The Press. — London, England, 1856-11-15 00:00:00

NOVEMBER 15, 1856. crude ideas with original thought, and a mul titude of words with philosophic teaching. The father of Catherine was the Duke of Urbino (or Lorenzo 11., as he is sometimes called), grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent. He married a princess of France, Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne. At this time he was only in his twenty-seventh year, yet his pro fligate life speedily proved fatal to him, and, according to Mr. Troliope, to his wile also. Their daughter Catherine was born in the Palazzo Medici, on pith April, 1519. Her mother died on the 28th of the same month, and her father on the 4th of May following. Thus, when only twenty-one days old. the in fant was deprived of both parents. The Car dinal tie Medici, subsequently Clement VII , took charge of the child and conveyed her with him to Rome. The author writes : On entering its gates, she passes out of the fitful circle of light projected into the darkness of the past, by the magic lanthorn of history, and vanishes from our gazing for the space of six years. The reader will at once recognise that we have not condemned Mr. Trollope's style without just cause. " Die magic lanthoru of history!" \o phrase could better illustrate the con temptible affectation and puerility which dis figure part of this biographical essay. To fill up this gap of six years, Mr. Trollope sketches the political and social state of Italy at the period, but he fails to construct, what we should very willingly have received, a minute picture of the domestic life of that time. I f Catherine is to be viewed merely as a well developed specimen of her age, other influences must have contributed to her growth than the wars of princes and the in trigues of Churchmen, and those influences must, in her childhood at least, have been purely domestic. In these pages there is little information that may not be found in the highways of history. Leo X. died before Catherine had completed her third year. In the opinion of Mr. Trol. lope this pontiff was one of those persons who have had greatness thrust upon them : At an earlier age, when monks were intrusted with the keeping of Fame's trumpet, the foundation of a monastery was the price in full of the immortalising blast. Tn Leo's days the instrument had passed into other hands ; and pensions, church preferments, cash distributions, and con vivial suppers, secured all the "greatness " which philo sophers, historians, and poets could confer on one who in• vested so largely in their commodities. Allowing Mr. Trollope to retain his own ideas on the propriety of making his favorite Mnemosyne indecent, we wish he would at all events learn to write decent English. The " immortalising blast of Fame's trumpet " is about as ridiculous as the " magic lanthorn of history." When Catherine was in her sixth year, and when Clement VII. was commencing those intrigues which made his pontificate the most disastrous Home has ever known, the child was removed to Florence, with two of her relatives, Ippolito (subsequently a cardinal), and Alessandro, who succeeded to the rule of Florence after the attempt of the city to main tain its independence had been crushed by foreign force. Under the care of Cardinal Passerini, Catherine appears to have passed the next two years of her life in tranquillity. A passage in which the author endeavours to show what must have been the current of her early thoughts, may be cited as a favorable specimen at his composition : The earliest fragments of the talk going on around her, which Catherine's sharp and active intellect was then avidly seizing and appropriating as chiblien do, to be stored in indelible asswiation with these first assimilated ideas which constitute character, must have turned on schetnes of popular repression ; on dread of popular violence; on cruel vengeances counselled by hate but held in check by fear; on all the rules and wiles of that state craft which regards nations as dangerous and un tamed animals to be kept in subjection only by mingled deceit and violence. Such was the future queen's earliest instruction in the art of governing, all the more carefully treasured in her inmost heart, if presented by example rather than by "professed precept." . . The capture of Rome by Constable Bourbon was thought by the citizens of Florence a favorable opportunity for asserting their liberty. They rose against the Government of the Cardinal Passerini, ana Catherine was sent for safety to the convent of Santa Lucia. Plague and famine combined with civil strife to desolate the unhappy city; and, for greater safety, Catherine was removed (Dec. 1527) to THE PRESS. the " Niurate," a community of nuns secluded, or supposed to be secluded, from all communica tion with the outward world, and " decidedly '• the most esteemed and most fashionable " nunnery in Forence." Here she remained two years and a half ; and her biographer, in pursuance of his design, attempts to track the influences by which she was here sur rounded : In due imitation of their poor half crazed, but certainly sincere, foundress, who shut herself in earnest reality from all communication with the world iu her narrow cell on the bridge over Arno, each noble damsel on her en trance into the sisterhood edified the Florentines by per forming the theatrical feat of passing in through a hole in the wall broken for the purpose, while archbishop and canons were there to make up the show, and to lay with their own right reverend hands the first brick of the mended wall behind her. But the solemn reclusion, typified by so awful a ceremony, appears to have been about as much a genuine reality as the other parts of their monastic discipline. If the one hole was bricked up, there were plenty of other eut►ances into the warren. Jf doors were decorously shut with ostentatious bolt and bar, there were other means of reaching the forbidden fruit ripening within those not too savagely guarded gardens. The Florentine chroniclers and novelists of the sixteenth century, whose melodmme-like tales are on this point sufficiently confirmed by the official edicts and complaints of the civic and ecclesiastical authorities of the ilay, prove that such means were put in habitual requisition by noble youths outside the cloister walls, who wished to visit noble ladies within them. Then the author proceeds to notice " sinister " stories which have been current in Florence "in later years, of the remains of infant skele " tons, found thick-sown in ancient nunnery " gardens." The conclusion he desires to point to is, that " Catherine's female educators " in her girlhood were as practically atheist " as the purple guardians of her infancy." The few facts brought forward by the author wholly fail to support this sweeping insinua tion. His object being to support a theory— that all Catherine's crimes in after life were due to her early training—he thinks it neces s►ry to represent that she was wholly sur rounded by depravity. In this case, however, the letters of Catherine herself furnish the strongest presumption against her biographer's sinister inferences. When at the height of her power Catherine settled lands on the Murate sisterhood to the value of six thou sand crowns, accompanying the gift with a letter commencing— The notable and unceasing zeal for God's service, as well as the purity and uprightness of life which in my childhood I observed to reign in your monastery ',where possibly some one may yet be alive of those who saw me there when a young girl) have induced me to show my gratitude for the continual and devout prayers that you have offered, and ever continue to offer up, for the King, my husband, and me, &c. The other letters of Catherine to the sister hood, dating from 1542 to 1588, a year before her death, are conceived in the same spirit. Assuredly, had this community of nuns been so vicious and hypocritical as it suits Mr. Trollope's scheme to represent them, Cathe tine would not in after years have cherished such grateful and affectionate remembrance of her residence amongst them. Nor are these letters consistent with the author's general idea of her character. He supposes that she was entirely indifferent to religion. It would be nearer the truth to say that she always con sidered herself a dutiful daughter of the Church. Her crimes were much less due to the general spirit of her age than to the teach ing of her Church, which taught that with heretics no faith was to be kept and no mercy shown. And Mr. Trollope misses the whole moral of her story in arguing that it was moral depravity, and not religious bigotry, which made her what she was. It was not, as Mr. Trollope would have us believe, that her mind was depraved by vicious practices within the convent of the Nlurate—(vicious practices which most likely never existed, though his imagina tion, strongly antagonistic to whatever is decent in history, fondly paints them)—nor that the gentle sisters were practical atheists, caring nothing for the creed they professed, but that the creed itself was of a nature to stimulate the most ruthless extremities against those who denied it Hence it unfortunately hap pened that the moat zealous believers were the most cruel persecutors. A large heart and an enlightened knowledge of the Gospel could alone save the genuine Romanist of those days from applauding the policy of Pro testant massacres and heretic fires. 1097 Were it worth while, it would not be difficult to show the fallacy of those grounds on which the author hai based his opinion of the iniquity of the sisterhood of the Murate The inference he draws from his assumption that the cognisance of such a fact as the deliberate murder of innocents because their removal was necessary for the suppression of scandal and the glory of religion, would be a most efficient training for the perpetration of such deeds as the pupil was in after years guilty of, would be sufficient of itself to destroy all con fidence in the author's judgment and impar tiality. The thirty months of Catherine's residence with the Murate go far, he conceives. to account for " the portentous phenomenon of " the exterminating Queen." It would he more just, as well as more pleasing, to contemplate Catherine when forcibly removed from the shelter she loved as pure and pious, but with the germ of that hatred agitiust heretics in her heart which was so fearfully to expand when the interests of her ambition combined with the sentiments of her faith to intensify her animosity against them. The sisterhood of the Murate incurred the suspicions of the popular party in Florence by their supposed attachment to the Medici : It was rumoured through the town, in the summer of 1530, that baskets bad been sent from the Murate to known favourers of the Medici, with designs of the Medi cian arms—the hated sik balls worked in flowers at the bottom of the basket. some said even that the cakes themselves had been arranged into the same treasonable semblance. Acting on this suspicion, the Government determined to remove Catherine—the " Du ehessina," as she was called—to her former residence of Santa Lucia : The tears and prayers of the DIM, however, and the remonstrances of the " Duchessina " herself, obtained a delay till the following day. The nuns, we are told, passed the whole of the intervening night in prayer in their chapel. Catherine herself, now just eleven years and three months old, seems to have been already capable of showing a sufficiently strong will and promptitude of action upon the occasion ; for while the sisterhood were thus em ploying the midnight hours, they were surprised by the sudden apparit►on of the Duchessina among them in the dress of their order, and with all her hair cut off according to monastic rule, crying out as she rushed into the choir. " Holy Mothers, lam yours! Let us now see what ex communicated wretch will dare to drag a spouse of Christ from her monastery." The reader will not fail to mark how this anecdote discountenances that indictment of vice and falsehood which the author has been at such pains to frame against the sisterhood. It is obviously the conclusion of a shallow mind to suppose that because certain beliefs and practices were false there could have been no truth in those who clung to them. Witch craft was a delusion, but all who believed in it were not knaves and hypocrites. Catherine, despite her resistance, was re moved from the care of the Murate to the covent of Santa Lucia. Sooa afterwards the popular Government of Florence fell before the Imperial forces, and Alessandro, the kins man of Catherine, was named Grand Duke by the victors. Between the victory over the re publicans and the re-establishment of the Medici there was an interval, employed by Clement in getting rid of the most obnoxious opponents of the Medici. Catherine was spared these bloody scenes by being taken to Rome. It is one proof of the purity and amiability of her mind at this period that she sought and obtained the pardon of Silvestro Aldobrandini, who had been employed to re move her from the care of the Murate, and who seems to have behaved with as much ten derness as the strict nature of his instructions would allow. On her return to Florence, Catherine entered into possession of a splendid home. Pumps and festivities succeeded to civil strife, and the young Dachessina seems to have been greatly admired for her talents, awl beloved for her amiable qualities. One of the most pleasing passages of this book is that describing the meeting of Catherine with the Princess Mar garet—an illegitimate daughter of Charles V.— the betrothed bride of Alessandro Catherine rode several miles out of Florence to meet the youthful Princess at Cafaggiolo. The follow ing is a pretty example of constructive his tory:— ■ Margaret was attended by the Cardinal appointed b y Charles as her governor, and by a numerous suit of male attendants. She was moreover accompanied by twelve