Madonna and Child, by Bellini," have | And we found in his palms, which were holstruck us as the most successful. For low, - sheer cleverness and power of assimila- What are frequent in palms, that is, dates. tion, there is nothing more remarkable than the descriptive poem, called "Santa This is really a triumph of wit and ingeCruz," narrating an episode in the career nuity. And "The May Exam.," by Alof Admiral Blake; but the eclecticism of fred Pennysong, though perhaps a trifle the style is somewhat kaleidoscopic. The brutal, is irresistibly comic. One line will grim Puritan sentiment of the time is dex-suffice to show its malicious fidelity, terously conveyed by the use of Scrip "And Charley Vane came out so grand, tural phraseology; while the whole poem in a tall, white chimney-pot." The same 46 Hamis cast in a Tennysonian mould, with a remarks apply to the burlesque on Swinburnian lilt of rhythm and turn of let." For we do not share George Eliot's expression. The morbid vein we have morbid horror of parodies, nor believe, as spoken of above is luckily not so notice- she dreads, that a day will come when the able in this really very interesting volume; original will only be referred to for comand yet to all Oxonian poets and poetast-parison with the travesties. On the coners of recent years we think that this vigorous protest of a Cambridge singer may be addressed with more or less of point: In drowsy odorous gardens of delight; Man has to plough the wastes, to scale the mountains, Has friends to succor, and has foes to fight. At any rate, it is exhilarating in the extreme to turn from the wailings of most of these youthful bards, spite of their cleverness and imagination, to the breezy Philistinism of the Light Green. This short-lived magazine was due to the enterprise and wit of two or three Cambridge undergraduates, the title being suggested by a serial named the Dark Blue, which, beyond the title, possessed hardly a single feature characteristic of Oxford. For the benefit of non-university readers, we can not resist quoting the following stanza from "The Heathen Pass-ee,' Bret Harte's "Heathen Chinee" re-written, rather than parodied, describing of Tom Crib how In the crown of his cap Of the Dorian States, trary, we hold that these Cambridge wits have earned our gratitude far more effectually by helping to furnish food for honest laughter than their Oxford compeers, who "steer a doomed course in heaviness of soul." Of all the parodies of a muchparodied Victorian poet, there is, perhaps, none so felicitous as the inimitable lines on the Octopus, in the Light Green, from which we take these four lines at random, for all are equally good:· In thy eightfold embraces enfolden, Let our empty existence escape; In Kottabos, a Trinity College, Dublin, miscellany, we have a blending of the two elements which characterize the verse of the older universities, the melancholy of Oxford and the mirth of Cambridge. Kottabos is a publication quite unique in itself, being a common ground on which all members of Trinity College, Dublin, past and present of all grades - meet in a rivalry of scholarship, wit, and humor. Though edited by one of the professorial staff — himself a fine scholar and welcome contributor-there is no don. nish spirit about its pages, but rather a catholicity of sentiment and a freedom of expression that are probably unsurpassed in any publication of the sort. From this it will be seen that Kottabos stands on a different and more advantageous footing than the other magazines we have been discussing, and the results do not belie our expectations. Amid so much good original verse, it is hard to award the palm. For fire and vigor it is perhaps due to Mr. Mulvany's "Garden Party in the time of Nero," a really splendid poem, and by far the best of his contributions. Here is a brilliant picture from it: Never were seen such sights as the Emperor's | And sang it: strangely could he make and sing. women that toil, Mixing sweet poppies' seed, fresh honey, and flawless oil, Fish from the Lucrine track, and boar from Umbria's plains, Of skylark's tongues no lack, and store of nightingales' brains; And of all wines men know, whose cost is beyond compare. Flowing in streams below, or fountain-tossed in the air, Or sailed on, in mimic seas, by vessels of pearl that hold Pilots, who give to the breeze their tresses and zones of gold. In less skilful hands the metre, with its double rhyme, would have degenerated into a mere jingle. Of the serious verse, we will take a sample from the poem on the text, "Thou hast sent sleep, and stricken sleep with dreams: ". Why have the gods thus cast on man such sadness and woe? All the day must he toil, with labor of brain and of hands; Yet when the night with her wings has covered the evening glow, Still must he labor and toil, inhabiting shadowy lands. Again must he mourn a form which he fain would ever forget, Again must he gaze on a face marred by the fingers of Death; Again must he look on eyes with rivers of weeping wet, And again feel fanning his cheeks the sweets of a breathless breath. Surely a terrible gift did the Titan bear to man When he gave him fire from heaven, and forethought placed in his mind; Better far would he be to fulfil his earthly span, Only knowing what is, not looking before or behind. In Mr. S. K. Cowan, Kottabos possesses a parodist capable at times of Calverleyan flights. His "Tennysonian Idyll" is excruciatingly absurd, a wonderful bit of sustained burlesque. We will confine ourselves to one short extract: And in those days he bought a pair of dogsCæsar and Pompey-each so like to each, That not one single man in the whole world Could tell the difference. And he made a song Like is my Cæsar, so they say, they say: I know not which is liker, he or him. The condensed novelette, "X. Y., or the Cambridge Man," a skit on the late Mortimer Collins's highly colored style of hero-worship; "An Appeal," a protest against the ordinary lodging-house diet, and for which we would suggest as an alternative title " Chopping without Changing;" and "Half-hours with the Classics," are merely the titles of some of the happiest pieces in this charming miscellany, where fun and fancy, Irish melancholy and Irish mirth, find such unfettered utterance. From the last-named piece, supposed to be written by a young lady who has been reading "Classics for English Readers," we will make our final quotation :· Pensive through the land of lotus, Still our Mentor, still our guide, Of Isis and of Osiris. All the learned ones trooped before us, To the hemlock-drinker grand; Dark the hour that closed the gates Of gloomy Dis on thee, Socrates! In conclusion, we have only to make the suggestion that the editor of Kottabos should give us a collection of the best pieces of English verse, humorous and pathetic, that have appeared in this magazine, and which in that form ought to achieve the popularity they so richly deserve, but can hardly hope to win while scattered through the pages of a miscel lany which, by its title and the refined classicism of much of its contents, appeals only to an audience of scholars. From The Saturday Review. THE SEVENTH CENTENARY OF THE TEMPLE CHURCH. THE service held last Sunday at the Temple Church, to celebrate the sevenhundredth anniversary of its consecration by Heraclius, patriarch of Jerusalem, has a unique interest, historical as well as architectural. There are but three other churches extant in England formerly belonging to the Knights Templars, or "round churches" as they are commonly designated from the naves being temporary Christendom. Pilate and Herod were made friends together in the betrayal of innocent blood. This may sound strong language; but a brief retrospect will suf fice to show that it is not one whit stronger than the facts of the case demand. In spite of two diverse but converging currents of adverse testimony, prompted by the unscrupulous esprit de corps of the two most powerful organizations of mediaval Europe, the legal and the ecclesiastical, the real verdict of history is plain beyond dispute. The Templars may have sinned grievously, as other religious orders of the day had sinned, and the secular priesthood. Of the hideous crimes which were charged upon them, and for which hundreds were tortured and burned to death, and the whole order suppressed, there is no shadow of proof. Of the atrocious iniquity of the method of their suppression even their worst accusers do not venture to affect a doubt. circular, in imitation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the best known of which is St. Sepulchre's at Cambridge, rendered famous in the early days of the Tractarian movement through what was called "the Stone Altar Case," heard in the Court of Arches. By far the finest of the four is the Temple Church in London, the nave or circular portion of which is exactly coeval with Canterbury, as Sir Gilbert Scott points out in his work on "Mediæval Architecture," having been consecrated in 1185, the year the metropolitan cathedral was completed; but the style is somewhat less advanced than that of Canterbury, owing to the preference apparently of the Templars for Romanesque. The choir was not consecrated till fifty-five years later, and is described by Scott as "a magnified transcript of the Lady Chapel at St. Saviour's," Southwark. It is not however so much the peculiar architecture of the church, interesting as it is not only to experts, as the remarkable history of The order was founded in 1118, with the powerful order to which it owed its the warm approval of St. Bernard, as a origin, which challenges attention on such sacred militia for the rescue and defence an occasion, and the primate rightly of the Holy Land, bound by the three grasped the true idea of the solemnity in monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and devoting his discourse to this subject. He obedience, but with castles for convents made a telling point in his comparison of and the battlefield instead of the cloister the great Christian hero who has just as the scene of its characteristic operafallen at Khartoum to the Templars who tions. It had been enriched with fresh fell in battle with the infidel at Acre and privileges by successive popes, and from Tiberias. And it is true enough, as he the nine French knights who formed its suggested, that the strength of Mahome- nucleus had increased to fifteen thousand, tanism in its rise was mainly due to the with nine thousand castles or convents contemporary corruption of the Christian scattered over Europe and the East. It East and to its large though unacknowl- had thus grown into a powerful and edged plagiarisms from the faith it set wealthy organization, governed by its own itself to uproot. But when he went on to laws, and animated by a distinctive corobserve, if he is correctly reported, that porate spirit of its own. Such a body was "the order of the Temple, in spite of its sure, like other great corporations, to propower and wealth, expired in failure -avoke jealousy and hatreds, but it was to a failure which was emphasized by the magnificence of its ambition to achieve what was beyond its strength," his language betrays, if not entire ignorance, a strangely defective apprehension of one of the most tremendous catastrophes and scandals of mediæval Church history. The Crusades no doubt failed as regards their immediate purpose, though they produced results of permanent importance for Christian Europe. But the Templars, like the rival order of St. John of Jerusalem, survived the failure of the Crusades, and fell at last not through failure or through their own fault-though no doubt they were far from faultless but by a gigantic crime deliberately planned and perpetrated in cold blood through the joint action of the chief civil and chief spiritual ruler of con baser passion than hatred that the Templars owed their fall. If we turn first to our English historians, we shall find Humewhose sympathies are not apt to be enlisted on the side of religion against the State, roundly asserting that they were sacrificed "to the cruel and vindictive spirit of Philip the Fair, who determined at once to gratify his avidity and revenge by involving the whole order in an undistinguished ruin;" there was more of avidity than revenge, as will presently appear. He goes on to observe that no evidence was produced, beyond that of two apostate knights condemned to perpetual imprison. ment for their vices, of the monstrous charges alleged, most of which will hardly bear repetition, and that, if some confessed under torture, they retracted their confes. for a sions directly they were off the rack, and all died, from the grand master down wards, protesting their innocence, and preferring death to immunity purchased by a base admission of guilt. Hume adds that "England sent an ample testimony of their piety and morals; but as the order was now annihilated [by Clement V.] the knights were distributed into several convents, and their possessions were, by command of the pope, transferred to the order of St. John." Lingard is more reserved, reason sufficiently obvious. He speaks of their "indulging in indolence and luxury" which is only true in the same sense as of other religious orders at the period, which were left unmolested and of "reports the most prejudicial to their reputation being circulated and credited," and reaching the ear of the French king. He does not say by whom these reports were circulated namely, the French jurists or why Philip IV., who had probably prompted them, lent so ready an ear to evidence which no magistrate in this day would listen to against the vilest criminal. But he does add that "Clement V. was dissatisfied with the precipitance of the king" who had or dered all the knights in France to be arrested and had burnt sixty of them with out awaiting any papal sanction-though he fails to point out how miserably Clement betrayed his trust as their ex officio protector and the representative of the cause of justice. But his candor compels him to admit that, after the process had lasted three years, “if it be fair to judge from the informations taken in England [we shall see that it was the same elsewhere], however we may condemn a few individuals, we must certainly acquit the order," and that accordingly the pope abolished it, "not by way of a judicial sentence establishing its guilt, but by the plenitude of his power, and as a measure of expediency rather than of justice." That is true, but Lingard hardly seems to perceive that it only renders Clement's conduct the more deeply discreditable. He knew and confessed that he knew these charges to be wholly unproved, but he had sunk into a mere head chaplain of the French court the very position Napoleon afterwards designed for Pius VII., but without success and dared not resist the imperious will of "our dear son," one of the most profligate and unscrupulous tyrants who ever disgraced the throne of St. Louis. His own shameless avowal is on record: "If it cannot be destroyed by the way of justice, let it be destroyed by the way of expediency, lest our dear son, the king of France, be offended." Milman naturally goes more at length into the matter than Hume or Lingard, and those who desire fuller information may be advised to study the two chapters bearing on it in the seventh volume of "Latin Christianity," with the authorities cited there. It is probable enough that the Templars were not immaculate. Bound by vows of chastity, and living, many of them, in distant convents in the East and under circumstances of exceptional temptation, without the sacred ties and safeguards of the priesthood, it would be little short of a miracle if they were all faithful to their vows in an age when monastic and clerical incontinence was so notorious a scandal that, at the very Council of Vienne -summoned not to examine their case, but to prejudge it-one bishop openly proposed as the sole adequate remedy the abolition of the rule of clerical celibacy. But it was not for any such vices - proved or unproved - that they were condemned. The specific indictment against them, confessed by a few under extremity of torture, but disavowed by all in prison and at the stake, was not that some members of the order had broken their vows, but that the whole order as such and every member of it was committed to beliefs and practices subversive alike of Christian faith and Christian morality, to habitual and systematic indulgence, by virtue of his membership, in obscenities too shocking to be even whispered to Christian ears. This and nothing short of this is the indictment on the strength of which French Templars were tortured and burned by the hundred, and the entire institution suppressed. And it was handed down from age to age, even to the days of Louis XIV., by the tradition of French legists on the one hand, who wished to save the credit of their profession and the honor of the monarchy, and who had the whole archives entirely in their own hands; and on the other hand by Ultramontane historians and divines, anxious to protect the personal character and judicial infallibility of Clement V. The real explanation, con. firmed by all recent criticism and research, is simply this; that the order of Templars was sacrificed to a barefaced conspiracy of French lawyers, who took a brief to provide funds for the royal exchequer. Philip IV. of France had cast avaricious eyes on the property of the French Templars, estimated at six hundred thousand gold florins, just as Henry VIII. of England two centuries later cast avaricious Most High. And certain it is that in the following year (1314) both Clement and Philip passed to their account. eyes on the property of the religious or- in Milman's language, "utterly inconceivders here, and resolved by a very similar able," will believe anything that happens process of mingled fraud and violence to to jump with his intérest or his prejudice. seize it for the replenishment of his ex To all who are not equally destitute of hausted treasury; but with this difference common candor and common sense the Henry had broken with the pope before words of De Molay the last grand master, he entered on his career of licentious when he endured with unflinching heroism spoliation, but Philip kept a tame pope at the agonies of death by a slow fire before Avignon, who did not shrink from the the portals of Notre Dame - he had once baseness of prostituting his apostolic pow- faltered under torture will carry convicers, and invoking the aid of a so-called tion: "Before heaven and earth, on the General Council to what he must have verge of death, when the least falsehood believed to be an act of wholesale sacri- presses on the soul with intolerable weight, lege and knew to be an act of the grossest I protest that we have really deserved cruelty and injustice. As Milman puts it, death, not on account of any heresy or sin "All contemporary history, and that his- of which ourselves or our order have been tory which is nearest the times, except for guilty, but because we have yielded, to the most part the French biographers of save our lives, to the seductive words of Pope Clement, denounce in plain, un- the pope and the king, and by our confesequivocal terms the avarice of Philip the sions have brought shame and ruin on our Fair as the sole cause of the unrighteous blameless, holy, and orthodox brothercondemnation of the Templars." Villani hood." De Molay was regarded at the says roundly that "the pope abandoned time not only as a martyr, but as a prophet. the order to the king of France, in order According to the testimony of an eyeto avert if possible the condemnation of witness he summoned "Clement, iniquiBoniface VIII.," his predecessor. A tous and cruel judge," and the king- who bird's-eye glance at the result of the in- was present at the execution to meet vestigation, instituted to bolster up a fore-him next year before the throne of the gone conclusion, is enough to show the real state of the case. In England, where no prejudice or interest intervened, and it was only in deference to papal insistence that the king reluctantly allowed the question to be tried at all, the order was virtually acquitted; in Scotland and Ireland nothing was proved by adverse witnesses and no confession was extracted from Templars; in Italy, wherever French or papal influence predominated, confession was obtained, but nowhere else; in Spain "the acquittal of the order in each of the kingdoms was solemn, general, complete; " in Germany several councils were summoned by direction of the pope to condemn them, but were compelled to declare their innocence. To sum up, we may say that beyond the confessions of the Templars themselves there was not a syllable of evidence but the wildest and most impossible tales of superstition or hatred, and these confessions were obtained only in France or where French influence prevailed, and invariably, without exception, were crushed out of men imprisoned, starved, disgraced, and under torture or immediate threat of torture, while promised pardon and favor if they would admit their guilt; and even these worthless confessions were almost invariably retracted. A man who can accept on such absence of evidence as this charges in themselves so wildly improbable as to be, From The Spectator. SOME TURKISH PROVERBS. IF the Turk has been qualified as "unspeakable," he is very far from being inarticulate. Strange as it may seem to those who have formed their opinion of him from hearsay, it is not the less true that he is commonly a good conversationalist, and can say well and pointedly what he has got to say, with a wealth of illustration in anecdote, quotation, and proverb. The latter form commends itself especially to the sententious Turkish mind. The synthetic form of the language, too, secures brevity and conciseness, and opportunities are afforded for those constant assonances or rhyming vowels which are so dear to the Oriental. On looking over a note-book containing several hundred Turkish proverbs, taken down in the course of reading and conversation, or borrowed from a collection made at the Oriental Academy at Vienna, the writer has amused himself by grouping them roughly under certain heads, so as to illustrate some aspects of the national character and surroundings. |