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19, 1860.] outcasts. The leper afforded a handy and tractable material for the saint to illustrate the power of his sanctity upon. There are countless instances recorded of this use of him. We have already quoted one, in which a healing influence proceeds from papal lips. Whoever wishes for others will find it profitable to peruse that immortal compilation the “Acta Sanctorum.” He will read there of many occasions on which the leper’s infirmity added lustre to the saint’s renown. It must have been very convenient to be thus supplied with vile bodies for experimental purposes. Those saints were fine and noble institutions. The medical men of the period must have eyed them with intense jealousy.

To take the leper to one’s own house, to wash his poor afflicted body, to wait upon his every want, and to lie by his side upon the same couch, were, we need scarcely say, acts beyond the self-denial and humility of ordinary men. They were reserved for those whose lives embodied the religious ideal of their time—men who regarded the body as given to man but to be tortured, and who deemed a moment’s carnal ease a sinful and damnable thing, only to be atoned for by years of penance and self-laceration. No doubt in the spectacle of these men there is something infinitely great and ennobling. We cannot but admire the unflinching patience with which they bore their crosses, the unconquerable will with which they worked out the life imposed, as they believed, upon them, the unrepining resignation with which they accepted their life with all its thorns and misery. But there is another face to the medal that excites very different feelings—feelings of deep melancholy and commiseration. We are thankful it is not our province to give judgment upon the men of those days. But we are at present concerned only with the deeds of kindness and charity that these great disciples of the ascetic creed performed to the poor leper, so illustrating those lines of Rabanus Maurus, according to the contemporary belief:—

Natu Dei felix homo collatatur fratribus,

Misellinis et pupillis et egenis et orphanis,

In his susceperunt viri celsi Dominum.

The birth of God taught happy man to feel

A gladsome sympathy with all his kind,

With lepers, orphans, and with those in need;

By helping such, great souls have put on Christ.

Mapes—the same Mapes who, in his memorable drinking-song, declares that his heart is set on “dying in a tavern”—gives us a long account of how Count Theobald devoted his life and zeal to the service of the miserable and the destitute, and of the leprous especially, “because,” says the author of the De Nugis Curialium, “as these were held most eminently despicable and most abjectly depraved, he hoped, by succouring them, to render himself especially well-pleasing in the sight of God.” So he would wash the feet of these outcast disciples, and wipe them with his own hands, in spite of the “lethalis fætor et amaritudo corrumpens et sanies ulcerosa,” that constituted the symptoms of his patients’ malady. He provided them with complete accommodation of every sort in his own house. Mapes proceeds to inform us how High Heaven rewarded his good deeds. A certain leper, to whose comfort and sustenance the Count had been particularly attentive, one day revealed himself to his benefactor. “The sweetest odour of fragrance” filled the cell; a few brief words passed between the Count and his leper; then the one vanished, and the other joyed in the consciousness that he had seen Christ.

Somewhat similar is the story of the Cid and the leper, preserved in one of those Spanish ballads which Mr. Lockhart has translated. Don Rodrigo is on his way to Compostella, with a view to performing a vow he had made:

The leper was St. Lazarus himself. During the night he made himself known, and promised the Cid a happy recompense for his charity.

We might quote many more cases in which men, in entertaining lepers, entertained angels unawares; and many more still, in which the generous deed was followed by no such dénouement, and the humble thanks of the recipient were the only acknowledgment of it. Thus, even the curse of leprosy oft-times produced a good and happy result. Some men, at least, it inspired with a generous pity, a holy charity, a divine sympathy; and in them these celestial instincts thus awakened brought forth good fruit, acceptable to God, and a source of hope to all who study human nature,—being as it were a light shining brightly in times else dark and disconsolate.

It would be a not uninteresting task—though a somewhat laborious one, as the notices of this disease are, for the most part, of a scattered and fragmentary description—to trace the gradual decline of leprosy in Europe. The great cause of its disappearance is undoubtedly the vast progress that has been made in sanitary matters. Our Europe is not the Europe of three centuries ago. The uncultivated and marshy era is past, with its humid and miasmatous atmosphere, its squalid and unwholesome dwellings. Those cachectic days are gone by for ever, and the leprosy is gone by with them. If it is lawful to personify it, can we not imagine him tearing his white hair