Images de page
PDF
ePub
[ocr errors]

his hotel hors d'œuvres. His diligent application and his heading for each month give the number of hours he worked in his little paradise monthly. Thus, for August he notes, This month I spent 86 hours in my garden.' For September he writes, This month I only spent 69 hours in my garden.' If the poor old waiter could give so much of his spare time to his garden and retain his hotel job, surely a priest-gardener can work in a few hours garden work in his day.

Another book, for which I long sought in vain, was sent to me some years ago by a youngster who uprooted it in a Scotch second-hand book shop. It is The Manse Garden, by Rev. N. Patterson, D.D., a Scotch divine, published about 1850, and often reprinted, but now, I think, out of print. It is the law, the prophets, the gospel, the fathers, and the doctors for a priest-gardener. The greatest merit of the dear old man is his plain, practical commonsense, and his very human views of his dear brethren of the gown and of clerical gardens, where great economy in labour and outlay must be observed. His book was written to help ministers to successful gardening and is extremely good on methods of growing flowers, fruit, and vegetables suitable for the cold, bleak Scotch highlands, so like our Irish lands. If a priest-gardener has any Scotch friend, let him seek for good Dr. Patterson's book.

The reverend doctor says that, as gardeners are SO careless and so ignorant, a clergyman should be his own gardener.

These being the evils of the case, this little volume is proposed for their remedy, and the better it may prove remedial, that it is small. You will [addressing his readers] escape, in the first instance, the great evil of a great book. . . . If I want to know what sort of peas I should purchase for seed, I meet a list so long that I am perplexed. My life is not long enough to try so many apples nor to eat so many peas. Besides, although I have no hot-houses and no conservatory I cannot learn to sow carrots without encountering a dissertation on the bleeding of vines or the temperature fit for exotics. I am, moreover, three hundred feet above the level of the sea, and further from the tropic than I could wish, and when I proceed with directions for the month (suited to Covent Garden or Italy) I find for the time nothing but ice and snow, and might as well dig a Roman causeway or sow the top of Mount Blanc.

Wise old Scot! Big books written for the warm, sheltered, pampered soil of English gardens confuse and discourage many an Irish struggler with his acres, roods, and

And the canny Scot gives as Appendix I of his book,

not a description of rakes and spades and knives, as gardening books always do-but a careful study of the clergyman's boy! Now, as I am no stranger to the woes of priestly life and having heard from my brethren, ancient and modern, of the ways, the wants, the wiles of clerical aiders in stable, in yard, and in garden, I have great pleasure in giving and endorsing the views of Dr. Patterson on the clergyman's boy, the priest's boy, a hero often met, but unhonoured and unsung :

In general, boys are plagues [writes the Scotch philosopher]. Something above what is usually denominated an urchin and beneath a varlet, they are of the most impracticable age. . . . Trained to no habits of industry, they like no sort of work. Their pleasure lies in idle companions and their haunt is not yet the tavern, but the smithy, where they spend long hours.

So constituted, a boy cannot fall into worse hands than those of a clergyman or enter on work he is more reluctant to than this. On the farm the crack of the whip is music to his ears, the assemblage of labourers, the jibe and the jest have the liveliness of the camp. . . . But the scene is different at the clergy house. There the boy works alone, if he works at all; he is depressed by solitude and the eye of his master is seldom upon him; he hates his task and spends his time in thinking which of a thousand lies will serve the best for an excuse. It ought to be a serious consideration with clergymen that boys, bringing to the clerical residence the seeds of corruption, should find there the best leisure for tending their growth. And this they will do if not narrowly watched and submitted to a treatment answerable to their nature, and freely it may be asserted that neither catechizing nor reading the Bible nor family prayers will ever produce the least salutary effect if idleness be allowed and lies go unpunished. Let the reflection be added that, as six months are the probable period of an ill-doer's service, it may happen that the clergyman in the course of his life has sent out to the world half a hundred youths, who at the parochial house have been endured as useless, but have gone somewhere to be endured as blackguards; whilst it may not be so certain that of all that number one convert has been made in all that time.

Dr. Patterson enters into a wise reasoning on hiring, the law of kindness and gentleness, diligence, not hard work.

Indeed, compassion ought always to be had for a frame that is but little matured. The physical powers are quite adequate to all that you want; the difficulty is to enlist the moral powers. Let gardening lessons be amazingly simple and let the boy see to do a little well rather than a great quantity indifferently. . . . And thus, whilst your art of training improves you have, in fact, less to do with it; your temper tried by fewer mischiefs, will be, by the sight of good order and willing service and conscience, instead of being galled by the thought of sending halfyearly from the priest's house, a pest of society, will be gratified by the hope of making a succession of youths more fit for the world and more likely to see the kingdom of heaven.

VOL X-4

O wise and good and pithy Dr. Patterson!

And now, having said so much about my acres, roods, and gardens, I may, in conclusion, express the wish and the hope that the junior clergy may take up this pursuit for pleasure, for profit, and to help, by word and example, their people in the restoring and improving of an almost unknown industry, tillage. By the practice of spadecraft they will show to all that they are not old women, nor too addicted to Carburettor, Racquet, and Mashee, and they will show to all that manual toil is not a sin, shame, nor scandal. The senior clergy will read Dr. Patterson's remarks with pleasure and sorrow, and possibly I may see in my summer tours monsignors toiling at a mangel plot, vicars-forane sowing winter vetches, parish priests working amidst acres, roods, and perches of parsley and pansies and poenies and pinks and potatoes.

And the dear students who annually call to see me and to cheer my depression with their happy smiles and healthy young looks, will they be able in 1918 to know the elements of gardening, of tillage? Will my theological friend, Felix Culpa, know a pansy from a viola or cineraira from a convolvulus? Will Jack Tantia (another theological entity) and his companion, Con Amore, ever grow to love garden, the purest of human pleasures, the greatest refreshment of the spirit of man'?

a

And then June, with its roses, brings home the school-girls. They love flowers and miscall the simplest flower-names, and as for vegetables, they never are mentioned in high class convent schools! When I see the banker's girls and the bank garden, I think that maybe Mother H and Sister M- might, with profit, give lessons on gardening to the enfants des Anges. For last year, in my garden, pretty Anné Licet and Barbara Celarent knew nothing about flowers or vegetables. Picking up a piece of horseradish, Anné remarked, 'I know the name of this, Father. It is a carrot. Isn't it?' 'Well, "caret fundamento" is a better name,' I said; and she was happy. With all the grandeur and ignorance of these boys and girls, each could truly and literally quote the second phrase of St. John xv. 1, and yet they were ashamed and ignorant of the utility and beauty of their fatherland's acres, roods, and

'COLUMBA.'

THE PASSING OF VALOIS

BY D. T. BARRY, M.D., F.R.C.S. (Eng.)

IV

HENRY, Duke of Orleans, became heir to the throne of France on the death of his brother, the Dauphin, in 1536. This mysterious death occurred at Tournon, as the young prince was returning from Provence, where the army of Charles V had just met with disaster. With him was his tutor, Montecuculi, a Spaniard, who had come from Italy three years previously in the train of Catherine de Medicis. The circumstances of the sudden death, after drinking a glass of cold water provided by the tutor, led to the suspicion of poison, an agent much in vogue at the time, and seemed to indicate the certain guilt of the Spaniard. The King, incensed at the tragedy, instituted immediate inquiry into it in the presence of a multitude of assembled nobles of all nations. The case of the accused was hopeless from the outset, but he vehemently protested his innocence to the end. Torture failed to elicit from him any further confession than insinuation of the guilt of the Emperor Charles, through his agents de Leves and Gonzague. Montecuculi had come direct from the service of the Emperor to join the Medicis suite, a fact which intensified the cloud hanging over him. He was first attached to Queen Eleanor and subsequently to the Dauphin. He was finally condemned and executed on the charge mentioned.

The Emperor's supposed interest in the death was attributed to the general belief prevailing that a marriage had been secretly arranged for the Dauphin which would aggrandize France. When the suspicion of his guilt in the affair was conveyed to him, Charles sent word to Francis that the blame more probably rested with Catherine de Medicis, wife of Henry, who had much to gain by the death. Fortunately for Catherine she had remained far

from the scene of the tragedy with her father-in-law, with whom she was a favourite. A guilty understanding between her and Montecuculi was probable. Proper analysis of the circumstances, which at first sight seemed conclusive against the Spaniard, indicates rather his innocence. There being no urgent hurry for such a murder, a prospective poisoner of any intelligence, especially one who had made a systematic study of medicine, as Montecuculi had, would have chosen less primitive method of dispatching his victim. There is no account of a postmortem examination, such as it would have been in those days, or other proof of poison having been administered. Heat-stroke has accounted for many similar deaths.

Though the principal rôle of Catherine de Medicis in our story comes with the third and last instalment, her chief part in State control being taken after her husband's death, yet she counted for something during his reign, especially towards its close. So we shall take this opportunity of introducing her, with incidental reference to a few other prominent actors in the drama.

Until near the close of the fourteenth century the Medicis, or de Medicis, though their genealogy is traceable to a much earlier period-according to some writers to the Carlovingian dynasty-were ordinary commercial people in Florence who, like other citizens, took part in public administration; but they had at the time referred to amassed great wealth. Giovanni de Medicis died early in the fifteenth century, leaving two sons, Cosmo, the elder, called the father of his country, and Lorenzo, the younger. From Cosmo was descended Catherine, the last of the line, who became Queen of France in 1547; and from Lorenzo, the younger, head of the collateral branch, was descended Marie de Medicis, who became Queen of France in 1600 by her marriage with the first Bourbon king, Henry IV. The first branch became extinct in 1589, on the death of Catherine, and the collateral branch ended with the death of Gaston, in 1737. Appended is a rough tabular sketch of part of this family tree.

« PrécédentContinuer »