ciples so justly condemned. From Chicago and Dubuque came no reply, the archbishops of these provinces being then ill. The archdiocese of Santa Fé was vacant. The Archbishops of Portland, Cincinnati and New Orleans did very little more than acknowledge with reverence the receipt of the Pontiff's letter. Out of the fourteen archdioceses of America two only-those of Milwaukee and New York-reported the presence of Americanism. This had been expected. The letter from the ecclesiastical province of Milwaukee represented the views of four German bishops; and, although the friends of these prelates defend their action on the ground that not one of the good pious men had ever read the "Life of Father Hecker," it should by no means be overlooked that Milwaukee is the pet preserve of Cahensly ism-it is a Fatherland itself against the influx of American ideas. As to (miniature American Germany, more carefully barred than the New York, it is said with much show of reason that had there not been of old serious friction between that See and those of Baltimore and St. Paul, Archbishop Corrigan might not have so suddenly detected the smell of heresy. This is rendered probable by the fact that the "Life of Father Hecker," from which the heresy was supposed to have been extracted, actually bore the imprimatur of Archbishop Corrigan himself. Be this as it may, it is now more than an open secret that the letter which his Grace of New York sent to Rome in the name of his suffragans did not represent the views of some at least of the bishops whose signatures it bore.

And here we must call attention to a glaring instance of the bad faith of the enemies of America. The "Civiltà Cattolica" and all the journals that take their cue from the Jesuit organ published the two letters which alone reported the existence of heresy in the American Church, as also the letters which courteously acknowledged the receipt of the Roman letter; but they sedulously excluded from their pages the letters of the archbishops who protested that the condemned doctrines were unknown in America. The "Civiltà Cattolica," which alone seems to have had access to the replies sent by the American Hierarchy, has not given to the public the letters on Americanism forwarded to Rome from five of the chief centres of the Catholic religion in the United States. It has never alluded even to the reply of Cardinal Gibbons, to whom the Papal document had been addressed. And

while it suppresses the testimony of bishops whose names would carry weight in every part of the world, and whose evidence would at once clear the American Church of the suspicion of heresy, while it ignores the chorus of repudiation of the Catholic press of America-a protest so spontaneous and universal that the bishops of Milwaukee raised against the Catholic journalists of the country the cry of Jansenism-it continues, together with its satellites, to cry out from Rome and other European centres that the errors condemned by the Pope actually found a home in America.

Mgr. Péchenard also still holds that American Catholics are guilty, first, of "a certain bending in the matter of dogmatic affirmation;" secondly, of "a separatist tendency with respect to the central ecclesiastical authority," and third, of "a minimizing in the practices of the Christian and especially the religious life."

These are grave accusations; but it will be observed that he does not offer a particle of evidence in support of any of them. He does not name a single book or discourse which could form the basis of the charge that American Catholics are guilty of tampering with the doctrines of the Church. He does not mention a solitary instance which would indicate a "separatist tendency" in the Church in America. It is one of Mgr. Péchenard's fellow countrymen-M. Brunetière, a man whose testimony is unquestioned in two continents-who recently wrote of the American Church: "No other Church adheres with more absolute fidelity to Rome or pays more strict attention to all her observances." The American Episcopate, it is observed, has always avoided extremes; its members have not had to do penance for Gallicanism, nor have they been laughed at for having made an act of faith in Diana Vaughan.

As to the third accusation which Mgr. Péchenard makes, the indictment would be intelligible if only some example had been given of the alleged "minimizing in the practices of Christian life." If Mgr. Péchenard means that there are wanting in America certain devotions which the Propagateur de Saint Joseph has been for years offering to a certain class of French minds-devotions which are exposing the Church in France to ridiculethen there is room for this criticism; but if he means that American Catholics detract in any way from the sound Catholic devotions approved by the Church, then his accusation is in every

respect like the rest. The piety of American Catholics is as far above suspicion as their orthodoxy; although neither their piety nor their orthodoxy dispenses them from protesting before the world against insults put upon their Church.

Mgr. Péchenard assures us that Americanism is dead in France. Indeed, the publication of the Pope's letter was an event of much greater importance for France than for America. The Archbishop of Paris made it the subject of a pastoral which, however, was disfigured by the lamentable assertion that certain Catholics in America substituted the natural for the supernatural virtues. Similarly, the Bishops of Nancy, Annecy and Beauvais used the utmost diligence in circulating the Pontifical letter among their clergy. It is a relief to know that these bishops have succeeded in strangling Americanism in their dioceses. In the United States, except in New York and Milwaukee, the Papal document was received with an unbroken calm which has excited much surprise in Europe. Indeed, the nonchalance with which the condemnation of Americanism was received in America has been the source of some disappointment and misunderstanding among the heresy hunters of Europe. Thus Mgr. Péchenard draws attention to the fact that Archbishop Ireland, during his sojourn last year in France, nowhere discussed Americanism, and intimates that the prelate's silence was an avowal of guilt. It is said, however, that the dignitary whom Mgr. Péchenard attacks is a practical man, and that he has but little admiration for the mythological heroes of the Valhalla who pass their days in hewing down shadows. Those who have read the well-founded statement that at Rome Mgr. Ireland was congratulated by the Sovereign Pontiff and leading Cardinals for having correctly interpreted the Pope's letter, will find a more obvious reason for the disdainful silence of the Archbishop of St. Paul.

In Europe, Americanism was cradled as well as entombed; in America, it was unknown until it was condemned. In Europe, for some time to come, the dead heresy will doubtless be taken as seriously as Gallicanism and Jansenism; in America, it has already become only a memory, except for the curious few who take an interest in myths of the Diana Vaughan type.

J. ST. CLAIR ETHERIDGE.

A NEGLECTED AMERICAN POET.*

BY MONTGOMERY SCHUYLER.

GEORGE ALFRED TOWNSEND is aware of my desire, after a personal acquaintance with him begun in a newspaper office a full third of a century ago, of making and publishing a review of his work in verse. He has helped me with material which otherwise would scarcely have been accessible to me. And he has made one request, or suggestion, in return, which I am sorry to find impracticable. This is that, whatever I might be moved to say about his literature, I should treat it by itself, and leave on one side the journalism through which he is so much more widely known.

It is impossible to treat his work in verse as quite apart from his work on the press, what he hoped might endure from what he was quite content to see perish after it had served its fugitive turn and boiled the diurnal pot. The two cannot be disjoined. Mr. Townsend's journalism and his literature have rubbed off on each other. Nobody who has followed his newspaper work will be disposed to deny to its author a very high degree of poetical sensibility, and a power of poetical expression often manifested in irrelevant, as well as in merely wasteful, ways. I remember he reported the trial of Tilton against Beecher, in the course of which some old love-letters came to be read, and noted the effect with which the reading fell upon the plaintiff in the suit, who had been one of the parties to the correspondence. According to my distant memory, the notation was something like this: "How like the fog bells on familiar coasts,

Poems." By George Alfred Townsend. Washington, D. C.; Rhodes and Ralph, 1870. Tales of the Chesapeake." By George Alfred Townsend ("Gath"). New York; American News Company, 1880. "Bohemian Days. By George Alfred Townsend ("Gath"). H. Campbell & Co., New York, 1880.

"Poetical Addresses of George Alfred Townsend." Published by E. F. Bonaventure & Co., New York, 1881.

"Poems of Men and Events." By George Alfred Townsend. Gapland Edition. E. F. Bonaventure & Co., New York, 1899.

whence one must steer, though homesick," and so forth. Fancy coming upon such a figure in a newspaper report of a sensational trial in this present year of grace. Thus did poetry rub off on newspaper work. And that the converse has happened, and how and how far it has happened, it seems desirable to show, in the interest of the poetry itself. Mr. Townsend seems to me a genuine poet, who comes as near to being spokesman in verse for his own generation as any one our country has produced, a faithful interpreter of what it is that the general, promiscuous mass of the American people "wishes to say." The work itself seems to me, at its best, to have done something of the same service for the workman's countrymen as Kipling has done for his countrymen of Greater Britain. That, while the one spokesman is world-famous, as he deserves to be, the other should be so extensively unknown in his true capacity that this article may be, to a majority of its readers, perhaps the first announcement that there is such a poet at all-this strikes me as absurd. And, evidently, there must be some other explanation of it than that the American people does not desire to be spoken for, or would not know when it was spoken for, if pains had been taken to bring the fact to its attention.

In the first place, it may or may not be characteristically "journalistic," but it seems to be the fact, that Townsend's poems have never been, properly speaking, "published." A glance over the titles makes this plain. The "Poems" of 1870, containing perhaps the most careful and deliberate of his work in verse, was set forth by a firm of which I never heard until I saw its name on the title-page, and the book itself has been so long out of print that it was only by much rummaging in second-hand book shops that I was able to procure a copy for the present purpose. The other volumes on the list were issued in forms and ways that seemed to label them as ephemera, excepting only the latest. This is a handsome and goodly volume, which constitutes, we find, the author's own poetical "claim." But the title, "Poems of Men and Events," does not define the claim, and gives the notion of something, or of a collection of somethings, rather "light and occasional" than "more serious and deliberate." And then, also, the make-up of the book, the pictures of the author's parents and of his birth-place and of his dwelling-place, and even of the tomb he has built for himself, presuppose a personal interest in the writer on the part of the reader, and seem to amount to an express