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

THE PRESS.

young minds on a process of self-examination,
very likely to be carried to a morbid extreme,
and generating that perpetual self-conscious•
ness which is a bar to all healthy mental
action.

Of this lady's style and language it would
be superfluous to speak. The simplicity of a
refined nature, the ease of a skilled writer,
and the correctness of an industrious one, are
conspicuous in every page. There is no
straining at effect, no distortions of English
palmed off as originality, no distrust of native
vigour evinced by a recourse to artificial. In
all these respects " Ivors " is a most charming
and comfortable production.

With one word more of recommendation we
must close our notice. "Ivors " is entirely
free from the slightest insinuation of theologi-
cal opinions. If anything, we see a slight
tendency to condemn [formalism. There is
certainly a complete absence of all that tone
of thought by which certain of the authoress's
former works were supposed to be pervaded.
We are sure this announcement will be re-
ceived with pleasure by all that class of
readers who prefer keeping their creeds and
their amusement distinct. Whatever its other
faults, " Ivors " will irritate no religious con•
victions. Nor will the enjoyment of a single
pleasant chapter be marred by the intrusion
of the odium theologicum.

The Girlhood of Catherine dc Medici. By
T. A. Trollope. London : Chapman and
Hall.
ALL that Mr. Trollope has to relate concerning
the girlhood of Catherine de Medici might
well have been comprised in twenty or thirty
pages of this volume. Busy as the life of
Catherine was, and large as is the space it
occupies in historic annals, very little is known
of her until after the point at which this narra-
tive terminates—her marriage with the Duke of
Orleans, second son of Francis I. Of her cha-
racter in girlhood scarcely a single anecdote
has been preserved ; and to make out his
volume the author has entered into a history
of the transactions of the troubled period of
the pontificate of Clement VII. His theory
is, that—

She [Catherine] was in truth a remarkably fine speci-
men—a normal and well developed product—of the social
life of an epoch, which has from many circumstances
been regarded of late years with an admiration it surely in
no wise merits.

There is some truth in this view, no doubt.
Characters cannot be disjoined from their
epoch nor from their training ; and it is always
difficult to decide in what light historical per-
sonages should be considered whose crimes
and errors are, in great part or altogether, a
reflex of the age in which they lived. To
judge them wholly by their time would be to
set up a standard which few modern readers
would understand : it would be to get rid of
one deception to substitute another in its
place. Characters blotted with great crimes
would be made to appear virtuous and heroic,
because they were a little less depraved than
the depraved age in which they lived. It
would be to refine too far to estimate indi-
viduals in this way,—to assert that Catherine
was not cruel and treacherous because she
breathed an atmosphere of cruelty and
treachery, and that the Borgias are not to be
detested, as in a wicked social state their
superior wickedness only showed the supe-
rior ardour of their nature. The same sort of
excuse has been made in modern days for the
crimes of the French revolutionists. The
gloomy triumvirate, Marta, Dantor, and Robes-
pierre, were the products of their time, and
were the victims of circumstances ; but are
we therefore to content ourselves with saying
that they were fine specimens and well-
developed products of their epoch? This
would be to obliterate the distinction between
right and wrong, and to intimate that humanity
has no better standard by which to regulate
its judgments than the changing ideas of
different epochs. There would undoubtedly
be harshness and error in estimating person-
ages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
by the moral standard now prevalent; yet
such error would on the whole be less danger-
' ous than to represent their crimes as excusable

SATURDAY,

because they were common. The historian,
however anxious he may be to avoid injustlce
to particular names, should yet keep a higher
object in view, and recollect that he is under
an express obligation—whatever may be the
characteristics of the times he paints—to
represent those qualities which oppress and
scourge humanity as hideous, and those which
raise and ameliorate it as lovely. This duty
may be fulfilled without malice or partisan-
ship. The victims of moral deformity are
themselves objects of pity ; but, as the de-
formity is personified in them, we must show
it in all its repulsiveness, and condemn it with
all the force of righteous feeling.

In those times in which Catherine lived
there was a wider scope for individual action
than is afforded by the more regulated society of
our day, and accordingly in that age there were
greater examples of moral elevation, and baser
examples of depravity, than are often to be
found in this nineteenth century. Both
classes of character were in some respects the
products of their age ; but are we therefore to
regard both with equal favour? More and
NVolsey were contemporaries : shall we view
them as equally estimable ? The time which
produced a Duke of Alva produced a Sir
Philip Sydney : taking both as equally well-
developed products of their age and circum-
stances, shall we write of them as we would
do of two turnips or two cabbages produced
from different fields by different modes of
culture ?

Mr. Trollope appears to belong to that
advanced order of authors who bear the same
resemblance to the established ranks of litera-
ture as a mob of ragged urchins do to some
noble and stately procession which they pre-
cede. Ho affects to follow Carlyle in his style
of thought, and in his contempt for all those
details of grand ceremonials which old
chroniclers were so fond of setting forth, and
which the modern world—as we know by the
popularity of the Illustrated News—is still so
fond of reading. Of the coronation of Charles
V., by Clement VII., at Bologna, Mr. Trol-
lope w•iites

Mankind knows but too well by heart the routine of
such great days ; the solemn hymns and the silken hang-
ings ; the shouting crowds and shining soldiery; the old
oaths broken and the new oaths sworn ; the bowings and
the benedictions ; " Te Deums " and dinners; bargaining,
overreaching, and signing and sealing ; the processioning,
and trumpet-blowing, and organ-swelling ;—all the great-
ness and all the glory producible by the united efforts of
cooks, tailors, priests, trumpeters, and upholsterers. We
know all about it; and have no difficulty whatever in pie-
taring to ourselves the grave and graceful courtesies that
passed between God's vicegarent in cloth of gold, and God's
anointed in velvet.

This supercilious tone and affected superiority
of sentiment are not becoming in a writer of
Mr. Trollope's order of abilities. Frequently
he puts forward reflections which the reader
could well spare. At page 9, for example,
there is a digression on the defects of historic
writers previous to the advent of Mr. Trol-
lope :
Many a page of history has been written with a deter-
mination to make Mnemosyne decent at whatever cost of
vague euphuisms and convenient suppression. To be
decent, the muse is made to speak only quod decel—that
which looks well. Better than so were it that she should
never speak at all.

Is Mr. Trollope, then, anxious to in augurate
an indecent style of history? The historic
student well knows that not all which he finds
recorded will bear repetition. Not even our
author has thought it judicious to call in the
aid of Aretino to illustrate the manners of
Catherine's age.
We should not have criticised Mr. Trollope's
style had it not, been in places offensively
affected, and had it not also been marked by
the insolent and vulgar assumption which is
common to a number of modern writers who
have yet their spurs to win in the field of
literature. In every kind of historic compo-
sition, the first requisite to be desired is plain
and succinct narrative. Most persons are
able to think for themselves on the facts
placed before them, and nothing can be more
impertinent than for au author to continually
break the thread of his story to dictate the
train of reflection which the minds of his
readers should pursue. Every writer may be
modest, though he cannot be brilliant. There
is no more fatal mistake than to confound

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. If 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