nothingness-how the best in us may become the worst, how the self-indulgence of even our higher nature will surely work its own punishment-he can find it all here in the most impressive personal form that tragedy ever assumed. Providence, as a spiritual power reigning over man, is never so awful as when it manifests itself in those finely endowed characters that have wrenched themselves away from their true relations to life and duty. And thus it is that Hamlet, the fitful and wayward Hamlet, regretful without heartfelt repentance, spasmodic not from weakness but from surplusage of undisciplined strength-thus it is that this majestic soul becomes a transparency through which Providence adapts its revelations to the vision of men. No such lesson in "vanity of vanities" has been taught since Solomon heaped around him the treasures of the whole earth only to impoverish his soul.

Nor are these the only instructions brought home to our hearts. Those human ties which are most human are concealed far down beneath the surface of our being. The tiny nervous filaments, distributed through the tissues of the organs, are invisible to the naked eye, and when combined they extend as cords to every part of the body. But we have ties that elude the scrutiny of consciousness, and our greatest influences do their work in hidden ways. Threads that reach the farthest and bind distant results most closely to our souls are often too delicate for even our observation. And so it is that we repeat ourselves in shapes and aspects least expected, and the mystery of the life within is deepened evermore by the mystery of the life without. As the procession of events moves forward in Hamlet, the shadow of what men call fate thickens in gloom. Polonius, worthy of a better destiny, is the first to perish. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, "my two school-fellows" who "bear the mandate," are the men who "marshal" Hamlet to "knavery," and in the trial of craft against craft they are destroyed. Ophelia, so unconsciously trustful, so firmly obedient, beautiful, too, in the strength and tenacity of her affections, passes from love and hope to disappointment and grief, then to madness, then to death. At her grave, where pathos and selfreproach and anguish rush with startling vehemence over his spirit, reason gives way, while the phantom of recollection cries out, 66 This is I, Hamlet the Dane!" The insanity is

temporary. Hamlet recovers himself, and shows his intellectual acumen in perfection when narrating to Horatio the incidents of the sea-voyage and reasoning with Laertes to convince him that he is "of the faction that is wronged." But life is exhausted now. "Fortune's finger" has sounded all the stops she pleased; there remains naught but the dirge; and that dirge is over Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, and Hamlet, lying together in death.

ART. V.-THE POPES AT AVIGNON.

On the banks of the Rhone, some fifty miles north of Marseilles, lies a very ancient and now decayed city whose long existence is densely packed with history. Its modern name, Avignon, comes naturally from Avenio, under which name it is described by the Roman historians. Its soil was, however, probably trod by Grecian feet five hundred years before Christ. After the Romans, it passed under the dominion of the Goths, and then of the Saracens, who were expelled from it by Charles Martel. After centuries of possession by Provençal counts it was sold in 1348 by the Countess of Provence, afterward Queen Joanna of Naples, to Pope Clement VI. for fifty thousand florins, a part of the price being that he should declare her innocent of the murder of her husband, of which she was generally believed to be guilty. It continued in papal hands till the revolution of 1791.

The city stands in one of the finest districts of France. From a rocky tower in the garden Rocher des Dons the prospect is one of the most beautiful in all Europe. The majestic Rhone flows at your feet. The blue line of the Cevennes skirts the north-west. Far across the plain toward the northeast lies Mount Ventoux, while farther southward in the dim distance are the Alps, and nearer the silver thread of the Durance winds along to its union with the Rhone. With all its beauty it was plagued with winds, and "Avenio ventosa, sine vento venenosa, cum vento fastidiosa" has passed as a proverb into its history. The city is still surrounded by its lofty medieval walls, with their towers and battlements and

handsome gates, while round the ramparts runs a shady

boulevard.

On the rocky eminence that overlooks the river and commands the city stands the cathedral called Notre Dame des Dons, founded originally on the site of a heathen temple, and after its destruction by the Goths rebuilt by Charlemagne. Near by is what was once the palace of the popes, now a barrack and a prison. It is a huge, irregular Gothic structure, with high, thick, gloomy walls, built piecemeal at long intervals by successive pontiffs. Its towers and chambers were in the fourteenth century the home of the Inquisition, and they still contain the atrocious implements with which it tortured the bodies of its victims. Those grim, solid walls could be at the same time the fête place of Petrarch, the poet-laureate of the age, and the prison-house of Rienzi, the last of the tribunes. These edifices, with one or two others of lesser note grouped with them, were the ecclesiastical heart of the city which Petrarch and other Italian historians called the Babylon of the papal Church. The years of the papal residence there were called the period of Babylonish captivity." This period extends from 1305 to 1378, a little more than seventy years.

The dawn of the fourteenth century began a new era in the history of European governments. Theocratic institutions had reached the height of their arrogant assumption of power, and modern royalty then achieved its first victory. The bold theories of Gregory VII., which for more than two centuries had made the necks of kings the pavement for papal feet, and their thrones the playthings of papal caprice, had found at last in Philip the Fair of France a king to defy them. Boniface VIII., a true successor of Gregory and the Innocents, had made a desperate struggle to establish more firmly the shaking throne of St. Peter. But the ignominy and insult of his last days, his fearful death, and the probable poisoning of his successor, showed that popular sentiment no longer regarded the person of the pope as sacred nor his authority as supreme. In the leading States of Europe, after the long dark ages of faction and disintegration-after the successive attempts at the imperial, aristocratic, republican, and mixed forms of royalty-there had at last emerged the essential idea of the twofold nature of nations, a government and a people. This idea had found

embodiment in powerful leaders. The Plantagenets had been its champions, and Edward III. was soon to surpass them all. Bannockburn and Crecy were its battle-fields. The last kings. of the Capetian dynasty were to transmit it greatly strengthened to the house of Valois. Charles IV., with his Golden Bull, was its fitting representative in Germany. Margaret, the Semiramis of the North, was to make it the policy of Sweden and Denmark at the close of the century. Switzerland had known her William Tell, and Spain was to see the culmination of roy alty in Charles V. It was the development of this principle that had secularized the nations. It was the deadly enemy of ecclesiastical assumption and tyranny. And though the tide of the battle had changed, yet it was around the banners of the Church that the blood of the people was still to flow, the strategy of generals was to find its field, and the keenest diplomacy of cardinals and statesmen was to match its powers.

This antagonism of Church and State was accompanied, perhaps largely caused, by the effort of the human mind to assert itself to cease its worm-like crawling and put on wings. Philosophy, literature, law, religion, began to be fields in which the mind claimed its right to independent thought without the shackles of ecclesiastical supervision. Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus had led the way in the realm of scholastic philosophy. Gower and Chaucer had laid the foundation of English literature. Before the close of the fourteenth century Wielif was to throw, as a firebrand among tinder-like combustibles, his English Bible into the excited thought of the age. Dante was just singing his divine songs in Italy and giving shape to her language. Petrarch and Boccaccio soon followed, the former a prominent actor in the arena of that Avignon he so aptly termed the Babylon of the Church.

The tide of papal supremacy had at last reached its height, and therein lay one of the mightiest of those crises that determine human affairs. The climbing aspirations of the human spirit came at length to a final pinnacle. That summit in the case of the papacy was gained when, at the jubilee of A.D. 1300, Boniface VIII., seated on the throne of Constantine in military garb, girded with a sword, a crown upon his head and a scepter in his hand, shouted to the assembled myriads before him, "I am Cæsar-I am Emperor." Little by little, from local and

humble supervision over the spiritual interests of men, the papal authority had crept on till its claim embraced all human interests in all Christendom. Long years it had been content that the spiritual and the secular should move side by side in complete accord in the government of the world. But dualism in headship is always a monstrosity. There may be harmony for a season, but soon or later headship means unity. All save one must become subordinate. And so at last the spiritual locked the temporal in its invisible fetters. The pope was the sole representative on earth of the Deity, and from him, therefore, must kings derive their power, and the temporal must be the slave instead of the sister of the spiritual. There must be a presiding power that should oversee the secular concerns of the nations, hold kings and emperors as their hereditary agents, be umpire in strifes, the source of international law, the judge in all causes, and the enforcer of its own sentences. Many conditions and powers helped the claim of the popes. Their office was sacred. They controlled the terrible weapons of excommunication and interdict. Their position was supposed to lift them above personal interest and narrowing jealousies. But experience had proved that the holiest office could be polluted by the lust and passions of the holder, and that the corruption of the best is always the worst.

And so the tide turned. But it must go out as it came in. No earthquake convulsions to swallow up the waters on the instant, but first a decided check, and then the slow, fierce struggle until the final ebb. Philip the Fair was the rocky barrier against which the highest tide dashed in vain. It was he that fulfilled the closing part of the famous prophecy concerning Boniface VIII., that he should enter like a fox, reign like a lion, and die like a dog. The tide turned with Boniface; but the slime it had deposited, and the foul relics of its recession, are more clearly visible in the period of the "Babylonish captivity."

Seven pontiffs sat on the throne of St. Peter during this portion of papal history. The first of these, Clement V., had consented to the degradation of the tiara that he might win it. The crown of Boniface, the disposer of secular crowns and the lord of all realms in its lofty claims, after a brief glitter on the head of Benedict XI. had tumbled to the feet of Philip the