reassuring. The Diligence soon came to a spot where the road ran between high banks covered with brush wood, and again stopped. Another band of armed men had surrounded it, and were conferring in low tones with the escort. A posse of skirmishers was then detached to search the pass, and presently a series of whistles announced that the road was clear, and the Diligence proceeded. This was repeated whenever it approached a dangerous bit of road, and the official asserts that at one of the halts there could not have been less than sixty men round the carriage. He was a little scared by hearing one of his fellow-passengers remark that his having no luggage was very suspicious, and he hurriedly explained who he was and why he was travelling. This seemed to satisfy them, but when just outside Bonifaccio they got down and took leave of him, he was not sorry to see the last of them; especially when he saw that the third man in the coupé between the body-guards was Dr. B., who was leaving his native village in Corsican fashion. It must be remembered that this occurred in November 1886. Out of the twenty newspapers published in the island not one has mentioned this vendetta, one reason being, according to one of the editors, patriotism; another, that the editor is in the habit of receiving a letter to say that he has no doubt heard of the misfortune which has happened to the famille B., and that it is hoped he will not add to their annoyance by publishing any details! And he knows what that means! What country is there except Corsica in which the following conversation could take place? The Procureur of the Republic of Sartène was going out shooting, when he perceived at the bottom of a ravine a man busy casting balls, who called out to him: "Hullo, M. le Procureur!" "Oh, it's you, Nicolaï Baritone! " "Can you tell me how my case is getting on? It doesn't seem to progress much." "How can it get on? As long as you are at liberty, none of the witnesses will come forward and give evidence. You ought to give yourself up.' "We'll see about that when I am tired of the woods, M. le Procureur." In fact, as we have said before, a sort of halo surrounds a bandit, and his compatriots even hide the exactions which he imposes on them. It is easy to imagine what a curse the presence of 600 bandits in the country is to Corsica. As the law is powerless, the bandit takes its place. "He has a bandit in his service," is a local expression which reveals a great deal. If you take a bandit under your protection his gun is at your disposal. If you can't collect a debt, he does it for you, and no one controverts his arguments. If you have a lawsuit about a piece of land, the bandit will show your opponent that he is clearly in the wrong. In fact the bandit is the great social arbi trator. For example, last year a duel was going to take place just outside Ajaccio. The bandits, knowing their protector was in danger, appeared, and put a stop to it. A French Company established some large vineyards near Sartène; but this did not suit the shepherds upon whose pastures they encroached, and at their request their friends the bandits boycotted the vineyards, and ten gendarmes had to be sent to protect workmen ; but when they had gone away, the bandits appeared again, and one fine day ninety workmen arrived at Sartène, having had notice to do no more work under pain of death. However, now the Company is prosperous; but they have made friends of the mammon of unrighteousness and taken the bandits into their pay. It is now the shepherds who are kept off by the bandits! As to political influence, every one in Corsica will tell you, without being ashamed of it, that the municipal council of Loggi was imposed on the Commune by the bandits Simeoni and Giansillo, that at Mansi the bandit Manani has done the same thing, and that the Mayor of Pigná would not be in that position were it not that the bandit Alessandri is his uncle ! The only thing to be said for Corsican bandits is that except in a few instances they are not, like their Greek confrères, brigands. They take to the woods, not to make money, but to avoid justice and satisfy revenge. However, in the present state of the country it will be no wonder if they take to brigandage as well. Indeed, in the month of November 1886, at eight o'clock in the evening, while thirty guests were sitting at table d'hôte in the Hôtel Bellevue at Ajaccio, five bandits entered the house and, putting a pistol to the head of the proprietor's wife, demanded 3000 francs. The husband borrowed a revolver and rushed with the cooks to his wife's assistance and after a brisk exchange of shots the bandits fled. This is getting perilously near brigandage. The most celebrated bandits of Corsica are two brothers, Jacques and Antoine Bonelli, known as the Bellacasia. They live in the gorge of Pentica in the centre of the island, near the town of Bocognano, which is an excellent strategical position, as it has only one entrance, and persons approaching it can be seen some distance off. In the midst of wild mountains, the valley itself is fertile, and supports the flocks and herds of the Bellacasia, who live there like true kings, as they are. They tax the adjoined villages, and come whenever they like to the town of Bocognano, where there are gendarmerie barracks. They have built themselves houses; they have married their daughters, and as their political influence is large, they have obtained good posts for their sons-in-law, and in fact live tranquil, hon ored and respected lives. Antoine took to the woods in 1848 in con sequence of a quarrel with the Mayor of the Commune, one of the causes being that the Mayor would not marry a sister of his, who could not produce her certificate of birth. Consequently Antoine and Jacques lay in wait for him, and fired four barrels into him. At the same time Antoine fell in love with the daughter of one Casati, and one night he and three other bandits appeared at her father's house and demanded his daughter. The terrified girl hid herself; but they managed to get hold of the father, whom they gagged and carried of to their cave and kept on bread and water. The fiancé of the young lady, Jean Baptiste Marcangeli, went with two friends to release him, but managed it so badly, that they were caught, gagged, and kept on bread and water in the cavern too. Marcangeli got his liberty on promising to give up the girl to Antoine, but no sooner was he free than he forgot his promise, and married her on the 30th of April, 1850. On the 27th of June Antoine killed him and demanded the hand of the widow. Soon after they committed another murder, because obstacles were raised to the marriage of another sister. It was after this that they settled in the valley of Pentica. Several expeditions have been sent against them. In September 1886, one consisting of no less than 120 soldiers and 70 gendarmes was despatched; but they went off to the house of a Mayor who was a friend of theirs, and stayed there quietly till the expedition had gone home again. The Bellacasia are a nearer approach to a bandit in a story than any in the island. They are supposed to have a cave of which no one knows the entrance. They are hospitable to strangers who are properly introduced, and they occasionally give large boar hunts to their friends. As we have said before, the state of Corsica is a disgrace to France, but the remedy, according to M. Bourde, is simple, namely, to make no special laws, but to apply vigorously and without fear or favor the existing law. With the tribunals in the hands of one family, a Corsican is not to be blamed for having no belief in justice. There must be a Prefet and a Procureur Général who are absolutely independent, and the Government must cease only to use its influence with the clan in order to get a deputy to vote the right way. The financial aspect, too, is a serious one for France. In no year has Corsica ever paid its expenses. Indeed, it is said to have cost since the beginning of the century more than a milliard of francs (£49,000,000). No wonder, when no one belonging to the right clan ever pays any fines or taxes. Every one carries a gun, but few get a license. In France 1 in every 97 inhabitants takes one out. In Corsica, 1 in every 830! In 1885 there was owing to the Treasury 1,000,691 francs for fines, &c. It only got in 79,093 francs! These facts speak for themselves.-CHARLES SUMNER MAINE, in Murray's Magazine. THE CHRISTIAN ELEMENT IN ENGLISH POETRY.* FOR nearly a hundred years after Christianity was carried from Rome to England, all the literary work was done by the foreign priests, and poor enough work it was. They should have preserved to posterity what would now be deemed invaluable-the Anglo-Saxon myths, songs, legends, and traditions. The earliest dawn of English poetry came in Cadmon, an inmate of the monastery of Whitby. He died in 680. He was only a poor native cowherd, being attached to the monastery in that relation. His call to poesy came to him, he claimed, in a night vision from heaven. At once he began singing the praises of the Creator of the world, of man and heaven. posed many poems on Bible history, and in the one on the Fall of Man, are passages and descriptions which might have given impulse to parts of Milton's Paradise Lost. It is a significant fact that our poetry started out saturated with Bible teachings, as if that beginning were to set the gauge of all that was to follow. After Caedmon, there was little poetic genius manifested by the English race for half a thousand years. The poems of Wace and Layamon, of Ormin and Guilford, with those of their contemporaries, were largely on Christian themes or paraphrases of the Bible. One other element of strength in English poetry is apparent from the first -the way it has always sought inspiration from nature, and become the interpreter to duller sensibilities of the glories of the meadow and wood, of mountain and lake, of sky and storm and life. These two elements, Christianity and nature, have had most to do in making our grand poetry what it is. Before John Langland wrote Piers Plough. man the words of the Norman-French, its spirit and awakening influences had enlarged the vision of early English writers so that their themes were more varied; but none attained a place that was lasting. Piers Ploughman may justly be called a Protest before Protestantism. Many of the purer teachings of our Master, especially as pertaining to personal duties and relations, are put into this poem. A contemporary of the author of Piers Ploughman was Geoffrey Chaucer, justly ranked among the few great English poets. His greatest work, the one on which his reputation rests, the Canterbury Tales, grows out of a supposed pilgrimage by a large party to the shrine of Thomas à Becket. The spirit and sentiment of all the Tales are above the church life and practices of that day. A monk, a nun and a friar, of very questionable conduct, are sharply criticised, while a poor parson, that Christ's gospel truly would preach," *Read before the Alpha Chapter of the Convocation of Boston University, December 6, 1887. is most lovingly and tenderly depicted by the poet. Through all this long poem, the vices and sins of church and society are condemned, while the Christian virtues are as surely commended. It is surmised that Chaucer depicts, in the poor parson, the sentiments he entertained for the lay preachers whom Wiclif, Chaucer's contemporary, sent out to preach the pure gospel among the masses of England. It is impossible to say how the poet was influenced in his writings by the reformer; but that his hard hits against the general imperfections and corruptions of church life had pungency added to them by the excitement raised by Wycliffe, can be little doubted. The minor poets, filling the space from Chaucer, two hundred years, to Spenser, mixed much of Christian ethics with their sentiments of other nature. There were poems of war, of love, and satire; translations from the French, Latin and Italian; but the purely English productions were, many of them, filled by the spirit, imperfect as it was, of the better church teachings of that age. If the great poets before the Reformation were truer to the New Testament teachings than the contemporary church, the poets who have sung since that time have all of them been Protestant in their sentiments. Spenser wrote fifty years after the Reformation in England, being the first one after that event who form the list of the giants. He inclined toward Puritanism, though partaking little of its austerity of feeling and conduct. His two great poems, the Shepherd's Calendar and Faerie Queen, while reaching far over much of the field of human thought and imagination, each has in it many noble, Christian sentiments. His Protestantism is distinctly shown in the fifth month of the Calendar, in which he draws a comparison between the pastoral spirit and methods of a Protestant and a Catholic, clinching his argument by the tale of the Fox and the Kid, in which the former, the Catholic priest, captures and devours the Kid, the Protestant. No less than three out of the twelve parts of the Calendar treat of the burning church questions of that epoch. Spenser's Faerie Queen was primarily in praise of Queen Elizabeth; but many of his characters are allegorical. The first book is of Holiness, the second of Temperance, the third of Chastity. These three books are the strongest of all his poetical productions, and these principles are clearly founded on the New Testament. Una, the Lady of the first book, is the true Church. The whole moral sentiment of the Faerie Queen is of a high order for those years, and clearly shows the Christian spirit of the author. More than Chaucer, but like him and all the great poets, Spenser drew much on the fancies and myths of the ancient and medieval world. It is a necessity of poesy that it range widely for its themes and expressions. The English poetry, while using material from all these fields, has had a truer relation to |