the lineaments he has learnt to idolize, his passionate attachment makes him forgetful of every fault. Besides, it must be allowed that Bossuet is large enough to bear an appreciable degree of detraction on this side and on that, without suffering serious diminution of his bulk. To some, like the Abbé Guettée, his defence of the Gallican liberties against Papal encroachment renders his memory too dear for impartial criticism; though what the imperious prelate would have thought of the Abbé's secession to the Greek communion because the Congregation of the Holy Office placed his History of the French Church on the prohibited list, cannot for a moment be doubted. Others again, like the Abbé Reaume, though vehement Ultramontanes, yet for the sake of Bossuet's vigorous onslaughts on Protestantism, are willing to condone his heterodoxy about the Pope, and to excuse it as being less the fault of the man than of his times. If each side finds something to palliate or to condemn, as the varied scenes of Bossuet's activity pass under review, each discerns in the whole man so commanding a personality, such an intellectual force and practical energy of character, that the blemishes remain scarcely visible, and the whispered censure becomes almost inaudible amidst the chorus of praise.

În the literature of which we are speaking, one thing stands out with supreme clearness: this, namely, that, notwithstanding the untiring activity of Bossuet's pen, both in Latin and French, during his whole life, the least appropriate aspect in which he can be viewed is that of a man of letters. He was heard a hundred time to say, records Le Dieu, that he could not conceive how any man of intelligence should have patience to make a book for the mere pleasure of writing; and late in life, when giving to Cardinal de Bouillon some hints respecting the formation of a preacher's style, he frankly confesses, 'I have read but few French books.' Whatever he wrote was composed for some immediate practical purpose, such as the instruction of his royal pupil, or in defence of religion and the Church. He wrote, not as an author, but as a bishop and a doctor of the Church, wielding his pen simply as the instrument of his work, just as the knightly warrior, vowed to combat for the right, employed his lance or his sword. As one goes through the thirty-one volumes of M. Lachat's edition of his works, it is surprising to discover that half of the immense collection was never sent to press by Bossuet at all, and only saw the light at various periods after his death, as circumstances induced those into whose hands the manuscripts fell, to give them to the world. Of two hundred sermons, extant in whole or in part,

he himself never published more than seven, and even those reluctantly, at the urgency of friends. His great Latin work, in defence of the declaration of the liberties of the Gallican Church adopted by the Assembly of the Clergy in 1682, by some esteemed the noblest fruit of his pen, was sup. pressed by him for political reasons, and only crept into print forty years after his death, under circumstances which gave Count J. de Maistre plausible ground for questioning its authenticity, or at least its conformity with Bossuet's real sentiments. Of the half-dozen treatises-most of them elaborate works-composed by him for the instruction of the Dauphin, only one, the celebrated 'Discourse on Universal History,' was given by the author himself to the public. Even his own favourite work, the Politics drawn from the very Words of Holy Scripture,' retouched and completed by him in the last years of his life, was left for his nephew to publish for the first time five years after his uncle's death. Of another' Concerning the Knowledge of God and of Oneself,' the fate was more curious. After it had served its immediate purpose, it was lent to Fénelon to aid in the education of his pupil, the young Duke of Burgundy, for whom the Télémaque' was written; and, being found among that prelate's papers after his death, was first published as a posthumous work of his, and passed as such for the next twenty years. In a word, the printing-press was only resorted to by Bossuet when some immediate purpose was to be served by it; in other cases his habit was to lay the manuscripts by, and leave them to take their chance when they fell into the hands of his heirs.

Having made these remarks on the works before us, we now turn to our main object, which is to examine Bossuet's achievement as a whole, and to form an estimate of his title to the great reputation which crowns his memory. To do this with justice, it will be indispensable first to sketch in outline his personal history, and take into account the circumstances amidst which he grew up and wrought out his destiny; for, of men of equal force and fame, few probably were ever more fashioned and controlled by their social environment. Of him it may be said with more than usual truth, that his age made him what he became; next after Louis XIV., the monarch whom he regarded with a veneration bordering upon worship, he may be described as the fullest incarnation of its ideas and beliefs.

Jacques Bénigne Bcs utt was born at Dijon in 1627, and on both sides of his parentage came of families connected with the provincial parliaments; bodies, as it is well known, not legislative but magisterial, and entrusted with the administration of

the law. At the time of his birth, not less than six of his near relatives were councillors of the parliament of his native town; and his father, finding no opening there, moved to Metz to take up a similar appointment in the parliament of that place, leaving our Bossuet, then six years old, in charge of an uncle at Dijon. It is important to remember that France was then but slowly recovering from the disastrous effects of the civil war of the League, the object of which had been to extirpate the Huguenot party, and force both the Crown and the Church into unqualified submission to the Papal See. Nor must we overlook that in his own youth, through the senseless wars of the Fronde, Bossuet himself saw his country once more convulsed and the Crown humiliated; while across the water he watched the English rebellion running its turbulent and fatal course, and shaking the thrones of Europe with amazement and terror. Both his hereditary prepossessions, then, and the experiences of his youth, combined to foster in his mind the sentiment of absolute submission to the Crown as the only secure centre of national unity, and to root in him two invincible and life-long aversions; on one side, to the reformed doctrines, which seemed in every nation where they found a footing to be a standing source of discord and weakness; on the other, to the encroaching policy of the Popes, which menaced the royal prerogative, and thrust upon the Gallican Church a foreign and unconstitutional jurisdiction. Of the influence upon his conduct of this early training of his mind the whole of his public life is an illustration.

From the age of eight, when he was tonsured, to fifteen, when he was removed to Paris, he received his education in the Jesuits' school at Dijon, becoming at thirteen, through his father's influence, a non-resident canon in the Cathedral of Metz, in accordance with the shameful prostitution of ecclesiastical patronage common at the time. Of his early diligence in study a memorial survives in the application to him of the punning nickname 'Bos suetus aratro,' a bullock accustomed to the plough (cf. Jerem. xxxi. 18); and it was, we are told, when he was in what we should now call the fifth form (en seconde), that he first, by chance, made acquaintance with the Bible, of course in the Latin Vulgate, and received from the Hebrew prophets an impression which left a lasting mark on his style. All accounts represent him both in youth and manhood as irreproachable in morals, in an age when unhappily even the highest eeclesiastical station and the most sacred functions were very far from being guarantees for private correctness of conduct. Late in his life, indeed, some dissolute priest whom he had ejected spread a

story of his having, when young, contracted a clandestine marriage with a Mademoiselle de Mauléon, a lady to whom he rendered many services, and who eventually outlived him; but the statement is so evidently baseless that it would not be worth mentioning, except to explain a bon-mot to which it gave occasion, that M. de Meaux was more Mauléoniste than Moliniste. From the first priestly vocation seems to have satisfied and absorbed him; his marvellous faculties as they ripened found all the outlet they needed in the exercises and duties of the ecclesiastic and theologian. He was born with a sacerdotal soul; without a single inward struggle or wandering desire he yielded himself to his chosen calling, and for it alone he lived to the end. As Lamartine says, 'Imagination cannot conceive of him as a layman.'

At fifteen he entered the College of Navarre at Paris, bringing with him the reputation of being a prodigy of learning and oratorical ability. To the following year belongs the curious story of his introduction to the Hôtel de Rambouillet, the fashionable lounge of the wits and scholars of the period. A wager was laid that the lad, with a short time for reflection, could extemporize a sermon on any given topic; the result being that one evening he was sent for, and a subject having been selected and a few minutes allowed for meditation upon it, shortly before midnight he declaimed a discourse with such fluency and eloquence as to fill the gay saloon with applause, and draw from Voiture the saying that he had never heard any one preach at once so early and so late.

Ordained deacon at twenty-two, and priest three years later, when he also 'ook his degree as doctor of theology and publicly dedicated himself, soul and body, to the defence of the truth, he made Metz his head-quarters for the next twenty years, pursuing his studies in patristic lore, preaching assiduously in the town and neighbourhood, and fulfilling his duties in the Cathedral, of which in 1664, he became dean. In the earlier part of this period he began his career as a writer and controversialist by publishing a refutation of a catechism put out by Paul Ferry, a leading Huguenot minis er settled at Metz; later on, spending a large part of his time at Paris, he gradually acquired the reputation of being the first preacher of the day, and became so much in vogue for his fervid eloquence and sympathetic treatment of the frailties of the great, that it seemed as if the splendid sinnners who surrounded Louis XIV. could not pass confortably to their account without the support of his deathbed ministrations. 'In his presence and at his voice,' it was said, 'death seemed to lose a part of its terrors.' His position

at this epoch is so vividly portrayed in the tragic story of the death of the young Duchess of Orleans, Henrietta of England, daughter of our Charles I., that we may be excused for briefly repeating it here.

In 1669 Bossuet had delivered his celebrated funeral oration for her mother, the widowed queen, at whose death nothing but its suddenness prevented him from being present. In the following year, the daughter being suddenly struck, when at Versailles, by a mortal sickness, supposed to have been the effect of poison administered by the creatures of her reprobate husband, cried out in her agonies that Bossuet should be instantly sent for, and brought to her bedside. While couriers were despatched in hot haste to fetch him from Paris, she made her confession and received the last sacraments, much distressed, it is said, by the 'inflexible severity' of the priest in attendance, and anxiously watching the door for Bossuet's arrival. It was past midnight when he came, and she immediately exacted from him a promise that he would not leave her as long as she breathed. With the crucifix in his clasped hands on which the Queen-mother, Anne of Austria, not long before had breathed her dying kiss, he threw himself on his knees by the bedside; and as the life of the illfated princess rapidly ebbed away, he wept and prayed with her, with words so full of consolation and faith that the people of the Court, who as usual crowded the chamber, were melted into passionate tears by the scene. Within an hour of her death, whispering in English, that Bossuet might not understand, she desired that a superb emerald and diamond ring she wore should be given to him as a memorial, when all was over. She expired at 3 A.M., only nine hours after the seizure, and the ring with the message was immediately conveyed by Madame La Fayette to the King, who sent for Bossuet, placed the jewel on his finger, and charged him to wear it always, and to preach the princess's funeral discourse. As soon as the incident got wind, Bossuet was congratulated by the courtiers, who at the same time expressed a regret that the proprieties of the pulpit would scarcely admit of his mentioning a circumstance so honourable both to the departed Princess and to himself. 'Why not?' was his reply; which, flying from lip to lip, excited an eager curiosity to see how the great orator would carry out his implied intention. It was not till near the end of the discourse that their curiosity was gratified, and it was in a way that took them by surprise. Among the virtues of the departed, Bossuet found occasion to commemorate not only her liberality, but the pleasing grace with which she enhanced the value of her gifts. 'This art of giving gracefully,' he added, 'which she so well