Santa Teresa

her sin, her Saviour, her original method of prayer and her unshared experiences in prayer,--she showers upon us continually gleams and glances of the sunniest merriment, amid all her sighs and tears. She roasts in caustic the gross-minded, and the self-satisfied, and the self-righteous, as Socrates himself never roasted them better. Again, like his, her irony and her raillery and her satire are sometimes so delicate that it quite eludes you for the first two or three readings of the exquisite page. And then, when you turn the leaf, she is as ostentatiously stupid and ignorant and dependent on your superior mind as ever Socrates himself was. Till I shrewdly suspect that no little of that 'obedience' which so intoxicated and fascinated her inquisitors, and which to this day so exasperates some of her biographers, was largely economical and ironical. Her narrow cell is reported to have often resounded with peals of laughter to the scandal of some of her sisters. In support of all that, I have marked a score of