many members of the best French families. Raised to the Episcopal dignity and entrusted with the important See of Orleans, he was not, from some points of view, so successful. As a schoolmaster he was simply adored by his boys; but his imperious nature did not fit him equally well to deal with men, and he was far from being a favourite with his clergy. His resolute stand against the influences which were most powerful in the Council of 1870 made him very unpopular at the Vatican, and Pius IX. has been credited with a very bad pun directed against him: Il est devenu 6 dupe et un loup.'

The movement, fertile as we have seen in men calculated to do their work in the world's ample witness,' did not lack saints of the unlettered mediæval type. Such was Jean-Baptiste Vianney, who, possessing very slender intellectual endowments and a mere modicum of education, succeeded by pure goodness in making his remote parish of Ars a centre to which thousands upon thousands resorted every year for the purpose of confessing to him, or asking his advice in spiritual matters. 'Go,' said one who had made the pilgrimage, to a friend, Go to Ars, and you will learn how Christianity was established, how nations were 'converted and Christian civilisation founded. When we

' enjoy the blessing of being contemporary with such a 'prodigy we must not pass it by with closed eyes.'

From a remote country parish on the banks of the Saône, the name of which would be utterly unknown to history save for the saintliness of its priest, we may pass to the centre of the Faubourg St. Germain.

The Salon which most fully represented the best side of the Catholic reaction during the later years of the Restoration, during the whole reign of Louis Philippe and far beyond its limits, was that of Madame Swetchine, a Russian lady who had become a convert to the Roman Church in 1815, and who settled finally in Paris just before the death of the Emperor Alexander I. It has been admirably described by M. de Falloux in his Life' of its presiding genius, and was the instrument by which her great and salutary influence extended itself widely through the Society of Paris. For Madame Swetchine was not only a highly placed and gifted woman of the world, but a saint in the best acceptation of the term. Lacordaire was to her almost a son, and her spiritual daughters were many. Through one of them, as we shall see presently, she still exerts a power

which is likely to continue for an indefinite period. After she died, in 1857, her position was, to some extent, inherited by another Russian lady, Madame de Circourt, who died in 1864, and was at the head of almost the last Salon of the old type which survived the changes of our crowded and bustling age.

In 1850 a split took place in the Catholic camp, the cause of division being M. de Falloux's Education Bill. Montalembert and all the more level-headed of his friends accepted that measure-were content, in other words, that Catholics should take their degrees in the University-a State and perfectly secular institution-while getting their education in establishments directed in accordance with their own ideas. A more fanatical section insisted that Catholics should not only be educated, but also receive their degrees from Catholic institutions. These two sections found congenial expression--the first in the review called the Correspondant,' and the other in the newspaper whose narrow bigotry was-lucus a non lucendo-distributed under the name of the Univers.' The section which the latter represented has been far the more successful of the two, and gained a triumph in 1870. But all the best work that has been done in the French Church has been done by the other, from which the violent faction gained only one adherent, in the person of the Abbé Gerbet, later Bishop of Perpignan, who, in his earlier life one of the most attaching of men, and described sympathetically in the sixth volume of the 'Causeries de Lundi' by Saint-Beuve, who looked at the whole movement with the calm independence of an outside critic, was drawn away from his older associates into an alliance, which must surely have been very distasteful to him, with the firebrand Louis Veuillot.

De Maistre's passionate and, considering the circumstances of his life, most natural abhorrence of the French Revolution had a curious effect, which became more and more observable as years went on, showing itself most markedly in this feud between the party of the Correspondant' and the party of the Univers.' The old Ultramontanism had been the protest of the centripetal forces of the Church against its centrifugal forces; the new Ultramontanism became the protest of the Ultra-Conservative forces of the Church against anything approaching to freedom of thought. Ultramontanism ceased to be the antithesis of Gallicanism

which was practically dead; it became the antithesis of Liberalism.

From the writings of all those we have mentioned, and from those of other lesser lights, many passages might be culled which are real additions to the wealth of the world; but it was reserved for another to produce a work which will be the best memorial to after times of the reflux of this age towards Catholic Christianity. In 1891 the Abbé Mugnier, the vicaire of St. Thomas d'Aquin, said :-

Quand on dénombrera les apologistes de ce temps, on trouvera sans doute que c'est une simple femme, dénuée de toute prétention théologique, qui a su construire à sa foi un monument éternel avec les matériaux les plus délicats, les plus périssables en apparence: des sourires, des baisers et des larmes.'

A truer criticism was never uttered. To many people, and they are among the most fortunate, the little bookwhich was long believed to have been only copied, but, as the better opinion seems now to be, was actually written by the monk of Mount St. Agnes near Zwolle (Thomas à Kempis) brings an ever-fresh stream of strength and delight. Others, again, feel towards it as the late Mr. Pater did, and would speak like him of the wonderful, inaccessible, cold heights of the Imitation.' Its piety is too cloistral for them; reading it is like breathing the air of mountain tops-the effort becomes oppressive. With Mrs. Craven's Récit d'une 'Sour' it is quite otherwise. Those whose lives are told therein did not live in a cloister but in the world, subject to all the vicissitudes, the joys and the sorrows which are familiar to most of us. Its authoress, when she was nerving herself to give to the public a treasure so sacred as that which she possessed in the manuscript lives and letters of her nearest and dearest, foresaw this and believed that her sacrifice would be rewarded by drawing into the path which she herself had trod (and which has been so well described by her friend Mrs. Bishop in a book reviewed last year in this journal), many whom examples of a more heroic kind. might easily have alarmed. Her success was triumphant. Very truly did M. de Meaux the son-in-law of her friend M. de Montalembert, describe the book when he wrote:

'Qui ne connaît, qui n'a relu souvent le "Récit d'une Sœur," cette histoire véridique qui débute comme un roman, le roman le plus pur et le plus passionné tout ensemble, et s'achève comme une pieuse et mystique légende, ce chant d'amour, de douleur, et d'espérance, où tour à tour la vie paraît si belle et la mort si radieuse.'

Of course the atmosphere of the Récit' is intensely

Catholic, but it is the purest form of Catholicism-Catholicism which in all that relates to matters of feeling and conduct is simply the quintessence of the religion which was 'evaporated from the ashes of Palestine.'

It is a book capable of producing the most powerful effects upon persons who may doubt, nay, entirely deny most of the dogmatic assumptions upon which the lives which it records were based; but they must be strangely constituted who do not admit that, whatever may be said of these dogmatic assumptions, the lives themselves touch the highest point to which human virtue can attain. The Récit d'une Sour' is one of the by no means very numerous books produced in our prolific century which will be read and treasured through all the ages.

There is no difficulty in obtaining full information as to the Catholic reaction in the France of to-day, in so far as it touches political and social questions. Mr. Lecky, in his great work on Democracy and Liberty,' holds the balance very fairly between the clerical and anti-clerical parties. Nor is it at all hard to find English books in which the views of both sides are set forth by strong supporters. The most interesting figure, perhaps, in the Catholic ranks, at this moment, is that of Count Albert de Mun, the second and only surviving son of Mlle. Eugénie de la Ferronays, later Marquise de Mun, whose name and character are so familiar to all the readers of the Récit d'une Sœur.' He has many of the highest gifts of an orator, and has the advantage of being intensely in earnest. Unfortunately, however, he has mixed up his religious views with a strong infusion of German socialism. He wishes to go back to the system of guilds and corporations, which were swept away under the beneficent influence of Turgot and the Economistes of last century. Alas! alas! that way madness lies,' and the best intentions can lead to no good. A wiser section of Catholic economists holds with Le Play and Périn, while some great employers of labour in France are trying, without setting before them unattainable ideals, to reconcile the modern conditions of labour with Catholic doctrine and practice.

We make no doubt that anyone who knew well the country districts of France at the present day could give us many charming pictures of the working of their religion in the life of the people of all ranks. Mr. Hamerton-by no means a clerical writer-had much to say in praise of many of the Curés in his neighbourhood, a few years ago, in his excellent book 'Round my House;' but we know of no

work which gives such a picture as is to be found in the 'Memoirs of Eugénie de Guérin.' It is much to be doubted whether the Catholic life of Paris is as worthy of admiration as it was. Writing in 1882, Mrs. Craven said:

'At times I feel wretchedly alone-not as all old women must from the gradual disappearance of their contemporaries, but in a quite different and new way. Madame Swetchine, though she was older than I am when she died, was to the last surrounded by younger friends, with whom she could entirely sympathise, the colour of whose thoughts was quite the same as hers. But that is just where the great change has taken place, and so I understand nobody, and nobody understands me.'

At the same time, when we are thinking of the religious state of Paris, we should not forget that the centenary of the Institute was inaugurated by the celebration of a mass for the souls of its deceased members-a strange and significant epigram of events! The Catholic reaction had not gone far in France, and the century was still young, when a diversion was made in its favour in an unexpected quarter -a diversion, too, which gave it a good deal of help in extending itself over Europe.

This diversion came from the country of whose people it had been said, with not a little truth

'They ran sae far to get frae Rome,

That they ran oot o' Christendom;'

and the unlooked-for auxiliary was Walter Scott. It would be difficult to exaggerate the effect of his poetry and prose in teaching his contemporaries to look back, with more kindness than they had been wont to do, upon those ages in which the Roman Church, so rudely assailed during the previous century, was the dominant factor; and the works of the great magician had all the more effect because he had not himself the very shadow of an inclination towards its teaching. It was not for nothing, however, that Newman wrote to the husband of the heiress of Abbotsford :

'I have ever had the extremest sympathy for Walter Scott. When he was dying I was saying prayers (whatever they were worth) for him continually, thinking of Keble's words: "Think on the Minstrel as ye kneel."

The sympathy was purely instinctive, but none the less strong.

It has often been said that Coleridge did a good deal to prepare the way for the English section of the movement, and there is some truth in the remark, but it was to the