareth not sinners; but if any man be a worshipper of God and doeth his will, him he heareth;" and it occurred to her vaguely, for the first time, that she was harder to please than her Master. Not that such an idea could get possession of a mind so well fortified, at the first assault; but it was strange how often the thought came back to her that the man who had thrilled through all those people about Prickett's Lane a kind of vague sense that they were Christians, and not hopeless wretches, forgotten of God; and who had taken in the mysterious lodger at Mrs. Hadwin's, bearing the penalty of suspicion without complaint, would be true at his post wherever he might be, and was a priest of God's appointing. Such were the strangely novel ideas which went flashing through Miss Leonora's mind as she went home to dinner, ejecting summarily the new gin-palace and her favorite colporteur. If anybody had stated them in words, she would have indignantly scouted such latitudinarian stuff; but they kept flickering in the strangest fluctuations, coming and going, bringing in native Wentworth prejudices and natural affections to overcome all other prepossessions, in the most inveterate, unexplainable way. For it will be apparent that Miss Leonora, being a

woman of sense, utterly scorned the Rosa | mind than otherwise, with healthful impulses Elsworthy hypothesis, and comprehended as nearly how it happened as it was possible for any one unaware of the facts to do.

Such were the good and bad angels who fought over the curate's fate while he was away. He might have been anxious if he had known anything about them, or had been capable of imagining any such clouds as those which overshadowed his good name in the lively imagination of Carlingford. But Rosa Elsworthy never could have occurred to the unconscious young man as a special danger, any more than the relenting in the heart of his Aunt Leonora could have dawned upon him as a possible happiness. To tell the truth, he had left home, so far as he himself was concerned, in rather a happy state of

of opposition to the rector, and confidence in the sympathy of Lucy. To hear that Lucy had given him up, and that Mis Leonora and Mrs. Morgan were the only people who believed in him, would have gone pretty far at this moment to make an end of the Perpetual Curate. But fortunately he knew nothing about it: and while Lucy held her head high with pain, and walked over the burning coals a conscious martyr, and Miss Dora sobbed herself asleep in her darkened room, all on his account, there was plenty of trouble, perplexity, and distress in Wentworth Rectory to occupy to the full all the thoughts and powers of the Curate of St. Roque's.

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MESSRS. SMITH, ELDER, AND CO. announce for publication early in the autumn an illustrated volume on the Lake Districts of England, by Mr. and Mrs. Linton, both letter-press and drawings being furnished by them. The same publishers have made arrangements with Mr. Hawthorne, author of the " Scarlet Letter," late United States Consul at Liverpool, to publish here simultaneously with their appearance in America, his reminiscences of his residence in this country, under the title, "Our Old Home."

MR. FROUDE has been busy about the Simancas MSS., and intends, it is said, making liberal reference to scandals about Queen Elizabeth in his first and second volumes of the history of the reign of that queen, forming the seventh and eighth volumes of his "History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth." Hitherto the extracts given from these Simancas documents seem entitled to no more credit than is usually accorded to the scandals promulgated by Nicholas Saunders and Girolame Pollini towards the close of the sixteenth century.

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From The Reader.

RENAN'S "LIFE OF JESUS." Vie de Jésus. Par Ernest Renan, Membre de l'Institut. (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères.) WITHIN the last year or two the name of Ernest Renan has been heard of as that of a French scholar and thinker almost singular for the seriousness of his tone and purpose among his literary compatriots, and worthy to be known and studied beyond the limits of France. A Breton by birth, and now over forty years of age, he has long had the reputation of being one of the best French orientalists-in which capacity he held the Hebrew Professorship in the Collège de France, until the recent outcry against his heterodoxy forced the government to remove him. For, along with his scholarship, he possesses a rare amount of the purely speculative spirit and genius, and the faculty also of a remarkably eloquent and graceful writer; and, although most of his writings were on such subjects as might naturally be handled by a Professor of Hebrew, the entire tenor and substance of these writings-his "General History of the Semitic Tongues," his "Essays on Religious History," his "Essays in Morals and Criticism," his treatise "On the Origin of Language," his dissertation "On Averroes and Averroism," etc.-had been such as to make it clear that this Hebrew Professor was not one of the usual stamp, but had utterly parted from the Church in his conceptions both of Judaism and of Christianity, and was, in fact, a skeptic of a new and very advanced type. What Bishop Colenso is now in England, Renan, by the exercise of a genius of far greater philosophic comprehension, of far richer information, and of far more poetical and sentimental quality, has for some time been across the Channel. The clergy anathematize him; but the skeptical French laity are proud of him, and view his career with ever-increasing interest.

had led him to reside on the frontiers of Gal-
ilee, and to travel much amid the scenes cel-
ebrated in the history of Christ. "All that
history," he adds, "which, at a distance,
seems to float in the clouds of an unreal
world, thus acquired, as it were, a body and
solidity which astonished me.
The striking
accord of the texts and the places, the mar-
vellous harmony of the Gospel ideal with the
country which served for its frame, were to
me like a revelation. I had before my eyes
a fifth Gospel, torn, but still legible, so that
thenceforward, through the medium of the
narratives of Matthew and Mark, I have
seen, instead of an abstract being such as
one would say never existed, a noble human
figure living and moving." He wrote the
present work while these impressions were
fresh upon him and the sacred scenes were
still in view; he had then scarcely any books
by him; and the only additions he has made
since his return home have consisted of ref-
erences, notes, and verifications. A beloved
sister was with him in the East, where she
died of a fever which for a time threatened
his own life; and it is to her memory that
the work is dedicated.

Renan's "Life of Jesus" is at this moment a European book. Everywhere it is being read, and everywhere it is making a profound sensation. Perhaps the first thing that will strike any one who reads it is the thorough contrast it presents to the famous "Life of Jesus" by the German Strauss. M. Renan, indeed, does not reject Strauss, but rather accepts him on the whole. "It is almost needless to remark," he says in a note in his Introduction, "that not a word in the work of M. Strauss justifies the strange and absurd calumny by which it has been attempted to discredit, with superficial persons, a work convenient, exact, ingenious, and conscientious, though spoilt in its general portions by an exclusive system. Not only has Into this state of opinion about himself, M. Strauss never denied the existence of and about the great questions which he rep- Jesus, but every page of his book implies resents, Renan has flung his new book-his that existence. What is truc is that M. "Life of Jesus." He had this book, it Strauss supposes the personal character of seems, in reserve; and its publication has for Jesus more obliterated for us than perhaps in some time been expected. It was written, he reality it is." It is by the practical extentells us, almost exactly as it now is, in the sion given to this last remark by M. Renan Holy Land, in the summer of 1861, at the in his work that he has made it so complete close of an expedition on which he had been a contrast to the work of Strauss. Strauss's sent by the French Government for the ex-work is an attempt to disintegrate the Gospel ploration of ancient Phoenicia. This mission narratives from beginning to end-to show

RENAN'S "LIFE OF JESUS."

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that they are an accumulation of myths upon | himself, are resolved by him into a practice, some basis of fact which, as being so covered in perfect good faith, of a "thaumaturgy over with myths, is no longer recoverable. then universally credited in such lands as Renan, on the other hand, accepting, in a Judea. In the case of one of the miracles, modified form, some of Strauss's results, and indeed-that of the raising of Lazarus-he quietly omitting from the Gospel narrative goes farther, and resorts to a supposition what he considers mere "legends," sets him- which, notwithstanding the subtle delicacy self to construct the real character and life with which he expresses it, will shock the pious fraud” of Jesus out of the materials that remain. reader greatly. He supposes that, in this His work is eminently imaginative and con- case, there may have been a “ structive, while that of Strauss is critical and though he does not give it in this blunt but implies that the oriental standard destructive. Throughout the body of the name, book the constant endeavor is to trace out in such matters must not be identified with and vividly represent the lineaments of the the occidental-on the part of Martha and real historic Christ as he walked and moved Mary and Lazarus himself, without Christ's about in Judea; and only now and then does knowledge. No passage in the whole work he permit a critical remark to intrude itself will shock more than this. It is but another statement of the peculias he proceeds. What of criticism there is in the work is chiefly contained in the Intro- arity of the book that it rejects from the first duction. There M. Renan gives his views as the notion of the Divinity of Christ, except to the authorship and the relative degrees of in the sense in which divinity might be precredibility of the Four Gospels; and there dicted of the noblest and grandest human also he announces, once for all, the skeptical being that ever walked on the face of the peculiarity, if it may be so called, which earth. It is of the man Christ, of Jesus of readers must be prepared to find in his book, Nazareth, that M. Renan essays to write the and which, wherever it is read, will provoke life. But, that being once understood by the reclamations against it as, with all its ex-reader, the astonishment will be at the untraordinary literary and moral merits, a blow paralleled devotion, the almost trembling at the substance of received Christianity, and occasion sorrow in pious minds that a man of such high and tender and yearningly devout genius should, as regards his religious faith, be no other than he is.

That peculiarity of the book is its entire "It is not," he rejection of the miraculous. says, in the name of this or of that philosophy, it is in the name of universal experience, that we banish miracle from history." And again, "Until a new order of things, we shall maintain this principle of historical criticism, that a supernatural story cannot be admitted as such, that it implies always credulity or imposture, and that the duty of the historian is to interpret it and to find out what portion of truth, and what portion of And again, in the error, it may contain." body of the work, "If ever the worship of Jesus shall become feeble among men, it will be precisely on account of the acts which originally caused belief in him." Hence, the miracles of the Gospel narratives, so far as M. Renan does not resolve them into myths of later formation, but recognizes them as part and parcel of the original series of events as done and countenanced by Jesus 1083

t

THIRD SERIES.

LIVING AGE.

fascination of heart and soul, with which M..
Renan treats his theme. Not a breath of the
Voltaire spirit, or of the skeptical spirit of
the eighteenth century, is preceptible here.
Renan and all that old French mockery are
millions of miles apart; Jesus is literally to.
M. Renan the grandest human being that
ever trod this earth, and the founder of the
religion which, in its essence, must be the
religion of humanity forever; and to got
back, by research and imagination through
the intervening eighteen hundred years, to
the exact time, and spot, and manner of this.
matchless reality, so as to behold it closely
and follow reverently and yet intelligently in
its footsteps, is, in M. Renan's view, that su-
preme feat of historical literature which,
though others have attempted it before, it
has been left for him to attempt again in a
new way. One may certainly say that, for
poetic vividness in the narrative, and for
depth and tenderness of reverent feeling, as
well as for definiteness of attempt at the
philosophic investigation of that human
character of Jesus which is all that M.
Renan recognizes, his work surpasses all that
has been written as yet, to the same purpose

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