nomist, and they all have very little to tell us about the real soul and genius that lifted the man above his fellows and crowned him with splendid robes and the glories of the most exalted office in the world. Officialism and its clothing are of official vahie only. They do not help the real man and his real work, and Leo's ecclesiastical smile became, toward the last, a disfigurement of his face.

While walking through a famous art gallery with a friend, some ten years ago, the great painting of Leo XIII in white and scarlet and gold became for a moment the subject of our conversation, and there while gazing upon the work of the artist, my friend, a devout and earnest catholic, remarked in a querying mood, "the mouth is a little foxy, don't you think?" and I replied "yes and no." The true smile of the face was simply a true record of the fineness and faith of the man and his creed, the triumph at once of nature and of God but the practiced habitual ecclesiastical smile, which simply or largely widened the somewhat large and elastic mouth and strained the muscles of the cheeks, had something of the foxiness of all formality, whether of the altar or the stage.

How much, to what degree this religiousness of Leo's face may have misled the world in its judgments of him, as compared with other men, it may be difficult to say at this time, but the eventual judgment will be based on studies, independent of all church smiles and robes of officialism, and judged by the simple laws of physiognomy, the face of Leo, representing the actual mind, and heart, and soul of the man will be found among the greatest and truest and best faces of the Christian era.

The face of Leo's great countryman, Dante, was and will ever remain far greater than Leo's, representing a greater mind, and a freer but believing soul; stern and serious as is all true greatness, but one of the very greatest souls of Christendom.

The portraiture of the early church, representing the apostles and earlier martyrs, may be very largely a reproduction of the Greek and Roman portraiture of their noblest men as these men and their faces were known to the Christian artists of the first Christian centuries. So there is a touch of the pagan in early Christian art as there is in early Christian and modern Roman forms of worship; but for the last fifteen hundred years the faces of Christian saints have been born of the primal struggle between the virtues and vices of the human soul, and the faces of the saints in the main represent a new victory over the old vices of lust and hate and greed of gain as they also show victory over open pride and ambition, and animal assertiveness generally, and indicate the subtle workings and rulings of the spirit of Christ in the bosoms and lives of his faithful followers and children. Monasticism was not wholly wrong—the heavy jawed, the grinning humorist, the posing and proud soldier or fighter of these last days will find eventually, that the church has been building up a type and types of men whose souls, braver than any mere fighter or debauche, have conquered themselves and are slowly, with the blessed Christ of God as surely conquering the world. There was a time when the severest standards of celibacy were needed but as far as they have militated against the highest sacredness of domestic life they were wrong.

Goodness is not a dream of rascals and fools as the modern heavy jaws would have us believe, nor does it belong exclusively to priests, and nuns, and convents. It is really a dream of angels realized now and then by the determined immortal soul of man, and this victory on man's part, angelward, writes itself on the lips and in the eyes of the victors, shines in their faces, and as to the present subject, was stamped therein from the beginning of his career until the final hours. Leo XIII would have been an ideal layman as he was an ideal Pope.

In a word, we are not dealing with mysticism or the imagination, but with the actual and primal as with the highest and final facts of human lives. All men worthy the name of man, all souls worthy the name of soul, are at heart pious, reverent and sincere.

As to mere greatness and variety of intellect, I hold that among his contemporaries, Thomas Carlyle and Victor Hugo were far and away greater men than Leo XIII, but both of these great men were doubters and deniers of the primal and supremest facts of the whole history and economy of the human race, and while they wrote or sang of conscience, and of justice, and of God, had no true comprehension of either phase of this divine universe, hence though matchless in their greatness of mind as shown in their faces and their work, they neither of them ever possessed the rounded and complete greatness of Leo XIII the beloved and reverend servant of the servants of God. But Cardinal Newman was a greater man in every way.

So again is it plain that doubt or denial of God's supremest truth of revelation is bound to dwarf and belittle the powers of the human soul. The face of Dante, as we have said—a plain Catholic layman, was and is far greater than that of any Pope that has ever lived. In him the flames of heaven and the fires of hell, the contradictions of dogma and the conceits of wealth and power; the flimsy futilities of officialism, the foolish contumelies of the rich, the absurd pretentions of militarism, the impossibilities of united mutual and perfect human love; the dreams of angels and the creeds of men had all fought together, freely without cowardice or fear till victory rested upon the banners of the living, seeing soul of man, stimulated, inspired and glorified by the presence of the ancient poets, artists, teachers and saviours ot the race, and supremely uplifted and made radiant, fine, stem, lovable, trusting and God-like by the constant companionship of the son of Righteousness, the son of God and His Blessed Mother into whose beauties of soul the transient virtues of his own dear Beatrice had glided till they, too, were as stars in the universal heavens of his dear love—broken and unrealized— except in a dream, O sorrow; heavenly priestess at the heart's eternal altar, O! Mater Dolorosa! Queen of humanity, Queen of Heaven, leader of the broken hearts of men. How does this face, 0 giddy, flippant, heavy-jawed, imperial menageryrof our day, look to thee?

Milton was of greater intellect than Leo, but Dante is the greater soul. Dante's is the master face of all history up to this hour, and the face of Jesus was to him so divine that he dared hardly gaze thereon and live. What will the emancipated scien tific pigmies of this twentieth century make of it all? Shall we fall down and worship or die? I would not be misunderstood. I do not hate or despise the million small fry swimming on the surface of life in our day. The numberless faces of actors and actresses that adorn the newspapers of our century, from Salvini and Irving and Madame Langtry and Maud Howe Elliot, the faces of many hundreds of so-called writers, "auihors," from Renan and Ingersoll to Mrs. Humphrey Ward and Mrs. Wheeler Wilcox: even the hard-headed and numerous portraiture of trades unionism and negro reformers, from John Mitchell and Booker Washington, and the faces of mere raw officialism, from Emperor William and President Roosevelt to the pictures of the Hon. United States Post Office thieves and the entire prison gang of political and other robbers in and out of jail all have a certain claim upon our attention, but the entire gang of them, from a to z, are not worth the face or soul of one great and believing man. Not only as Pope but as a man, Leo XIII was worth many millions of people, such as we are in the habit of admiring, displaying in the newspapers, senate chambers and executive mansions of this country. To such a pass have science and scepticism led us—and to glory of a kind.

In all our history the faces of Washington, Lincoln and Emerson are the only faces that can be compared with the face of Leo XIII. Time is separating all of these from the crowds that lived with, and stole from, and libeled them in their day. So nature cherishes and saves her own.

Of the three Americans named, Lincoln was the greatest and his face most nearly resembles that of the late Pope; Emerson was too much of a Protestant sentence weaver for true greatness. There is a pleasure in speaking to men from a certain height. "On the Heights" all distinctions between races and nations fail. A gentleman is a gentleman, and a great man bears the indelible marks and lines of greatness in his face whether born and reared in Boston, London, Berlin, Paris, Pekin or any where in the woods or villages of any one of all the nations in the world. Li Hung Chang was the ablest man that has ever visited or trod this continent, and in his face were many of the same lines and expressions found in that of Leo XIII. We simply cannot hoodwink nature, or hem and haw her laws out of existence. Ecclesiastical robes never made Leo great.

In all the array of the faces of Cardinals so recently made prominent in the newspapers of the world, there were but two perhaps only one of them all that approached the face of Leo XIII, in completeness of mind and heart and culture—I refer to the face of Cardinal Gotti—the Cardinal Carmelite Monk, but he was too good and great to be made a Pope in this era. Rampola's face was, and is, hard, and set, and wilful, yet shifting where personal policy might require. Satoli and Martinelli were no better. In fact the same may be said of the faces of many of the Cardinals quite recently named as possible successors to Leo. It simply would have been a catastrophe not to be born in this age, to have had either one of the Vanutellis chosen Pope.

The Cardinal Priest Sarto, Patriarch of Venice, who was chosen and is now Pius X, had and has one of the best faces of the whole college of Cardinals. Not great but yet capable of great things. Sincere, well balanced, and the man is clearly full of zeal and true piety. Our own Cardinal Gibbons was recently quoted as having said in Rome that he hoped the next Pope would be chosen for his true religiousness, or piety, and not because of any prejudices or oppositions to any political power or government whatever. This expression again was true portraiture. A man. Cardinal or what not, forever teaches what he himself really is and represents, just as an artist paints himself, and a tailor cuts garments after his own figure and not often after the customer he is measuring In American portraiture, Pius X is represented as an able honest, Irish-American Priest. In French Canadian papers he is pictured as a showy Frenchman.

Fortunately, let us say by Providence Divine, the conclave chose just such a man, strong, sincere and true, is Cardinal Sarto He is now sixty eight years of age, and is not healthy or sound, as he faints and swoons under the extraordinary pressures of his new office, but long may he live and mind his own business, as true spiritual head of the church and not dabble with the lost and contaminating temporal power which ever was a mistake and blunder, a curse and a shame, in spite of its recent advocacy by the conglomerate of confederate Catholic societies of America. If men would speak to the level of their own heads and not above them—but we are democratic and know it all. Pius X has such a face as may be seen in our own land among hundreds of our best priests to-day; it is of the type of that of Cardinal Gibbons, whereas in Rampola we would have been saddled with another Archbishop Ireland—a man of insatiable ambition in the chair of Peter and as Vicar of Christ. A mere burlesque on the cross of Christ and all true humility.

Providence has saved us from such an infliction, yet our American and other ecclesiastics who want to run the politics of heaven and earth and hell, while unable to master their own selfish and unholy greed for temporal gain, will not find in the face of Pius X as many seeming lines of conciliation as were found in the face of Leo XIII.

So the ship of Peter is still sailing on and on, though many would-be Peters are sinking 'neath the waves. It is an endless