which summed up his case in a happy phrase, might have recalled Plunket, but in truth, like most original men, he resembled no one but himself."[1]
It was a rare enjoyment to visit the monuments and historic sites of such a city with such a guide. If a holidaymaker has seen the birthplace or the grave of the local artist or preacher, poet or patriot, where chance conducts his steps, he counts his day well spent. But when the painter is Raphael or Claude, the poet Tasso, the patriot Rienzi, and the preacher Saul of Tarsus or St. Matthew the Evangelist, written words are but a pale shadow of the feelings they evoke. To visit for the first time the noble halls and galleries, cabinets and courts of the Vatican, which vie in beauty with the treasures they contain, and make all other museums mean and dingy, is an education in art; and what an historical study is the Collegio Romano, where one may see the identical rooms occupied by eminent missionaries and saints of the Society of Jesus two centuries ago, still containing the books and furniture they used when they were students or professors, and its noble library, where it was a pleasant surprise to find the works of Savonarola on its shelves, and the portrait of Galileo in its observatory? And
- ↑ "After that winter in Rome it was more than a dozen years before I heard him preach again, and in the interval he had been in feeble health, and sometimes prostrate with suffering. It was in the Jesuits' Church, Farm Street, London, where he made the annual éloge of St. Ignatius. The subject had been exhausted by a multitude of predecessors in that pulpit; it had perhaps special difficulties for a Dominican, and his health was known to be failing fast. But it stands out in my memory as one of the three or four greatest orations I have heard. It was a fresh character portrait, drawn in bold, striking lines, and set in a narrative lucid as the waters of the Mediterranean. Again the master charm was persuasiveness. I could not help thinking, if he had not already found his life-task, here was a man who could plead the cause of his native country with more winning force than any one to whom I have listened in later years—perhaps than any one to whom I ever listened. He did not wield the Thor's hammer of O'Connell, crushing and crashing whatever impeded its stroke, and he could not thrill with the passionate enthusiasm sometimes evoked by Thomas Meagher, but to win the assent of the conscience and convince the judgment no one excelled him. Much of this force was mesmeric, the outcome of the whole moral and intellectual nature of the man. The orator is not always made; sometimes, like the poet, his gifts are born with him. Father Burke was a born orator; the charm of voice and eye and action combined to produce his wonderful effects. When his words were printed much of the spell vanished. One rejoiced to hear him over and over again, but re-read him rarely, I think,"—Letter to W. J. Fitzpatrick.
