made. This objection being removed, nothing could be adduced against the Hebrew metre except, perhaps, some principle, which many would call prepossession, or compare to a rather subjective rule, ascribed to a certain class of European bureaucrats: Quod non est in actis, non est in mundo.

But this difficulty is now removed. Already, on the 2d February, 1879, a competent Orientalist wrote in the Athenæum, of London, reviewing Bickell's first metrical specimens, as follows: "We agree with the writer, that the Psalms and many other poetical pieces of the Old Testament are, without doubt, of metrical composition. We cannot see, indeed, why the Hebrew should form an exception in this regard to all other nations. But, whether Dr. Bickell has found the key to the rhythmical system in the Bible we cannot decide, till we see his system adapted with some regularity to all poetical pieces of the Old Testament."

Bickell has given this proof in the most complete and satisfactory manner, as we hope to show in another article.

W

FATHER FELIX VARELA,

VICAR GENERAL of new york fROM 1837 TO 1853.

HOEVER has paid a visit to the Catholic Cemetery of St. Augustine, Florida, generally known among the people of that city by the name of "Tolomato," or "Tolomato Cemetery," will remember with pleasure, not unmixed with emotion, the pretty little chapel erected in its grounds by the Cubans to shelter the remains of their fellow-countryman, Father Varela, and perpetuate his memory.

The eloquent Father Baker, who had visited this chapel, alludes to it in one of his sermons,' and after paying deserved praise both to the beauty of the monument and to the goodness of the spirit which prompted its erection, found occasion to speak of the "holy and learned Cuban priest, who spent his whole life in the service of God and men, and who was at all times a perfect model of apostolic zeal and boundless charity."

The corner-stone of this beautiful monument was laid on the 22d of March, 1853, with imposing ceremonies, an account of which, printed in Charleston,' has preserved and transmitted to us the funeral oration delivered there by Rev. J. F. O'Neill, of Savannah, Ga., and the discourse of Don José Maria Casal, the Cuban delegate, who on behalf of his countrymen had purchased the ground and provided the means to build the chapel and the tomb.

The writer of this article, a pupil of Father Varela, actuated by a feeling of gratitude and patriotism, and by the more practical wish of recalling to the memory of the Cuban people the fruitful example of private and public virtue given by the great priest, and preventing his teachings from being lost at the very critical moment of the political reconstruction of the country, after the convulsions of the struggle through which Cuba had passed, undertook to write his life. It appeared in Spanish, in 1878.3 The reception of the book, however undeserving as a literary performance, showed that the generous noble-minded youth of the island of Cuba, to whom it was dedicated, were not insensible to

1 Sermons of Rev. Father A. Baker, with a Memoir of his Life, by Rev. A. F. Hewitt.

2 Ceremonies at the laying of the corner-stone of a chapel in the Roman Catholic Cemetery in the City of St. Augustine, Florida, dedicated to the memory of the Very Rev. Felix Varela, D.D., late Vicar-General of New York, who died on Friday, Feb. 25, 1853. Charleston: Printed by Councell & Phinney, 119 East Bay. 1853.

3 Vida del Presbitero Don Felix Varela, por José Ignacio Rodriguez. Nueva York Imprente de "O Novo Mondo," 39 Park Row, Times Building. 1878.

the appeal, and that the author, himself born in that privileged land, had struck upon a chord of feeling which cannot fail to produce good results.

A short synopsis of this book, by the lamented Father Finotti, was published in the Catholic Telegraph, of Cincinnati, Ohio, October 3, 1878, while other notices of it, published in sections of the country where the Spanish language is more generally known and spoken, extended the circulation of the work beyond the sphere for which it was specially intended.

But the influence which Father Varela exercised upon the development of Catholic interests in this country-where he arrived in 1823, poor and proscribed-and the love with which his memory has been preserved and cherished, as well in New York, among the people of the parish he founded and in which he exercised his sacred ministry, as in Florida, where he closed his life and labors, have been too great not to justify us in presenting to the readers of this QUARTERLY the most distinctive features of the character of that illustrious man.

From the day on which the first mass was said within the chapel of the cemetery, April 13, 1853, up to this time, a committee of five ladies, selected among the Catholic families of St. Augustine, have been in the habit of paying a visit to Father Varela's tomb every Monday afternoon; and the writer of this article has seen in New York several persons who still preserve as sacred relics a little piece of his cassock or a lock of his hair. He knows one gentleman in Harlem who undertakes every year a kind of pilgrimage to the city of St. Augustine and pays a visit to the tomb of his friend and confessor.

Father Varela was born in Havana, Cuba, on the 20th of November, 1788. He was baptized by the chaplain of the regiment to which his father and grandfather belonged, the former as a lieutenant and the latter as the lieutenant-colonel, and received at the baptismal font the names of Félix Francisco José Maria de la Conception.

When Felix Varela was a child, public education in Cuba was entirely in the hands of the Church. Latin, Logic, Philosophy in all branches, Theology were taught, always gratuitously, in the convents of Saint Francis, Saint Dominic, Saint Augustine, and others; and the Fathers of the order of Saint Jerome at Belen maintained primary schools, the only public ones in the island, where children of all classes and conditions, white and black, poor and rich, free and slave, were admitted gratuitously, and taught reading, writing, and Christian doctrine, and the four elementary rules of arithmetic. Books and paper, pens and ink, slates, etc., were furnished gratuitously to those who could not pay.

While here in the United States, in our advanced state of civilization, under republican institutions, the idea of "mixed schools," where a negro child can be seated on the same benches as the white one, is not yet relished, in Cuba, in 1793, under monarchical rule, in a thoroughly aristocratic atmosphere, where no man had yet ventured to make a bill of rights, or any declaration of principles, religion, holy religion, Roman Catholic religion, through. the instrumentality of her monks and friars, spreading her merciful mantle over all classes of society, protected all alike without opposition, and afforded to all without distinction and without pay all the means that she possessed to raise up their hearts and enlighten their minds.

According to the obituary notice of Father Varela, which the New York Freeman's Journal and Catholic Register published March 19, 1856, his vocation for the sacred ministry was clearly shown from the very first days of his childhood. The writer says that the young Felix Varela, when scarcely fourteen years of age, declined a cadetship which was offered him in recognition of the services of his father and his grandfather, and that he accompanied his refusal with the statement: "I wish to be a soldier of Jesus. Christ. My desife is not to kill men, but to save souls."

He was admitted at about that time, as a day scholar, in the seminary attached to the Cathedral of Havana; and there he completed his course of Latin, Philosophy, and Humanities, becoming in a short time the favorite son of that institution.

This seminary, founded in 1769, and always kept under the control of the Church, was the most brilliant and most fruitful educational institution that ever flourished in Cuba. Its history is connected intimately with all that has been grand, and noble, and advanced, and progressive in the culture of the country, and its high degree of intellectual development. The pupils were gratuitously and thoroughly instructed in rhetoric, the Latin language and literature, mathematics, logic, metaphysics and ethics, natural philosophy, theology, civil law, both Roman and Spanish, and canon law. A class of chemistry was established almost as soon as it became a distinct branch in Europe, and in 1820 a class of Constitutional law was also founded.

Young Felix Varela received the tonsure in 1806, and the degree of Bachelor of Theology in 1808, after having presented himself, with some others, as a candidate for the professorship, then called "of St. Thomas and Melchior Cano," and made a brilliant exhibition of his talent and learning in the competitive examination required by law.

In 1809 he received the four minor orders and the subdeaconship. He was ordained a deacon in 1811, and in the same year,

VOL. VIII.-30

after another brilliant examination, he was appointed by the great Bishop of Havana, Señor Espada y Landa, to the chair of Philosophy in the Seminary.

In 1811 he was raised to the priesthood, and said his first mass in the church annexed to the convent of Carmelite nuns in Havana, where one of his aunts was a religious.

Father Varela, "the teacher," el maestro, as he was called in Cuba, soon became entitled to this appellation. There was no branch of human learning, cultivated at that time, with which he did not become familiar. Even in chemistry, then almost a newborn science, he went as far as any other had gone in the highest centres of civilization in Europe. God endowed him also with great musical talent, which he did not allow to be lost. He was a skilful performer on the violin, and took great pains in creating in Havana, in 1811, the Philharmonical Society, the earliest of its class ever established in Cuba.

The first philosophical work published by Father Varela was written in Latin, in the shape of detached sentences, or propositions, under the title Propositiones varie ad tironum exercitationem. Each proposition was defended and argued in scholastic form. They were printed in 1812, to be used in his class and in the public examinations.

Soon after this, he published another set of propositions to be defended and discussed at the commencement of July 16, 1812. The title of this most curious pamphlet reads as follows:

Sub auspiciis Ill. D. D. Joannis Josephi Diaz de Espada et Landa, hujus dicecis meritissimi præsulis, Regii conciliari, etc., etc., has propositiones ex universa Philosophia depromptas tuebitur B. D. Nicolaus Emmanuel de Escobedo, in hoc S. Caroli Seminario Philosophia auditor. Discussio habebitur in generali gymnasio prædicti Seminarii, præside D. Felice Varela, Philosophie magistro, die 16 Julii, anni MDCCCXII. Typis Ant. Gil."

This pamphlet, consisting of twenty-five printed pages in octavo, contains two hundred and twenty-six propositions relating to all branches of science, metaphysics, logic, moral philosophy, physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc. It was reprinted, with additions and great improvements, in 1813.

In the same year (1812) Father Varela, at the request of the Archbishop of Santo Domingo, printed in Latin, in two volumes, to be used as text-books in the Ecclesiastical Seminary of that island, the work to which he gave the name of “Institutiones Philosophiæ Ecclesiastica ad usum Studios Juventutis. Habana, MDCCCXII" The first volume contains a treatise on logic, and the second a treatise on metaphysics.

In 1813, as it had been announced that Spanish would be al