viewer says of "Lovel the Widower?" The characters are ignoble, the scenes are revolting; is the spectator, therefore, untouched with one spark of generous feeling-does he suffer moral deterioration? Evidently not; but why? Because the moral significance is so clear throughout. It is a material, rubicund, beef-eating morality; but that is what the British mind requires. The British moral teaching of the last century was of this kind. Be a good boy, an industrious apprentice, and you shall become Lord Mayor. Be an idle boy, and you shall be hung. This confusion of virtue and plum-tarts is peculiarly British. Sinners will starve, says British morality as by law established; saints shall have turtle-soup and stewed terrapin in its season. Is any thing falser? Can any thing show such an "intense, ingrained vulgarity of spirit" as such teaching? It makes a martyr a fool, and a hero a zany.

But while this is the obvious, superficial impression, there is something a little deeper-and that it is which lifts Hogarth and his works into the realm of pure art. The true moral is that virtue is best. Beef is but a symbol. An alderman is not, ex officio, a saint; but he who trusts in God, though he starve, is yet content. That is what lies under the seeming vulgarity of Hogarth, and he was himself probably not conscious of it.

a great book, but it is not a bad book. It may be stupid, it may be stale, it may depict vulgar people: but, for all that-measured by the fair intention of the author, as displayed in all his works—it is not a demoralizing book.

As for " Philip," which has been laid before the readers of this Magazine regularly for a twelvemonth, no one who likes the "Newcomes" but must enjoy it. True, yes, it has the old flavor. True, we seem to have seen Philip before, and the dreadful Mrs. Baynes, and the General, and the Little Sister. True, we have been invited before to the feast of folly and fashion; to the coarseness of brutal mothers-in-law; to the swagger of Irish chieftains; to the proud recklessness of youth; to the trusting, constant, loving maiden heart. All this we have seen and known; and having had it once, if it comes again we instinctively ask, "But why has an author not more variety of invention? Why does he walk us around the same old path?”

Well, well-the question is fair. But it was good before, and it is good now. The reality, the humanity of the portraits, are not less than they were. I do not hear any hiss in the tender voice that tells the tale of Charlotte's devotion to Philip-of the silent life of sacrifice of Madame Smolensk-of the hearty, impetuous youth of Philip. It is no ogre licking his chaps as he surveys succulent youth and the ripened game of age: it is a man who feels our common weakness, who knows how readily we go astray, but who draws and honors a real manliness as heartily as Walter Scott, and who recognizes the real womanliness in many a voice which speaks love in bad grammar and has no other charm than truth.

Now the question is whether you may not convey the lesson indirectly as well as directly. Hogarth thinks you can; so does Thackeray. That is to say, their genius works in that way. Because the personages in Hogarth's "Marriage" are disgusting what then? "Behold," the pictures say, "how useless are beauty, rank, wealth, when there is nothing more!" It is not necessary that a Bishop should be perpetually moving in the perspective, nor a Dairyman's Daughter be audibly praying in the fore-ground. The scene is, apparently, one of unredeemed meanness. But the meanness is so trued to young minds. ly drawn that the spectator shudders, and ignobility was never so ignoble to him before.

It seems as if the same thing might be said, and without any unseemly strain, of such stories as "Vanity Fair" and "Lovel the Widower." They are certainly lamentable pictures of human nature. If Life were only that, life would be hardly worth living. Exactly, and there the satirist begins. "See what it may be; what it often is. Be warned; be simple, honest, pure." That is the moral of such books and of such pictures. They do indirectly, inversely, what others do directly and positively. But certainly the artist may choose whether he will warn you or win you. For a long time it seemed to be thought essential that the hero of every novel should be brave and handsome, rich and strong and picturesque; and that the heroine should be beautiful and graceful. That fashion has gone by. Major Dobbin is very tall and very gawky; but what a man he is compared with Pelham, or Vivian Grey, or Ivanhoe!-who are not men at all, but schoolgirls' puppets.

The point of departure of Thackeray and Hogarth, and all the realists in Art, is dependence upon Nature. If they do not exaggerate the form or the color, nature will take care of the morality. "Lovel" is certainly a sketch, and but a sketch, of dreary characters. But is any body attracted by them? is any body fascinated? Is vice made lovely, or meanness winning? Or, again, are life and nature degraded by such a picture? No: not if it be true, and if it be painted to warn the beholder. It is not

How little we know of any thing that ever happened! A man looks round upon his books, and among them the patricians are the histories. They are the "substantial reading" so strongly commendThey are not "light," or frivolous, or distracting. To read a course of history“ is to do a very fine and meritorious work.

Yet into nothing does prejudice more deeply enter than into history: so deeply, indeed, as to affect the credibility of the story. There, upon that shelf, for instance, is Hume-with Smollett and Bisett—a goodly range of nineteen volumes. It is called a history of England. Now the history of England is the story of the long debate in Parliament, in courts, and upon the battle-field, between Prerogative and Privilege-between the power of the crown and the rights of the people. It is a bitter, impassioned quarrel. Every Englishman or British subject has a strong feeling upon the matter. He is in favor of the one side or the other. He is a Tory or a Whig. If a Tory, he sees every incident in one way, and interprets it according to his feeling. If a Whig, he does the same. Hume was a Scotch Tory, as Walter Scott was, and his Toryism makes his history almost a fable. The great Revolution is entirely misrepresented by him. Yes; and Smyth, with the other Doctors, show how unfairly he stated facts at a much earlier date than that of the Stuarts. Hume decides and delineates according to his Tory predilections. His history is a Tory history.

But here is Macaulay. His great work is also a history of England, not from the beginning, like Hume's, but practically from the Revolution of 1645. He was peculiarly versed in that period. His best essays are those that treat of it; and he lights up whatever he touches. But Macaulay was a Whig. He no more believed the word of Charles First than

the members of the Parliament he outraged believed
it. The struggle, in his view, was occasioned by
the invasion of privilege by prerogative, of the rights
of the people by the assumptions of the king. Mac-Tartar knows of California.
aulay's history is a Whig history. Which is right
-the Whig or the Tory?

an impartial foreign hand-what a wonderful per-
formance it would be? Such a person evidently
knows as much of what he is talking about as a Crim-

Then there are the old stock histories-Robertson, Rollin, Mitford, Gillies, Ferguson-later scholarship, with sharper eyes, sees that they were sadly at fault. New documents discovered, new principles of interpretation, more resolute investigation, supersede them all. An Englishman and a Frenchman, when they were boys, chummed together at a college on the Continent. The English boy read to the other the story of the battle of Crecy, in an English book. The French boy demurred, and read in a French book his story. The boot was on the other foot. The Mexican accounts of our war there a dozen years ago are curiously different from ours. We did not march upon the city and take it. They permitted us to advance. And the Mexicans always rebel against the old Spanish histories of their country.

Nothing is more uncertain than our historical knowledge. And why should it not be so? We have lately had an illustration of the profound contemporary misunderstanding of a whole people; and if that is true of our own time, why should we suppose posterity will be any wiser? For the last six months Great Britain has insisted that we were determined to fight her, and that we should hasten to find and to use an opportunity of insulting her. Every circumstance, every word, has been misconstrued to that end; and when Captain Wilkes stopped the Trent and seized the rebel agents, it seems not to have occurred to any but a few in England and France that it might be only his individual act, unauthorized by his Government. Both England and France, as nations, reasoning upon the false premises of our wish to fight England, could see in the action only a premeditated insult.

No; histories are as limping as the rest.

People complain that Dickens is a caricaturist. What, then, is Hume? What are the London Times and Blackwood? And we need not look so far. We have but to read our own papers upon our own men and events. We have no soldiers and no statesmen, if you believe one side; we have great generals and wise counselors, if you believe the other. What is the truth about the Missouri summer and autumn campaign? Will you have it from a friend of Frémont's, or from a friend of the regular army?

How hard it is to know the truth when we have all the documents and live among the men and events! But when a hundred years hence any man's interpretation of them must be trusted, is it not clear that we should not be too swift to believe, until we know exactly the sympathies and character of the historian?

Our Foreign Bureau.

WE begin where we left off. Geneva was the

city, and Swiss affairs the topic. Greater topics have thrown this in the shade; but still the little mountain republic has its flow and reflow of political excitements-culminating just now in the non-election of M. Fazy, a prominent Genevese politician, who for many years past has had a controlling influence in the government of the Canton. The quays, bridges, and public grounds of the city have been mostly of his design and of his urgence. The jealousies of rival politicians have thrown him out of power. In his way he was the Cavour of the Canton; and however the votes may turn, the Cavours are never thrown out utterly.

The Dappenthal speck of war has fairly passed into the hazy atmosphere of diplomatic discussion, in which the French representative takes position as serenely as a harvest moon, and the Swiss rights twinkle like a belt of stars. It is easy to foretell which light the poor Dappenthal will live by.

A new Swiss Atlas, which has been under course of elaboration for thirty years past, under the auspices of the Federal Council, is now understood to

But besides this curious misapprehension, the English assume and gravely state that the population of this country is a mob, and that the President is swayed by his terror of mob law. This is so exquisitely absurd that an American can only laugh. The city of New York has a population within the police limits of nearly a million, and the police numbers fifteen hundred men. For nine months a desperate war has been waged upon the Government by a fac-approach completion. A report has been recently tion in the country, which, in its own section, has always mobbed the citizens of other sections who held that one man had no right to enslave another, and yet, with the exception of two or three summary suppressions of newspapers in small towns, the peace of the country has never been more secure. Yet the English, who have made themselves the close friends of those among us who notoriously rule by mobs, in-ent with Switzerland. Even the old road-map of form themselves by their newspapers that the mob rules in this country.

The English historian of the time who should be governed by the current reports in his own country, would tell a story sadly at variance with the truth. Fancy, for instance, Archibald Alison undertaking a history of America to follow his history of Europe. What a figure the poor United States Government would cut? Or imagine the author of "Lady Lee's Widowhood," who now writes an occasional paper about the United States in Blackwood, to write a novel in which allusion should be made to our situation, and which should be appealed to by the future historian as a sketch of contemporary manners by

made upon the progress of the work by M. the General Dufour, from which it appears that a million of francs has been already expended, and that the task will be brought to an end in the course of 1862.

Most maps are but the measures of a country's distances, the indications of sites of towns, of bigness of rivers, of strategic capabilities. It is differ

Keller (how much more the new minuteness of the Federal survey!) opens always on the eye like a rereading of some grand book of poems. This little fine line, half-blurred, that skirts Vevey and Clarens (Sentier they mark it) and wavers past the spur of Jaman, is no mere foot-path, but a summer madrigal, full of the rarest music of brooks and a June loveliness of green. This other, that trails zigzag around Tête Noire, is a brave war lyric, with banners of firs and an army of angry clouds. This broader streak, that is written " Diligence road," and that gleams along the Via Mala, is an epic whose every Cæsarean pause we can recall among the Imperial heights; whose pages are written over

with lichens, and dashed with the blood of Alpine | the Baron upon the Church question, and more pliroses; whose resonance is in sliding mountains of snow. There are tragedies, too; as where this frailest hair line of path stretches by the Dead House of St. Bernard, where the frozen mummies stare at you, or goes glinting along the precipices of the Gemmi, where unwary travelers have fallen and dashed their lives out on the rocks below. Then Pastorals come, with sweet, far-sounding bells, goat herds, kids feeding, hay-makers, banks of green velvet, long lines of widening valley, down which you pass into the glow and gold of Italy.

ant to the views of the French Emperor. He was fèted at Paris by the journalists of that city upon the same day on which a similar fête was given by the London Society of Fishmongers to the unrecognized embassadors of certain so-called "Confederate States." And if we may trust to M. Ratazzi's afterdinner declarations on that occasion, no more uncompromising enemy to the temporal power of the Pope, and no more earnest champion for complete and entire Italian unity is to be found at Turin. General Cialdini, one of the most accomplished

On this thread of memory we march there now, officers of the Piedmontese army, has thrown up his and seek for news at Turin. command. Difficulties with the Cabinet are said to be the occasion. It is certain that, while in au

THE Neapolitan difficulties, whatever the opti-thority at Naples, he did not pay flattering respect mists may say, are not yet wholly at an end. The to certain orders of the Government. On his return scattered companies of brigands still drive their trade the King proposed to bestow upon him the highest in the fastnesses of Calabria, doing murder, and mark of his regard, equivalent to the honor of the making booty in the name of the good King Francis Garter in England. To this the Cabinet strenuousSecond. Their character, and the romantic episodes ly objected; but the matter coming to the knowlof their life, are ever made the subjects of labored edge of Cialdini, he showed his disaffection by reapology and exposition in the ultramontane journals signing. The Italian army, however, can not afford of Paris. It is strange and monstrous to find pro- to lose him; and it is believed that the King, who fessed Christian organs, like La Monde, drawing ten- has a rare talent for such delicate services, may win der pictures of the homes and habits of these im- him back to full allegiance. practicable robbers, and commending their predatory vigor and successes as so many illustrations of Bourbon patriotism and Papal obedience.

Venetian affairs are in no way of improvement. The Empress of Austria, a pretty, delicate person, whose face challenges sympathy, and whose ill health commands devotion, is passing a portion of the winter in Venice, the climate of Vienna being too severe for her. The Duchesse de Berri is there too, as usual, and her stolid son, the Duke of Bordeaux. The Duke of Modena is presently to arrive with the late Duke of Tuscany, and possibly the whole of the exiled court of Naples. In a certain sense, then, Venice will be gay. The Austrian offi

The new Lieutenant-Governor, Della Marmora, of Crimean fame, is showing his usual energy; but the total suppression of Southern brigandage can not reasonably be looked for until the nest of reactionary conspirators is broken up and driven away from Rome. Never more than now is the government of Victor Emanuel feeling the necessity of a central capital. The Baron Ricasoli, in a personal letter to the Pope, urges the matter more vehement-cers and the exiled families will make up a fair house ly than ever; and begs the French Government, through whose officials the document passes to its destination, to add urgency to his demands upon His Holiness. Italy (in the name of Ricasoli) asks only that Rome shall decide upon the character of its own temporal authority, and engages the complete spiritual submission of a united country to the sovereignty of the Pope.

for the Fenice Theatre, and a brilliant company of promenaders for the Place St. Mark. The Venetian element, however, will be wanting in what festivities crown the winter. The Governor, Toggenberg, was never more cordially detested, or the commerce of the place on a more dreary footing. Even the famous Arsenal, which was one of the show places of the city, which carried such glorious memories of Dandolo, and Pisani, and the Morosinis, has been despoiled for the equipment of a new naval dépôt at Pola, on the Dalmatian shore. The estates on the main land, which supplied a precarious revenue to many of the old titled families, have this year given neither crops nor rental. The poor harvest, being the smallest known for years, has been expropriated by the exactions of the soldiery, and even the tenantry have been stimulated to an agrarian rebellion, and pillage has been done under the flag of Austria.

Full revenues are promised, all existing princely titles of the Church, the right to convoke religious assemblages as heretofore; and fears are hinted that except the Holy Father yield in this matter to the wishes of Italy before it be too late his ecclesiastical authority will crumble with his temporal privileges. The whole question of Rome as capital for the new Italy rests, as heretofore, upon the presence or absence of the French army within the gates del Popolo. The august Hierarchy, with all its immunities, hangs trembling upon the point of Louis We should hardly know or hear of Venice, save Napoleon's sword. If he withdraws General Goyon, that in the Florentine Exhibition, which has had so he irritates a great swarm of Church declaimers at large success, one or two bits of rare painting, and home; he offends the religious prejudices of the Em-as rare sculpture, tell us with a tender pathos of the press; he alienates the Court of Madrid; he pro- lingering art-inheritance at the old home of Giovanni vokes the open hostility of Austria. If he holds his Gentile Bellini. ground, he stimulates the Bourbonist reaction in the South; he defeats the accomplishment of national unity, and must gradually alienate all the liberal minds of Italy. He holds in his hand the power to consolidate the nationalities of the Peninsula; he holds also, to a limited degree, the larger power to break them asunder. What will he do with it?

M. Ratazzi is spoken of as a possible successor to the Baron Ricasoli at the head of Government. He is represented to be less strongly committed than

We have said nothing of that Florentine Exhibition, though it is worth its page of record-albeit, a story of the summer past.

The building is worthy of the exhibition. Passing through a court-yard, in the centre of which stands a colossal statue of the King, you pass under a noble colonnade, surmounted by a façade bearing appropriate inscriptions and allegorical bas-reliefs, and enter the body of the structure (which was, in

they be utterly withered, and so become King of us all."

fact, the old railway station), you see before you a spacious hall, one hundred and seventy yards long by forty wide, divided in the centre by a row of col- Before we leave Italy we give a paragraphist's umns, and surrounded by a wide and commodious sketch of an eminent personage now seeing carnival gallery. The walls of this building are brick, but at Rome. We will not vouch for the truth of it. it is lighted by a glass roof-the glare from which is Se non e vero e ben vestito. "Riding a few days admirably tempered by a covering of canvas, divided since in the Campagna I was passed by three equesin square partitions, each bearing the name and de- trians-two certainly men, the third a puzzle, but vice of a province or city of Italy. In the centre seeming rather of the 'epicene' or doubtful gender. of the salle, on a marble pedestal, stands a fine It wore a yellow Zouave jacket; a black garment statue of the Florentine political economist, Sallus- beyond description clothed its lower members; and tio Bandini. This is the only permanent ornament, on its head was jauntily stuck a Bersaglière hat, all the available space being very properly reserved with a great plume of yellow and black feathers. It for the objects exhibited. From the side doors open rode like a woman—that is, very fast and recklessly to different committee-rooms, post and telegraph -to the evident terror and suffering of its two comoffices, the reading-room, two excellent restaurants panions, who, dressed in tight suits of black, and and cafés-in one of which there are déjeuners and one at least with his feet thrust into his stirrups the diner à table d'hôte at the prices respectively of two wrong way, were tempting Providence in a trot. A and four francs-the police-office, secretary's rooms, wide ditch was before them-I have seen men turn and, last not least, the sanitario (hospital), to attend from a smaller. It, however, went straight at it, to which a staff of thirty doctors is appointed. From and got well over; and turning round, and taking the body of the building you enter a circular space off her hat to her 'pounded' companions, there was two hundred yards in diameter, which is arranged as the beautiful face of the ex-Queen of Naples, who an open-air garden, and laid out in parterres of flow-stopped to light her cigar, while the men went ignoers (in pots) worthy of Florence; in the centre is a hot-house for tropical, a tent for exotic, and a fountain, rockery, and reservoir for aquatic plants. The garden is surrounded by a corridor twenty yards in width, lighted by windows that form one side, and widening at the extremity into a large semicircular room, in which is the permanent orchestra of the Exhibition.

The King opened the Exhibition upon a gala Sunday of the summer, on which the beating of drums, the movement of troops, and the rattle of carriages, broke down all Puritan remembrance of the day.

We can only epitomize some of the best things. Milan bears the palm for sculpture, and Pietro Magni is chiefest.

miniously round to the bridge."

We are talking of peaceful themes for these times of war; yet we can easily slip to a scene of war. By the new Ancona railway (opened with a royal fête) we glide to the Adriatic, thence it needs only to cross the gulf and the southern limb of Dalmatia, and we are in the midst of the wars of Montenegro and the Herzegovine against Turkey. Success is various, but mainly falls to the share of the mountaineers, who fight among their own homes. The money and men are enlisted for the Ottoman cause, which, besides, is contending for empire that has been acknowledged in treaty and is supported by long possession. But the Montenegrins and the Herze

Piedmont is feeble in its art-show; but her ma-govines believe in the remaking of treaties, and the chinery, and show of mechanical contrivances generally, range far beyond any thing of more Southern Italy. The war material is best represented by the founders of Turin and Brescia. There is also very remarkable Turin cabinet-work of woods in mosaic, so daintily arranged as to represent the portraits of popular Italian heroes.

renaming of the boundaries of empire when treaties and boundaries are clenched with tyranny: they have the advantage of fighting upon the defensive, and the further one of possessing the sympathy of nearly every Christian nation of Europe. Austria is understood to keep a very watchful eye upon the current of this war upon her borders; and is specially

Florence is remarkable for its carvings and for its anxious to convince the Sclaves who live under well-known pietra dura.

The Marquis Campana shows very wonderful imitations of marble and of precious stones, so perfect as to require interpretation. The Roman photography maintains its old excellence, and is perhaps the best in Europe. Porcelain from the manufactory of the Marquis Ginori is declared equal to that of Sèvres.

One of the most interesting parts of the Exhibition, and that to which the Government has extended special encouragement, is the show of cheap wares for the poor. The articles are ticketed with their prices, and can be furnished to those wishing at a dépôt near by. If cheapness makes success, then this department certainly has achieved success. What shall we say to women's shoes ticketed at 16 cents; and infants' shoes at 6 cents; boots 84 cents; and corsets 25 cents?

When the King came to open the Exhibition the émigrés of Rome and of Venice presented an address to him, with this touch of the old romantic Italy at its close: "Sire, the garlands we have woven for the virgins of Venice and of Rome are beginning to fade. We pray that you may arrive there before

Mussulman rule that she is their friend, and so gain merit and approval with her Sclave population at home. She is needful of such sympathy. The Magyar element of Hungary was never more thoroughly alienated than now.

As for the Sultan, who is presumed to direct this war, the hopes we had in him long since "touched ground;" and if they have not "dashed themselves to pieces," it is no fault of his. The economies of his beginning have faded into wanton indulgence. The one Sultana has grown into a gay group of concubines. Mehemet Ali, an ambitious leader of affairs (his brother-in-law), assumes virtual control. The British reporters do indeed give us hopeful accounts of the status of the Ottoman court. But all other authorities, whether German, Russian, or French, look despairingly upon the current of Turkish affairs. And we make no question but that the dictum of the Russian Nicholas, about the sick master living at the Dardanelles, will in a few years be confirmed. Not twenty years can pass before the sick master must make his will and die. The propagand of Oslamism is as dead as the propagand of slavery; and when a nation loses the virus by

which to propagate its special and sustaining faith, it must die too: except its faith be changed.

We shift now our view to Paris. Swift cold, and overcoats, and the rattle of ball-bound carriages tell of winter. Great quiet at court, now come back from the long vacation at Compeigne, tell of death in royal circles-a King in Portugal, a Prince Regent in England. Death too has appeared in humbler though not less illustrious circles. At the Academy of Sciences a sitting has been made sombre by the news that M. Geoffroy de St. Hilaire was dead. He was born, where he died, in the midst of the wonders of the Jardin des Plantes. His father was one of the illustrations of French science, as his life and works, edited by the son, have proved. The savant who is just now lamented interested himself specially in the acclimature of new animals; and he was at the head of the society of acclimation of the Jardin des Plantes and of the Bois de Boulogne. He has been specially known latterly by his efforts to secure the somewhat inglorious conquest over the old prejudice against horse-flesh. We have alluded repeatedly in our record to his persistency in this direction; and it may be well to say that his labors were not without avail. He had the satisfaction of knowing before his death that he had contributed largely toward furnishing cheap food for the poor.

And while in the Chamber of Science, let us mention that M. Boussingault, the eminent (perhaps most eminent) agricultural chemist, has latterly contributed certain extremely interesting discoveries in regard to the transpiration of plants. It has long been known that all vegetables gave off a certain quantity of oxygen by day, and a certain quantity of carbonic acid in the dark; but M. Boussingault finds that aquatic plants especially give off in the dark an oxide of carbon which is well known as a deadly gas. The question arises, what this transpiration of vegetable growth, on great tracts of swamp land, may have to do with the miasma (so intangible hitherto to all chemical grasp) of tropical vegetation?

Sir Humphrey Davy once taking two or three inhalations of the oxide of carbon came near his death. May it not possibly be true that the "country fever" of the South, and the fever and ague of New Yorkers and New York, may be due to a conditional inhalation of the same poison?

What a melee of people thronged to hear him! And what earnestness and power in the talk of him! No little proprieties of elocution, that took away the edge of his force; no daintiness of speech, that made you forget his meaning; no transparent tricks of oratory; no suavity of tone, that made you say, What voice! No elaboration of rhetoric that made you say, What artist! But complete, entire engrossment in the full-souled carnestness of the man. Those truths he uttered were the things to live by, and, if need be, die by; nothing less, nothing more. A preacher that engulfed your thought, and bore it onward in the rush of his language, and crowned it and sealed it with a prayer. If all preachers talked as Lacordaire talked, the apostles of the world would count more than twelve.

Yet they hardly do.

Jean Baptiste Lacordaire was born in the year 1802, in Burgundy. His father died while he was quite a lad, and under the guardianship of his mother he studied at Dijon. His first ambition was to qualify himself for the stage; and it is said that he enjoyed for a time the counsels and instruction of Talma. But he soon changed the drift of his labor and studied for the bar. At one time, indeed, he was a duly qualified advocate in Paris. But religious convictions came upon him in a flood, and he left the law for theological study in the school of St. Sulpice. If he had been an actor, he would have rivaled the best; if he had been a lawyer, he would have ranked with Chaix d'Est Ange. As a pulpit orator no man came near him unless, perhaps, M. Coquerel of the Oratoire.

It was in 1828 that Lacordaire first took orders as a priest. The whirl of the revolution that brought in the Orleans family to power carried Lacordaire into association with Montalembert and Lamennais, as the editors of L'Avenir. It was a religious journal in sympathy with the times. It raised the banner of religious as well as civil freedom. Its editors appealed to Rome for countenance. But France was in advance of the opinions of poor Gregory. The paper was too free for its day. Lamennais broke out into open revolt-revolt that drove him to socialism, and a wild, uncurbed philanthropy that ended in stark infidelity. Montalembert shivered in the wind of Papal disapproval, and ended, as we know, in eloquent support of the Church's worst abuses. cordaire, alone of the three, held strongly to a simple Christian faith, lamenting the illiberalities of the Church, but not believing with Lamennais that its illiberalities were reason for its annihilation; nor yet believing with Montalembert that eloquence was well spent in defense of its sophistries or its traditions. Lacordaire, wiser than either, seized hold of the kernel of truth which made the life and the germ of the Church, and about that kernel poured the irradiating store of his knowledge and his eloquence.

La

The Pope feared him; Montalembert distrusted him; Lamennais tried to scorn him; but good men loved him, and strong men applauded him.

THE French Academy (we speak now of the Acad. emy par excellence, and not of the Academy of Sciences) has just lost an associate in the Père Lacordaire. We will call him a Dominican preacher; and not a stranger in Paris, at the date of 1846 or thereabout, but, if he had a mind to any sort of preaching, struggled to hear the good Father Lacordaire, in his discourses at the old church of Nôtre Dame. To ourselves Nôtre Dame has three aspects very wide apart in character, but we can hardly tell which of the three keeps strongest in mind. First, Victor Hugo has stamped its image in our thought, WHAT the French think in respect of the Trent with his weird poem (shall we say?) of the "Hunch- imbroglio the papers will already have told you. back." When we think of Notre Dame we think They do not, with rare exceptions, favor the sumof Gringoire and Quasimodo. Next, the miracle of mary action of Captain Wilkes. Continental opinthe architect seizes us: the wondrous towers and ions lean, as we have always leaned hitherto, toward wondrous sculpture, the flying buttresses that flank granting the largest liberty to neutrals. And, whatthe quay, and the flamboyant miracles of the win-ever sympathies may be, the Continental nations will dows enchain us. Last-but perhaps more strongly than all-we think of Notre Dame as the parish pulpit of the Dominican Lacordaire.

not live down their traditions in a day. If the American treatment of the question be upon the basis of old American claims as regards search, it