tion or resist. Human society obeys a similar which, in a different age, would have been influence. Laws as anomalous in appear- consecrated to more splendid, though not perance, as uniform in reality, as those which haps to more worthy undertakings. direct the planetary movements, determine the present state, and regulate the progress of commonwealths, whether, political, literary, or religious. Christianity demands the belief, and experience justifies the hope, that their ultimate tendency is towards the universal dominion of piety and virtue. But it is neither pious nor rational to suppose, that this consummation can be attained by any sequence of identical causes constantly working out similar effects. The best generations, like the best men, are those which possess an individual and distinctive character. A chain of splendid biographies constitutes the history of past centuries. Whoever shall weave the chronicles of our own, must take for his staple statistics illuminated by a skilful generalization. Once every eye was directed to the leaders of the world; now all are turned to the masses of which it is composed. Instead of Newtons presiding over royal societies, we have Dr. Birkbecks lecturing at mechanics' institutes. If no Wolseys arise to found colleges like that of Christ Church, Joseph Lancaster and William Bell have emulated each other in works not less momentous at the Borough Road and Baldwin's Gardens. We people continents, though we have ceased to discover them. We abridge folios for the many, though we no longer write them for the few. Our fathers compiled systems of divinity-we compose pocket theological libraries. They invented sciences, we apply them. Literature was once an oligarchy, it is now a republic. Our very monitors are affected with the degeneracy they deplore. For the majestic cadence of Milton, and the voluptuous flow of Jeremy Taylor's periods, they substitute the rhetorical philosophy, invented some fifty years since, to countervail the philosophical rhetoric of the French Revolution; and put forth, in a collection of essays for the drawing-room, reproofs which the hands of Prynne would have moulded into learned, fierce, and ponderous folios. It is impossible to prevent-is it wise to bewail, this change in our social and intellectual habits? During the inundations of the Nile, the worship of the mysterious river ceased, and no hymns were heard to celebrate its glories. Idolatry lost its stay, and imagination her excitement; but the land was fertilized. Learning, once banked up in universities and cathedrals, is now diffused through shops and factories. The stream, then so profound and limpid, may now, perhaps, be both shallow and muddy. But is it better that the thirst of a whole nation should be thus slaked, or that the immortals should be quaffing their nectar apart in sublime abstraction from the multitude? There is no immediate and practicable reconcilement of these advantages. Genius, and wit, and science, and whatever else raises man above his fellows, must bend to the universal motives of human conduct. When honour, wealth, public gratitude, and the sense of good desert, reward those who teach elementary truth to the people at large, the wisest and the best will devote to that office powers, In the state of letters, there is no maintaining a polity in which the three elements of power are blended together in harmonious counterpoise. There a monarch infallibly becomes a despot, and a democracy subjugates to itself whatever else is eminent, or illustrious. Divines, poets, and philosophers, addressing millions of readers and myriads of critics, are immediately rewarded by an applause, or punished by a neglect, to which it is not given to mortal man to be superior or indifferent. Inform the national mind, and improve the general taste up to a certain point, and to that point you inevitably depress the efforts of those who are born to instruct the rest. Had Spenser flourished in the nineteenth century, would he have aspired to produce the Faery Queen! Had Walter Scott lived in the sixteenth, would he have condescended to write the Lady of the Lake? Our great men are less great because our ordinary men are less abject. These lamentations over the results of this compromise are rather pathetic than just. It forms one indispensable chapter in the natural history of a people's intellectual progress. It is one of the stages through which the national mind must pass towards the general elevation of literature, sacred and profane. We know not how to regret, that genius has from the moment abdicated her austere supremacy, and stooped to be popular and plain. Mackintosh surrendered his philosophy to the compilation of a familiar history of England. Faithless to his Peris and Glendoveers, Mr. Moore is teaching the commonalty of the realm the sad tale of the woes inflicted on the land of his birth. No longer emulous of Porson, the Bishop of London devotes his learned desire to preparing cheap and easy lessons for the householders of his diocess. Lord Brougham arrests the current of his eloquence, to instruct mechanics in the principles of the sciences which they are reducing to daily practice. Tracts for the times are extorted from the depositories of ecclesiastical tradition, obedient to the general impulse which they condemn, and constrained to render the Church argumentative, that they may render her oracular. Nay, the author of the "Natural History of Enthusiasm" himself, despite his own protests, yields at length to the current, and has become the periodical writer of monthly tracts, where, in good round controversial terms, the superficial multitude are called to sit in judgment on the claims of the early fathers to sound doctrine, good morals, and common sense. Let who will repine at what has passed, and at what is passing, if they will allow us to rejoice in what is to come. If we witness the growth of no immortal reputations, we see the expansion of universal intelligence. The disparities of human understanding are much the same in all times; but it is when the general level is the highest that the mighty of the earth rise to the most commanding eloquence. But whatever may be the justice of the hopes we thus indulge for future generations, our business is with ourselves. If, as we think, they are well judging who devote the best gifts | of nature and of learning to the instruction of the illiterate, the praise of wisdom is not to be denied to such as write with the more ambitious aim of stimulating the nobler intellects amongst us to enterprises commensurate with their elevated powers. No strenuous effort for the good of mankind was ever yet made altogether in vain ; nor will those of our author be fruitless, though the results may fall far short of his aspirations. The general currents of thought and action can never be diverted from their channels, except by minds as rarely produced as they are wonderfully endowed. Energy, decision, and a selfreliance, independent of human praise or censure, are amongst their invariable characteristics. To this sublime order of men the Recluse of Stamford Rivers does not belong. Nor can a place be assigned to him among those calmer spirits, whose inventive genius, or popular eloquence, has enabled them from their solitudes to cast on the agitated masses of society seeds of thought destined at some future period to change the aspect of human affairs. He is an independent more than an original thinker. He is rather exempt from fear than animated by ardent courage in announcing the fruits of his inquiries. A great master of language, he is himself but too often mastered by it. He is too much the creature, to become the reformer, of his age. His assiduity to please is fatal to his desire to command. His efforts to move the will are defeated by his success in dazzling the fancy. Yet his books exhibit a character, both moral and intellectual, from the study of which the reader can hardly fail to rise a wiser and a better man. Standing aloof from all vulgar excitements, heedless of the transient politics and the fugitive literature of his times, and intent only on the permanent interests of mankind, he has laboured to promote them with an honest love of truth, aided by brilliant talents, comprehensive knowledge, and undaunted intrepidity. And thus he has come under the guidance of principles, which no man can cultivate in his own bosom, or earnestly impart to other minds, without earning a reward which will render human applause insignificant, or reduce the neglect of the world to a matter of comparative indifference. THE PORT-ROYALISTS.* [EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1841.] ALL religions, and all ages, have their saints; of a steep cleft or hollow, intersecting the motheir men of unearthly mould; self-conquerors; notonous plain across which he has been sublime even in their errors; not altogether passing. The brook which winds through the hateful in their very crimes. If a man would verdant meadows beneath him, stagnates into understand the dormant powers of his own na- a large pool, reflecting the solitary Gothic arch, ture, let him read the Acta Sanctorum. Or, if "too the water-mill, and the dove-cot, which rise high this price of knowledge," let him at least from its banks; with the farmhouse, the deacquaint himself with the legends of the later cayed towers, the forest-trees, and the innumeheroes of the Gallican church. Of all ascetics rable shrubs and creepers which clothe the they were the least repulsive. They waged slopes of the valley. France has many a lovewar on dullness with the ardour of Dangeau lier prospect, though this is not without its and St. Simon, and with still better success. beauty; and many a field of more heart-stirring While macerating their bodies in the cloisters interest, though this, too has been ennobled by of Port-Royal, they did not cease to be French heroic daring; but through the length and men and French women of the Augustan age. breadth of that land of chivalry and of song, While practising the monastic virtue of silence the traveller will in vain seek a spot so sacred their social spirit escaped this unwelcome re- to genius, to piety, and to virtue. That arch straint, in a body of memoirs as copious as is all which remains of the once crowded mothose which record the splendour and the mise-nastery of Port-Royal. In those woods Racine ries of Versailles. In a series of volumes, of first learned the language-the universal lanwhich the above is the first, the author is about guage-of poetry. Under the roof of that to tell their story in the language (vernacular humble farmhouse, Pascal, Arnauld, Nicole, and erudite) of his country and his times. A De Saci, and Tillemont, meditated those works, rapid sketch of it may be of use in directing which, as long as civilization and Christianity the attention of our readers to one of the most survive, will retain their hold on the gratitude remarkable episodes in ecclesiastical history.and reverence of mankind. There were given He whose journey lies from Versailles to innumerable proofs of the graceful good huChevreuse, will soon find himself at the brow mour of Henry the Fourth. To this seclusion *Reuchlin, Geschichte von Port-Royal. Der Kampf retired the heroine of the Fronde, Ann Genedes Reformirten und des Jesuistischen Katholicismus. vieve, Duchess of Longueville, to seek the 1 ter Band: bis zum Tode Angelica Arnauld. (Reuchlin, peace which the world could not give. Madame History of Port-Royal. The Struggle of the Reformed de Sevigne discovered here a place "tout and the Jesuitical Catholicism. 1st vol.: to the death of Angelique Arnauld.) 8vo. Leipsic, 1839. propre a inspirer le desir de faire son salut." From the Petit Trianon and Marly, there came | Mere Angelique, by which she has since been hither to worship God, many a courtier and celebrated in the annals of the church. many a beauty, heart-broken or jaded with the very vanity of vanities-the idolatry of their fellow mortals. Survey French society in the seventeenth century from what aspect you will, it matters not, at Port-Royal will be found the most illustrious examples of what imparted to that motley assemblage any real dignity or permanent regard. Even to the mere antiquarian, it was not without a lively interest. At the eve of his departure to the conquest of the holy sepulchre, the good knight, Matthieu de Marli, cast a wistful gaze over the broad lands of his ancestors, and intrusted to his spouse, Mathilde de Garlande, the care of executing some work of piety by which to propitiate the Divine favour, and to insure his safe return. A Benedictine monastery, for the reception of twelve ladies of the Cistertian order, was accordingly erected, in imitation of the cathedral at Amiens, and by the same architect. Four centuries witnessed the gradual increase of the wealth and dignity of the foundation. Prelates of the houses of Sully and Nemours enlarged its privileges. Pope Honorius III. authorized the celebration of the sacred office within its walls, even though the whole country should be lying under a papal interdict; and of the host consecrated on the profession of a nun, seven fragments might be solemnly confided to her own keeping, that, for as many successive days, she might administer to herself the holy sacrament. Yet how arrest by spiritual immunities the earthward tendency of all sublunary things? At the close of the reign of Henry IV., the religious ladies of Port-Royal had learned to adjust their "robes a grandes manches" to the best advantage. Promenades by the margin of the lake relieved the tedium of monastic life. Gayer strains of music than those of the choir, might be heard from the adjacent woods; and if a cavalier from Paris or Chevreuse had chanced to pursue his game that way, the fair musicians were not absolutely concealed nor inexorably silent. So lightly sat the burden of their vows on those amiable recluses, that the gayest courtier might well covet for his portionless daughter the rank of their lady abbess. Such at least was the judgment of M. Marion. He was advocate-general to Henry IV., and maternal grandfather of Jaqueline Marie Angelique and of Agnes Arnauld. Of the arts to the invention of which the moderns may lay claim, that of jobbing is not one. M. Marion obtained from "the father of his people" the coadjuterie of the abbey of Port-Royal for the high-spirited Jaqueline, then in her eighth year; and that of St. Cyr for the more gentle Agnes, over whom not more than five summers had passed. The young ladies renounced at once the nursery and the world. A single step conducted them from the leading strings to the veil. Before the completion of her first decade, Angelique, on the death of her immediate predecessor, found herself, in plenary right, the abbess and the ruler of her monastery; and, in attestation of her spiritual espousals, assumed the title and the name of the To the church, however, must not be imputed this breach of ecclesiastical discipline. In the ardour of his parental affections, the learned advocate-general was hurried into acts for which he would have consigned a criminal of lower degree to the galleys. He obtained the requisite bulls from Rome by forged certificates of his granddaughter's age; and to this treason against the holy see, Henry himself was at least an accessary after the fact. Hunting in the valley of Port-Royal, the gay momarch trespassed on the precincts of the sacred enclosure. To repel the royal intruder, a child, bearing in her hand the crosier, which bespoke her high conventional rank, issued from the gates of the abbey at the head of a solemn procession of nuns, and rebuked her sovereign with all the majesty of an infant Ambrose. Henry laughed and obeyed. Marion's detected fraud would seem to have passed for a good practical joke, and for nothing more. In the result, however, no occurrence ever contributed less to the comedy of life, or formed the commencement of a series of events more grave or touching. It would be difficult or impossible to discover, in the history of the church, the name of any woman who has left so deep an impress of her character on the thoughts and the conduct of the Christian commonwealth. The family of Arnauld held a conspicuous station among the noblesse of Provence, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In a later age, a member of that house enjoyed the singular honour of at once serving Catharine de Medicis as her procureur-general, and of defeating, sword in hand, at the head of his servants, the force sent to assassinate him on the day of St. Bartholomew. Returning to the bosom of the church, which had thus roughly wooed him, he transmitted his fortune and his office to his son, Antoine Arnauld, the husband of Catharine Marion. They were the happy parents of no less than twenty children. Of these the youngest was the great writer who has imparted to the name of Arnauld an imperishable lustre. Five of the daughters of the same house assumed the veil, in the abbey of Port-Royal. Their mother, Catharine Marion, was admitted in her widowed into that society. Pomponne, the minister of Louis XIV.; Le Maitre, unrivalled among the masters of forensic eloquence in France; and De Saci, the author of the best version of the Holy Scriptures into the French language, were three of her grandsons. Before her death, the venerable matron had seen herself surrounded, in the monastery and the adjoining hermitages, by eighteen of her descendants in the first and second generations; nor until the final dispersion of the sisterhood, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, had the posterity of Antoine and Catharine Arnauld ceased to rule in the house of which Mere Angelique had, seventy years before, been the renowned reformer. To those who believe that the psychological distinction of the sexes may be traced to physical causes, and that, where they neither marry nor are given in marriage, those distinctions | taught, the visible presence of her Redeemer will for ever disappear, the character of Ange- was daily manifested-all spoke to her of a lique is less perplexing than to the advocates high destiny, a fearful responsibility, and of of the opposite theory. Her understanding, objects for which all sublunary ties might well her spirit, and her resolves, were all essen- be severed, and a sacrifice wisely made of tially masculine. She was endued with the every selfish feeling. Nor need a Protestant various faculties by which man either extorts fear to acknowledge, that on a heart thus conor wins dominion over his fellow-men; secrated to the service of her Maker, rested with address, courage, fortitude, self-reliance, the holy influence, familiar to all who meekly and an unfaltering gaze fixed on objects at adore the great source of wisdom, and reveronce too vast to be measured and remote to ently acquiesce in his will. As a science, be discerned but by the all-searching eye of religion consists in the knowledge of the relafaith. Among the Israelites of old, she would tions between God and man; as a principle, in have assumed the office of judge; or would the exercise of the corresponding affections; have given out oracles in the forests of an- as a rule of duty, in the performance of the accient Germany. tions which those affections prescribe. The principle may thrive in healthful life and energy, though the science be ill understood and the rule imperfectly apprehended. For, after all, the great command is Love; and He from whom that command proceeded, is himself Love; and amidst all the absurdities (for such they were) of her monastic life, Angelique was still conscious of the presence of a Father, and found the guidance of a friend. When at the age of eleven years, Angelique became the abbess of Port-Royal, few things were less thought of by the French ladies of the Cistertian order than the rule of their austere founder. During the wars of the League, religion, by becoming a watchword, had almost ceased to be a reality; civil war, the apology for every crime, had debased the national character; and the profligacy of manners which the last generation expiated by their sufferings, may be distinctly paid back to the age of which Davila has written the political, and Bassompierre the social history. Society will still exert a powerful influence even over those by whom it has been abandoned. When Gabrielle d'Etrees reigned at the Louvre, beads were told and masses sung in neighbouring cloisters, by vestals who, in heathen Rome, would have been consigned to a living sepulchre. In a monastery, the spiritual thermometer ranges from the boiling to the freezing point with but few intermediate pauses. From the ecstasies of devotion there is but one step to disgust, and thence to sensuality, for most of those who dare to forego the aids to piety and virtue which divine wisdom has provided in the duties and the affections of domestic life. Born in the reign, and educated near the court, of a Bourbon, the lighter and more gentle elements of her nature found exercise even under the paralyzing influences of an ascetic life; for Angelique was gay and light of heart, and St. Benedict himself might have forgiven or applauded the playful sallies of his votary. In scaling the heights of devotion, she could call to her own aid, and that of others, all the resources of the most plaintive or impassioned music. To flowers, and to the glad face of nature, she gave back their own smiles with a true woman's sympathy. With such literature as might be cultivated within the walls of her convent, she was intimately conversant; and would have eclipsed Madame de Sevigne's epistolary fame, had it been permitted to her to escape from theological into popular topics. Concentrated within a domestic circle, and bestowed on a husband or a child, the affections, which she poured out on every human being who claimed her pity, would have burned with a flame as pure and as intense as was ever hymned in poetry or dreamed of in romance. A traveller on the highways of the world, she must have incurred every peril except that of treading an obscure and inglorious path. Immured by superstition in a cloister, she opened the way at once to sublunary fame and to an immortal recompense; and has left an example as dangerous as it may be seductive to feebler minds, who, in a desperate imitation of such a model, should hazard a similar self-devotion. Angelique, indeed, might be fitted for a nunnery; for such was the strength, and such the sacred harmony of her spirit, that while still a sojourner on earth, she seemed already a denizen of heaven. When a child, she un-ing at Port-Royal, it happened that a Capuchin derstood as a child; enjoying the sports, the friar sought and obtained permission to preach rambles, and the social delights which the there. Of the man himself, the chroniclers of habits of Port-Royal had not then forbidden. the house have left a scandalous report; but With advancing years came deeper and more they gratefully acknowledge the efficacy of his melancholy thoughts. She felt, indeed, (how sermon. Angelique listened, and was concould she but feel?) the yearnings of a young verted. Such, at least, is her own statement; heart for a world where love and homage and unstirred be all the theological questions awaited her. But those mysteries of our being, connected with it. How deep was the impresof which the most frivolous are not altogether sion on her mind, may be gathered from her unconscious, pressed with unwonted weight own words;-" Often," she exclaims, "did I on her. A spouse of Christ; a spiritual wish to fly a hundred leagues from the spot, mother of those who sustained the same awful and never more to see my father, mother, or character-her orisons, her matins, and her kindred, dearly as I love them. My desire was vesper chants, accompanied by unearthly to live apart from every one but God, unknown music and by forms of solemn significance; to any human being, concealed and humble, the Gothic pile beneath which she sat en- with no witness but himself, with no desire throned; and the altar where, as she was but to please him." Her dignity as abbess While this downward progress was advanc she now regarded as a burden. Even her himself then hazarded an encounter with the projected reforms had lost their interest. To formidable termagant. He returned with a live where her holy aspirations would be whole skin, but boasted no other advantage. thwarted, and where examples of holiness Next appeared at the abbey gates a band of would not be found, was to soar to a more archers. After two days of fruitless expostulaarduous, and therefore a more attractive sphere tions, they broke into the enclosure. Madame of self-denial. now changed her tactics. She took up a defensive position, till then unheard of in the science of strategy. In plain terms, she went to bed. A more embarrassing manœuvre was never executed by Turenne or Condé. The siege was turned into a blockade. Hour after hour elapsed; night succeeded to day, and day to night; but still the abbess was recumbentunapparelled, unapproachable. Driven thus to choose between a ludicrous defeat and a sore scandal, what Frenchman could longer hesitate? Bed, blankets, abbess and all, were raised on the profane shoulders of the archers, lifted into a carriage, and most appropriately turned over to the keeping of the Filles Penitentes at Paris. That such fascinations should dazzle a young lady in her seventeenth year, is, it must be confessed, no very memorable prodigy; but to cherish no ineffectual emotions was one of the characteristics of the Mère Angelique, as it is, indeed, of all powerful minds. To abdicate her ecclesiastical rank, and by breathing a tainted moral atmosphere, to nourish by the force of contrast the loftier Christian graces, were purposes ultimately executed, though for awhile postponed. She paused only till the sisterhood of Port-Royal should have acquired, from her example or teaching, that sanctity of manners in which her creed informed her that the perfection of our nature consists. To the elder ladies, the prospect had few charms. But the will of their young abbess prevailed. They laid at her feet their separate possessions, abandoned every secular amusement, and, closing the gates of their monastery against all strangers, retired to that uninterrupted discharge of their spiritual exercises to which their vows had consigned them. Much may be read, in the conventual annals, of the contest with her family to which the Mère Angelique was exposed by the last of these resolutions. On a day, subsequently held in high esteem as the "Journée du Guichet," her parents and M. D'Andilly, her eldest brother, were publicly excluded, by her mandate, from the hallowed precincts, despite their reproaches and their prayers, and the filial agonies of her own heart. That great sacrifice accomplished, the rest was easy. Poverty resumed his stern dominion. Linen gave place to the coarsest woollens. Fasting and vigils subdued the lower appetites; and Port-Royal was once more a temple whence the sacrifices of devotion rose with an unextinguished flame to heaven, thence, as it was piously believed, to draw down an unbroken stream of blessings to carth. Far different were the strains that arose from the neighbouring abbey of Maubisson, under the rule of Mde. d'Etrees. That splendid mansion, with its dependent baronies and forests, resembled far more the palace and gardens of Armida, than a retreat sacred to penitence and prayer. She was the sister of the too famous Gabrielle, to whose influence with Henry she was indebted for this rich preferment. Indulging without restraint, not merely in the luxuries but in the debaucheries of the neighbouring capitol, she had provoked the anger of the king, and the alarm of the general of the order. A visitation of the house was directed. Madame d'Etrees, imprisoned the visiters, and well-nigh starved them. A second body of delegates presented themselves. Penances, at least when involuntary, were not disused at Maubisson. The new commissioners were locked up in a dungeon, regaled with bread and water, and soundly whipped every morning. Supported by a guard, the general And now was to be gratified the lofty wish of Angelique to tread in paths where, unsustained by any human sympathy, she might cast herself with an undivided reliance on the Arm which she knew could never fail her. From the solemn repose of Port-Royal, she was called, by the general of the order, to assume the government of the ladies of Maubisson. Thetis passing from the ocean caves to the Grecian camp, did not make a more abrupt transition. At Maubisson, the compromise between religious duties and earthly pleasures was placed on the most singular footing. Monks and nuns sauntered together through the gardens of the monastery, or angled in the lakes which watered them. Fètes were celebrated in the arbours with every pledge except that of temperance. Benedictine cowls and draperies were blended in the dance with the military uniform and the stiff brocades of their secular guests; and the evening closed with cards and dice and amateur theatricals, until the curtain fell on scenes than which none could more require than friendly shelter. Toil and care might seem to have fled the place, or rather to have been reserved exclusively for the confessor. Even for him relief was provided. Considerately weighing the extent of the labours they habitually imposed on him, his fair penitents drew up for their common use certain written forms of self-arraignment. to which he, with equal tenderness, responded by other established forms of conditional absolution. But the lady entered, and Comus and his crew fled the hallowed ground which they had thus been permitted to defile. She entered with all the majesty of faith, tempered by a meek compassion for the guilt she abhorred, and strong in that virgin purity of heart which can endure unharmed the contact even of pollution. "Our health and our lives may be sacrificed," she said to her associates in this work of mercy; "but the work is the work of God:" and in the strength of God she performed it. Seclusion from the world was again established within the refectory and the domain of Maubisson. Novices possessing a "genuine vocation" were admitted. Angelique directed |