The Irish standard. [volume] (Minneapolis, Minn. ;) 1886-1920, 1911-09-16

Stafford. To be quite honest l did not
love him either then or any period OF
his life. He was too thorough an Eng
lish Tory to the very marrow of his
bones. Throughout all his episcopal
4 life we Irish nationalists in England
regarded him as a very formidable
and a very irreconclable enemy of the
Irish cause. l now think we did him
' injustice; he was kind to Irish priests
and he did not interfere actively in
Z politics; and although he was not
favorable to Home Rule or to any
other liberal cause, he was not as
Vaughn was a full, almost obese
man, his face with Norman nose, with
full cheeks with a lofty and arrogant
brow, was that of an aristocrat; and
when one added to this, the flowing
scarlet robes of a cardinal, he might
well have stood for the portrait of one
prelates whom the genius of an Ital-
ian artist with a love for satire and
a quiet hatred of the church, might
have handed down to US as his con-
ception of the medieval naughty and
omnipotent prelate Ct the days when
the pope ruled the kings and kingdoms
was cold and hard, and accordingly
he was never loved.
Suddenly ! found one day that my
whole conception of the man was
false. He had cousin named Snead-
Cox who, for a long time was brought
into closest intimacy with him as edi-
tor of the Tablet, the Catholic weekly
newspaper which Vaughn owned for
many years; and this cousin was en-
trusted with the duty of writing his
biography. Everybody expected the
usual style Of thing; an unctuous de-
scription of faultless angel with the
kind of sentimental piety which does
duty for biography in such official
biographies of great ecclcsiastics.
II" The biography wa sthe very anti
thesis. 1t was a record of a poor, suf-
fering, self doubling and lacerated
human heart: it was a picture of a
man and not of saint; Of a soul in all
its nudity, not of a prelate yelled in
the robes Of his Office and the incense
of the altar. This man, supposed to
be the very embodiment of pride,
self-contidence and hardness, is found
scourging himself nightly in the soil
tude Of his chamber and in the pages
of his diary for his ofrenses against
:, his ideals. Over and over again en-
tries like this; and finally when his
life was closing and apparently after
he had reached to the highest point
but one in the hierarchy of his church,
he used constantly to say. Il know I
i, have been a failure"
There was one other revelation
which upset my whole estimate of the
man. L had thought him self-indul-
gent; a lover of the pleasures Of the
table, and I found that he had worn
for years around his wrist spiked
bracelet, or shall call it handcuff,
which must have given him constant
pain and which was so firmly embedd-
, ed in his flesh that it had to be sawn
off after his death.
There We're other things to surprise
and even to astound in his biography.
Two passages have always appeared
to me to reach the very highest note
of profound human tragedy. Once he
and Snead Cox were walking together
on fine summer evening near Court
field the ancient family home of the
Vaughns. Snead Cox remarked what
a beautiful scene it was as they stood
together leaning on a gate looking at
the sunset as it was rejecting in the
river.
ut must be a pleasure to you
sometimes to come back to Courttield,"
said Snead Cox.
YES" he replied. And then after
a pause the cardinal asked with some
thing like passion why he should ever
return to Courtield
1T is like coming back to land of
tombs," he said, and then he spoke of
all the dear ones whose ghosts haunt
ed the place. And this unusual out
burst wound up with this awful
. glimpse into the gigantic self sacrifice
that a man has to make who becomes
a priest. "And over it all the memory
), of what I went through before made
.rup my mind to be priest"
+ That seems the profoundest depth
Of tragedy through which a human
- soul can pass; but there was a depth
Still deeper than plummet sounded.
Vaughn took months to die; peace of
!, soul went with strength Of body and
. j,,et faur davis hacoro Lic 1oott, +bo