ABSTRACT
Tms is a remarkable nalTative, lovingly drawn in all its details, of a noble woman who by her charity and mercy, her piety and unflinching rectitude, rose from an humble station to be the counsellor of popes and princes~ and their mediator with the turbulent people by whom she was enthusiastically adored. Mrs. Butler has had full materials for her book in the letters written by Catherine herself, and also in the accounts of her life, and works written by many of her contemporaries, who had loved her and laboured with her, when the question of her canonization first arose, twenty-three years after her death; but it required the pencil of a true artist to produce this living, touching figure of an earnest, loving woman, from the tedious and formal narratives of her well-meaning biographers. Catherine was a true reformer. She was the contemporary of our own Wycliffe, and, like him, was unsparing in her reprobation of the vices which disgraced the Church. Had she lived two centuries later she might have been one of the first movers of the Reformation, standing firm on the side of evangelic truth, but the time was not ripe for this. Her efforts were directed to the moral reformation of the Church; she attacked, as, indeed, all the reformers of succeeding centuries began by attacking, the vices and ungodliness of the clergy, and her piety, and still more her inexhaustible charity, whicK "hopeth all things, endureth all things," have immortalised her name.
