THE supposed discovery of a religious relic, and the miracles attending it, are events so common in Roman Catholic legends as to deserve but little attention, even on the ground of curiosity; but the real changes and vicissitudes of one of these relics, for twelve centuries after its discovery, may perhaps excite some interest, more especially as its singular adventures, very distant in time, and recorded by different writers, have never yet been brought together, and formed into one connected narrative.

In the reign of the Emperor Constantine the Great, his mother Helena, when almost an octogenarian, undertook a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Her pious zeal was particularly directed to the search of the holy sepulchre, and of the cross on which Jesus Christ had suffered; and, according to her own judgment at least, she was successful in both. A vision, or perhaps a dream, disclosed the place of the Holy Sepulchre; the three crosses were found buried near it, and that of the Saviour is said to have been distinguished from the others by its healing powers on the sick, and even restoring a corpse to life. This discovery

caused great and general rejoicing throughout Christendom. The spot was immediately consecrated by a church, called the New Jerusalem, and of such magnificence that the celebrated Eusebius is strongly inclined to look upon its building as the fulfilment of the prophecies in the Scriptures for a city of that name. A verse of the sibyl was also remembered or composed, which, like all predictions after the event, tallied in a surprising manner with the holy object so happily revealed.§ The greater share of the cross was left at Jerusalem, set in a case of silver, and the remainder was sent to Constantine, who, in hopes of securing the prosperity and duration of his empire, enclosed it within his own statue on the Byzantine Forum. The pilgrims also, who thronged to Jerusalem during a long course of years, were always eager, and often successful, in obtaining a small fragment of the cross for themselves; so that at length according to the strong expression of St. Cyril, the whole earth was filled with this sacred wood. Even at present there is scarcely a Roman Catholic cathedral which does not display some pretended pieces of this relic; and it has

De Vita Constant., lib. iii. c. 33.

§ The verse was as follows:

been computed, with some exaggeration, that, were they all collected together, they might prove sufficient for building a ship of the line. To account for this extraordinary diffusion of so limited a quantity, the Catholic writers have been obliged to assert its preternatural growth and vegetation, which the saint already quoted, ingeniously compares to the miracle of the loaves and fishes.* That the guardians of this cross at Jerusalem should have had recourse to such evident and undoubted falsehood, should, I think, very much increase our doubts whether the cross itself was genuine, and whether the old age and credulity of Helena may not have been grossly imposed upon. Where we see one fraud, we may justly suspect another. From this period, however, the history of this fragment of wood may be clearly and accurately traced during the twelve succeeding centuries.

In spite of its frequent partitions, the holy cross, say the monkish writers, thus remained undiminished at Jerusalem, receiving the homage of innumerable pilgrims, until the year 614, when this city was besieged and taken by the Persians. Their barbarous fanaticism reduced to ruins or burnt to the ground nearly all the sacred buildings, and made a great slaughter of the Christians, in which they are said to have been actively assisted by the resident Jews. The bishop and the relic in question were removed into Persia, and continued in that country fourteen years, until the victories of the emperor Ileraclius led to an honourable peace, in which the restoration of this most precious treasure was expressly stipulated. During its captivity it had happily escaped the pollution of infidel hands; the case which contained it was brought back unopened to Jerusalem, and Heraclius himself undertook a journey in order to replace,it in its former station on Mount Calvary. The prelude to this religious ceremony was a general massacre of the Jews, which the emperor had long withstood, but at length granted to the earnest and renewed en

treaties of the monks of Alsik. The fact itself, and all its details, are so disgraceful to the parties concerned, that I would gladly reject it as false or overcharged, did it not rest on the authority of a patriarch of Alexandria. Heraclius then, attended by a solemn procession, but laying aside his diadem and purple, bore the cross on his own shoulders towards the holy sepulchre. An officer was appointed to its peculiar care, with the title of STAUROPHULAX and the anniversary of this event, the 14th of September, is still celebrated in the Greek church as a festival, under the name of the Exaltation of the Cross.

The relic did not long continue in the place to which the valour and piety of Heraclius had restored it, but was doomed to undergo still further vicissitudes of fortune. Only eight years afterwards (A.D. 636), an army of Arabs, the new and fervent proselytes of Mahomet, invaded Palestine. At the battle of Yermuk, the imperial forces were totally routed, and Heraclius, downcast and dismayed, returned to Constantinople, bearing with him, as a source of consolation, the invaluable fragment, whose alleged miraculons powers were never exerted for its own protection.|| It is rarely that, when a sovereign despairs of success, his subjects have the courage (it would, perhaps, be termed the disloyal presumption) to prolong their resistance; but the inhabitants of Jerusalem were animated by religious zeal and local associations, and did not, till after a doubtful siege of several months, yield the holy city to the Saracens. The event soon justified the prudent foresight of Heraclius in removing the cross from the danger of Mahometan masters. The Caliph of Omar experienced some difficulties in the construction of a mosque at Jerusalem: he immediately supposed those difficulties to be supernatural, and, by the advice of the Jews, destroyed a great number of the neighbouring crosses; so that it seems certain that the wood of the real crucifixion could still less have escaped the

Eutychius, Annal., vol ii. p. 242-247.

§ Ducange, Gloss. Med. Græc., p. 1437. Theophanes, Chronograph., p. 280.

VOL. IV.

U

effects of his ignorant fanaticism. At Constantinople, on the contrary, it was preserved with the utmost veneration in the metropolitan church of St. Sophia, and the honours paid to it are attested and described by the father of English historians. Never, but on the three most solemn festivals of the year, was its costly case unclosed. On the first day, it received the adoration of the emperor and principal officers of state; on the next, the empress and chief ladies repeated the same ceremony; and the bishops and clergy were admitted on the third. While exposed to view on the altar, a grateful odour pervaded the whole church, and a fluid resembling oil distilled from the knots in the wood, of which the least drop was thought sufficient to cure the most inveterate disease. This precious fluid is also mentioned by Pope Gregory the Great in one of his letters to Leontius. "I have received your present," writes the pope, "some oil of the holy cross, and some wood of aloes, of which the one confers blessing by its very touch, and the other, when burnt, diffuses a pleasant perfume."+

In a period of several centuries, during which this relic remained at Constantinople, we find it occasionally mentioned in the annals of the time. It was on the holy cross that Heracleonas swore to cherish and defend his nephews;§ it was to the same fragment that the son of Justinian the Second clung for protection, in the revolution which hurled his father from the throne; and we might entertain more respect for the superstition of the Greeks, if the supposed sanctity of this relic had produced either the observance of the oath or the safety of the suppliant. At length, in the year 1078, the object of my narrative recommenced its travels. A wealthy citizen of Amalfi, whose name is not recorded, had long felt a wish to exchange active life for the cloister, and had selected the monastery of Casinum as the

Being pre

place of his future retirement. sent in the Eastern capital during the tumultuous deposition of Michael the Seventh, he perceived in the general confusion a favourable opportunity for appropriating this precious fragment to himself. His zeal did not forget at the same time to secure the golden case, richly embossed with jewels, which contained it, and both were laid as a welcome offering before the shrine of St. Benedict, at Casinum. good fathers must have felt no little pride when strangers beheld, in their secluded and obscure retreat, a relic which a long succession of the most illustrious princes had gloried in possessing.

The

The next place to which we can trace the cross is Palestine, during the crusades, to which it had doubtless been conveyed for the purpose of restoring it to its more ancient and appropriate station at Jerusalem. In that country it was exposed to frequent hazards, as the crusaders appear to have been in the habit of bearing it in the van of their armies, when marching against the Mussulmans, hoping by its presence amongst them to secure the victory. One of their battles against the forces of Saladin by no means fulfilled their expectations, and in the course of it the sacred relic itself was unforturately severed; one half of it being captured by the enemy, and most probably destroyed.** This untoward accident, however, by no means impaired their veneration for the remaining fragment; and at the commencement of the thirteenth century, it is again recorded as taking the field with the King of Hungary and the Duke of Austria. From these it passed into the hands of their brother crusaders, the Latin sovereigns of Constantinople; and thus, by a singular train of circumstances, a change of dynasty restored this precious relic to the people which had so long enjoyed its possession. It does not, however, appear to have received the full measure of its ancient veneration, and a new crown of

ed. 1741.

thorns, alleged to be that of the passion, held at this period a far higher rank with the public.

In the year 1238, the pressure of poverty and impending ruin compelled the Emperor Baldwin the Second to sell what the piety of St. Louis, King of France, induced him as eagerly to purchase.* A very considerable sum was given in exchange for the holy wood, and, on its arrival in Paris, it was deposited by King Louis in a chapel which he built on this occasion. There the cross remained for above three hundred years, until at length, on the 20th of May, 1575, it disappeared from its station. The most anxious researches failed in tracing the robber, or recovering the spoil, and the report which accused King Henry the Third of having directly sold it to the Venetians may be considered as a proof of the popular animosity rather than of royal avarice. To appease in some degree the loud and angry murmurs of his subjects, Henry, the next year, on Easter-day, announced that a new cross had been prepared for their conciliation, of the same shape, size, and appearance as the stolen relic, and asserted, most probably with perfect truth, that in divine powers, or claim to religious worship, it was but little inferior to its model. "The people of Paris," says Estoile, an eye-witness of this transaction, "being very devout, and of easy faith on such subjects" (he is speaking of the sixteenth century), " gratefully hailed the restoration of some tangible and immediate object for their prayers." Of the original fragment I can discern no further

authentic trace; and here, then, it seems to have ended its long and adventurous

career.

Before I conclude, I ought, perhaps, to make some mention of the pretended nails of the passion, which were obtained by Constantine the Great at the same time with the cross. He melted a part of them into a helmet for himself, and the other part was converted into a bridle for his horse, in supposed obedience to a prophetic text of Zechariah: "In that day shall there be upon the bells (bridles) of the horses, holiness unto the Lord." Yet, though the helmet alone might appear to have required all the nails which could possibly be employed in a crucifixion, it is not unusual in southern Europe to meet with fragments of old iron, for which the same sacred origin is claimed. Thus, for instance, at Catania, in Sicily, I have seen one of these nails, which is believed to possess miraculous powers, and exhibited only once a year with great solemnity. There is another in a private oratory of the Escurial; and I was surprised in observing in the same case a relic of St. Thomas à Becket. All the nails, from the time of Constantine, are rejected as spurious by Cardinal Baronius;§ yet a former pope had expressed his belief in their authenticity;|| and the ingenious idea of miraculous vegetation might have been easily applied to them. But to trace the other parts of this real or fabulous history, and more especially their insertion in the iron crown of Lombardy, would require, though scarcely deserve, a separate essay.

Zech., ch. xiv. v. 20.

Annal. Eccles., A.D. 326, No. 54.

ABREYO;

RETURNING one evening, in the island of Cuba, with ten or twelve others, from the cafétal of a friend, with whom we had been dining, my horse becoming restive at the sluggishness of the pace, I gave him the rein, and in a few minutes was considerably in advance of the party. The sun had just set behind the mighty Pass of Matanzar, that lifted its dark blue summit in the distance, and the whole western half of the hemisphere presented a glorious drapery of golden clouds, tinging every object around and beneath with a deepness and richness of glow altogether unknown, and inconceivable to the untravelled inhabitants of colder climates. The coffeetrees, their tops all level to the view, just exhibiting the even rows in which they are planted, which intersect each other transversely and obliquely, and their bright green leaves profusely intermingled with their small white flowers, lay on either hand in extensive squares, separated by broad alleys of the red soil of the country, lined either with limehedges, pine-apples, or flowers, or with mangoes, guavas, or other large or smaller fruit-trees. Here and there, tall, straight, slender, column-like palms, singly rearing their plumy tops to the sky, or in thick clusters mingling them into leafy canopies-tufts of the feathery bamboo, with its long, narrow leaves of light green-patches of the broad-leaved plantain or banana-trees, and the picturesque, horizontally spread, roof-like tops of a few scattered plane or tabletrees, varied and beautified the scene; while an occasional ceiba, or cotton-tree, with its huge, smooth, silver-coloured trunk bulging out towards the centre, heaving out from its very summit its gigantic arms, and towering over all, seemed more immediately to connect the lower with the upper world. Not a breath of air stirred the slightest leaf, and the repose of the scene was rather heightened than disturbed by the sound of the bells on the neighbouring café

tales, tolling the Oracion, and by gangs of negroes in the distance, with their instruments of labour, slowly retiring, to assemble before the family of their masters, or their mayorales, for the purpose of prayer, preparatory to their dismissal for the day. The beauty and tranquillity that surrounded me filled my soul with tenderness and adoration; and, reigning up my horse, and yielding to my feelings, I lost all consciousness, save that of forming a portion of the world about me.

A pricking of the ears and a restless pawing of the fore-foot of my steed, recalling me from my revery, I heard the quick tramp of a horse behind, and, not wishing to be disturbed in my meditations, rode hastily forward. Finding, however, that I was likely soon to be overtaken, I slackened my pace, and in a few moments, a stranger, on a coalblack Arabian charger, was by my side. His features, and the noble animal he bestrode, were indistinctly familiar to me; but when or where, I was utterly unable to recall. His face, a transparent olive, was of the higher order of the Spanish cast-oval, a slightly curved nose, and piercing black eyes, sparkling beneath well-arched eyebrows, which, with the moustaches, the tuft below the under-lip, and long curling hair, was of the deepest and glossiest black. It was one of those countenances that one would imagine in a Castilian hero of romance, in which might be read many a tale of successful gallantry, high, chivalrous love, and perilous adventure. His dress was that usually worn by gentlemen in that climate, and he was armed, as most travellers are in that country, with a sabre, and pistols in his holsters, and in a belt round his body-the former with a steel scabbard, and the butt-ends, and all the wooden portion of the latter, being thickly ornamented with gold and silver mountings. Over his shoulder was slung, a rather unusual thing, however, a blunderbuss,