16, 1587, was interred at St. Paul's. Amid solemn strains of music, a procession of deputies from the States, English peers, gentlemen and citizens, thirty-two paupers to the number of his years,' heralds with trailing standards, soldiers with reversed weapons, and the dead knight's riderless steed followed the bier. The grave was closed amid a volley of musketry. Elegies and panegyrics amounting, it is said, to two hundred, Spenser's Astrophel' among the number, were published as tributes to Sidney's memory. A stronger evidence of national sorrow was the initiation of what is now an ordinary formality on such occasions-the first general mourning recorded in England. Walsingham attributed his retirement from the toils of state to the weight of sorrow with which his son's premature death overwhelmed him. More silently but profoundly must have mourned the multitude of aged, poor, and desolate whom Sidney's charity had befriended. The letters written by him at various times to and on behalf of such pensioners form a noble chapter in the history of his life. He died with an estate seriously encumbered, notwithstanding his so great care to see all men satisfied.' 6 His eulogists have been so numerous, and their functions so easy of performance, that it would be difficult to lay a wreath upon his tomb which should be distinguishable from any other. His character is not unique, like a monolithic obelisk, or a tazza hollowed out of a single gem, but rather resembles one of those mosaic altars found in Italian cathedrals, wherein each precious section of lapis-lazuli, porphyry, and serpentine, while retaining its distinctive beauty of grain and radiance of colour, blends with all the rest into a harmony of glowing lustre. Such faults as he displayed carry with them their own excuse, as the inevitable sign of humanity, the natural excess of impulse in a generous spirit. To the student of history he affords a striking type of the luxuriant national energy which marked the Elizabethan epoch. The marvellous development of thought and action shown in every field of human enterprise, to an extent scarcely appreciable by us who witness the minutest division of labour, is fitly exemplified in the life of one who was at once statesman, soldier, poet, and critic, and excelled in each career as though he had been trained for no other; who could unravel the mesh of European politics as though the Old World contained all that was worth living for; and then turn to discuss schemes of colonisation and adventure as though the New World were the sole outlet for his genius and ambition. To the hero-worshipper his character possesses a no less distinct individuality, and of a type which Englishmen may boast with some justice to be eminently national. That indefinable yet most intelligible combination which seems the quintessence of classic refinement, feudal chivalry, and modern civilisation, the concord of intellectual grace, moral purity, and emotional sensibility-which, partially expressed in the words generosity, urbanity, and courtesy, is comprehended alone in 'The grand old name of Gentleman,' attained its ideal impersonation in Sir Philip Sidney. ART. V.-1. A Dictionary of Christian Antiquities. Being a Continuation of the Dictionary of the Bible.' Edited by WILLIAM SMITH, D.C.L. LL.D., and SAMUEL CHEETHAM, M.A., Professor of Pastoral Theology in King's College, London. 2 vols. 8vo. Vol. I. [A.-J.] London: 1875. 2. A Church Dictionary. By WALTER FARQUAR HOOK, D.D., Dean of Chichester. Eleventh edition, 8vo. London: 1871. 3. Manual of the Antiquities of the Church. By H. E. F. GUERICKE, Phil. et Theol. Dr. Translated and adapted to the use of the English Church by Rev. A. J. W. MORRISON, B.A. 8vo. London: 1851. 4. The Churchman's Theological Dictionary. By the Rev. ROBERT EDEN, F.S.A. 8vo. London: 1845. DR. R. SMITH'S Dictionary of Christian Antiquities,' the latest addition to his valuable cyclopædic series, will do more to raise the reputation of English scholarship than any of its predecessors, and, perhaps, than all the rest taken together. In the other divisions of the vast subject over which the Cyclopædia' has ranged, the editor has generally had the advantage of following in the track of Pauly and other able and laborious compilers in the same department in England or upon the Continent. For a Dictionary of Christian Antiquities,' on the scale undertaken in the present work, there can hardly be said to be any exact precedent, whether in English or foreign literature. Our English Church Dictionaries," Ecclesiastical 'Dictionaries,' Churchman's Manuals,' and other similar compilations, besides being for the most part superficial and meagre, are in general limited in range and narrow in view. The same is true of Martigny's Dictionnaire des Antiquités 'Chrétiennes,'* though in a less degree. The German manuals, as those of Augusti,† Guericke,‡ Boehmer,§ Krüll,|| and others, are rather treatises for the methodical study of the subject than books of ready reference for detailed information; while the really comprehensive and scholarlike (Roman Catholic) ecclesiastical cyclopædia-the Kirchen-Lexicon' of Welte and Wetser comprises, in addition to the subject of Christian Archæology, those of Divinity, Canon Law, Biography, and History, and involves the further embarrassment for the student of purely primitive antiquities, that, along with Dr. Smith's period-the first seven centuries-it embraces the medieval, the Reformation, and the modern periods, and in some instances fails to distinguish sufficiently from one another the conditions and characteristics of the several periods. Dr. Smith's is strictly a Dictionary of primitive Christian Antiquities; and the editors must be confessed to confine their pretensions within very modest limits, when they describe their compilation as at least more complete than any attempt hitherto made by English or foreign scholars to treat in one 'work the whole archæology of the Early Church.' There needs but a very cursory examination of any of its leading papers in order to establish the claim of the work to the character of profound erudition and of extensive and original research. But a still more valuable characteristic is the comparatively calm and impartial spirit in which most of the topics are treated, and, if we except one very limited class of articles, the almost uniform absence of that polemical tone which might hitherto have appeared an inseparable accompaniment of the study of Christian antiquities. Indeed, it is only by very slow advances that sacred archæology has come to assume in any degree the character of a science. During the early controversies of the Reformation, the relative attitudes of the contending parties seemed almost to shut out this study as an element of argument. On the one hand, a large body of the Reformers, by taking their stand upon the Written Word as the sole doctrinal basis, in effect cut off any appeal to antiquity; and on the other, the Catholic disputants, who relied upon the analogies of primitive usage, * Paris, 1865. † Handbuch der christlichen Archæologie. 3 vols. 8vo. Leipzig, 1836. Lehrbuch der christlich-kirchlichen Archæologie. Leipzig, 1847. Die christlich-kirchliche Alterthums-Wissenschaft. 2 vols. 8vo. Breslau, 1836. Christliche Altherthums-Kunde. Regensburg, 1856. felt themselves at first so indisputably masters of that field, and were so little challenged by their contemporaries on their right of possession, as to be relieved from all obligation of study or research for the maintenance of their claim. When, by degrees, the basis of controversy came to be widened, and when primitive usage began to be generally regarded as in some sort a test or a witness of primitive belief, it was almost inevitable that the facts of archæology should be studied solely in their bearing upon the doctrinal views of the rival religions. Instead of looking first to the facts, in order to gather therefrom the belief of which the facts were a witness, men sought rather to read and interpret the facts, so as to discover in them authority for the foregone doctrinal conclusions which they had independently drawn. Antiquity was read by the light thrown back upon it from the controversies of the sixteenth century; nor, indeed, for a long time, in the first stages of theological inquiry, could it be said that the materials of the study of archæology had reached that degree of completeness which might furnish data for a certain or safe judgment. The early Christian monuments were as yet for the most part unexamined, and in a great degree unknown, at least in their scientific aspect. The Roman catacombs were still a buried city. Of the eleven thousand Christian inscriptions of Rome alone, which we now possess, hardly a twentieth part had been studied, or even deciphered. The whole subject of ancient glasses and mosaics-in the hands of careful students the richest treasury of information that antiquity affords-was utterly unknown. In ignorance as to the condition of the field of exploration, it was hardly unnatural that the inquiry should be looked upon with little interest, if not with coldness, and even with suspicion and fear. With better knowledge came trustfulness and practical activity. From the day which opened Subterranean Rome' to the learned, the study of the structures, the inscriptions, the paintings, and the monuments, of the city thus singularly recovered to the world, became a necessity; and, in the accumulations of the new facts which it supplied, archæology, by the very necessities of induction, entered upon the first stage of its career as a science. Nevertheless the study of archæology, even in the early periods of more scientific inquiry, continued to maintain a strongly polemical character. Each party, in professing to look to the usage of the primitive time as the standard, sought, not so much to construct a complete and faithful picture of the time, as to draw thence evidence in support of its own peculiar opinions. The spirit of early Christian archæology was in effect the same that is manifested in the beginning of Church history. The well-known Centuries of Magdeburg' is little else than an overgrown congeries of Protestant controversial divinity. It was confessedly in this spirit that the Centuries' was undertaken by its compilers, and that it was subsidised by the Protestant states and princes of Germany and the North. The rival work of Baronius was originally projected as an antidote to the Centuries; and, if the Annals of Baronius' be in part redeemed from the same purely controversial character, this is mainly due to the form of annals in which the work is written, and which is less suited to the polemical form than the form of subjects, which was followed by the Magdeburg writers; but the real light in which the work of Baronius was regarded by the scholars of the time, is clearly seen in the Animadversiones' of Casaubon, which can hardly be said to possess either point or value, except as a criticism of Baronius purely in relation to doctrinal controversy. It was religious, much more than scientific enthusiasm, that inspired the zeal of Bosio in those adventurous explorations, when, taking with him a hermit's meal for the week, he often descended into the bowels of the earth by lamp-light, clearing away the sand and ruins till a tomb broke forth or an inscription became legible." And the polemical element is distinctly traceable in the literary fruit of his unexampled labours-the well-known Roma Sotterranea,' published after his death by the learned Oratorian Severani,† and perhaps still more in the enlarged Latin version of that work, published in 1650 by Paolo Aringhi of the same congregation. 6 The impulse thus given to the study at first directed itself into particular branches. What Onofrio Panvini had begun for Christian epigraphy was continued by Doni, Fabretti, and above all, Boldetti. The great Benedictine Order, although their chief labours lay in the publication of patristical remains, and although many of their members devoted themselves to various other departments of historical and antiquarian research, undertook in a particular manner the illustration of sacred as well as general chronology; Labbe, Hardouin, and others, opened a new field for the study of ancient discipline, ritual, and law, by their publication of the early synods and councils. A Paolo, Spanheïm, Sanson, and Le Clerc devoted themselves * Disraeli's Literary Characters,' p. 144. |