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these amounts, we will talk about meeting your demands.'

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"Heavens!" cried Monsieur Morin, "do you deny the deposits? Do you mean-”

"I mean exactly what I say. I have never received a farthing from either Monsieur de Grandmesnil or yourself."

Paralyzed by the audacity of this assertion, the refugee stood like one stricken to stone.

Richard Devaux rang the bell. "I will satisfy you that I am speaking by the card. Benson,'

he continued, addressing the clerk who entered, "bring me the account of the Marquis de Grandmesnil.” "Whose, sir?"

Devaux repeated the order. "We have no account in that name, sir."

"I told you so," said Devaux, coolly, turning to Monsieur Morin. "That will do, Benson; you may go. Have you any desire, Monsieur Morin, that I should ask for your account also?"

"Traitor! Liar! Robber! All this world shall ring with the report of your villainy. But I shall have justice! I will-I will-at-Mercy! What is this at my heart! HenriAdel-Mon Roi !" Morin staggered

and fell.

Richard Devaux bent over him for a moment, and then ran to the door.

"Come here, come here, some of you. This unfortunate gentleman has fallen in a fit. Run for the nearest surgeon. A most excitable man, Benson. I have assisted him privately to a great extent. A disinclination to make further advances has completely turned his head. He is under the strangest delusion."

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A FEW Words may close this story. The projected expedition failed for want of money. The Marquis de Grandmesnil and his son both fell at the bombardment of Gertruydenberg. Adelaide Morin, taken under the protection of another refugee family, survived her father's death and that of Henri de Grandmesnil, to whom she had been secretly married; but she survived, happily for herself, without memory, save perchance those gleams whose visitations cannot be tracked.

Richard Devaux never again went near the house of Monsieur Morin, which, after his death, remained unoccupied; but to his own house in the city he went day by day, year after year. He was the most assiduous man of business in London, and stood high in the world's estimation. He lived to be one of the richest men in England, but his wealth brought him neither happiness nor contentment. He lived amidst the plaudits of his fellow-men, and was surrounded with every luxury that money could command, but bereft of that peace of mind which is the basis of all true happiness, each day became to him all the more intolerable, until finally broken in mind and body and filled with an undying remorse, he put an end to his miserable existence with his own hand.

LITERATURE AND THE ARTS AND SCIENCES IN THE DARK AGES.

THE hordes of barbarians who streamed down upon the civilization of Rome had little thought of or care for either intellectual culture or those arts and sciences which, cultivated and fostered, contribute so much to the comfort and improvement of the people. Alaric with his Visigoths, and Attila, self-styled the Scourge of God, with his Huns, would have laughed to scorn the modern philosophy contained in the euphemism, "The pen is mightier than the sword." Yet slowly but surely a power almost unknown was paving the way for proving that truth, while they revered no art save the wielding of the sword, no science save that in which that weapon was all-powerful.

Among the barbarian conquerors, however, a singular exception to this universal ignorance and contempt for learning is to be found in Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths. He fostered as far as he could the study of the ancient literature, and was the protector of Boethius, who may be styled the last of the classics, and the connecting link between the old and the new periods of literature. When his eloquence was silenced by an untimely death there was found no tongue to take up the tale, the language of Tully and Virgil was heard no more, and long ages passed away ere learned diligence restored its purity. The downfall of learning after the death of Boethius was very rapid; an encyclopædic method of study was introduced by the few who still fed the sacred flame; but this method, by its very form, proved its weakness.

For five long centuries the ecclesiastical order were almost the only guardians of the faint flame of the lamp of knowledge. In the retire

ment of their monasteries or the solitudes of their hermitages they still fed the spark, and protected it from the rude northern whirlwind. It was from this hidden source that the fair form was to come forth to prove her power, and the might which was to overcome with wondrous art the rude prowess of the sword. The necessity among the clergy of preserving the Latin language as that in which the Scriptures, the canons, and liturgies of the Church were written, of having a fixed organ of communication in order that the truths of Christianity might not be at the mercy of the changing jargon of the various tribes, kept flowing in the worst times a slender stream, but one of living waters, which in a short time was to prove itself a mighty river.

But the studies of the clergy were confined, for a long time, strictly to sacred subjects; there seemed to be an intense prejudice against secular learning. Gregory I, who may be considered the founder of the Papal supremacy, Isadore, and Alcuin, all shared this dislike. St. Benedict, in establishing his several orders, while he enjoined his brethren to read, copy, and collect books, was silent as to their nature, and this omission became the means of preserving and multiplying classical manuscripts. Good, however, grew out of this prejudice, for if the clergy had been less tenacious of their Latin liturgy and the Vulgate translation of the Scriptures, it is very certain all grammatical learning would have been lost.

In Ireland, in the sixth century, the monasteries were known as foci of light; students flocked thither from France and Italy. In England greater attention was paid to secular

learning through the instrumentality of Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, sent there by the Pope in 668. The Venerable Bede is the greatest name in the literary annals of England at that time. Alcuin, a disciple of his, with Brother Stalicius, assisted Charlemagne to lay the foundations of learning, and thus dispel some part of the gross ignorance which had enveloped his empire. But the praise of establishing schools originally belongs to some bishops and abbots of the sixth century, in place of the imperial schools overthrown by the barbarians. Hallam says: "In the downfall of that temporal dominion a spiritual aristocracy was providentially raised up to save from extinction the remains of learning and religion itself."

The cathedral and conventual schools established by Charlemagne preserved the small portion of learning which survived, and Alcuin devoted himself to the restoration of the Latin language to grammatical purity.

The tenth century is considered the darkest of these dark ages, but this is applicable rather to Italy and England than to Germany and France. Meiners tells us that, "In no age, perhaps, did Germany posse'ss more learned and virtuous churchmen of the Episcopal order than in the latter half of the eleventh century." Among the most nowned names were John Scotus Eregina and Gerbert.

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With the twelfth century we enter a new era in the literary history of Europe. A decided progress had been made in all the walks of intellectual pursuits, and the result of this progress was the institution of universities, and the methods pursued in them; the cultivation of modern languages, followed by the multiplication of books, and the extension of the art of writing; the investigation and study of Roman law; and last, by the return to the study of the Latin language in its ancient

models of purity. Schools of logic in Paris were instituted by William of Champeaux in 1109. In this century we also have Lanfranc and Anselm in theology.

Paris was, in the middle of the twelfth century, another Athens. The number of students exceeded that of the citizens, in consequence of which influx Philip Augustus enlarged the boundaries of the city, but this only increased the crowd. Colleges with endowments for poor scholars were established in Paris and Bologna about the middle of the thirteenth century. Andrés derives the institution of collegiate foundations in monasteries from the Saracens. He finds no trace of them among the ancient customs of Greece or Rome, while in Cordova, Granada, and Malaga colleges of great renown existed.

Oxford, founded by Alfred, became a great resort in the reign of Henry II, and was in the thirteenth century second only to the University of Paris in the multitude of its students and the celebrity of its scholastic disputations. In 1220 Abelard established his school of rhetoric in Paris.

The institution of the mendicant order of friars soon after the beginning of the thirteenth century gave encouragement to the scholastic philosophy. Not so well acquainted with grammatical literature as the Benedictine, less accustomed to collect and transcribe books, the disciples of Francis and Dominic betook themselves to disputation. The greatest scholars of the new era were the Dominican Thomas Aquinas and the Franciscan Duns Scotus. This philosophy gave rise to a great display of address, subtlety, and sagacity in the explanation and distinction of abstract ideas, but at the same time to many trifling and minute speculations and a contempt of positive. and particular knowledge, and much unnecessary and false refinement.

In Italy it was not till 1360 that

public schools of theology were opened. Yet the disciples of Averroes were very numerous in the University of Padua about that time. The cultivation of modern languages led naturally to an era of romantic poetry, whose expression was the far-famed music singers, the troubadors and wandering minstrels, to whom we are indebted for the preservation of many traditions of the manners and customs of our forefathers. Many of these were of noble and even royal birth, and the cultivation of this gentle art tended greatly to subdue and civilize.

ion every trace of divinity, and leaves it to the guidance of each individual's imaginary inspiration, and under the false guise of liberty decks out the demon of license; while the Church, unruffled and serene, purified by the laws and decrees of the Council of Trent, goes on her God-sent mission, and daily sees fall around her some one or other of the pigmy sects sprung from Luther's heresy. The corruption among the higher classes of the clergy, and of the people, increased his chances of success. The suppression of celibacy amongst the clergy and of monastic vows was From what has been said we can looked upon with secret favor by the easily see whence came the light depraved among them; the prospect which illuminated the dark ages in of seeing all the property of the the field of literature. The Church, Church fall into their possession guided by her Divine founder, was excited the cupidity of princes, and the source whence all truth, learn- the rejection of ecclesiastical teaching, and knowledge proceeded, and ing flattered the vanity of the peoif weeds grew up in her fair gar- ple, who by the new teachings were den, she alone had the power to ex- made supreme judges of dogmas tirpate and uproot them; there was through the rights which had been no need to apply for external as- conferred upon them, themselves to sistance. Many evils had sprung interpret the Bible, now translated up and had been rooted out. Many into the vulgar tongue. For two still remained, and when Luther's centuries Rationalism had been disprotest against Rome and Catholi- seminating the leaven of revolt against cism, in 1517, first burst upon the the authority of the past, and the adworld, the heresy of Reform had vent of printing lent it fresh force. In long slumbered in a chrysalis state, the first ecstasy of license men deemed so to speak, awaiting only some cir- it unnecessary to preserve any outcumstance to favor its developement. ward decency, and threw away the "The egg was laid," says Erasmus; cloak of even a certain code of moral"Luther had but to incubate and ity, of which we find most brilliant hatch it." Had he been in earnest examples among pagan society. And in his reformation, had his sincere disciples, at first obedient, soon bedesire been to shake the dust from came rebellious and impatient to the spotless garments of the Bride of obtain for themselves the liberty Christ, he need not have gone the of inquiry and the independence length he did, nor employed the of principles which Luther despotimeans. The instruments of true re- cally endeavored to reserve excluform were in the Church ready to sively for himself; hence sects innuhis hand had he but chosen to use merable sprang up, so that the great them. But the devil had taken pos- heresiarch in contemplating his work session of the vain, weak heart, and might have been reminded of the led him to his destruction. The re- fisherman of the "Arabian Nights," sult was the "modern civilization," who, finding a bottle on the seaso lauded, of hard, cold materialism, shore, uncorked it, and thus liberated a false philosophy and a soulless a genie possessed of unthought-of creed, which eliminates from relig- powers, and who refused again to re

turn to his prison-house, or to be controlled by his liberator.

In the art of agriculture, the cultivation of the cereals and the preservation of these necessities of modern life, we find again it is the monks who have been instrumental in their development and continuance to our day. The tracts of land assigned to the religious orders were often nothing but dreary, desolate wastes, out of which it would seem impossible to glean any useful matter, or stony, rocky wilds, fitted only for the grazing of mountain goats or similar hardy animals. These gifts were made by kings and princes sometimes, as being too poor for their own use, or too worthless to be given to a courtier. So the monks fell heirs to what often was not worth a thought in the minds of the rich and great. They took the gift thankfully, quietly went to work, and in an incredibly short time the substantial walls of the monastery would rise in grace and symmetry, the swamps around would be drained with scientific care, the fields be waving their rich treasures of wheat and other grains in the soft summer air, while the little chapel, nestling among the vines covering the rocky hillsides, would, with its silvery bell, call the country people round to Divine service, over roads rendered passable and kept in excellent order by the "lazy "monks. These duties were their recreation after hours spent in study over musty half-effaced manuscripts, or in the illumination of the Sacred Scriptures, missals, etc., which are now guarded with such care in our museums of literature, and which bring such fabulous prices among our dilettanti. Printing, however, put an end to these literary labors to a great extent.

Various dates have been assigned for this grand discovery, which was to revolutionize the world. A discovery it could hardly be called, but rather a lost art. Stamps have been found among the ancients with

legends traced the wrong way, from which positive impressions were obtained, and Cicero, in a passage refuting the doctrine of Epicurus on the creation of the world by atoms, says, "Why not believe also that by throwing together indiscriminately innumerable forms of letters of the alphabet, either in gold or in any other substance, one can print with these letters on the ground the annals of Eunius?" The movable letters of the ancients were carved in boxwood or ivory, but they were only used in teaching children to read, as Quinctilian testifies in his "Oratorical Institutions," and St. Jerome in his "Epistles.' Various dates have been assigned, and also various birthplaces as well as different parentages for this wonderful art. Some assign it to the year 1420, to Haarlem and Laurent Coster, thirty years before Gutenberg, of Strasburg, gave his scientific discovery to the world. In these pages we have no space to enter into the dispute. Suffice it for us that the discovery was made, and we of to-day reap all the advantages accruing from it.

The use of paper made from cotton and even linen rags was known in very early times, as far back as the beginning of the twelfth century. After the Saracens had reduced Egypt, the importation of papyrus, so long in general use, was stopped. Parchment, which took its place, was very expensive, and this costliness gave rise to the custom of erasing MSS., and writing matter upon the clean pages thus obtained. Much valuable information has been lost by this practice. The Greeks sought for some material to take the place of parchment, and discovered a material made from cotton rags, sold in the city of Damascus, whence called charta Damascena, which is our paper.

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For a long time, as we are aware, "the ancients lived in tents," architecture was an unknown art, and even when they found the necessity

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