inequalities of the ground, but does not make them the less fatiguing. The cold too increases every instant, and our travellers regretted that they had not followed their guides' advice and brought both overstockings and gloves. After toiling up in this manner for two hours, they came to a pile of lava which marks the distance halfway between the Casa del Bosco and the Casa Inglese. The snow here increased in depth-the rarefaction of the air became painfully intense; while the clouds of sulphur from the eruption, which still continued on the opposite side of the mountain, driven in their faces by the wind, made some of the party so sick that they could scarcely proceed. The cold too became well-nigh intolerable. The mule of one of the ladies sank in a snowdrift, rolled and fell some way down the precipice, compelling her to continue the journey on foot; but her feet and hands were so numbed and so nearly on the verge of being frost-bitten, that it was with the utmost difficulty she could go on. At last the Casa Inglese was reached. It is a low stone house, built on what is called the Piano del Lago, a small ledge of frozen water, 10,000 feet above the sea. In spite of the orders of the Professor, it was still half full of snow when they arrived; and this had to be cleared out, and made into what the children call "snow men," before the frozen travellers could enter and endeavour to make a fire with the wood they had brought with them. The guides cautioned those who were still on their mules to descend very gently, as in the semi-frozen state they were in, the least jerk or slip might occasion a broken limb. One of the party was lifted off her horse at last and laid on some rugs by the fire, which for a long time resisted all efforts to light; and then her limbs had to be rubbed with snow to restore some kind of animation. When this object was attained, the overpowering smoke-for there was no chimney or fireplace-made the remedy almost worse than the disease. All this time they had been well-nigh deafened by the detonations from the mountain, which, at regular intervals sounded like artillery practice on a large scale. Every thing they had brought with them was frozen, including the milk they had got at Nicolosi, and of which they were obliged to break the bottle before they could melt any for their tea. After a time, the younger portion of the travellers lay down to rest on some straw arranged in wooden shelves or layers round the inner room, one at the top of the other, after the manner of pears and apples in a kitchen-garden house in England. A French geologist and two other professors had joined their party, and of course had no other place to go to; but the appearance of the company, roosting in this way on the shelves, was comical in the extreme.

At three o'clock, however, every one rose, and commenced the ascent of the cone, so as to reach the top by sunrise. The distance is short, but intensely steep; it is like going up the side of a house; and the difficulty is heightened by the loose ashes in which you sink at every step, and the hot fumes of sulphureous vapour which pour out of the sides of the cone. Only a portion of our travellers persevered to the top; the others being reluctantly compelled by faintness and violent sickness to retrace their steps. On reaching the crater, they at first saw nothing but a deep yawning chasm, full of smoke, which kept pouring out in their faces. The eruption, which one of the party had seen in perfection two months before, was some miles off, and had burst out of a new crater on the Taormina side of the mountain. But with the dawning light the whole magnificent scene was revealed to them. It has been so admirably and accurately described by Mr. Gladstone, that any attempt at a fresh description could be but a poor repetition of his words. Sufficient, then, is it to say that the view at sunrise repaid all the sufferings of the ascent. Etna, unlike other mountains, stands alone, rising straight from the plain, with no rivals to dispute her height, or intercept any portion of the glorious view below. The whole of Sicily is stretched out at your feet, the hills below looking like the raised parts of a map for the blind. Not only is the panorama unequalled in magnificence, but there are atmospherical phenomena in it which belong to Etna alone. As the sun rises over the Calabrian coast, a perfect and distinct image of the cone is reflected as on the sheet of a magic-lantern-on the horizon below, gradually sinking lower and lower as the sun becomes brighter, and finally disappearing altogether. As it was early in the season, the snow extended over the whole of the so-called desert region, while the wood below seemed to encircle the mountain as with a green belt, which added to the beautiful effect of the whole. Tired and exhausted, and yet delighted, our travellers descended the cone, and rejoined their companions at the Casa Inglese, who had been compelled to content themselves with seeing the sun rise from a green hillock just below the house. They determined on their way home to diverge a little from the straight route, in order to visit the Val del Bove, that weird and ghost-like chasm which had struck them so much when looking down upon it from the height of the cone. Floundering in the snow, which was a good deal deeper on that side of the mountain, their mules continually sinking and struggling up again, breaking their saddle-girths in the effort, and consequently landing their riders continually on the soft snow, the party arrived at last on the edge of this magnificent amphitheatre.

It is of vast size, enclosed by precipices 3,000 feet in height, and filled with gigantic rocks, of wonderfully strange and fantastic shapes, standing out separately, like beasts-hence its name. The perfect silence of the spot reminds one of some Egyptian city of the dead. Smoke, explosion, dripping ice, or rushing torrents, characterise the other extinct craters in this wonderful mountain; but in this one all is still and silent as the grave. It is stern as the Curse of Kehama, and as if the lava had been cast up in these wonderful shapes in some extraordinary convulsion of nature, and then had been petrified as it rose. Our travellers lingered long looking over the edge of the precipice, vainly wishing to be able to descend into the enchanted valley, and at last reluctantly turned their mules' heads in the direction of Nicolosi. The descent was intensely fatiguing, from the continual jerking and slipping of their beasts; and they arrived more dead than alive at the kind Professor's house, after being more than eight hours in the saddle. A few hours later found them once more in the burning sunshine of Catania where the thermometer in the shade was 86°, while it had been 27°, on the mountain-a difference in one day of 59° degrees of temperature. But no difficulties should discourage the traveller from attempting the ascent of Ætna, which is worth coming the whole way from England for itself alone. A few days later saw our party on the deck of the Vatican steamer, en route for Naples, carrying away with them recollections of enjoyment and kindness such as will ever associate piety in their minds with pleasant thoughts and grateful memories.

Last Days of Lacordaire.

We have endeavoured in former articles to give some account of the earlier career of Lacordaire, his connection with the Avenir, his characteristics as a great preacher, and his labours for the introduction into France of the religious Order to which he devoted himself. We shall now attempt to complete our sketch of this remarkable man by considering what has been made known to us of his more interior life as a religious, and his labours during the few last years of his life, when he was chiefly employed in the formation of a Third Order of Teachers, attached to the Dominican body, and in the government of the School at Sorèze, which was his last great work. But before passing on to these subjects, it will be well to say a few words upon an episode in his later career which has perhaps attracted more criticism and been more misunderstood than any other part of his life-we mean the position which he took up as a politician and a journalist after the Revolution of 1848. The unpublished memoirs dictated by him shortly before his death are full of information on this subject, and we have also some interesting pages upon it in the short work which M. de Montalembert has consecrated to the memory of his friend and colleague in the Constituent Assembly of 1848.

The overthrow of the Government of Louis Philippe came like a thunderclap upon France and upon Europe, and it is probable that but few of those who brought it about had any intention of doing So. It was a remarkable instance of the way in which accidental and inadequate causes produce effects which a thoughtful and clearsighted philosophy might nevertheless have predicted as certain to happen sooner or later. The constitutional monarchy of France, a form of government which probably had far more adherents among educated and intelligent Frenchmen than any other, fell in a moment because it had neglected to secure itself upon any solid and durable basis, and had had the weakness to shrink from its pledges as to the liberty of religion, out of obedience to the interested clamours of men who were in reality far more bigoted than any of those whom they denounced as bigots. The wonderful and unexpected moderation of those who triumphed in February 1848 is one of the best proofs that the nation was unprepared for the revolution. But it was a terribly anxious time for the friends of order and religion; for the

lower elements of society were stirred to their depths, and the leaders of the secret conspiracy against the peace of Europe and of the Church were sure not to be slow in endeavouring to turn the popular excitement in the direction most convenient for the furtherance of their own selfish and pernicious aims. We may attribute the prevention of a multitude of evils, and the comparative innocuousness of the storm which threatened so much devastation, to the general feeling as to the necessity of personal exertion and combined action which spread itself among the more influential and enlightened ranks of the nation, and to the public spirit which induced so many men of distinction and character, but of different parties, to accept the infant Republic generously, and expose themselves readily to the dangerous hazards which such an acceptance involved.

The common view of Lacordaire's conduct at this crisis may probably be said to suppose that he had always had strong democratic and republican sympathies, that he hailed with joy the overthrow of the monarchy, and hastened eagerly to take a prominent part in the new state of things, from which, however, he was soon to retire either from inconstancy or disappointment, or because the course which he desired to pursue was disagreeable to his ecclesiastical superiors.* The whole episode is considered one of the failures of his life but it looks very different when we come to examine the facts. Lacordaire had never been a republican. His principles were liberal, though he was radically unlike many "liberals" of our time in that he contended for the independence of the Church from secular control, and for the perfect liberty of her ministers and her children to educate, to instruct, to associate themselves together, and to follow without hindrance the counsels of Jesus Christ. He was no uncompromising adherent of a particular dynasty or a particular family: and he thus incurred, from those who thought every one a revolutionist who was not an Orleanist or a Legitimist, the reproach of

*The Times at the time, with even more than its usual inaccuracy, circulated a detailed account of Father Lacordaire which had the singular happiness of being in every particular untrue. According to this account, Lacordaire had been a pupil of Talma: he had pleaded, while at the bar, a cause at Carpentras which brought him in contact with some object of affection" as to whom he was disappointed, and so rushed off to hide himself in the Dominican Order: and he was obliged to resign his seat in the Assembly because the Archbishop insisted on his speaking, against his convictions, in defence of the endowment of the clergy. Lacordaire had never spoken to Talma, or been at Carpentras: he had been a priest for eleven years when he became a Dominican; and at the very time that he was sitting in the Assembly he was writing articles in the Ere Nouvelle in defence of the " clerical budget."

VOL. V.

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