The Cardinal laughingly retorted that the Irish were far too

fine, too imaginative and poetical a race, to be bothered with

material questions of government and administration. They

should leave such cares to the stolid, practical English, and

devote the leisure they would thus obtain to the further

exercise and development of what someone had called "the

starfire of the Celtic nature." Ireland should look upon

England as her working-housekeeper. And as for the addition of

Irish saints to the Calendar, the stumbling-block was their

excessive number. "'T is an embarrassment of riches. If we

were once to begin, we could never leave off till we had

canonised nine-tenths of the dead population."

Monsignor Langshawe, at this (making jest the cue for earnest),

spoke up for Scotland, and deplored the delay in the

beatification of Blessed Mary. "The official beatification,"

he discriminated, "for she was beatified in the heart of every

true Catholic Scot on the day when Bloody Elizabeth murdered

her."

And Madame de Lafere put in a plea for Louis XVI,

Marie-Antoinette. and the little Dauphin.

"Blessed Mary--Bloody Elizabeth," laughed the Duchessa, in an

aside to Peter; "here is language to use in the presence of a

Protestant Englishman."

"Oh, I'm accustomed to 'Bloody Elizabeth,'" said he. "Was n't

it a word of Cardinal Newman's?"

"Yes, I think so," said she. "And since every one is naming

his candidate; for the Calendar, you have named mine. I think

there never was a saintlier saint than Cardinal Newman."

"What is your Eminence's attitude towards the question of mixed

marriages?" Mrs. O'Donovan Florence asked.

Peter pricked up his ears.

"It is not the question of actuality in Italy that it is in

England," his Eminence replied; "but in the abstract, and other

things equal, my attitude would of course be one of

disapproval."

"And yet surely," contended she, "if a pious Catholic girl

marries a Protestant man, she has a hundred chances of

converting him?"

"I don't know," said the Cardinal. "Would n't it be safer to

let the conversion precede the marriage? Afterwards, I 'm

afraid, he would have a hundred chances of inducing her to

apostatise, or, at least, of rendering her lukewarm."

"Not if she had a spark of the true zeal," said Mrs. O'Donovan

Florence. "Any wife can make her husband's life a burden to

him, if she will conscientiously lay herself out to do so. The

man would be glad to submit, for the sake of peace in his

household. I often sigh for the good old days of the

Inquisition; but it's still possible, in the blessed seclusion

of the family circle, to apply the rack and the thumbscrew in a

modified form. I know a dozen fine young Protestant men in

London whom I'm labouring to convert, and I feel I 'm defeated

only by the circumstance that I'm not in a position to lead

them to the altar in the full meaning of the expression."




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