The Catholic World Volume Ii Part 44

CATHOLIC ANECDOTES; OR, THE CATECHISM IN EXAMPLES.

The Apostles' Creed, etc. Translated from the French by Mrs. J.

Sadlier. 12mo., pp. 236. New York: D. & J Sadlier. 1865.

An excellent little book, and should meet with a general circulation.

The present volume contains anecdotes on the different articles of the Creed, and is to be followed, we believe, by two more on the other portions of the Catechism. The translation is well made, and the book is very neatly got up. We earnestly recommend it to our readers as a book worthy of universal circulation.

THE METROPOLITES; OR, KNOW THY NEIGHBOR.

A Novel, by Robert St. Clar. 12mo., pp. 575. The American News Company. 1865.

Here is a formidable volume describing fas.h.i.+onable society in New York. The parentage of the leading character in the story is at first unknown, but is supposed to be the son of some German emigrant who was s.h.i.+pwrecked and drowned off the coast. He was brought up by a German woman, and pa.s.sed through all phases of New York life, from being a bootblack and newsboy, to find himself an office boy with a lawyer, who, seeing in him talent, sent him to college and paid for his education. Nathan P. Trenk is the cognomen by which this person is designated {288} in the story. The author seems to have taken every good quality possessed by different men and placed them _all_ in the person of his beloved Nathan. His hero far exceeds in perfection the G.o.ds of the ancients. He speaks French like a Frenchman; German like a German; Spanish like a Spaniard; English of course, and we are led to infer that if he chose he could converse in the language of Timbuctoo, Malay, or in the Sanscrit. In fact, he excelled in all things--was perfect in dancing, music, tragedy, yachting, _and the law_. He is made to possess nearly all these qualities before he was even sent to school!! He was also better looking than any of his comrades--a perfect Apollo. One gets tired of this hero called Nathan, and cannot help asking, with the poet,

"How one small head could hold it all."

As a story, "The Metropolites" is a failure. There are many good pa.s.sages in it; but it is too inflated in style, too absurd and impossible in its scope and plot, and too pretentious, to suit the merest tyro in light literature. It ends too abruptly--in fact, the story is not finished; for only one or two of the characters are disposed of, and you are left to imagine what became of the author's _beau ideal_ of a man--Nathan. But there is no danger of such a question troubling the reader, for it is very few will have the patience to wade through its pages to the end. If there be any such, we pity them.

THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.

Its Const.i.tution, Tendencies, and Destiny. By O. A. Brownson, LL.D.

New York: P. O'Shea.

We have seen some of the advance sheets of Dr. Brownson's forthcoming work with this t.i.tle. The book will be out in the course of this month. It will make a very handsome octavo volume of nearly 500 pages, elegantly printed. It appears from what we have seen of it to have been written with great care, and to be a profoundly philosophical work on the principles of government, and especially on the const.i.tution of the United States.

NATURAL HISTORY.

A Manual of Zoology for Schools, Colleges, and the General Reader. By Sanborn Tenney, A.M. Ill.u.s.trated. 8vo., pp. 540. New York: Charles Scribner & Co. 1865.

This is an excellent manual for schools and colleges; beautifully ill.u.s.trated; well printed on fine paper, from large type; nicely bound; and is altogether a _fine_ book.

THE LIVES OP THE POPES.

By Chevalier d'Artaud. Translated from the French. Edited by Rev. Dr.

Nelligan. Nos. 1 and 2, pp. 96. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co. 1865.

This is, we believe, the first attempt to give the "Lives of the Popes" in English. The French work from which this is a translation has been looked upon as a very reliable one. This work is one that was much needed in this country, and will no doubt have a decided success.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

From P. O'Shea, New York. Nos. 13 and 14 of the GENERAL HISTORY OF THE CHURCH, by M. l'Abbe J. E. Darras.

From P. Donahoe, Boston. PARRA SASTHA; or, The History of Paddy Go-Easy, by William Carleton.

From Ticknor & Fields, Boston. LYRICS OF LIFE, by Robert Browning.

From Charles Scribner, New York. Froude's History of England. Vols.

III. and IV.

------ {289}

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL, II., NO. 9.--DECEMBER, 1865,

From Le Correspondant

GENERAL DE LA MORICIeRE.

I.

It is the sad destiny of those who outlive their generation to be called upon to speak over the graves of friends, companions, and chiefs who have the happiness of being the first to depart. Forced to envy those who precede them their lot, they readily yield to the temptation of beguiling their regrets by recalling their memory; and while thus essaying to lighten their own griefs, they think, perhaps not justly, that they have something of which to remind forgetful contemporaries, or which they may teach an indifferent posterity.

The _elite_ of the men who date from the early years of the century begin already to be decimated by death, and this death which strikes them with a premature blow, while in the full possession of the gifts which G.o.d had lavished on them, has often been preceded by a disgrace or a retreat so prolonged that we naturally regard them as having long since entered into history. Their stern and melancholy fate, aggravated by the inconstancy of their country, may at least serve to lengthen the perspective from which our eye contemplates them.

What can less resemble the times in which we live than those early and splendid years of the parliamentary royalty in which Leon de la Moriciere was first revealed to France and to glory? A whole powerful generation, delivered from military despotism and the imperial censors.h.i.+p, enfranchised, brought up, or completed by the free and loyal _regime_ of the Restoration, was then in full sap and full bloom. A constellation of rare men, men of original powers and popular renown, appeared at the head of all the great departments of the national intelligence, and fulfilled the first condition of the life of a people that are free and master of their destiny. The nation was governed or represented by its most eminent men. All its living forces, all its real wants, all its legitimate interests, were represented by men of an incontestable superiority. The names of Casimir Perier, Royer-Collard, Mole, Berryer, Guizot, Thiers, Broglie, Fitz James, Villemain, Cousin, Dufaure, gave to the contests of the tribune and to the country itself an _eclat_ never surpa.s.sed, not even in 1789. Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset stamped poetry with a character as original as ineffaceable. Ary Scheffer, {290} Delaroche, Delacroix, Meyerbeer, in the arts; Cuvier, Biot, Thenard, Arago, Cauchy, in the sciences; Augustin Thierry, Michelet, Tocqueville, in history and political philosophy, opened new paths, into which rushed the ardent and high-spirited youth of the nation.

Lacordaire and Ravignan made radiate from the Christian pulpit a halo of eloquence and popularity unknown since Bossuet.

Perhaps this fertile opening of political, intellectual, and moral life did not encounter an a.n.a.logous development in the military life; perhaps this purely civil glory extinguished the necessary attraction of the glory of arms. To this doubt, the army of Africa takes upon itself to reply.

In the ranks of that army new men, predestined to glory, began forthwith to appear. Each year, each day, augmented their renown. The true soldiers of free and liberal France were found. We learned to greet in that army a new line of soldiers, as chivalric, as formidable, as brave, as the bravest among their fathers, and adorned with virtues but too often wanting in our soldiers in former times --modest and austere virtues, civic virtues, which were the honor, and in the hour of danger the salvation, of their country. The ill.u.s.trious Changarnier is the only one of that glorious phalanx that can receive here below the homage of our loyal grat.i.tude. Of his n.o.ble companions, some, like Damesme, Negrier, Duvivier, Brea, gave themselves to be killed in the streets of Paris in 1848, so that France might remain a civilized country; others, and the most ill.u.s.trious, Cavaignac, Bedeau, La Moriciere, have died one by one, obscurely and prematurely, rendered by implacable destiny useless to the country they had saved.

This oppresses the heart, and certainly does no honor to our times.

Among all those valiant knights, the youngest, the most sympathetic, the most brilliant, and the most rapidly popular, was this same La Moriciere, who has just been torn from us by death while still so full of fire, light, and life, of strength and faith, of physical and moral strength, of faith in G.o.d and in the future of France. Although few to-day know, or, having known, remember, that the future conqueror of Abd-el-Kader, a simple lieutenant of engineers at the taking of Algiers by Marshal Bourmont, faithful to the traditions of his royalist race, accompanied to the coast almost alone that disgraced and proscribed conqueror, and then returned to take his rank in the army where he was to conquer the most brilliant renown, without suspecting, a.s.suredly, that he himself would one day experience injustice, ingrat.i.tude, proscription, exile, and forgetfulness.

[Footnote 41] But all the world knows that the name of La Moriciere, as that of Changarnier, is inseparably connected with the most dramatic episode of our African history--the two expeditions against Constantine. The pencil of Horace Vernet has made us all familiar with those prodigious exploits; he has made live again for us the immovable intrepidity of Changarnier, inclosed in the square battalion that saved the army on occasion of the first retreat, and then the impetuous daring of La Moriciere at the head of his Zouaves, the red fez on his head, the white burnous on his shoulder, rus.h.i.+ng the first up to the breach, where he was soon to disappear in the cloud of smoke and dust, in the midst of a fearful explosion, to be found again, his eyes almost destroyed, under a formless group of soldiers blackened with powder, their garments charred, and their flesh burnt. [Footnote 42] From that day he was married to fame. All France felt what has been so well rendered by Tocqueville in a private letter dated November, 1887: "I am even more interested in La Moriciere than I can {291} explain. He carries me away in spite of myself; and when I read the account of his storming of Constantine, I seem to see him arrive first at the summit of the breach, and my soul for the moment is with him. I love him also, I believe, for France; for I cannot help believing that there is a great general in that little man."

[Footnote 43]

[Footnote 41: I must be permitted to refer for all the details of the military career of General de la Moriciere to the article of M.

de in "Le Correspondant" for April, 1860.]

[Footnote 42: _"Les Zouaves et les Cha.s.seurs a pied,"_by his Royal Highness the Duke d'Aumale, 1855. _"Histoire de la Conquete d'Alger,"_by Alfred Nettement.]

[Footnote 43: Tocqueville, born the 29th of July, 1805, was nearly of the same age with La Moriciere, who was born the 6th of February, 1806. Before being colleagues in the Chamber of Deputies and in the ministry, they had, still young, met in 1828 at Versailles, where Tocqueville was a judge auditor, and where he received a visit from La Moriciere, then hardly out of the Polytechnic School. In a letter of that date which is found in the precious collection published by M. Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville traces a portrait of the future hero which remained a striking likeness to his last days: "I must say that I have been charmed with him personally; I thought I saw in him all the features of a truly remarkable man. I who am habituated to live among men profuse in words with little meaning, was wholly surprised at the craving for clear and distinct understanding with which he seemed to be constantly tormented. The _sang-froid_ with which he stopped me to demand an account of one idea before proceeding to another, which several times a little disconcerted me, and his manner of speaking of only what he perfectly understands, have given me an opinion of him superior to almost any that I have ever formed of any man at first sight."]

Incorporated with the Zouaves from the foundation of the corps in 1830, it was he who, in gaining with them all his grades up to that of colonel, created the European reputation of that unequalled troop, at the same time that by his vigilant activity in the Arab bureaus, he preluded his remarkable faculties as an organizer and administrator.

Major-general at thirty-four, lieutenant-general at thirty-seven, governor-general of Algeria _ad interim_ at thirty-nine, he never quitted Algeria till he had rendered it for ever French by forcing Abd-el-Kader to surrender his sword to the Duke d'Aumale, a young and meritorious prince, whose own rising glory was soon to set unexpectedly in the sad night of exile. He quitted Algeria in the beginning of 1848, and bore with him a reputation whose brightness was dimmed by not a shade or a breath. His courage, his rare strategic ability, the number and splendor of his victories, were enhanced by the most rigid integrity and at the same time by a humanity and a generosity all the more meritorious from the pain it must have cost his impetuous nature to exercise it in favor of barbarous enemies who ma.s.sacred and mutilated our soldiers who were taken prisoners.

[Footnote 44]

[Footnote 44: "In leaving the sh.o.r.es on which he had landed young and obscure, and which he quitted ill.u.s.trious without appearing old, he bore with him a recollection more precious than the fame of his heroic deeds; his glory was without a stain, his hands, always burning for the combat, were sullied by no abuse of victory. When the irritation against an enemy that ma.s.sacred our soldier prisoners was at its height. La Moriciere, pursuing one day a tribe that was in insurrection notwithstanding their oaths, and having driven them to the sea, he suddenly halted his columns and suspended his vengeance. What fear had seized his intrepid soul? He himself tells us: 'In the disposition of mind in which our soldiers then were, that vengeance might have been too severe!' Beautiful and touching words, which reveal the man in the warrior, and attest a fear of excess in the bosom of a courage that paused at no obstacles."--_Le General de la Moriciere_, by Viscount de Meaux, p. 11.]