ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE FOURTH VOLUME. The "Cyclops," Gurney Slade. (Etching) Proposed Tomb of Archbishop Plunkett. (Lithograph) Portrait etching of the Right Rev. Dr. Burchall PAGE 49 71 137 177 195 211 DOWNSIDE REVIEW. JANUARY, 1885. EDITORIAL. WITH our present number the "Downside Review" begins its fourth volume. Since July 1880, when it first appeared, eleven numbers have been issued, and our sincere thanks are offered to all who have contributed articles or other literary material to our pages. To our artist, especially, we feel deeply indebted, because we have reason to know that his illustrations have been much appreciated by our subscribers. If our resources would permit we would very gladly increase the number of etchings and lithographs in each number, as we believe that it is a distinctive mark of our College magazine, but at present we cannot promise ourselves this pleasure. Not only does the preparation of the copper plate obviously entail a good deal of work; but the printing of the etching is a process, we believe, both slow and laborious. At any rate it has been found sometimes impossible to obtain the prints in time for the punctual issue of our periodical, as we have had to wait on the convenience of the etching printers. We have consequently come to the conclusion that the interest of the Review would be best served by punctuality of publication, even at the risk of having to let illustrations stand over to subsequent numbers. Still every endeavour will be made to give at least two etchings or other illustrations in each number. At the commencement of our undertaking, the programme we laid down was to make it our first object to keep Downside and its interests before the mind of all connected with the College and Monastery. Most of our readers are linked to St. Gregory's by ties so personal and intimate as to make it almost a second home to them. And although it does not, we are sure, require any help from the Downside Review to keep alive these feelings, still we believe that because of it many have been drawn more closely than before to their "Alma Mater," and comparative strangers have A f been induced to take an interest in St. Gegory's. We could wish that the number of our subscribers was larger, as it would free St. Gregory's Society, which guarantees the expense, (within a margin), from all payments on account of the Review. To be stable such a periodical ought to be self-supporting, and a small increase in the number of the subscribers would enable the Review to pay its expenses. We are sure that there are many friends and old students of St. Gregory's who would willingly pay the annual amount of the subscription, but who are, perhaps, unaware of the existence of our small periodical; or who, perhaps, find the difficulty so often experienced of sending trifling yearly donations. We trust that our readers will help us to obtain others, who will read and what is more important pay for their Copies. SOME ANCIENT BENEDICTINE CONFRATERNITY BOOKS. Among ancient memorials of monastic life and practice, the Confraternity Books have been perhaps the most neglected. It must be owned that at first sight they present little to attract the enquirer. Obituaries, on the continent at least, have received competent attention from editors and historians, although some of these learned persons stoutly maintain that obituaries have no claim to be admitted into the category of strictly historical material at all. Dealing with suffrages for the dead and thus depending on anniversaries, they do profess to record a definite fact, the day of death, but a fact after all, which can rarely be of practical use for historical or critical purposes unless, as occasionally happens, the year is stated as well; and the present value of obituaries is more in the seeming than the reality. A Confraternity Book offers still less it is an enrolment of the living, presenting nothing but long lists of bare names, broken here and there by a rubric or heading, or (in later times, and then most sparingly) a cursory note of a benefaction or oblation. Unpromising as it may at the first glance appear there is much to commend it to the philologist, the historian, even to the genealogist, but certainly to those who are interested in the social and ecclesiastical life of the middle ages. : Within the past year a large quarto has been published, of four hundred pages, exclusive of indexes, devoted to the ancient confraternity books, of no more than three Swiss monasteries, St. Gallen, Reichenau, and Pfaffers1 The existing St. Gallen book, whilst comprising copies of earlier admissions to fraternity, was actually begun about the year 810; from that time the entries are contemporary and extend over the whole of the ninth century. The editor has appended the oldest profession book of the monastery which, though now detached, seems originally to have formed part of the same volume; the professions range from about the year 720, to the second half of the eleventh century, and are original from about the year 808 onwards. The Reichenau manuscript, though hardly so ancient, is a truly venerable volume. The first hundred and thirty four pages, were written in the years 826--34; the remaining thirty, in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The circumstances in which it found its way to its present resting place, the Public Library at Zurich, deserve to be recorded. It may be premised that Dr. Ferdinard Keller, now or lately President of the Zurich Antiquarian Society, had been on excellent and friendly terms with its recent possessors, the monks of Rheinau, by whom he has been allowed liberal use of their manuscript treasures. When the cantonal representatives decreed the suppression of Rheinau and the civil authorities took forcible possession of the monastery, Dr. Keller hastened to the spot. The library had already been compared with the catalogue, and was in the hands of the officials. The Reichenau confraternity book had never been incorporated in the Rheinau library, being doubtless looked on as a sort of family memorial of bye-gone days. These were no reasons for Dr. Keller; he urgently called for the book and demanded that it should be given over to the spoiler; nor did he cease in his insistance until with sorrowful reluctance, it was delivered up.2 "To this we owe it that the precious codex did not find its way to Italy or England or some other land," remarks the German editor in wholesome horror of English acquisitiveness. To most persons probably the transaction will suggest reflections of quite another kind. It might have been remembered too, that if the present century has seen the dispersal of valuable libraries, with loss of some of their contents, and the sale or alienation of inestimable Mss., it is not monks who have been responsible for the one, or have profited by the other. Besides, it is somewhat permature to congratulate ourselves unreservedly on the garnering of all this harvest into a few great public institutions. It yet remains to be seen whether public libraries will succeed, as did the monasteries, in preserving through all perils of war and civil disturbance, and 1 Libri Confraternitatum Sancti Galli, Augiensis, Fabariensis, ed. Paulus Piper Berolini, 1884, pp. x. 550. 2 P. 147. |