base and ignominious, can to no rightly thinking person appear doubtful but that it is beyond measure an eternal weight of glory to be wrought in us, who look not to the things which are visible, but to those which are unseen."
The simple spiritual grandeur of this valediction sank into the hearts of the listening multitude, and won them, in spite of Protestant detractors, to the martyr's side. The executioner did his work clumsily, which added extra torment to Father Southwell's death; but to the last he calmly commended his soul to its Maker. One is comforted in this dark history to read that the mob itself prevented his body being taken down before dead, as the sentence had directed. "May my soul be with this man's!" exclaimed Lord Mountjoy, a bystander; and when the poor, severed head was held aloft to the public gaze, not one voice was heard to cry "Traitor."
The world, after its wont, was kinder to the man's work than to the man himself. Three volumes of his productions—already even popular, as it seems—were published immediately after Father Southwell's death; and they were followed by a host of others. In a very eminent degree was this young Jesuit the "poet of Roman Catholic England"; but he was not merely the poet of any single class. He spoke to the sorrowful and serious of soul, to the meek and the devout; and the Old Faith and the New ceased their warfare to listen. The longest and most ambitious of his poems, but by no means his best, is St. Peter's Complaint. The ever sympathetic Dr. Grosart anticipates a very natural objection in pointing out that "regarded as so many distinct studies of the tragic incident, it is ignorance and not knowledge that will pronounce it tedious or idly para-phrastic," for the constant play of fancy is too
