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NEW PUBLICATIONS.

S. Alphonsus has never found a perfectly competent biographer, and perhaps never will. F. Tannoja has written full and minute memoirs, containing all the facts and events of his life, but he wrote under the fear of the Neapolitan censorship, and could not speak openly of the miserable infidel Tanucci and the other Jansenists and infidels, or faithless Catholics, of the wretched period in which the saint lived, and the corrupt court with which he had to contend. Moreover, Tannoja had not a sufficiently elevated and comprehensive mind to be able to appreciate and describe the life and times of S. Alphonsus in their higher and broader relations. The Oratorian translation of his life is a most wretched and shabby affair in respect to style and accuracy. The religious lady who has prepared the first of the lives placed at the head of this notice has therefore done a very great service to the Catholic public by compiling a careful and readable biography from the other earlier works of the kind, and adding some interesting particulars concerning the history of the modern Redemptorists.

Bishop Mullock's life of the saint is quite brief and compendious, but of the best quality so far as it goes. The publisher has made a great blunder in omitting the title of Doctor of the Universal Church, which has been given to S. Alphonsus since Dr. Mullock's life was first published, on the title-page.

Archbishop Manning, who has given, though in brief form, the best appreciation of the character and work of the great doctor which we have seen, truly says that S. Ignatius, S. Charles, and S. Alphonsus are the three great modern leaders of the church in her warfare. As one of this great trio, S. Alphonsus deserves to be universally known and honored among the faithful, and we rejoice in the publication of the biography compiled by the accomplished Sister of Mercy as the best we have in English, wishing it a wide circulation, as a means of promoting devotion to the latest of the doctors and one of the greatest of the saints.

It is not often that we have the privilege of noticing such a work as this—the labor of a lifetime, the history of a whole nation's sanctity. Since Alban Butler, no such hagiographer as F. O'Hanlon has appeared, nor has any work on hagiology so full of interest and importance been given to the world. Up to this time the saints of Ireland, with few exceptions, were hidden saints; of the three or four thousand souls who have shed upon her the light of their sanctity, and earned for her the glorious title of the "Island of Saints," the world knew scarcely anything. It was in vain that the ancient annalists compiled voluminous records for the benefit of posterity; those that escaped the hands of the spoiler were left unexamined, and the learned of the nation seemed to have forgotten that their country had a holy and heroic past, whose history it was their sacred duty to look into and perpetuate. No attention was given to traditions of bygone days; no light was thrown upon them; they were fast becoming dim and obscure, and what was, in reality, fact, the rising generation was beginning to regard as fable. This neglect, so ruinous, and even criminal, might have gone on till it became irreparable, had not this learned and devoted priest undertaken the great task of redeeming the past of Erin's sanctity from the oblivion into which it was rapidly sinking. How carefully he prepared himself, and how well qualified he is to perform this labor of patriotism and love, the first number of his work gives ample proof. His acquaintance with Irish lore, his erudition and research, his fine style, all combine to make him the fittest person that could have engaged in so great a work.

Were we disposed to find fault with him at all, we should say he is rather critical; at least, we fancy we perceive in him a tendency to conform to the critical spirit of the age, which perhaps is prudent, after all, and may enhance the historical value of the work, though it will mar somewhat, we think, the poetic beauty it ought to possess.

No literary effort has yet been attempted that appeals so strongly to the national and religious sentiments of the Irish people; and none should receive so large a share of their interest and support. F. O'Hanlon's Lives of the Irish Saints, when completed, will be a noble monument to Erin's faith and Erin's glory, to which his countrymen in every land should feel proud to contribute; the appreciation that he meets with may encourage others to enter the comparatively unexplored mine of Irish history, and bring to light the treasures it contains.

We learn that F. O'Hanlon, who is a citizen of the United States, has copyrighted the work here, and it is to be hoped will make arrangements for its reissue in this country. Meanwhile, intending subscribers may address the author directly, or order the book through "The Catholic Publication Society," New York. It will be published serially, and the American price is fifty cents per number.

Another publication throwing light on the period of the Elizabethan persecution of Catholics, and more especially on the part borne by the Jesuits themselves in this heroic struggle. So many books have appeared lately on this subject that we may almost say that a new branch of Catholic literature has been opened in the English language. The "getting up" of this book is worthy of the subject, and we rejoice that it is so; for, to take a simile from a passage in this very volume, we may say with truth of the outward appearance of a book in these times what the holy lay-brother, Thomas Pounde, considered his rich dress in prison to be: "A means of inspiring Catholics with greater courage, and conciliating authority" (p. 42). The history of the three confessors of the faith, Thomas Pounde, George Gilbert, and F. Darbyshire, is very interesting. In the two former we have examples of lay sanctity and constancy, as distinguished from that of priests, though both saints were in heart members of the Society of Jesus, to which one was affiliated by extraordinary dispensation of the ordinary novitiate, and the other received the habit and pronounced his vows in articulo mortis. Thomas Pounde, of Belmont, a man of old family and high connections, had all the burning zeal of a convert whose soul had narrowly escaped the everlasting infamy of the life of a court minion. Not only his fearlessness and constancy, but his high intellectual attainments, claim our attention. Thirty years of perpetual imprisonment had not enfeebled his mind, and his one desire was a public disputation with his adversaries, nay, "with Beza and all the doctors of Geneva," if it pleased his foes to reinforce themselves with such noted aid. In a lengthy paper, written in 1580 to show that the Bible alone is not the true rule of faith, he brings forward the same reasons which we hear so much about in our day, and after specially dwelling on the many articles of universally held Christian faith that are not directly and plainly traceable to Scripture, he says pointedly: "Do not these blind guides, think you, lead a trim daunce towards infidelitie?" He could not have spoken otherwise had he meant his apology for the XIXth instead of the XVIth century.

George Gilbert, also of a good English family, was one of those rich men who, in truth, make themselves the stewards of the Lord. With him originated the useful and ingenious Catholic Association, in which young men of the world bound themselves to become the temporal guides, helpers, couriers, furnishers of the priests who labored spiritually for the conversion of England. The companion of F. Parsons, as Pounde had been of F. Campion, he, too, was a convert not only from courtly vanities, but from actual Calvinism. Ardently desiring martyrdom, he nevertheless embraced obediently and lovingly the cross of a "sluggish death in bed"; but at least the pain of exile had been added to imprisonment, for he was banished from his native land, and died at Rome in 1583. His whole substance was offered to the service of God, and what little remained at his death he left to the Society for the spiritual needs of his country. It was not till he lay upon his death-bed that he pronounced his vows.

F. Darbyshire was as learned as he was zealous. While in France preparing for his perilous English mission, he refused the honors of the pulpit and the professorial chair, and confined himself to giving catechetical instruction; but God so rewarded his humility that grave scholars and theologians would flock to hear him, and make notes of the wonderful learning he displayed, while they admired the eloquence he could not hide. He and his friend, F. Henry Tichborne, might well congratulate themselves, later on, on the holy efficacy of persecution, which had caused the "confluence of the rares and bestes wittes of our nation to the seminaries," and of the happy increase in the number of fervent inmates of the foreign seminaries They descant, too, on the unwise policy of persecution, and the fact that no religion was ever permanently established by the sword. The faith might have been reft of one of its greatest glories in England had not a short-sighted fanaticism resorted to violent means to uproot it. F. Darbyshire died in exile in France in 1604, in the very same place, Pont-à-Mousson, where he had so signally distinguished himself for learning and for modesty in the beginning of his apostolate.

This book is written in simple, Saxon style. The author trusts rather to facts than to rhetoric, just as of old the acts of the martyrs were chronicled without much comment, whether descriptive or panegyrical. The volume bears "First Series" on its title-page, as a promise that it is but the prelude to other biographies as interesting. Let us hope that the promise will be speedily fulfilled.

At last we have in English a biography of this angelic imitator of S. Aloysius, as charming as himself. The other lives we have seen are edifying but tedious. This one is equally edifying, but as fascinating as a romance, and published in an attractive style. It is specially adapted for the reading of young people.

We cannot do more than call attention to the publication of this work, just issued as we go to press. It embraces stenographic reports of four extempore lectures by the pastor of St. Ann's, New York, upon a subject of special interest at this time. In an appendix is given the pastoral of the archbishop and bishops, announcing the consecration of all the dioceses of this province to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus; together with a Novena, from the French of L. J. Hallez.