Sadi's younger brother, Hippolyte, remained with his father until the death of the latter. He devoted himself for a time to the Saint Simonians, assisted in their journal and published some verse translations. In 1831 he became editor of the Revue Encyclopédique'; in 1839 he entered the Assembly as Deputy for Paris, and upon the Revolution of 1848 he became Minister of Education. He took up the work which his father had begun in 1815, and introduced a comprehensive proposal for universal free compulsory education in primary schools. The spirit of compromise which pervaded this proposal served to wreck the measure. His own supporters desired a purely secular system. Hippolyte proposed simple religious instruction based on the Apostles' Creed. Opposed both by the Catholic Right and the Secularist Left, he withdrew the measure and retired from office. The interlude of the Second Empire naturally excluded him from place or power; but in 1871 he was elected deputy for the Seine et Oise and in 1875 life Senator. His two sons both attained eminence. Marie Adolphe became Director of the École des Mines; and his chemical researches have given him a European reputation. As for the other son, Marie François Sadi, one of Hippolyte's last acts in his eightyeighth year was to call at the Élysée to congratulate him on his elevation to the Presidency of the French Republic. With the good humour which was traditional in the race, he said, 'Now you are the head of the family; you will sign yourself Carnot-tout court.'

The career of Marie François Sadi had been first that of a civil engineer. During the war of 1870 Gambetta had appointed him Commissioner in the Lower Seine. He had constructed the defences of Havre and had designed an improved mitrailleuse. He became an enthusiastic follower of the English Philosophical Radicals and translated some of Stuart Mill's shorter works. In 1871 he definitely adopted a political life. He was elected Deputy for the Côte d'Or, was Minister of Public Works in three successive administrations, and in 1885 became Finance Minister. The finances of the State were in great disorder; corruption had crept into the Public Services; the Panama enterprise was languishing towards extinction; periodic deficits had accumulated to an alarming extent. François Sadi justified his appointment.

He dismissed the reptile commission-hunters who had gathered round the President's son-in-law, and he laid before the Assembly a Budget of truly heroic proportions. It was the first time that financial truth and honesty had been outspoken since the débâcle. But the reorganisation of the national finances was on too large a scale to meet with acceptance; and the Budget was defeated, as was a similar proposal in the following year. For the time being, the efforts of the Finance Minister resulted only in increasing the public disorder by ensuring an exposure of the Wilson scandals.

But there was a general feeling that Carnot was the man to save the Republic; and, when Grévy fell, he was elected President by 616 votes against 188, Ferry retiring in his favour. When he took office, the Republic was menaced by a host of enemies, and the Government was involved in countless difficulties owing to the alarm and anger excited by the Wilson prosecutions, the utter collapse of the Panama Company, the Boulanger conspiracies, the anarchist outbreaks associated with the names of Ravachol, Meunier and Vaillant, perhaps above all the constant pressure of accumulating deficit and financial instability. That these troubles were overcome is the measure of Carnot's success. The seven years of his Presidency were the crisis of the Third Republic; and there were times when no good judge would have staked his reputation on its continuance. But every one of these crises was surmounted with an increase of popular respect and admiration for the President; and when, on June 24, 1894, he perished at Lyons under the dagger of Caserio, he left the Republic firmly established. In 1889 he had had the satisfaction of presiding at the removal of his grandfather's remains from Magdeburg to the Panthéon, and his own ashes now lie beside them.

M. Poincaré, who, as a member of the Ribot Cabinet, was brought into close contact with President Carnot, was chosen to pronounce the oration over his monument, on Sept. 8, 1895. Naturally perhaps he dwelt at greatest length on the international aspect, on the fact that he had found France isolated, friendless, torn by internal dissensions, and with financial credit impaired, and he had left her restored to her rightful position in the Concert of Europe. It was undoubtedly the Russian

Alliance which seemed at the moment the greatest triumph of the President, but it may be that in future the influence he exerted on the minds of his own countrymen will seem even more important. At his death, for the first time since 1870, faction was laid low and the Republic became really one and indivisible.

The President's surviving brother Adolphe has maintained the family tradition of scientific ability. His researches in mineral analysis are known throughout Europe, and have recently been collected and published in four volumes. What is more important to remark is that he has maintained the family tradition of many-sided capacity, for he occupies at the present time the positions of Chairman of the Paris Gas Company and President of that important political association, 'L'Alliance Républicaine Démocratique.' Both of his sons are already making their reputation, one in medical and the other in physical science.

Of the late President's sons the eldest holds office as Premier President at Dijon and as Chairman of the Viscose Company; the second is a recognised authority on military history; two others have sat in the Chamber as deputies for the departments of the Côte d'Or and the Seine et Oise, and one of these has lately been elected President of the Union des Arts Décoratifs.' When we reflect that during the period of a hundred and fifty years there has never been wanting some one of the lineage of Carnot ready and competent to fill the highest offices to which the State might call him, the question arises, What kind of capacity is that which has thus been transmitted for five generations? What kind of brain is this which defies the rules of probability and refuses to descend to the average?

The question admits of a partial answer. As we look over the record of this family mind and contemplate the wide range of its activities, we see at once what this brain is not. It is in no sense the brain of the virtuoso or the pedant. There is here no abnormal development of one set of activities to the exclusion or enfeeblement of others, but rather the extension, evenly in all directions, of every activity which the ordinary human brain is capable of exercising. At Nolay, in front of the Maison Carnot, is a superb statue of Lazare in which the sculptor

Roulleau seems to have embodied in stone the living image of this great intellectual type, the man who thinks with his whole being and grasps every object of attention through and by means of every possible outlet of nervous energy at one and the same moment. To look at the upper part of the face, you might suppose him absorbed in reverie, but a glance at the whole bodily frame shows that cogitation is leading direct to action. The lips are framing a word; the right hand is moving over the chart, the left hand adjusts the compasses; the pose and balance of the body indicate a forward step definitely

chosen.

The Carnot type of mind is then no prodigy; it is the normal brain invigorated from childhood upwards by constant and varied exercise in all directions. And it would seem, from all the indications we can glean, that this was indeed the method of education pursued in the home at Nolay and at Presles. The education of the Carnot sons was directed not to the finding of an imagined bent or inclination, and the forcing of that to the neglect of everything else, but to the encouragement of an active and incessant interest in everything. Morally the notes of this character are good humour and perfect courage. The grace and charm with which Carnot-Feulint smoothed over the difficulties between generals and Commissioners in 1794 appear again in 1890, when François Sadi won the hearts of all Frenchmen in his progresses through the Departments. The courage with which Lazare withstood Napoleon and exposed the perfidy of Louis Philippe appears again in the late President's attacks on the methods of Grévy finance.

The French intellect-one might almost say the human intellect-has seldom been exhibited to greater advantage than in this line of capable citizens. Surely Nolay, which has already honoured in stone the memory of Lazare and of François, should erect a tablet to the memory of Claude and Margaret engraven with the thanks of the community for the illustrious progeny to which they gave birth.

JAMES CARLILL

Art. 4.-MILTON AND VAUGHAN.

A CERTAIN quiet obliquity of speech, in a writer, a disdain of italics, is a perfectly successful blind to those who read lightly. It is a famous complaint of Newman's (thus to wrong a great passage by putting it into common language) that, would one be taken by the populace to be in dead earnest, he must get up and screech, or else remain for ever half-understood, or less. A loose general understanding is the very most we care to give, or can give, our old poets. But some of them demand even more; they demand belief, and a clairvoyant intelligence which masters the context only by reading between the lines. This applies particularly to the generation just after Donne, which was moulded by him. These men spoke truth but shrank from explanation. Forthright speech came in during the Protectorate, when men of thought began to lose their excessive anxiety not to be understood by the vulgar. The true Carolians are cryptic; no one of them more so than Henry Vaughan. What intricate allusion, what shades of inflection, what an amazing play of comment flicker in and out of those shadowy pages, those seemingly calm pages of his! How hard he is to follow when attention relaxes ever so little! How critical, how external, how quite rabidly contemporaneous he proves, when a modern reader once gets into intimate touch with him! Would it were not so! The great unstated difference between him and Herbert whom he so constantly parodied (in the good old sense of the word) is that Herbert minds his prayers, and that the Silurist's eye is all over the room. An intense appeal was made to him by the stormy era in which he lived. Mystic as he is, he won his mysticism more through Plato and St Paul, and through moods engendered by deliberate sacrifice for principle's sake, than from any happiness of nature, or endowment of grace. Whenever his noble numbers' fail, as they do fail often, it is because the old political Adam in him is too strong for the harp of David. His critics have not said it; but Vaughan himself tells us many a time that this is so. He speaks, out of his very striking self-knowledge, of his fierce soul,' his fierce wild blood.' In a spirited early poem he thanks the blessed Powers' for his loss