SHORT ARTICLES.-The Calabar Bean, 30. Non-inflammable Fabrics, 30. Poems of W. M. Praed, M, P., 48. Cool as a Cucumber, 48. Hard-headed, 48. FIRST SERIES LIVING AGE, 36 vols., Morocco backs and corners, $90 a Set. We have, at last, with great regret, sold the stereotype plates of the First Series of The Living Age, to be melted by type-founders. We have a small number of copies of the printed work remaining, which we shall be glad to receive orders for so long as we can supply them. Persons desirous of buying odd volumes or numbers, to complete their sets, would do well to or- THE REBELLION RECORD: a Diary of American Events, 1860-64. Edited by Frank Moore, PERRINE'S NEW TOPOGRAPHICAL WAR MAP OF THE SOUTHERN STATES, with a concise History WAX FLOWERS AND FRUITS, AND HOW TO MAKE THEM. With many wood-cuts. Boston: J. E. Tilton & Company. freight, are for sale at two dollars a volume. ANY VOLUME may be had separately, at two dollars, bound, or a dollar and a half in numbers. ANY NUMBER may be had for 13 cents; and it is well worth while for subscribers or purchasers to com- plete any broken volumes they may have, and thus greatly enhance their value. WASHINGTON IRVING. IN MEMORIAM. "As that new grave was covored, the beauty of a sunset of extraordinary splendor was poured over it as a last farewell; and as the sun went down over the Rockland Hills, and the gold of the clouds faded into gray, and the glory of the rolling river died in the leaden dulness of the night, there were few of the thousands returning homeward from that day's pilgrimage whose hearts were not moved within them."-Paper of the day. THEY have laid him at rest, and that sun-gilded hill, Jenny must needs have diamonds to wear, When "upper" and "sole" will both give away, Oh, Jenny! just think That we're now on the brink Of a struggle most mighty and fearful; And that soon Jamie's head May lie midst the dead, At whose base his loved Hudson rolls sparkling On a field so pitifully dreadful. and still, Which his fancy has peopled, his footsteps have trod, Is his monument now, and his pillow its sod, As that river, his life-stream flowed tranquil and kind, As bright as those sunbeams, the rays of his mind, And as gentle, their heart-warming glory. Throw by all your follies and cease all your races And strive to think less They have laid him at rest, and his spirit has fled, That darkens our nation, once blest; And all that was mortal of IRVING is dead! wave, And the halo that rests around Washington's And fervently pray That bright peace soon may Shine on Jamie and all of the rest. -Philadelphia Press. OUR ORDERS. WEAVE no more silks, ye Lyons looms, To deck our girls for gay delights! The crimson flower of battle blooms, And solemn marches fill the nights. G. G. Weave but the flags whose folds to-day Keep back your tunes, ye viols sweet, That pour delight from other lands! Rouse there the dancer's restless feet; The trumpet leads our warrior bands. And ye that wage the war of words With mystic fame and subtle power, Go chatter to the idle birds, Or teach the lesson of the hour! Ye sibyl arts, in one stern knot From The Christian Remembrancer. The Catastrophe of Santiago. The Weekly pressed as wrong or unjust on the face of it; for we are constituted to look for a Providence in great events, using this word in marked distinction from a divine judgment. THE recent frightful calamity at Santiago has, from the first, refused to be classed This need of being accounted for led the among mere accidents, among those visita- priests, in the very sight of the conflagration, tions of God before which we must hold our to attribute it to the direet favor and mercy peace in awed, uninquiring submission. Per- of Heaven. Possibly apprehending that haps the mere vastness of the calamity ac- some might call it a judgment, they were counts for this general sentiment. Perhaps driven to assert it a crowning and distinit is simple human nature to trace to some guishing grace; they were compelled to decause, and to pursue to some end, any gigan-clare every sufferer a saint, and each death a tic mischance, the consequence of human mis- martyrdom, and their country, which hithtake or folly; but there are circumstances in erto had wanted martyrs, an infinite gainer this case which undoubtedly quicken and by this new army of intercessors. And we as many say justify this tendency; and really do not see that there was anything else which, from the first, asserted for it, alike in for them to say, not only to the miserable spectator and listener, a moral weight, as a relatives, but to themselves. Such an event, thing full of teaching and of consequences. happening on such a day, and in consequence Not only were the two or three priests who of unparalleled exertions to do honor to that saw the flames spread with what must have day's especial object of adoration, and befallseemed miraculous speed-and the lookers- ing the particular class who had been most on—who, in frenzied helplessness, had to en- docile to their teaching,-who had lived in dure an ordeal only less terrible than what the dogmas then celebrated, with absolute was passing within those doomed walls-en- submission and a very passion of enthusiasm, gaged in the very moment of agony in seeking—and considering, too, that the object there a meaning, accounting for, making resolu- exalted had been systematically set forth to tions, deriving some lessons from the hideous scene enacting under their eyes; but the world of men to whom the news was brought received it in the same didactic attitude of mind, as a thing from which something was to be learnt, and (in direct opposition to the habit of thought belonging to our time) never for a moment entertained the idea merely as an inscrutable event, over which they could only sigh and wonder. By every one it has been received as something designed to convey a lesson; as something with a meaning, which it is given us to discover and to profit by. It has been assumed on every side that the lives of those two thousand victims cannot have been poured out in vain; they must effect some change in the world's mode of thinking and acting; there must be a purpose in this huge sacrifice,-in this concentration of human suffering. An event so startling and appalling must needs, through the agency of pity and terror, enforce some conviction on men's minds, and compel to consideration. We are aware that this natural train of thought is open to grave abuse; that it may, to many persons, on consideration, appear even unreasonable; but this is no argument that it ought to be sup these victims as a more intelligible Providence, a more intimate and familiar Guardian, tenderer and more indulgent to human infirmity than even the Redeemer of the world:-in such an event they ought, we repeat, to labor to trace the direct visible finger of Heaven, marking its approval. As honest men, they ought to receive it as a strong confirmation of their faith, or it ought to shake their belief to its centre. We do not say that indifferent persons, or members of other communions, would be led to see any particular or supernatural intervention in this event, or that they need regard the catastrophe on that particular day as other than a mere coincidence; but men who teach of the Blessed Virgin as perpetually manifesting herself on especial occasions and crises of men's fate, and working always in mercy of the most intelligible character, and who saw the multitudes whom they had trained in these ideas struck by death in the moment of prompt obedience and eagerest devotion, they must welcome it as a mark of, we will not vaguely say, Heaven's, but of the Virgin's, signal and distinguishing sanction and grace, and of the divine favor promised by her. This was on the one side a neces Fary interpretation of the event. The lay inference was as inevitable. If the men of Santiago had not devotion enough to be present at the magnificent celebration that had collected so vast a crowd of women, it is very certain that the sights and sounds of that terrific half-hour would not change indifference into belief; we may say, on the contrary, that coldness or contempt turned very naturally into fury toward all who were concerned in collecting that excited feminine gathering, whether by impassioned exhortation, or reckless splendor of decoration. most unreasonable Protestant cannot say that the priests scholars were more guilty in the matter than the priests themselves, and yet these were the victims, while the priests escaped. However, we are given to understand that, in certain obscure quarters, the event is made capital of as a judgment,-a judgment upon poor, ignorant women, maidservants, and children. The Christian Observer we see, in addition to the train of reflection obvious to a Protestant organ, uses the event as an occasion for (we suppose) backing Mr. Kingsley, without, however, falling into his snare-the snare fatal to rhetoricians-of proper names. not very easy to get at the exact truth in that confusion of horrors; but, choosing those reports which reflect most strongly on the It is shaken by any counter-statement. It will believe no Roman Catholic priest in the world, even on his oath, in any matter affecting the interest of his church. Some people have denounced the atheism of the enraged clamorers against priesteraft and "idolatry," as though this were the worst feature of the whole tragedy; but the impartial reader feels that such a spectacle could not be witnessed in utter forgetfulness priests, it declares its resolve not to be of the occasion which had lit up the disastrous conflagration; nor could the carelessness of a few subordinate officials, or the want of vomitories" for the imprisoned crowd, be reasonably expected to satisfy the cry for a reason and a cause, which the heart sends up under such terrible appeals. Thus, while the clergy were led by an inexorable logic to congratulate Chili on its new army of martyrs, the laity were led, by what they thought the logic of facts, to denounce fanaticism, and a blind obedience to faratical teachers, as the very ground and source of their present anguish. The English Roman Catholic press, in a natural dilemma, finds it an occasion for saying a great many things. Indirectly, the event gives an opportunity for the use of that copious and resounding vocabulary of abuse, which is its speciality. It is furious against every comment from without. Remarks which seem to us inevitable, they call blasphemous; and as, in all public excitements the second thought of everybody is the Times, they fly out into transports at that organ's comments; and, because the Times says that if the priests had wished to set the church on fire, they could not have laid their plans better, they assume that the Times charges the priests of Santiago with a deliberate plan for burning church and congregation together. The British public, of course, has viewed the event as a warning against what it calls "mariolatry," which it sees written with fingers of flame, without nicely considering whether this instruction can be logically deduced from it. The tone of " enlightened public opinion," which would interfere with no one's creed, and leaves every soul to the free exercise of its religious convictions, spoke "It is hideous and horrible," says the in the Times. But here, again, accident was Tablet; "it is revolting to the mind and not allowed free scope as an agent. The degrading to our common nature, that a event was made a lesson against extravagance catastrophe so awful should have called forth and want of moderation: whatever is im- such comments as the Times and many of the moderate entails disaster; whatever we do, London newspapers have this week pubwhatever we believe, let us be reasonable. lished. The Times of Monday, February A dogma it was explained may even be true 1st, refreshed and edified the English public in itself, but if held without moderation, it with all the resources of its hideous blasceases to be true, and sooner or later comes phemy; according to the diabolical sugan explosion. It has not fallen in our way gestion of the writer in that paper, the coneither to see or hear this calamity called a flagration was more than an accident," etc. judgment: most people, indeed, carefully "Could the arch fiend himself insinuate guard against this interpretation; for the better than this? " etc. Incidentally, this event furnishes an occasion to mark the tant writers call The Virgin Mary's Postdifference of tone so constantly observable office.' The writer from the spot says that between Roman Catholics of the old stock he would outstrip the Catholic world, and and the more zealous body of converts who must, one would think, not seldom disconcert their brothers older in the faith. Thus, in a letter signed Robert Canon Smith," we find the Virgin's Post-office thus explained away: 66 Among other assertions of a Chilian writer, for the purpose of exciting hatred against the clergy, is one to the effect that there was a letter-box into which the superstitious women of Santiago were instructed by Father Ugarte to throw their letters to the Blessed Virgin. The Chilian who wrote this knew well, as the editor of the Register remarks, that he was giving a maliciously false version of a very simple circumstance, which all Catholics understand.' The editor gives a perfectly clear explanation; he says, We presume no Christian will deny the efficacy of prayer. We are told on divine authority that when two or three are gathered together in the name of the Lord, he is amongst them. had invented a celestial post-office, by which direct communication in writing was obtained with the Virgin Mary.' This obviously points at something like that which Catholics well know to have existed in Europe. With regard to St. Aloysius, many of your readers must, like myself, have witnessed it at Rome, and some may remember an account of it published in the Weekly Register in June, 1862. It was at first a pious imitation of a remarkable act of St. Stanislas. This saint (who, as all the world knows, died in the Jesuit noviciate at Rome) had drawn by lot, according to the custom of the house, the name of St. Laurence as his patron for the last month of his life. He was in perfect health and in the dawn of opening youth. But his desire of death was so strong that he wrote to St. Laurence a letter, entreating him to ask for him that he might be removed before the then approaching festival of the Assumption, It is not for us to criticise the acts of a saint, even when they depart from the ordinary course, and the result seems to show that in this instance he acted under a special exceptional direction, by which his own desire was moved to ask that which was the will of God for him; for, contrary to all appearance of probability, the suit was granted. When some years later the cultus of St. Aloysius was sanctioned by the Church, and introduced with On these occasions it is a common prac-general joy and thankfulness in the Roman tice for the faithful to intimate in writing, College in which that saint died, and in the but anonymously, to one of the priests of the church belonging to which his relics still rechurch, their desire that the prayers of the pose, one of the Fathers suggested to the puflock might be requested in favor of the in- pils that those who had favors to ask should tention" (which is not expressed) of the write letters to St. Aloysius, as St. Stanislas writer, A. B., or C. D., or any other anonyme wrote to St. Laurence. To a Catholic, at that the postulant may have chosen for the least, all this seems most natural and graceoccasion; and before the commencement of ful. The idea was immediately taken up, divine service the officiating clergyman, and from the Roman College, in which it is whoever he may be, requests the prayers of still kept up, it has spread, I may say, to the the faithful for those unexpressed intentions whole world. Many days before the festival accordingly. This is the whole mystery of of St. Aloysius, letters to him arrive from all the Letter-box,' which has called forth so quarters of the globe; many, I was glad to many vile calumnies and blasphemies, both here and in South America."-Weekly Regis-more Catholic countries. The mass of them hear, from England. I need not say from ter, February 13th, 1864, p. 106. Catholies, it need not be said, believe in the communion and intercession of the saints. Novenas, in honor of particular saints in every country, and of the queen of all saints in all countries, are ordinary incidents of Catholic devotion. are brought in on the eve of the feast. They Yet in the same paper we have the "Post-are of all sorts; some mere ordinary-looking office " itself defended, and almost enforced, under the well-known signature H. W. W in the following terms :— letters, some enclosed in embroidered cases like purses or reticules. There is in front of the altar, under which lie the mortal remains of the saint, a large opening which, when I "What is most remarkable in English saw it, was completely filled with such letProtestants, who write about Catholic coun-ters, brought in (in a sort of procession) and tries, is, not their ignorance or their profane-placed there on the eve of the feast. Others, ness, but their narrow-minded bigotry. The especially those more richly ornamented, were writers before us are a remarkable example. hung about the altar. I need hardly add For instance, a devoted priest, named Ugarte, that none of these letters are ever opened. had introduced in Santiago what the Protes- They are kept till the last day of the term, |