might make a stirring tale, or haply a series of them: the cowled
hypocrite suggesting crime to those whose answer is all innocence; his
schemes of ambition, or avarice, or lust, slowly elaborated by the
fiend-like purposes to which he puts his ill-used knowledge of the human
heart; his sacrilegious violation of the holy grievings made by mistaken
penitence. History should bring its collateral assistance: the Medicean
Queens, Venice, bloody Spain, hard-visaged monks calmly directing the
engines of torture, the poison of anonymous calumny, and dread secrets
more dreadfully betrayed, could furnish much of truthful precedent. The
bad obstructions placed between the sinner and his God by selfish
priestcraft; the souls that would return again, like Noah's weary dove,
enticed by ravens to forsake the ark, mate with them, and feed on their
banquet of corruption; the social, religious, philosophic, and eternal
harms brought out in full detail; the progress of this world's misery in
the lives of the confessing, and of studious crime in the heart of the
absolver: a scene laid among the high Alps, and the sunny plains they
topple over; the time, that of some murderous Simon de Montfort; the
actors, Waldensian saints, and demon inquisitors; the prominent
characters, a plausible intriguing friar, (as of old a monk of Cluni,)
whose ambition is the popedom, and whose conscience has no scruple
about means, bloody, bad, vindictive, atheistic; and then his victims, a
youth that he trains from infancy to the sole end of poisoning, subtly
and slowly, all who stand in his path; a girl who loves this youth, and
who, flying from the foul friar in the day of temptation, betakes her to
the mountains, and ultimately saves her lover from his terrible
destination in guilt, by hiding him in her own haven of refuge, the
persecuted little church; and with these materials to work upon, I need
hardly detail to you an intricate plot and an obvious _denouement_.
This class of theme, it is probable, has exercised the talents of many;
but as the evils of confessing to deceitful man, and of blind trust in
his deleterious advice, have not specifically met my eye, the subject is
new to me, and may be so to others. Still, I stay not now further to
enlarge upon it; I must press on; and will not cruelly encourage the
birth of thoughts brought forth only to be destroyed, like father
Saturn's babes--the anthropophagite.
A good reason for selection at last presents itself. Sundry collateral
ancestors of mine [every body from Cain downwards must have had
ancestors; so no quibbling, please, nor quarrelling about so exploded an
absurdity as family-pride,] were lucky enough in days lang syne to
appropriate to themselves, amongst other matters, a respectable
allowance of forfeited monastic territory; and I know it by this token:
that in yonder venerable chest of archives and muniments, rest in their
own dust of ages, duly and clearly assorted, all those abbey deeds from
the times of Henry Beauclerc. Here's a fine unlooked-for opportunity of
making dull ancestral spots classic ground, famous among men; here's a
chance of immortalizing the crumbling ruins of an obscure, but
interesting, abbey-church; here's a fair field for dragging in all that
one knows or does not know, all that parchments can prove, or fancy can
invent, of redoubtable or reprobate progenitors, and investing the place
of their possessions with a glory beyond heraldry. Much is on my mind of
the desperate evils consequent on the Romish rule of idol-worship: and
why not lay my scene on the wild banks of the Swale, among the bleak,
rough moors that stand round Richmond, and the gullies that run between
the Yorkshire hills? Why not talk about those names of gentle blood,
familiar to the ear as household words, Uvedale and Scrope, Vavasour and
Ratcliffe? Why not press into the service of instructive novelism truths
stranger than fiction, among characters more marked, and names of higher
note, than the whole hot-pressed family of the Fitzes?