IV.  St. Margaret of Antioch was a shepherdess; the St. Genevieve of the East; the type of feminine gentleness and simplicity.  Traditions of the resurrection of Alcestis perhaps mingle in those of her contest with the dragon; but at all events, she differs from the other three great mythic saints, in expressing the soul’s victory over temptation or affliction, by Christ’s miraculous help, and without any special power of its own.  She is the saint of the meek and of the poor; her virtue and her victory are those of all gracious and lowly womanhood; and her memory is consecrated among the gentle households of Europe; no other name, except those of Jeanne and Jeanie, seems so gifted with a baptismal fairy power of giving grace and peace.

I must be forgiven for thinking, even on this canonical ground, not only of Jeanie Deans, and Margaret of Branksome; but of Meg—­Merrilies.  My readers will, I fear, choose rather to think of the more doubtful victory over the Dragon, won by the great Margaret of German literature.

V. With much more clearness and historic comfort we may approach the shrine of St. Cecilia; and even on the most prosaic and realistic minds—­such as my own—­a visit to her house in Rome has a comforting and establishing effect, which reminds one of the carter in ’Harry and Lucy,’ who is convinced of the truth of a plaustral catastrophe at first incredible to him, as soon as he hears the name of the hill on which it happened.  The ruling conception of her is deepened gradually by the enlarged study of Religious music; and is at its best and highest in the thirteenth century, when she rather resists than complies with the already tempting and distracting powers of sound; and we are told that “cantantibus organis, Cecilia virgo in corde suo soli Domino decantabat, dicens, ’Fiat, Domine, cor meum et corpus meum immaculatum, ut non confundar.’”

("While the instruments played, Cecilia the virgin sang in her heart only to the Lord, saying, Oh Lord, be my heart and body made stainless, that I be not confounded.”)

This sentence occurs in my great Service-book of the convent of Beau-pre, written in 1290, and it is illustrated with a miniature of Cecilia sitting silent at a banquet, where all manner of musicians are playing.  I need not point out to you how the law, not of sacred music only, so called, but of all music, is determined by this sentence; which means in effect that unless music exalt and purify, it is not under St. Cecilia’s ordinance, and it is not, virtually, music at all.

Her confessed power at last expires amidst a hubbub of odes and sonatas; and I suppose her presence at a Morning Popular is as little anticipated as desired.  Unconfessed, she is of all the mythic saints for ever the greatest; and the child in its nurse’s arms, and every tender and gentle spirit which resolves to purify in itself,—­as the eye for seeing, so the ear for hearing,—­may still, whether behind the Temple veil,[25] or at the fireside, and by the wayside, hear Cecilia sing.