Page:Gesta Romanorum - Swan - Wright - 1.djvu/487

Rh duty; he who is a cruel and ungrateful son, a bad husband, and careless master; he whose whole life is to consume time, not to employ it—to vegetate, but not to exist—to dream away life, with every sense locked up, every capability destroyed, every good principle uncultivated—and that too in the most loathsome and degraded condition—, is to be a Man of God!

That the story before us contains a faithful picture of the times, and of many succeeding times; that it describes the prevailing tenets of Popery, will be generally admitted. Some, indeed, whose charity "hopeth the best," will be ready to believe, that the colours of an imaginative mind have been scattered along it; and that, however correspondent the outline may be, the sketch has been filled up by the aid of exaggeration, while embellishment has stepped into the place of truth. But we have unfortunately too many prototypes in nature; history is too copious in examples to oblige us to have recourse to fiction for an illustrative comment. The life of Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the order of Jesus, presents a very singular and apposite confirmation of the remark; and I am happy to have received a most obliging permission to extract an able article on this subject from a late number of the Retrospective Review a work, which I have no