From The Quarterly Review. to have arrived to introduce to our readers the resuits of recent investigation and analysis, and to do for the "Eagle of Meaux" what a few years ago we endeavored to do for the recluse of Port Royal. To criticise in detail the works named at the head of this article would be beside our purpose; enough to say that they are for the most part highly eulogistic, and show that it has been a labor of love with their authors to throw light on the nature of Bossuet's genius, and to display the force of his character and the achievements of his intellect. Indeed in some the admiration is so indiscriminate and excessive as to confound the functions of the advocate and of the judge, notably in the case of M. Poujoulat, who professes to inaugurate a cult of Bossuet, and devotes his book to the purpose of unveiling the "unknown god" before the gaze of the worshippers, who have hitherto adored in faith rather than with knowledge. So serious a specimen as this, however, of what Macaulay styled "the lues Boswelli Of the recent French literature upon Bossuet, the famous Bishop of Meaux, a portion of which is named below, but little we believe is known to English readers. It originated in the impulse given about forty years ago, by M. Victor Cousin, to a critical examination of the texts in which were current the works of the best French writers of the seventeenth century, by whom chiefly the language had been developed and fixed; and it was stimulated by the discovery shortly afterwards of the long-lost biographical work of the Abbé le Dieu, who had been Bossuet's secretary during the last twenty years of that great prelate's life. Unlike, however, the literature upon Pascal, which had the same origin, the modern critical works upon Bossuet are exclusively French, and appear to have attracted little notice out side the country of their birth; a fact, we conceive, highly significant of the interval which separated his genius from that of the author of the "Provincial Letters "ana, or disease of admiration," peculiarly and the "Thoughts." Under these circumstances, now that no further discov. eries are to be expected, and time has at last irrevocably stamped out the whole policy, both in Church and State, to the support of which Bossuet devoted his splendid abilities, a fitting occasion seems 3. Mémoires et Journal sur la vie et les ouvrages incident to biographers and editors, is strictly exceptional, so far as our acquaintance with this voluminous literature has extended: the warmth of M. Poujoulat's fellow-eulogists, even in its excesses, does not make them overstep the bounds of decency; and their admiration, though occasionally irritating in the loudness of its tones, may plead a great deal in its excuse. For Bossuet is unquestionably one of the glories of France, and to a patriotic Frenchman it would naturally seem as sacrilegious to lay a hostile hand on the pedestal of his fame, as it would to a de Bossuet, de l'Abbé le Dieu, publiés pour la pre-patriotic Englishman to impugn the right mière fois d'après les manuscrits autographes, et of our nearly contemporary Milton to his accompagnés d'une introduction et de notes. Par seat in the pantheon of our country's l'Abbé Guettée. 4 vols. Paris, 1856. 4 Lettres sur Bossuet à un Homme d'Etat. Par worthies. There are many much less J. J. F. Poujoulat. Paris, 1854. pardonable literary errors than the exag 5. Etudes sur la Vie de Bossuet. Par P. A. Flo-gerations into which the biographical stu quet. 4 vols. Paris, 1855-1864. 6. La Politique de Bossuet. Par J. F. Nourrison. dent is betrayed when, in lovingly tracing the lineaments he has learned 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, FE like the Abbé Guettée, his defence of the | that half of the immense collection was Gallican liberties against papal encroach- never sent to press by Bossuet at all, ment renders his memory too dear for and only saw the light at various periods impartial criticism; though what the im- after his death, as circumstances induced perious prelate would have thought of the those into whose hands the manuscripts abbé's secession to the Greek commun- fell, to give them to the world. Of two ion because the congregation of the Holy hundred sermons, extant in whole or in Office placed his history of the French part, he himself never published more Church on the prohibited list, cannot for than seven, and even those reluctantly, at a moment be doubted. Others again, like the urgency of friends. His great Latin the Abbé Réaume, though vehement Ul work, in defence of the declaration of the tramontanes, yet for the sake of Bossuet's liberties of the Gallican Church adopted vigorous onslaughts on Protestantism, are by the assembly of the clergy in 1682, by willing to condone his heterodoxy about some esteemed the noblest fruit of his the pope, and to excuse it as being less pen, was suppressed by him for political the fault of the man than of his times. If reasons, and only crept into print forty each side finds something to palliate or to years after his death, under circumstances condemn, as the varied scenes of Bos- which gave Count J. de Maistre plausible suet's activity pass under review, each ground for questioning its authenticity, or discerns in the whole man so command- at least its conformity with Bossuet's real ing a personality, such an intellectual sentiments. Of the half-dozen treatises force and practical energy of character - most of them elaborate works comthat the blemishes remain scarcely vis-posed by him for the instruction of the ible, and the whispered censure becomes Dauphin, only one, the celebrated "Disalmost inaudible amidst the chorus of praise. course on Universal History," was given by the author himself to the public. Even his own favorite work, the "Politics drawn from the very Words of Holy Scripture," 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. In the literature of which we are speaking, one thing stands out with supreme clearness: this, namely, that notwith-retouched and completed by him in the standing 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 times 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 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 Bossuet 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 encroach. ing 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 ecclesiastical 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 evi. dently 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 the 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 ecclesi. astic 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 | Versailles, by a mortal sickness, supposed says, "I Imagination cannot conceive of to have been the effect of poison adminhim 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 in troduction 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. istered 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 ill-fated 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 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 cour tiers, who at the same time expressed a regret that the proprieties of the pulpit would scarcely admit of his mentioning a circumstance so honorable 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 vir tues of the departed, Bossuet found occasion to commemorate not only her liber ality, but the pleasing grace with which she enhanced the value of her gifts. In 1669 Bossuet had delivered his cele." This art of giving gracefully," he added, brated 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 Ordained deacon at twenty-two, and priest three years later, when he also took his degree as doctor of theology and pub. licly dedicated himself, soul and body, to the defence of the truth, he made Metz his headquarters for the next twenty years, pursuing his studies in patristic lore, preaching assiduously in the town and neighborhood, 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 minister 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 sinners who surrounded Louis XIV. could not pass comfortably to their account without the support of his death-bed 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. "which she so well practised in life, accompanied her I know it into the very arms of death." Those three words, "Je le sais," pronounced with a sudden emphasis and a gesture of the hand sparkling 66 During his tenure of this office we find Bossuet growing in influence with the king, corresponding with the pope about the Dauphin's education, and laying more broadly the foundations of his fame as the champion of established institutions, and the scourge of heresy and novelty. Nor was it only by his intellectual force and resolute bearing in controversy that he won respect and esteem; he is described as simple in habits, courteous and candid, full of sweetness and kindliness, a man to draw real friends around him and keep them attached by personal affection. Indeed, in a secret report, which has been recently unearthed among the papers of Colbert, he is described as " an adroit and insinuating spirit, endeavoring to please all with whom he associates, and profess ing the opinions which he finds them to hold." It is a truer, as well as pleasing picture, which one of his biographers gives, when he sketches him taking his afternoon walks in the Philosopher's Alley at Versailles, attended by the most cultivated of his clerical colleagues, like a father surrounded by his council, Bible in hand, interpreting a text, explaining a Hebraism, or solving a difficulty, while they freely added their several contributions of science or philosophy, exegesis or historical anecdote, and almost forgot his superiority in the charm of his deference and modesty. more with the well-known jewel, electrified the | to his teacher. "Madame," said the prince brilliant audience, which was as much abruptly one day to a lady who happened moved by admiration of the orator's ad- to speak in his presence of some intense dress in dealing with so delicate a matter, sorrow of her life, Madame, had you as it had been previously thrilled by his ever to compose themes?" "No, your pathos in depicting the consternation of Highness," she answered, in surprise at that night of horror, when the precincts so odd a question. Then," rejoined the of the court rang with the terrible cry, lad, "don't talk any more of misery, for "Madame is dying - Madame is dead!" you don't half know what it really is." Nearly a year before, Bossuet had been nominated by the king to the see of Condom; but owing to the illness and death of the pope, Clement XI., and the long vacancy that ensued, twelve months elapsed before the bulls necessary to his consecration arrived from Rome. Just a week before the day fixed for the ceremony, he was unexpectedly appointed tutor to the dauphin, then nine years old, the only legitimate son of Louis who survived in fancy. For this responsible office his learning and ability, joined to the solidity and spotless purity of his character, designated him as the most proper person to be found in all France; and his well-known leaning to absolutism was a further strong recommendation. But at first the two offices of bishop and tutor seemed to him incompatible; it would be impossible, he felt, while residing at the court, to do his duty by a diocese in the extreme south of the kingdom. For a time he was sorely perplexed. Every preparation having been made for his immediate consecration, he could scarcely recede at the last moment without ecclesiastical scandal; yet his friends assured him that the Church would suffer more by his burying himself in a remote province. Besides, the king poohpoobed his scruples, said he was determined to have a bishop for his son's tutor, and ordered him to go forward at once with his consecration. In the end Bossuet yielded to the royal wish; but after A few remarks may here be devoted to nominally holding the bishopric for thir-the two most important of the works comteen months, just long enough to defray the costs of institution, he very honorably resigned it, and gave his undivided attention to the education of the young prince. For ten years he labored at this difficult and delicate task with unwearied diligence, and to the entire satisfaction of his royal master, cheerfully resuming the classical studies which he had long laid aside, and exhausting all the resources of his great intellect to train up worthily the heir of the first throne in Christendom. Unfortunately the soil which he tilled was too thin and poor to repay such high cultiva tion, and the pupil's constitutional incapacity of attention rendered his lessons as bitter to himself as they were irksome posed by Bossuet as text-books for his royal pupil, the "Politics" and the “Universal History." The former was intended to be a manual for kings of their rights and their duties. In order and method it has a geometrical character, being drawn out in a series of formal propositions; in substance it is the defence of a despotism, qualified by nothing but the royal conscience. Starting from the assumption that the monarchical polity of the Jews was a divine ideal, Bossuet undertakes to exhibit in the very words of Scripture a perfect system of government. With the doctrine of legitimacy he does not trouble himself; the king de facto, as soon as his power is consolidated, is rep. |