the arrangements of the ménage, which were wisely constructed with a view to elasticity.

We got on to Goethe, whom Mr. Gladstone called a great artist, for he never made a failure. He was, in this respect, very different to Shakespeare, who could not be admitted into this class, for his work was often slovenly and careless. He asked us all if we knew Manzoni's poem 'Cinque Maggio,' which was, he considered, the best portrait that exists of Napoleon, by far the most vivid projection of the man.' I had to confess I had never even heard of it, and was relieved to find myself in good company, for the professor was equally ignorant. According to the Prime Minister, Goethe's translation of this poem was one of the only bad bits of work he had done.

I asked of both men if they thought Wilhelm Meister' a teaching book. Mr. Gladstone said he doubted Goethe as a teacher, for he had searched in vain through his works for any recognition of the sense of duty. A friend of mine, a Goethe enthusiast, had pointed to "Iphigenia" as an example to the contrary, but I said nobody could rob a Greek drama of this quality.'

Max Müller was evidently disturbed by this view, and considered that Goethe recognised duty in another form. Duty was art with him, the art of life. But Mr. Gladstone would not accept this theory at any price, arguing that this was surely a very different idea.

Max Müller maintained that with Goethe beauty was goodness and goodness beauty. The Prime Minister grudgingly admitted such a possibility. The only form of goodness which Goethe did not appreciate was, according to the professor, respectability. This roused Mr. Gladstone's smouldering indignation. Call goodness anything but that, please,' he said. I once heard a remarkable sermon from Stopford Brooke on the subject of respectability; it was admirably done and gave me great enjoyment.' I ventured to suggest that respectability was not infrequently mistaken for goodness. Mr. Gladstone demurred to this, and Mrs. Drew went so far as to say she thought they militated against each other.

Her father then told us about the murder trial of one Tartley, who, on his statement that the parents of the murdered party were respectable, was asked what proof there was of their respectability, and answered: 'They kept a gig.' A smile of tigerlike satisfaction curled up his thin lips when he had told this story, which was the origin of Carlyle's 'Gigmanity.'

From this they wandered on to Tennyson, who, it appears, became a gourmet with advancing years, and latterly always had his own wine and his own dish, which nobody else was offered. Mr. Gladstone admitted having observed this with true pain. Tennyson once came unexpectedly to luncheon with our professor at Oxford, and on seeing cutlets and a chicken on the table remarked that it was the sort of luncheon one would get at any wayside inn. He was given the liver

wing of the chicken, upon which he remarked: 'The liver wing is the only privilege a Poet Laureate gets.' Mr. Gladstone remarked that, though the devotion of his family had done its worst to spoil him, he could still tell a story against himself. A tourist was questioning his gardener about his master, and at last, having acquired as much information as he seemed likely to be able to get, said: 'Well, your master is a great man! A great man? He's no great man; he only keeps one man-servant, and he don't sleep in the house.' Max Müller said that Tennyson latterly was better company after dinner than before; in this respect consolingly like many lesser men of my own acquaintance.

In talking of Kingsley, he said that for some time before he died he was little read. Though conscious of and saddened by this fact, it was still more brought home to him when he was anxious to raise some money to start a son in Australia. With this object in view he visited his publisher, hoping to be presented with a few thousands of pounds, but his disappointment was great when he was told that 300l. was the most the publisher was prepared to offer. Kingsley, however, had a revival in public estimation and interest after his death.

Mr. Gladstone said that he never recovered the crushing defeat Newman gave him, in which Kingsley had all the right on his side, but managed his case so unskilfully that Newman trampled on him with the heel of his boot. In the matter of uncles, I learned that the professor was highly favoured, as both Kingsley and Froude stood in this relation to his wife. He not unnaturally felt something of the pride of possession in discussing two such distinguished men. Mr. Gladstone went on to ask how uncle Froude was getting on at Oxford. He was glad to hear that his lectures were very popular and well attended, unlike Mr. Stubbs, whose whole audience seldom exceeded two men and one old woman. They agreed that Froude not only tried to, but succeeded in showing his pupils that history did not consist of parchments only, but of blood as well as of bones. He had waited patiently for his post of Regius Professor while four other men had walked into it in front of him.

I left Hawarden the next morning.

After being with such a personality the world felt cold and stagnant.

CHARLOTTE RIBBLESDALE.

HOLY WEEK AT JERUSALEM IN THE

FOURTH CENTURY

In the year 1884, Signor Gamurrini, the learned librarian of a lay brotherhood at Arezzo in Tuscany, found among the archives of his community a MS. which contained a description of a lady's journey to the Holy Land in the fourth century. The discoverer, although a scholar, could scarcely have guessed when he published the text that it would shortly afterwards be regarded by Church historians on the Continent as un document de premier ordre.'

The MS. of the Itinerary, unfortunately incomplete, dates from the middle of the ninth century, and contains, in addition, an unedited treatise and three hymns of St. Hilary. As the missing pages of the lady's MS. are at the beginning, the author's name which probably appeared in them has till lately remained a mystery. The writer describes her journey in a long letter, containing a sort of diary, addressed to her sisters,' whom she sometimes styles 'vener

As suspicion may be aroused at the outset as to the genuineness of the MS., it will be as well to give briefly its pedigree. It is written on parchment in the Longobardo-Cassinian script, associated by palæographers with MSS. which have Monte Cassino as their provenance. Signor Gamurrini therefore made inquiries at that famous library and found that both the treatise and hymns of St. Hilary and the Peregrinatio figured in the catalogue there of 1532. After further research he discovered, moreover, that as far back as 1070, one of the librarians of the monastery, Leo of Ostia, mentions these works of St. Hilary in his chronicle, and his successor, Peter the Deacon, in his book on the Holy Places, makes long extracts from the lady's Peregrinatio. Neither of the MSS., however, appears in the Monte Cassino inventory of 1650; but in 1788 they were found by Angelo of Constantia in the library of the monastery of SS. Flora and Lucilla at Arezzo. It is probable that they were brought there by Ambrose Rostrelli, abbot of Monte Cassino (1599-1602), who retired to Arezzo, and was made abbot of SS. Flora and Lucilla in 1610. Two hundred years later Napoleon turned the monks of St. Flora out of their abbey. Many of their MSS. were dispersed, but some were rescued by the lay brotherhood, to whom Signor Gamurrini subsequently became librarian. Among them was the MS. containing St. Hilary and the Peregrinatio, the opening pages of which were very probably lost in its last hasty removal. It was published by Signor Gamurrini at Rome in 1887, and a second edition appeared in 1888. Corrections and amended readings have been made by Duchesne and Mommsen. The latest critical edition is that of Geyer in the Corpus of the Academy of Vienna. An edition with an English translation was also brought out by Dr. Bernard, Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin, in 1891, for the Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society.

able,' sometimes beloved,' and who were most probably her fellowmembers in a religious community. That she was a person of rank and importance may be inferred from several facts mentioned in the MS. For instance, in her journey to Sinai and Egypt, while passing through the desert, then in a disturbed and dangerous state, she was provided with an escort of Roman soldiers. At every stage of her travels she was courteously received, and had interviews with the bishops and leading ecclesiastics of all the Holy Places. Even hermits, whose reluctance to suffer any intrusion from the outside world was proverbial, left their cells to welcome her and gladly answered the numerous questions she put to them. For, as she says herself, she was of an inquiring mind. 'Ego et sum satis curiosa." Although she does not seem to have possessed the cultivation and literary ability of some of her contemporaries, such as the great ladies who were the correspondents of St. Jerome, or the sister of Rufinus, who sat up all night to read Origen, she had a keen faculty of observation, was well versed in Holy Scripture, and appears also to have had an intelligent knowledge of ecclesiastical usages and

customs.

The Latin in which she writes is of a provincial character, and scholars have inferred from its dialectic peculiarities that the writer must have been a native of the south-west of France or the north of Spain. Her style, however, is not so barbarous as that of Prosper of Aquitaine, who wrote in the following century. That her home was in a distant province of the Empire, probably on the Atlantic seaboard, may be gathered from the words of the Bishop of Edessa, who compliments her on having travelled from the ends of the earth' to his own city.

If we are somewhat surprised at the courage of a woman who in the fourth century could venture on a journey of so many thousand miles, we must remember that the facilities of travel in those days were considerable. Roman roads connected the seaports with the inland cities, and the posting service was well conducted. The provinces through which her route lay were all under the sway of the Empire, and Greek and Latin were everywhere spoken by the educated and commercial classes. At the moment of her travels, however, grave perils were threatening the order and security of the Roman world, and our intrepid traveller, if she came from the Spanish frontier, had first to pass through Gaul, then disturbed by invading barbarian tribes, as well as by the advent of Maximin with his revolting legions from Britain, issuing in the assassination of the Emperor Gratian near Lyons. On leaving this disturbed province, this heroic lady proceeded, probably by the overland route, to Constantinople, where again the country could scarcely have been in a settled state, as the Goths had recently defeated the Roman legions at Hadrianople, burnt the wounded Emperor Valens in the

cottage where he had taken refuge, and had spent a twelvemonth ravaging the neighbouring provinces of the Empire. The reason for assuming that these calamities occurred shortly before our pilgrim entered on her journey is due to our being able, from a study of the contents of her MS., to place the date of her pilgrimage between the years 379 and 388. For instance, the Bishop of Edessa, who, as we have seen, comments on the length-of the lady's journey, is described as a Confessor, a title which he probably earned during the Arian persecution under Valens, who turned all the Catholic bishops out of their sees. The bishop in question seems to have been Eulogius, who returned to his diocese after the persecution had ceased in 378, and lived on, as we know, till 388; hence, as we infer, the visit of this lady must have occurred within those ten years.

Who could this remarkable lady have been? It was at first suggested that she was Galla Placidia, daughter of Theodosius the Great, but this theory was soon rejected, as her date did not coincide with the limits of time determined by the contents of the MS. The discoverer of the MS., Signor Gamurrini, was of opinion that the authoress was St. Silvia of Aquitaine, a sister of Rufinus, Prefect of the East under Theodosius, of whose journey from Jerusalem to Egypt we possess a notice in the writings of Palladius. This hypothesis, although not entirely satisfactory on several points, was nevertheless generally adopted, and the MS. has been known as the Peregrinatio Silvia ever since. Within the last few months, however, a learned Benedictine, Dom Férotin, who has devoted much time to the study of MSS. preserved in Spain, has, without the aid of any fresh documents, but by a felicitous juxtaposition of already known facts, identified the author of the Peregrinatio with Etheria, a Spanish religious, who belonged to the remote north-west province of the peninsula, and has thus suddenly emerged from obscurity as the authoress of a document of the first importance.

The existence of this Etheria was hitherto known only to the few scholars who had read Valerius, a Spanish hermit of the seventh century, who occupied his time between the writing of many books and making the desert around his cell in the Asturian Mountains, between Astorga and the Atlantic, to blossom like the rose. By a happy inspiration, Dom Férotin recognised in a letter written by this recluse, containing a panegyric of a female pilgrim called Etheria or Echeria,3 a counterpart of the description contained in the MS. found at Arezzo. This letter of Valerius was addressed to his neighbours, the monks of Vierzo, with a view of

2 Hist. Lausiaca, c. 143, 144.

We have two MSS. of the letter of Valerius, both of the tenth century: one in the Escurial, which Dom Férotin has now edited for the first time, and one in the National Library of Madrid. These MSS. give both readings of the lady's name. That of Toledo, now lost, gave Egeria.