SIX MONTHS IN THE APENNINES.* Tins book is unexpectedly delightful

reading. It is marked by sober accuracy, it is redolent of Italy, it presents the results of learned study with tact and taste, and yet it is about Irish saints and sages of that dark period of history between the sixth and tenth centuries. Its Celtic legends are set in Italian records, and the evangelisation of the pleasant plains of Northern Italy and the slopes of the Apennines touches us with a sense of reality that we do not feel among forms as shadowy as those of Ossian's heroes, with their background of forest and morass. Miss Stokes, perhaps the most cultivated of Irish archseologists, and the least liable to antiquarian delusions and prehistoric vanities, inspires trust. Before we have read ten pages of her " nourishing " Italian experiences, we are ready to believe all she tells us, and to adopt her rendering of archaic legend and existing fact. For readers who desire to know the true truth about semi-mythic personages, this is not a common experience. They are too noble to be willingly dropped out of the calendar of heroes, yet too much obscured by veils of legend to be quite human. Miss Stokes has reconciled much of what is grotesque in the legends of Finnian and Colomban and Donatus of Fiesole, with the tender grace of Christ's folk in pagan villages. She has begun a work which, if carried out as she promises, would establish on historical bases the claims of Irishmen to a con- spicuous part in the great monastic civilisation of Europe, which merged Latin and Greek and Jewish and Arabic ex- perience in the great whole of medieeval life and the consequent Renaissance. It is by Christian ties that Ireland belonged first to the commonwealth of the European continent. She was never part of the Roman world, and never broken in to its system of law. It was Patrick, or, if not he, another mis- sionary of the same stamp, not Cwsar, who sowed the germs of civilisation on the far seaboard of Kerry and Aran. The Celts of uttermost Erin echoed with full sound the Italian themes, and their resonant hymns swept back in interlacing waves across Europe to the place of their birth. The Irish missionary "flood," as St. Bernard calls it, had its origin in Celtic pilgrimages to Rome and the Holy Land, as Miss Stokes's Italian researches go far to prove :—

" Crossing the Continent on foot, the Irish devotees fell in with mountaineers and dwellers in the wilderness, or in the depths of the forest, through which they pierced their way, who had never heard of Christ, or who, if they had been visited by some early apostle, had relapsed into heathenism. And thus the missionary system of the Celtic Church was a development of the pilgrimage customs of the early Christians. These holy men, having made their pilgrimage, returned to found schools and churches where they had seen most need of such, and where, therefore, their vocation lay."

We do not think that, even among the most anxious be- lievers in an Irish ecclesiastical system apart from that of Rome, any will be found to refuse the evidence in this book of the identity of Latin and Irish Christianity in their essential characteristics and dogmas ; and, indeed, the fervour of Celtic faith in our Lord's divinity did good service against the wide- spread evil of Arianism in Southern Europe. Between sixty and seventy of the more famous religious houses on the Continent were of Irish foundation, but in immediate touch with Rome, besides countless " Hospitalia Scotorum " mentioned in the capitularies of Charles the Bald, A.D. 846. There is no doubt that the Danish raids and command of the sea checked and almost cut off Ireland from the rest of Europe ; if they had not done so, its perfervid inhabitants might have spent their splendid qualities otherwise than in retarding that civilisation, in founding which they had so large a part.

Meantime, this volume has special interest in pointing out the filiation of the ascetics of Irish deserts from those of the Thebaid ; and surprise at the number of monks who crowded into the Ulster Bangor and other religious houses of Ireland,

* Six Months in the Apennines ; or, A Pilgrimage in Search of Vestiges of the Irish Saints in Italy. By Margaret Stokes, Hon. Member B.I.A., to. London: George Bell and Sons. 1892.

is lessened when we remember the seventy-six thousand who swarmed in Egypt. By them the standards of industry and personal piety were raised, which helped to lift European society to its present level, and we prefer to contemplate these evangelising multitudes as one general product of the Christian leaven, rather than to claim exceptional influence for this or that race or locality. For Irishmen at that period of ethical revolution, we may, perhaps, claim an enthusiasm for the counsels of Christ, and a hardiness to endure, which were diffi- cult to people within the great circuit of Roman life and customs and those delightful paganisms in which Manias the Epicurean was brought up.

The legends which gather round the Celtic saints in their Italian bishoprics are sweeter and more reasonable in their symbolism than are those of their fierce struggle with the briars and thorns of the North. Their sanctity is less tor- mented by fiends, rheumatic or other, and Miss Stokes has in her researches gained for them visibly firm footing on a soil already historic. The Lombards, fiercely heathen as they were, could be won and tamed. They had not the Philistinism of the Danish pirates, which burned "the host of the books of Erin," and ruined every object of art in the Irish sacristies that they might get at the gold of them. To find the Irish

Finnian coming to Italy to secure a copy of that "recent work," The Vulgate of St. Jerome, to admire him canalising Shelley's unruly river Serchio, and obliging Lombard Kings to "go to Canossa," appeals to us as no Irish incidents of a dim past can do. Even to know that Finnian's, or Frediano's,

body was consigned to a Pagan sarcophagus, brings his noble episcopal figure within classical illumination. How intelli- gently the author links facts—not theories—together, is shown by her account of the bas-relief on the sarcophagus, now, however, only known to us by careful drawings made in the seventeenth century :—

"The subjects on the three compartments all belong to the Pagan iconography of death. The altar, the dance of winged genii, the Thanatos who holds in one hand the inverted torch, and in the other a mirror. Here we have a fine instance of the mystic mirror which was a not uncommon Pagan symbol of death—much used by the Etruscans—and evidently referred to by St. Paul. The initiated, in dying, pass into the presence of the divinity, the flame is extinguished, the mirror of life cast away, says the Pagan ; and the Christian, developing the heathen faith, adds : 'For now we see in a mirror darkly, then face to face ; now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.' And so along the Egyptian, Greek, Latin, and Christian chain, pass the great doctrines of human hope and faith, and by the legend of this Irish pilgrim are handed down to us through mediceval learning and modern research."

What a lesson in rebuke of sectarian iconoclasm, which is theft from the human treasury. Miss Stokes has done well to gather the fragments of scattered gold in Italy, which are

nearer the surface there than in the wilder north. The pax Hibernica too often imposed by English hands on Ireland

would have swept them away long since ; she has replaced at least four great figures, Celtic to their finger-tips, on the level height of universal history by her careful inquiries at Lucca, and Bobio, and Fiesole ; and she makes their ascetic figures as pleasant as they are strong to the eyes of the most modern tourist. We believe in the bell and drinking-cup of Colomban when we recognise as his so many precious codices in libraries fed from his great collection at Bobio. The caves and cells of Donatus, Andrew (his deacon), and Briget (Andrew's sister), become reasonable and real in the sunshine of the Fiesole Bishopric and on the slopes of the Apennines.

It was of course natural that an Irish archteologist should have studied the curious resemblances in Italian ornamental design to what have been assumed as purely Celtic patterns. In the " dark " ages, or even in the time when the marvellous Book of Kells was created, novelty in patterns was probably as impos- sible as now, when we can only produce apparent variety by breaking up old designs into a chaos without form and void of old mystical symbols, the expressions of prehistoric religions. Italian authorities call the interlaced bands, knots, triquetras, and other intricacies of Irish ornament, Italo-Byzantine. It is, we think, satisfactory to link the art products of Ireland with the common stock, while we praise the marvellous skill in their use and the refinements of their development, as in Miss Stokes's frontispiece. She prefaces her many examples of Italo-Byzantine design by the incomparable monogram of Christ from the Book of Kells, in which illumination pro- bably reached its most beautiful expression.

But Miss Stokes leads us into "pastures new" by her

charming progress through scenes still echoing the hymns of the Irish saints in Northern Italy. In her zeal and sympathy she makes no mention of her own discomfort, after the modern fashion, and we live with her in the very presence of Colomban at Bobio, and Dungal, the learned envoy of Charle- magne and Lothair ; we love Fiesole with new reverence within the halo of the beautiful Donatus and his deacon, Andrew. They were, as were most of the Italo-Celtic saints, pilgrims to Rome when miraculous signs warned the people of Fiesole that a true pastor was at hand. "The people crowded round, and cried with one voice, Eia Donatus, pater Deodatus,' ascend the Bishop's chair that you may lead us to the stars." We have not space to quote the charm- ing scene as it is given by Miss Stokes from an old Lzfe of Donatus, nor the yet more beautiful account of his death. The student of Dante will, as he reads it, remember Dean Plumptre's suggestion that the celebrated lines in Virgil's fourth eclogue, which seem to prophesy the coming of Christ, because quoted by Donatus on his death-bed, "may have had a special influence on Dante's mind."

Miss Stokes has travelled in the old-fashioned spirit ; not for personal amusement or the benefit of her health, but with a good purpose, by which we hope many will profit. Her charming book proves the best use of archmology. It affiliates us in our very different age to our great forefathers of pre- medival times. It finds authentic traces of the scaffolding by which Europe was lifted to its present level, and its learning and sound suggestions are clothed in modern taste that yet never jars us by a discordant note.