to be better than they are if they can keep from starving; the fierce
and prepotent Cardinal who is over them all, has moments of the common
good will, when he forgives all his enemies except the recalcitrant
canons. He likes to escape from these, and talk with the elderly
widow of the gardener whom he has known from his boyhood, and to pity
himself in her presence and smoke himself free from, his rancor and
trouble. He is such a prelate as we know historically in enough
instances; but he is pathetic in that simplicity which survives in him
and almost makes good the loss of innocence in Latin souls. He keeps
with him the young girl who is the daughter of his youth, and whom
it cuts him to the soul to have those opprobrious canons imagine his
mistress. He is one out of the many figures that affirm their veracity
in the strange world where they have their being; and he is only the
more vivid as the head of a hierarchy which he rules rather violently
though never ignobly.

But the populace, the underpaid domestics and laborers of the strange
ecclesiastical world in their wretched over-worked lives and hopeless
deaths are what the author presents most vividly. There is the death
of the cobbler's baby which starves at the starving mother's breast
which the author makes us witness in its insupportable pathos, but his
art is not chiefly shown in such extremes: his affair includes the
whole tragical drama of the place, both its beauty and its squalor of
fact, but he keeps central the character of the refugee, Gabriel Luna,
in the allegiance to his past which he cannot throw off. When he
begins to teach the simple denizens of the Cathedral, some of them
hear him gladly, and some indifferently, and some unwillingly, but
none intelligently. He fails with them in that doctrine of patience
which was his failure, as an agitator, with the proletariat wherever
he has been; they could not wait through geological epochs for the