political discouragement which Burke justly calls the most fatal of all maladies. Do not despair of the cause which you have adopted, or give up sound principles, because a generation without faith and without soul seems to dishonor them by pretended attachment.'

In another letter to Rio he says, 'I am reading Kant, which I find horribly difficult. M. Cousin recommended me to give myself up to this study; but I shall not follow his advice.' He distrusted Kant's philosophy, as tending to undermine faith, and he lent a ready ear to the Abbé Studach, of whom he says, 'I have made a precious discovery here, that of a Catholic priest, who is at the same time a philosopher, and who believes that faith may be reached by knowledge. His toleration is as great as his knowledge.' The abbé brought him acquainted with a school, boasting numerous disciples in the Bavarian and Austrian universities, which undertook to combine religion with philosophy; but metaphysics were never much to his taste, and he was wont to arrive at conviction by a shorter road than argument. Truths divine did not come to him mended by the tongue of a theologian: they came by insight, by intuition, by inspiration; and they went forth from him with the lightning flash of genius, in spontaneous and irresistible bursts. Burke and Grattan attracted him far more than Kant and Schelling. 'Grattan above all,' says Rio, as the unwearied champion of the greatest of causes, acquired rapidly the grandeur of the hero of a crusade to the eyes of his young admirer, whose enthusiasm, heightened day by day by the fame of O'Connell's patriotic orations, led him a little later to make an excursion, full of attractions for him, into the country of that great man.'

Steeped to the lips in Irish oratory, he resolves to write a history of Ireland, which was to be partly founded upon the speeches of Grattan, and to include translations of the most remarkable passages. This plan, including a journey to the Green Isle

this projet adorable-was suddenly suspended by a domestic bereavement. The failing health of his only sister, Élise, four or five years younger than himself, to whom, since he was domesticated with her at Stockholm, he had become passionately attached, required a warmer climate, and the duty devolved on him of accompanying her and her mother across Germany to the

South. They arrived at Besançon on the evening of the 29th October, 1829. She asked him to sit up with her that night, to which the mother objected, and she was left to the care of her maid; but in the middle of the night he was summoned to what in a few hours was to be her deathbed. The Cardinal de Rohan, Archbishop of Besançon, administered the last sacraments, and offered whatever consolation could be afforded to the brother and mother; but Montalembert left Besançon in the deepest compunction and despondency, heartbroken at the thought that, unconscious of her danger, he had reluctantly abandoned his Irish expedition to accompany her.

Many months ensued before he could shake off his melancholy, brace his mind to a fresh effort, or even fix it on a definite object. He was left free to choose a career, but was utterly unable to make a choice. At one time he was disposed to take holy orders: at another he commenced the study of the law; and under a passing impulse he thought of joining the army of Algiers as simple soldat. There is a well-known saying of his, quoted by M. Fossier, 'Je suis le premier de mon sang qui n'ai guerroyé qu'avec la plume; mais qu'elle devienne un glaive à son tour.' He had no real military ardor, and the pen in his hands was a more trenchant weapon than the sword.

During this interval of suspense he wrote an article on Sweden, which was submitted to M. Guizot, as editor of the Revue Française,' for insertion in that periodical. It was accepted upon condition that it should be cut down to half its length; and he submitted to this Procrustean process, the most painful act of self-sacrifice that can be imposed on a young writer, with an expression of despair, Encore une illusion perdue. Finding it still too long, M. Guizot ruthlessly struck out those very passages which Montalembert considered the gems of the composition, especially a spirited sketch of the soldier king of Sweden, Bernadotte, whom he describes as a true Gascon: 'He told my father that he considered himself the natural subject of Charles X., and that, should that monarch ever require his services, he would leave his throne to his son, and hasten, a simple soldier, to offer his sword to his native Sovereign.'"

About the same time Montalembert formed his first connection with the 'Correspondant' by contributing to it an article

on Ireland which was by no means an unqualified success; for he subsequently records of this and the Swedish article that one of his friends found the first wearisome and the second commonplace. His father, however, who happened to be in Paris at this time, was delighted by the article on Ireland, as indicating a talent which he had never suspected in his son; and the literary aspirant was cordially received as a confrère by the leading men of letters-Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, and Lamartine.

Had he foreseen the dangers impending over his cherished Charter, it may be doubted whether he would have left Paris on his Irish expedition till the cloud had burst or blown over. But it was at London, where he had just arrived, that he heard the startling news of the Revolution of July, which, at the first blush, he was disposed to hail as a sublime victory.' Mortified at not having been present to aid in it, and eager to retrieve the lost opportunity, he immediately returned to Paris, where his ardor rapidly cooled down, after a calm view of the situation in reference to the personal as well as public consequences which it involved. His father was on the eve of resigning his post as ambassador: his brother, one of the royal pages, had escaped through a window at the peril of his life, and was equally without a career. The abolition of the hereditary peerage was threatened, and, with it, the road to distinction on which he had confidently reckoned. The cause of the Church was not likely to be advanced by the change of dynasty, and, as to freedom, he was not many days in arriving at the conclusion that it never gains by such violent movements: it lives by slow and successive conquests, perseverance, and patience.' In a word, the glorious Three Days grew less and less glorious as he dwelt upon them: his sympathies, by some law of his nature, were invariably with the losers in the political conflict: Je n'aime pas les causes victorieuses, was his frequent avowal :

:

'Victrix causa Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni.' In this state of uncertainty as to the line he should take in French politics, his views reverted to Ireland, and in the August of that momentous year, 1830, he is crossing the mountains of Kerry, on his way to 'interview' the Liberator. He travelled on horseback with a lively and intelligent

Irish boy for his guide. The weather and the splendid scenery were at their best. His spirits rose, his bosom swelled, his expectations were on tiptoe, when he dismounted from his hired steed at Derrynane. But here, alas! the picturesque part of the pilgrimage ended, and the prosaic reality began. The motley friezecoated throng that besieged the entrance, squabbling and vociferating about their own petty grievances, was not a favorable example of a nation rising in its majesty for the vindication of its rights; and the figure of the great man himself, which had loomed so grandly at a distance through the mist, was reduced to very moderate dimensions by familiarity and proximity. Nor was his enthusiasm revived by seeing O'Connell, soon afterwards, the centre of a numerous and disorderly meeting, at which, adapting his tone to his audience, he exhibited the rude coarseness of the demagogue and indulged in language rather vernacular than high-flown. But his inexperienced critic lived to learn that popular influence is not obtained or retained by pure patriotism or heroic flights, any more than revolutions are made with rose-water; and due reflection brought him back to his original conviction that O'Connell was the heaven-born advocate of the most sacred of causes-a man to whom no impartial historian would refuse the epithet of 'great.'

Mrs. Oliphant thinks that it was this visit to Ireland that decided the future of Montalembert. He had come to see the Liberator and was disappointed, but he had seen the Island of the Saints, the island in which Liberty was making common cause with Faith, in which the standard of patriotism was waved from the altar by the priest; and he came back burning with eagerness to bring about a conjunction of the same kind in France. But if the train was laid in this fashion, it was fired by his being brought into simultaneous contact with two men who more or less influenced all the remainder of his life. These were the Abbé de la Mennais and the Père Lacordaire.

Félicité de la Mennais, born 19th June, 1782, at Saint-Malo, was the son of a shipowner who had received letters of nobility from Louis XVI., so that he was legally entitled to the noble prefix which, in a fit of democratic equality, he laid aside after 1834. Neglected by his father, whom he

had offended by refusing to engage in commerce, he was adopted by an uncle, who left him to himself with the use of a good library. His unguided reading was of the most desultory kind, until he was fifteen, when, resolving to pursue a regular course of study, he took up his abode with his brother in a retired house near Dinan, where, besides amassing an immense amount of classical and general erudition, he mastered the Fathers and historians of the Church. He took the tonsure in 1811, and entered the little seminary of Saint-Malo, founded by his brother, but made no further step in the ecclesiastical profession till 1815, when he was ordained priest by the Bishop of Rennes, having first written to his sister that it most assuredly was not his taste that he indulged in deciding for it. A tract, in which he had assailed Napoleon at the beginning of 1814, compelled him to take refuge in England during the Hundred Days, and for some time after his return and settlement in Paris he was glad to earn his livelihood as an assistant tutor to the Abbé Carron in a school. One fine morning he awoke and found himself famous, or (to use his own words) he found himself invested with the power of Bossuet. The first volume of his Essai sur

l'Indifférence en Matière de Religion' burst upon the religious world like a thunderclap, and gave him European celebrity as much by the opposition it excited as by the admiration it called forth. The second (1820) and the two concluding volumes (1824) were equally successful, and on his first visit to Rome, although half of the conclave were against him, the Pope, Leo XII., declared him the last Father of the Church,' offered him a cardinal's hat, and hung up his picture amongst

the chosen saints in his cabinet.

'Le Père Lacordaire,' by Montalembert, is rather a biographical essay, composed as a vehicle for personal reminiscences, than a biography. Left to discover as we best may when and where Lacordaire was born-he was born at Recey-sur-Ource, Côte-d'Or, the 12th March, 1802-we are told that no adventure, no stroke of fortune, no passion, occurred to trouble the course of his boy

hood:

'Son of a village doctor, brought up by a pious mother, he had, like all the young people of his day, lost the faith at school, and had not recover

ed it either at the law school or the bar, in which he was enrolled for two years. To all outward seeming, nothing distinguished him from his contemporaries. He was a deist, as all the youth was then; he was, above all, liberal, like the whole of France, but without excess. He has said it again and again: no man or book was the instrument of his conversion. A sudden and secret flash of grace opened his eyes to the nothingness of irreligion. In a single day he became Christian, and the very next day from Christian he wished to be priest. Seminarist at almoner in 1828, college almoner in 1825, he Sulpice in 1824, ordained priest in 1827, convent seemed not to depart on any side from the ordinary course of things and men. There was nothing singular about him but his liberalism. By seminarist, this almoner of nuns, insisted on rea then unheard-of phenomenon, this convert, this maining liberal as in the days when he was only student and advocate.

'He comprehended, then, in his youth and in his solitude, that of which no one around him seemed to have a glimpse: first that the Church, after having given liberty to the modern world, had the right and the imperious obligation to invoke it in her turn; secondly, that she could no more invoke it as a privilege, but only as her part in the common patrimony of the new world.

'M. de la Mennais, then the most celebrated and the most venerated of the French priests, starting from the opposite pole, had arrived at the same conclusion. It is that which had all of a sudden brought him into proximity with the obscure almoner of the College Henri IV. It was upon this ground that they both planted the ban

ner of the "Avenir."

The first number of the 'Avenir' appeared on October 15, 1830. The Church was then at a low ebb in France: it was not popular with the people, and it was kept in strict subordination to the State. All ecclesiastical dignitaries were appointed by the government. The priests could hardly venture into the streets in the dress of their order for fear of insult, and when the cholera was raging in Paris they had to be smuggled into the hospitals, dressed as laymen, to administer the last Sacraments when required. Then, again, they were practically excluded from any interference in the national education, which was under the control of the University and the Minister of Public Instruction. No school could be opened without a licence, and no licence was given for denominational schools, or for any distinct religious teaching, except in the seminaries, in which none but youths intended for the ecclesiastical calling were received. In fact, the only accessible education for the laity at large was the mixed or 'godless' system which the Roman Catholic hierarchy of Ireland have so indignantly repudiated; with the aggravation, consti

tuting a real grievance, in France, that those who were dissatisfied with it were not permitted to provide a substitute at their own expense.

The triumvirate, therefore, had plenty of useful work cut out for them which they might have performed without hurrying into extremes; without flying in the face of lawful authority on the one hand, or venturing to the utmost verge of intolerance on the other. In most of their grand efforts they contrived to do both. We take, by way of specimen, the first article by Lacordaire which is quoted with commendation by his young admirer. The subject was the refusal of a priest to bury a man who had died without calling in the aid of religion, and the forcible introduction of his remains into a church by the sous-préfet. The form adopted was an apostrophe to the priesthood:

'One of your brethren has refused to a man who died out of your communion the Christian service for the dead. Your brother has done well: he has acted as a free man, as a priest of the Lord, determined to keep his lips pure from servile benedictions. Woe to him who blesses against conscience, who speaks of God with a venal heart! Woe to the priest who murmurs lies at the edge of a coffin! who conducts souls to the judgment of God through fear of the living or for a vile fee! Your brother has done well. Are we the sextons of the human race? Have we made a pact with them to flatter their remains more wretched than the courtiers to whom the death of the prince gives the right of treating him as he deserved by his life. Your brother has done well; but this shadow of a proconsul believed that so much independence was not becoming in a citizen so vile as a Catholic priest.. The domi

cile of the citizen cannot be violated without the intervention of justice. Justice has not been so much as summoned to say to religion, "Veil thy face a moment before my sword."'

Precisely the same appeal might be made and the same range of sympathies invoked, should sepulture in a church or churchyard be denied (as it frequently has been) to those who, like players, died in an unhallowed vocation, or, like many of the greatest men in all domains of genius, departed this life without due preparation by a priest. The Archbishop of Paris did well who sought to deny sepulture in holy ground to Molière; the Curé of Saint-Sulpice did well who denied it to Adrienne Lecouvreur; the Dean of Westminster did well who excluded the bust of Byron from Westminster Abbey; and, in spite of the

church which he erected to God, Voltaire should have been buried like a dog.*

Sir George Beaumont used to tell a story of his asking the Pope to authorize a Protestant burial-place at Rome; and the reply of the Holy Father, that he could not bless a locality for such a purpose, but had no objection to curse one, if, in default of consecrated ground, the heretics were content to repose in desecrated. The editors of the 'Avenir' appear to have been moved by the same spirit as this Pope : only they were serious and his Holiness was laughing in his sleeve.

It was the favorite theory of Lacordaire that great causes were to be fought out, as in ancient Rome and England, in legal proceedings before the tribunals in the full light of publicity: he was fond of reverting to his old profession of advocacy in which he shone, and he was never better pleased than when brought into open conflict with the procureur du roi. The Government were ready enough to give him the opportunities he sought, and on the 31st January, 1831, he appeared with de la Mennais before the Criminal Court to answer for two articles bitterly assailing the King for exercising the constitutional right of nominating bishops. He made a spirited defence, and they were both acquitted.

"The decision was not given till midnight," says Montalembert. "A numerous crowd surrounded and applauded the victors of the day. When it had dispersed, we returned together alone, in the darkness, along the quays. When we reached his threshold I hailed in him the orator of the future. He was neither intoxicated nor overwhelmed by his triumph. I saw that for him the little vanities of success were less than nothing, mere dust of the darkness. But I saw him at the same time eager to spread the contagion of courage and self-devotion, and charmed by those evidences of mutual faith and disinterested tenderness which shine in young and Christian hearts

with a glory purer and more delightful than all

victories."

This victory encouraged the party to a fresh and original enterprise. Besides founding the 'Avenir,' they had formed a society called Agence de la liberté religieuse,

The dying words of Voltaire, when spiritual aid was pressed upon him, were, Laissez-moi reptitiously in the Abbey of Scellières, of which mourir en paix.' He was buried in haste and surhis nephew, the Abbé Mignot, was Commendator, only a few hours before the arrival of a prohibitory mandate from the bishop of the diocese to the prior. No attempt, according to Mr. Morley, was made to obtain Christian burial for Rousseau.

which publicly announced that, attendu que la liberté se prend et ne se donne pas, three of their members would open a school, free and gratuitous, at Paris, by way of testing the right. The school was opened on the 7th May, 1831, after due notice to the prefect of police, by three members of the society, Lacordaire, M. de Coux, and Montalembert, who succinctly relates what followed :

"The Abbé Lacordaire delivered a short and energetic inaugurative discourse. We formed each a class for twenty children. The next day a commissary came to summon us to decamp. He first addressed the children: "In the name of the law I summon you to depart." Lacordaire immediately rejoined: "In the name of your parents, whose authority I have, I order you to remain." The children cried out unanimously: "We will remain." Whereupon the police turned out pupils and masters, with the exception of Lacordaire, who protested that the school-room hired by him was his domicile, and that he would pass the night in it, unless he was dragged out by force. "Leave me," he said to us, seating himself on a mattress he had brought there, I remain here alone with the law and my right." He did not give way till the police laid hands upon him; after which the seals were affixed and a prosecution was forthwith commenced against the schoolmasters.'

Soon after the commencement of the

proceedings, his father died: he succeeded to the peerage with its privileges, and the trial consequently took place before the Chamber of Peers on the 19th September, 1831, when, after a touching allusion to his great bereavement and an exposition of the reasons which induced him to claim the judgment of his peers, he said :

"It is sufficiently well known that the career on which I have entered is not of a nature to sa

tisfy an ambition which seeks political honors and places. The powers of the present age, both in government and in opposition, are, by the grace of Heaven, equally hostile to Catholics. There is another ambition not less devouring, perhaps not less culpable, which aspires to reputation, and which is content to buy that at any price: that, too, I dis

avow like the other. No one can be more conscious than I am of the disadvantages with which a precocious publicity surrounds youth, and none can fear them more. But there is still in the world something which is called faith-it is not dead in all minds; it is to this that I have early given my heart and my life. My life-a man's life-is always, and especially to-day, a poor thing enough; ut this poor thing consecrated to a great and holy cause may grow with it; and when a man has made to such a cause the sacrifice of his future, I believe that he ought to shrink from none of its consequences, none of its dangers.

"It is in the strength of this conviction that I appear to-day for the first time in an assembly of men. I know too well that at my age one has neither antecedents nor experience; but at my

age, as at every other, one has duties and hopes. I have determined, for my part, to be faithful to both."

The sentence was a fine of a hundred francs.

He thus, on the most solemn occasion of his life, deliberately took his stand upon the principles to which he persistently adhered to his dying day; and the nobility of thought, the moral courage, the spirit of self-sacrifice which actuated him, are beyond cavil or dispute, whatever may be thought of the prudence or wisdom of his course. He here states that the powers of the present age, both in government and in opposition, were, by the grace of Heaven, equally hostile to Catholicism. Twelve years later, he stat ed that the press, the public, the learned bodies, the councils of state, were against him on the same subject, in the proportion of ninety-nine to a hundred. How did this come to pass in a Catholic country? Or in what sense are such expressions to be understood? What he meant was, that the vast majority of Catholics were opposed to his description of Catholicism: that they agreed with Bossuet rather than with de Maistre or de la Mennais: that they were Gallican, not Ultramontane, and were instinctively swayed by the apprehension so sensitively alive in England at this hour; namely, that what his beau idéal of a Church meant by liberty was, that she herself should be left free as air, whilst all other freedom of thought or action should be held dependent on her will. When I mention religion,' said Thwackum, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.' Montalembert went still further, for he identified religion and Christianity with the small section of the Catholic Church which then agreed with him. No wonder, therefore, that more lukewarm or (as we should say) more reasonable Catholics stood aloof.

He became a little more practical when he had to legislate upon the same subject, but in these Avenir days he and his clique exulted in their unpopularity. They longed to be persecuted, to be (metaphorically) stoned like St. Stephen or imprisoned like St. Paul. Then the agitation and excitement of the expeditions undertaken for the propagation of their principles, far more