The Cardinal laughingly retorted that the Irish were far too
fine, too imaginative and poetical a race, to be bothered with
material questions of government and administration. They
should leave such cares to the stolid, practical English, and
devote the leisure they would thus obtain to the further
exercise and development of what someone had called "the
starfire of the Celtic nature." Ireland should look upon
England as her working-housekeeper. And as for the addition of
Irish saints to the Calendar, the stumbling-block was their
excessive number. "'T is an embarrassment of riches. If we
were once to begin, we could never leave off till we had
canonised nine-tenths of the dead population."
Monsignor Langshawe, at this (making jest the cue for earnest),
spoke up for Scotland, and deplored the delay in the
beatification of Blessed Mary. "The official beatification,"
he discriminated, "for she was beatified in the heart of every
true Catholic Scot on the day when Bloody Elizabeth murdered
her."
And Madame de Lafere put in a plea for Louis XVI,
Marie-Antoinette. and the little Dauphin.
"Blessed Mary--Bloody Elizabeth," laughed the Duchessa, in an
aside to Peter; "here is language to use in the presence of a
Protestant Englishman."
"Oh, I'm accustomed to 'Bloody Elizabeth,'" said he. "Was n't
it a word of Cardinal Newman's?"
"Yes, I think so," said she. "And since every one is naming
his candidate; for the Calendar, you have named mine. I think
there never was a saintlier saint than Cardinal Newman."
"What is your Eminence's attitude towards the question of mixed
marriages?" Mrs. O'Donovan Florence asked.
Peter pricked up his ears.
"It is not the question of actuality in Italy that it is in
England," his Eminence replied; "but in the abstract, and other
things equal, my attitude would of course be one of
disapproval."
"And yet surely," contended she, "if a pious Catholic girl
marries a Protestant man, she has a hundred chances of
converting him?"
"I don't know," said the Cardinal. "Would n't it be safer to
let the conversion precede the marriage? Afterwards, I 'm
afraid, he would have a hundred chances of inducing her to
apostatise, or, at least, of rendering her lukewarm."
"Not if she had a spark of the true zeal," said Mrs. O'Donovan
Florence. "Any wife can make her husband's life a burden to
him, if she will conscientiously lay herself out to do so. The
man would be glad to submit, for the sake of peace in his
household. I often sigh for the good old days of the
Inquisition; but it's still possible, in the blessed seclusion
of the family circle, to apply the rack and the thumbscrew in a
modified form. I know a dozen fine young Protestant men in
London whom I'm labouring to convert, and I feel I 'm defeated
only by the circumstance that I'm not in a position to lead
them to the altar in the full meaning of the expression."