ecclesiastical writers, omitted by Bellarmine, says very quietly, "She wrote, or Kaimondo de Vincia wrote in her name, a work inscribed," &c., &c. And it is very possible that the suspicion indicated may be a just one ; but there is nothing in the matter of the work itself to belie the origin attributed to it. It may be re marked, however, that the context, as it stands, does not even pretend to give the unbroken utterances of the saint. It is intermingled, without any advertisement to the reader, typographical or other, that he is about to enter on matter of a different authorship, with long passages descriptive of the saint s mode of receiving the revelation, written in the person of the secretary. But the saint s own utterances are exactly such as might have been ex pected from such a patient. They resemble the worst and emptiest style of the pulpit eloquence of her time and country, and consist entirely of mere verbose and repetitive inanities and plati tudes. It is impossible to read them without being strongly reminded of the productions, which have been given forth in these latter days as spiritual communications made to persons in trance or otherwise constituting themselves "mediums," a simi larity which suggests sundry curious considerations. The most probable supposition seems to be that these "dialogues" were composed by Father Raiinondo, from notes taken down from Catherine s trance ramblings. The 26 prayers might have been expected to throw more light on the character and mental calibre of the saint, whose couvuunings with the Infinite they represent. But nothing of the kind is to be gathered from them. The im pression they are calculated to produce is either that the saint was a self-conscious actor and pretender, or that they are not her compositions, the latter perhaps being the more probable hy pothesis. Though addressed in form to the Deity, there is little in these effusions that can with accuracy be called prayer. The speaker, or rather writer, seems continually to forget his avowed object, nnd runs off into long statements of the nature and attributes of the Deity, and ecclesiastical positions based thereon, evidently prompted rather by didactic views as to mortal hearers, than by effort to hold communion with the Almighty. It is all dry, cold, repetitive, verbose theology, instead of the warm utterances of either a contrite or a thankful heart. It remains to say a few words of the saint s letters, by far the. most interesting and valuable of her reputed works. They are 373 in number, and form two stout quarto volumes of the Lucca edition. In the four octavo volumes of the recent cheap Milan reprint, only the first 198 are given, though no word appears to indicate that the collection is imperfect. On the contrary, the fourth volume is entitled "4th and last." Still more recently the letters have been reprinted by Barbera at Florence, 1860, in 4 vols. small octavo, with a preliminary notice of the saint prefixed by the cele brated Niccol6 Tommasao, consisting of 210 pages. The 373 letters of the entire collection have among them many addressed to kings, pop(;s, cardinals, bishops, conventual bodies, and political corpora tions, as well as a great number written to private individuals. And it seeins very strange that among so many correspondents of classes whose papers are likely to be preserved, and many of whom, especially the monastic communities, would assuredly have attached a high value to such documents, no one original of any of these documents should have been preserved. Girolamo Gigli, the editor of the quarto edition of the saint s works, printed at Lucca and Siena, 1707-13, an enthusiastic investigator and collector of every description of information regarding her, gives, in his preface to the letters, a careful account of the manuscript collections from which they have at different times been printed, but has not a word to say of any scrap of original document. The epistles were first printed by Aldus in 1500, just 120 years after Catherine s death. The difficulties connected with the subject of the true authorship of these letters are much complicated by questions respecting Catherine s capability of writing, and her own statements of the miraculous manner in which she acquired that accomplishment. The discus sion of these difficulties would require a larger space than can here be allotted to the subject. And the reader curious on the subject may be referred to a life of the saint by Mr Trollope, from which much of the present notice has been taken. It is admitted on all hands, however, that a large portion of the letters were written by the hands of secretaries. The very high reputation, and that no t wholly of a pietistic or ecclesiastical nature, which this large mass of writings has enjoyed for several centuries will probably appear to most English readers an extremely singular fact. A great deal of the praise bestowed on St Catherine s writings by Italian critics has reference to their style and diction. Written at a time when the language, fresh from the hands of Dante, of Petrarch, and of Boc caccio, was still in its infancy, and in a city at all times celebrated for the purity of its vernacular, they have by the common consent of Italian scholars taken rank as one of the acknowledged classics of the language, as a testa di lingua, as the Tuscan purists say. The Delia Cruscans have placed them on the jealously-watched list of their authorities, and an enthusiastic Sienese compatriot, the be fore-mentioned Girolamo Gigli, has completed a vocabulario Caterini- ano, after the fashion of those consecrated to the study of the works of Homer and Cicero. Of course no one from the "barbarous" side of the Alps can permit himself any word of observation on this point, especially when the judgment is in the main confirmed bv the authority of the greatest of living Italian critics, Niccolo Tommaseo. Had no such decisive opinion been extant to guide his ignorance, it might perhaps have seemed to a foreigner that the saint s style was loose in its syntax, intricate in its construction, and terribly overloaded with the merest verbosity. But the philological excel lencies of her writings are, after all, the least part of the praise that has been lavished on Catherine as an author. Her admirers enlarge on the moving eloquence, the exalted piety, the noble sentiments, the sound argumentation of her compositions, especially the letters.
So large a number of devout writers have occupied their pens on "legends" and biographies of Saint Catherine that it would be far too lengthy a task to attempt to give even a list of them. The public library of Siena contains no less than 79 works of which the popular saint of the city is the subject. Almost all of them, however, seem to be based more or less directly and avowedly on the work of Father IJaimondo. And enough has been said to give the reader a sufficient idea of the nature of that book. Of Giro lamo Gigli s Vocabulario Cateriniano mention has also been made. Of course it will readily be understood that this work regards the saint s writings in a purely philological point of view. But the curious fate which attended this work may be noticed. It was burned by the hangman at Florence, not because it was supposed to contain any heterodoxy in matter of religion, but merely because the Delia Crusca, which is occasionally somewhat slily satirized in it, was enraged at the position taken up by the author, to the effect that the Sienese is a purer dialect of Italian than the Florentine ! The notice of Saint Catherine by Niccolo Tommaseo, prefixed to the most recent edition of St Catherine s works, has also been mentioned. It cannot be called "a life" in any sense. For the author makes no attempt to relate the story of her career, or to examine the evi dence for any of the anecdotes which he does relate. It is written in a strain of enthusiastic pietistic admiration, which is certainly curious in the case of a highly-cultured 19th century layman ; and its principal value consists in the judgment on the purely literary merits of the writer, by one who must be admitted to be the greatest living critic of Italy.
and after his death for two years (1725-27) empress of Russia, was the natural daughter of a country girl in Livonia. Being left utterly destitute when a mere child, she was brought up by a Lutheran pastor of Marienburg, named Gliick. About 1702, at a pretty early age, she was married to a Swedish dragoon, from whom, however, she was almost immediately separated by the vicissitudes of war. She never saw him again ; for she was carried off by the Russian forces, and was slave or mistress to more than one Russian general, last of all to Prince Menschikoff, in whose house she attracted the notice of the czar. The czar was struck by her beauty and good sense, and made her his mistress, and then his wife publicly in 1711. After that, in the same year, she performed a service to her husband for which she will always be remembered in history. In the campaign on the Pruth, Peter, with an excessive contempt of the generalship and other military qualities of the Turk*, had rashly placed himself in a position in which he was completely surrounded and cut off from all supplies. From this peril he was relieved by Catherine, who was expert enough to collect the necessary sum for bribing the Turkish general, and in this way to bring about a tolerable peace. Next year she was solemnly crowned empress at St Petersburg. She continued to be the faithful companion and adviser of the czar, till his death in 1725. After that event she was herself raised to the Russian throne, chiefly through the address of her former lord, Prince Menschikoff, who put himself at the head of a powerful party, and gained over the guards at the capital. Her reign of two years was in no wise remarkable. Menschikoff was her minister, and directed affairs almost at his pleasure. Catherine was by no means free from the vices then prevalent at the Russian court. She spent whole days in dissipation, which hastened her end. She died in 1727, being somewhere about forty years of age. She was evidently a woman of
considerable insight and expertness, able to manage the
