The Lives of the Saints. April. By the Rev. S.
Baring-Gould. (Hodges.)—It is a somewhat singular fate that has allotted to Mr. Baring-Gould this task of compiling the Lives of the Saints. It is a work which makes a considerable demand upon the faith, not to say the credulity, of its author, and its author happens to be a man of a distinctly critical temper, apt, we should say, to put an excessive reliance upon his own judgment, and indisposed to accept even the weightiest opinion of others. There is certainly, for instance, a very considerable consensus of authority in favour of the identification of "John, whose surname was Mark," with the Evangelist Mark. Of this Mr. Baring- Gould calmly disposes in the words, " Some have, without reason, con- founded him [the Evangelist] with John surnamed Mark." (It is a curious circumstance, by tho way, that our author is so busy with comparing ecclesiastical authorities that he has not time to look at Scripture.) "He has also been thought," we read, "to have been sister's son to the Apostle Peter," and then we are told how he was his amanuensis and interpreter, and had a talent for in- terpreting his discourses, &c. Would it not have been as well to tell no- that St. Peter does actually call him " Marcus, my son"? Mr. Baring- Gould is far less confident when he comes to speak of St. Mark's relics. These were translated to Venice in the ninth century frpm Alexandria.. Soissons, however, boasts a head. They have an arm at Candler
interest of the volume, it is not unequal to its predecessors. The most important lives are those of St. Richard of Chichester, one of the few saints which England produced in the five centuries that passed between the Conquest and the Reformation; St. Leo the Great, Pope Leo IX., and St. Anselm. The ordinary biographies grow a little wearisome after one has read two or three hundred of the same pattern. Still there is an occasional relief. The Irish Saints are true to their national vocation of amusing. Here, for instance, we have St. Tighernach put, when a child, to sleep in the same bed with two young- Princes of Brittany, and so overpowering them by his sanctity that they were found dead in the morning. But the spear of Achilles healed the wound it made. He was again put between the dead bodies, and they revived ; only, one was blind and the other bald to the end of his days. But the best story is that of Dulcitius, a Roman governor, who, having imprisoned three Christian virgins, heard them singing psalms at night, and groped his way into the kitchen after them. He tries to lay hold of them, but they escaped him, and he caught and kissed instead the pots and saucepans. Unconscious of his grimy condition, he took his seat next morning in the hall of judgment, and even made his way into the imperial presence.
To the wolf of the desert, that prowls where they feed,— another at Leth, a third at Marolles, and a fourth at Rome. " There- If Jesus at last leaves them lost and astray,— 0 Mother of Mercy, do thou intercede:" most be a mistake somewhere," he gently remarks. As to the general.
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