mitted from many popular histories of American
literature. Yet the author of "The Truce of God" had mastered the story
teller's and the dramatist's art. "If there was ever a born
_litterateur_," writes Eugene L. Didier, in _The Catholic World_ for
May, 1881, "that man was George Henry Miles. His taste was pure,
exquisite and refined, his imagination was rich, vivid, and almost
oriental in its warmth." Moreover, he consecrated his life and his
talents to the cause of Catholic education, identifying himself for many
years with Mount St. Mary's College, Emmitsburg, Maryland, with whose
annals so much of the early history of the Catholic Church in the
United States, is closely linked.

The author of "The Truce of God" was born in Baltimore, July 31, 1824;
he died at Emmitsburg, July 23, 1872. In his twelfth year the lad
entered Mount St. Mary's College. Here he became a Catholic and had
afterwards the happiness of seeing his family follow him into the
Church. The studies at the "Mountain" in those days were still under the
magic and salutary spell of the venerable founder, Bishop Dubois, and
his followers. They were old fashioned, but they were solid, with the
classics of Greece and Rome, mathematics, philosophy and religion as
their foundation. They were eminently calculated to mold thinkers,
scholars and cultured Catholic gentlemen. They left a deep impression on
the young Marylander. After his graduation at the end of the scholastic
year, 1843, the law for a short while lured him away, to its digests,
its quiddits and quillets, abstracts and briefs. But it was putting
Pegasus in pound. Miles at a lawyer's task was as much out of place as
Edgar Allan Poe was when mounting guard as a cadet at West Point, or
Charles Lamb with a quill behind his ear balancing his ledger in India
House. The Mountain and the Muses lured him back to Emmitsburg, where a
short distance from the college gate, in the quiet retreat of
Thornbrook, he settled to his books and a professor's tasks at the
Mount. Close by were the lovely haunts of La Salette, Hillside, Loretto,
Tanglewood, Andorra, Mt. Carmel, every little cottage and garden,
eloquent, it has been said, of the faith and piety of the builders of
the Mount, who breathed the spirit that thus baptized them ("The Story
of the Mountain. Mount St. Mary's College and Seminary, Emmitsburg,
Maryland." By the Rev. E. McSweeny. Vol. II, p. 102). For its historic
associations, its panorama of hills, w