est allusion to the business which had brought us to Rome.'

This, although far from a brilliant or flattering solution, was the most favorable they had any ground to hope. Lacordaire was quite prepared for it; and, on the whole, hardly regretted that he had come. It was his first visit to Rome, and he was not only vividly impressed by the genius of the place, but juster and broader views of ecclesiastical policy broke upon him. The journalist, the bourgeois of 1830, the Democrat-Liberal, had comprehended at the first glance not merely the majesty of the supreme Pontificate, but its difficulties, its long and patient designs, its indispensable ménagements for men and things of here below. In this noble heart the faith of the Catholic priest and the sense of duty had instantly got the better of all the fumes of pride, all the seductions of talent, all the intoxication of the struggle: with the penetration bestowed by faith and humility, he anticipated the judgment on our pretensions which has been ratified by time, that grand auxiliary of the Church and of Truth.'

Not so de la Mennais, whose pride was mortified to the quick. His position was widely different from that of his young and comparatively obscure associates. He, 'the last of the Fathers,' to be neglected and snubbed on the scene of his former

glories, in the very Vatican where his portrait had been hung by pontifical grace among the Saints! In vain did Lacordaire repeat, One of two things: either we should not have come, or we should submit and hold our tongues.' No, de la Mennais would not hear of silence or submission. He replied, 'I will hasten and provoke an immediate decision, and I will await it at Rome; after which I will consider what is to be done.' Lacordaire left Rome for France, saying, 'Silence, next to speech, is the second power of the world.' The Abbé waited four months, and then, losing patience, left Rome, openly announcing his intention to return to France and recommence the publication of 'L'Avenir.' Montalembert had remained, and now left with him. They took Munich on their way, where accidentally (he says, providentially) they fell in again with Lacordaire; and the three were together when they were overtaken by the Encyclical epistle of 15th August, 1832, directly provoked by the parting threats of de la

Mennais and manifestly condemning, without naming, most of his new doctrines. 'Our submission was immediate and unreserved. It was immediately published, and we returned to Paris, "vanquished victors over ourselves," according to the expression of him amongst us who had so well foreseen and accepted the defeat.' He added, with Montaigne: Il y a des défaites triomphantes à l'envi des victoires.

The enforced submission of de la Men

nais was hollow and formal. In his inmost soul he had already broken with the Church, and sworn war to the knife against his clerical brethren. Within three years he published his 'Paroles d'un Croyant,'-a complete manual of socialism, a wild diatribe which would have satisfied even the philosopher who longed for the day when the last king would be strangled with the entrails of the last priest. Seven crowned heads are in consultation over a bowl of blood, with a human skull for a drinking-cup, round a throne of human bones, with their feet resting on a reversed crucifix. The question is how most effectively to enslave the minds and bodies of men; and it is carried nem. con. that they must begin by abolishing the religion of Christ :

Then the seventh, having like the others drunk in the skull, spoke thus with his feet upon the crucifix. "No more Christ: there is war to the death, eternal war between him and us.

But

how to detach the people from him. It is a vain attempt. Then what is to be done. Listen to me: we must gain the priests of Christ with property, honor, and powers. And they will command the people in the name of Christ to be subdain what we like. missive to us in all things, do what we like, orAnd the people will believe them, and obey by conscience, and our power will be firmer than ever." And all replied: "It is true: let us gain the priests of Christ."

This publication left Montalembert, who had faithfully stood by de la Mennais through good and evil report, no alternative but to concur with Lacordaire in separating from him.

It would be taking a most erroneous view of Montalembert's character to suppose that the affair of the 'Avenir' or the expedition to Rome exclusively occupied his attention or his time. Like our present Premier, he had the invaluable gift of being able to prevent or relieve any undue strain upon the mind by incidental objects of interest. He could say with Fénelon le changement des études est toujours un délassement pour moi. During

the interval before leaving Paris, in the very heat of the struggle, he kept up his communication with the literary world, mixed in the society of the noble Fauxbourg, attended the debates in the Chamber of Peers (in which he was disqualified from taking part till twenty-five), and was occasionally seen at those places of amusement which formed the chief attractions of his equals in rank and age. He has a discriminating eye for genius and pretension, ugliness and beauty. He has a marked liking for Victor Hugo, but then Victor Hugo at that time was expecting the regeneration of the world to emanate from the Church of Rome, and dreamt of a confederation of nations under the presidency of the Pope. He sets a black mark against one salon by saying that he met in it only obscure doctrinaires and ugly women.' 'It is pleasant,' says Mrs. Oliphant, referring to the Journal, to find our young champion of the church betrayed into warm though momentary commendation of Taglioni, whose modest and poetic grace of movement was so different from the bacchanalian feats of the more recent ballet. He declares with fervour that nobody has danced like her since the epoch of Christianity, and that she is divine.'

We have said that he lingered at Florence on his way to Rome. He lingered there as well to enjoy the society and co-operate in the pursuits of his learned and accomplished friend, Rio, as to indulge in a newly-formed friendship of that intense, devoted kind of which we read in ancient story but find few examples in our tamer, colder, more matter-of-fact society. You know,' he had written to one of his first friends, M. Cornudet, 'you know that friendship is the only movement of the soul in which excess is permissible.' He had not yet tried love, although he yearned for it. This new friendship is recorded, portrayed, and illustrated with grace, refinement, and delicacy of touch, in the 'Récits d'une Soeur,' a romance of real life; in which scenes of pure affection and simple pathos, softened by melancholy and elevated by faith, supply the almost total absence of passion, incident and plot. It is the story of Albert de la Ferronays and his young bride their courtship, their marriage, and his death in the bloom of youth

'Manibus date lilia plenis, Purpureos spargam flores, animamque nepotis His saltem accumulem donis, et fungar inani Munere.'

It is told by his sister, Mrs. Augustus Craven, and told inimitably well; but we must warn off the novel readers whose taste has been formed in the sensational

school-procul, oh! procul este, profani. They must chasten their thoughts, repent their sins, and get absolution before they venture upon it, or they will be found soliloquising like Guinevere :

'I thought I could not breathe in that pure air, That pure serenity of perfect light,

I wanted life and color

The main bond of union between Montalembert and Rio was their common view of Art: they were unwearied in their investigations and inquiries; and we suspect that Montalembert was quite as much interested in the establishment of their favorite æsthetic theory, as in the vindication of 'L'Avenir.' This was, that Art, in all its forms or manifestations, came nearest to perfection in proportion to the amount of Christianity with which it was imbued or permeated; and M. Fossier claims for them the credit of being the first to perceive and prove that there is a Christian art, as there is a Christian literature or a Christian civilisation. But was it ever denied that there is an art which sprang from Christianity, Roman Catholic Christianity, and is marked by the ascetic character of that faith? Henry Heine, accepting it as a recognised fact, says (in 1835) that it was necessary as a wholesome reaction against the gloomy colossal materialism which had unfolded itself in the Roman empire and (he might have added) against the sensual materialism of Greece. "The flesh had become so wanton in the Roman world, that the monastic discipline might well be necessary to mortify it. After the feast of a Trimalchion, there was need of a fasting regimen.' After pointing out the signs of it in poetry, he says, 'Less favorable was this religion upon the plastic arts. For these two were obliged to represent the victory of spirit over matter. Hence in sculpture and painting those frightful subjects: martyrdoms, crucifixions, dying saints, and mortification of the flesh. Verily, when one goes through many a picture-gallery, and sees nothing represented but scenes

of blood and torture, one might believe that the old masters had painted their pictures for the gallery of an executioner.' But it was in architecture that the influence was most marked ::

'When we now enter an old cathedral, we hardly feel any longer the exterior sense of its stone-work symbolicism. Only the general impression strikes immediately into the soul. We here feel the elevation of the spirit and the prostration of the flesh. The interior of the cathe

dral is itself a hollow cross, and we there walk in the very instrument of martyrdom. The variegated windows cast their red lights upon us, like drops of blood: funeral hymns are trembling

round us; under our feet, tombstones and corruption; and the spirit struggles with the colossal pillars, towards heaven, painfully tearing itself asunder from the body, which drops, like a wornout garment, to the ground.'

The distinction between sacred music and profane is self-evident. Everyone sees the incongruity of playing 'The Last Rose of Summer' or 'Cherry Ripe' on an organ in a church. And everyone will see on reflection the equal incongruity of replacing The Descent from the Cross,' in the cathedral at Antwerp, by one of Titian's voluptuous beauties or a bacchanalian piece by Rubens. Yet M. Fossier asks as if he was contending against a paradox: 'Is it true, yes or no, that a church is not a theatre? Given this, is it true, yes or no, that, in the house of prayer, everything ought to incline us to pray, the painting, the statues, the music,-all like the architecture? Is it true, yes or no, that consequently the Christian subjects ought to be treated with absolutely the same absence of faith as the mythological subjects? Is it true that the image of Jesus Christ ought not to be that of Jupiter, nor the image of the Virgin that of Venus?' But no one says they ought. Neither ought pictures painted for altarpieces to be hung up over mantel-pieces in dining-rooms; nor is the enjoyment of a company met for social pleasure in a saloon or ball-room promoted by the representation of bodily suffering-of a saint on a gridiron or a saint without his skin. Montalembert distinguishes the schools thus: Fra Angelico and the Dispute of the Holy Sacrament, there is Christian art. The form studied for itself, studied anatomically, as in the "Last Judgment" of Michel Angelo, there is the naturalist school. The Fornarina sitting for the portrait of the Virgin-then the infamous imaginations painted by Julio Romano,

there is the Pagan art.' Is this quite fair? Are not the master-pieces of Rubens and Titian as much Pagan art as the 'infamous imaginations' of Julio Romano? And are these, and such as these to be proscribed, along with the Venuses and Apolios, because the contemplation of them does not dispose to prayer? The truth is, he would fain apply to art the same exclusive principle which he applied to education; it must be entirely pervaded by what he calls Christianity, or it is nought. At one of Rogers's breakfasts, Rio was asked what he thought of the He had his choice amongst pictures. masterpieces of all sorts. He led the inquirer up to two specimens of the preRaphaelite school, and said they were the only pictures in the collection that interested him. Montalembert in Overbeck's studio was animated by the same feeling: Overbeck, so famed a painter of Christianity, that people in the streets pointed him out with: Tiens, voilà Jésus-Christ. Besides Fra Angelico, Perugino, Cimabue, Giotto, and Fra "Bartolomeo, Montalembert must have held in especial reverence the painter Lorenzo Lotto, who went to Loretto to die painting the Virgin so as to be occupied with her to the last.

Some thirty years since the lower limbs of several allegorical female figures in St. Peter's were suddenly invested by papal order with robes or petticoats of tin, plastered over so as to resemble marble; and about the same time the King of Naples caused green muslin drawers to be distributed among the danseuses at San Carlos, with an especial injunction that they should never appear on the stage without this habiliment. These innovations were popularly attributed to Montalembert, who, on a second visit to Rome, had been received with marked favor by his Holiness. He was certainly guiltless of the green muslin drawers; his recollection of Taglioni would have saved him from such a solecism. But he may have recommended the tin petticoats in St. Peter's, and he would have been right; for without being a devotee of Christian art, a man of taste and feeling might have been scandalised at seeing (what he could hardly help seeing) the Madonna in the guise of a Venus, with Faith, Hope and Charity in the undress and attitude of the three Graces or the three heathen goddesses contending for the apple.

Coleridge used to say that an old Gothic cathedral always looked to him like a petrified religion. The Gothic is certainly the style of architecture which harmonises best with seriousness and solemnity: St. Peter's, St. Paul's, and the Cathedral of Florence, are rather palatial than ecclesiastical, and there is an Oriental look about the domes. Montalembert's enthusiasm, therefore, took a right direction in the eloquent appeal entitled, Du Vandalisme en France,' , in which he called on the French to respect their architectural treasures, especially their grand old cathedrals, as preservatives of their faith as well as monuments of their history.

It was during one of the frequent tours he made to inspect medieval buildings and monuments that he was inspired with the conception of his first sustained and eminently successful effort in literature, the History of Saint Elizabeth.' The opening sentences of the Introduction are these:

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"On the 19th of November, 1833, a traveller arrived at Marbourg, a town in the electorate of Hesse, situated upon the beautiful banks of the Lahn. He paused to examine the church, which was celebrated at once for its pure and perfect beauty, and because it was the first in Germany where the pointed arch prevailed over the round in the great renovation of art in the thirteenth century. This church bears the name of St. Elizabeth, and it was on St. Elizabeth's Day that he

found himself within its walls. In the church itself, which, like the country, is now devoted to the Lutheran worship, there was no trace of any special solemnity, except that in honor of the day, and contrary to Protestant custom, it was open,

and children were at play in it among the tombs. The stranger roamed through its vast, desolate, and devastated aisles, which are still young in their elegance and airy lightness. He saw placed against a pillar the statue of a young woman in the dress of a widow, with a gentle and resigned

countenance, holding in one hand the model of a church, and with the other giving alms to a lame The lady is then depicted, fairer than in all the other representations, stretched on her

man.

bed of death midst weeping priests and nuns; and lastly, bishops exhume a coffin on which an emperor lays his crown. The traveller was told that these were events in the life of St. Elizabeth, queen of that country, who died on that day six hundred years ago in that very town of Marbourg, and lay buried in that very church."

After his first visit to the church, he went to a bookseller, and inquired if there was a 'Life of St. Elizabeth.' The bookseller mounted to his garret and brought down a pamphlet covered with dust. Here is a

*Revue des Deux Mondes,' March, 1833.

Life of her,' he said, 'if you care about it: it is never asked for here.' Montalembert possessed himself of it as a prize, and found it the cold lifeless composition of a Protestant. But the sympathetic cord was struck, and he set about the study of her career with hourly increasing eagerness, consulting traditions, visiting every place that she had hallowed by her presence, and ransacking all the books, chronicles, and manuscripts in which mention was made of her, or which threw light on her contemporaries and her age. And what is really most valuable and most characteristic in the book is that which elucidates her age, especially the Introduction (135 pages royal octavo), in which he seeks to prove that the thirteenth century, in which she flourished, has been shamefully calumniated: that it was not merely the age in which the Papacy attained its culminating point of pride and power, but the age in which Christian literature and art, that is to say, what he deems the best and purest literature and art, approached nearer to perfection than they have ever approached since or are likely to approach again.

He is strong, indeed unassailable, in Gothic architecture; for almost all the finest cathedrals in Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, and England, were built or founded in the thirteenth century: strong in painting, for he can point to the early schools of Siena and Florence: strong in poetry, if we allow him Dante, born in 1265, and bear in mind the legendary poets and the Niebelungen;' but singularly weak, we think, when he tries to make out that this was also the age of social progress or legislation, and that the successors of St. Peter, who, like Innocent III., aspired to universal empire, were simply doing their duty in that state of life to which God had called them: that, in claiming to hold all the kings of the earth in humiliating vassalage, they had not a spark of mundane ambition and were merely vindicating the sacred liberties of the Church.*

* Pour lui (Innocent) la chrétienté entière n'est qu'une majestueuse unité, qu'un seul roy. aume, sans frontières intérieures et sans distinction des races, dont il est le défenseur intrépide au dehors, et le juge inébranlable et incorruptible au dedans' (p. xiii.). He did this, 'quoique sans cesse menacé et attaqué par ses propres sujets, les turbulents habitants de Rome.' He was not particular as to means, for 'il correspondait même avec les princes musulmans, dans l'intérêt de paix et de leur salut.' Of Honorius III. it is said,

'Malgré sa douceur, il se vit forcé de mettre l'empereur, une première fois, au ban de l'Eglise, en laissant à Grégoire IX. le soin de continuer le combat.' Le pauvre homme!

Whilst he was occupied with St. Elizabeth, he joined his friends Albert and Alexandrine, the hero and heroine of Le Récit d'une Sœur,' at Pisa, and she writes: How he loves this St. Elizabeth! He collects the smallest, the most minute details about her. He told me the other day a story of a knight who wore the colors of a saint who appeared to him in a dream.' There is another letter of hers which pleasantly illustrates the playfulness and versatility of

his mind and character:

"We all went to the Cascine: then (which amused us much) we all went to order a bonnet for me. At dinner Albert suddenly took the resolution of going to a ball which was to be given that evening, but which we had all three declined. I resisted, fearing that it might do him harm; but he insisted, and ended by saying, 'Je le veux.' He told my maid to prepare everything, and by degrees I allowed myself to be persuaded into the pleasant annoyance of making myself as pretty as possible (je me laissai faire la douce violence'). This occupied me entirely for two hours. To make the joke complete, we forced Montal to go with us.

We had hard work to succeed in this, for he had nothing to put on. Albert lent him almost everything. Then it was necessary to get a shoemaker for him, and a hairdresser to cut his hair. All this amused us immensely; and the end of all, which made us laugh more than all the rest, was that, recollecting all at once that we had no servant, we took the shoemaker's boy with us in that capacity to go with us to the ball!"

In May, 1835, he attained the age (twenty-five) at which a French peer was permitted to join in the debates: the right of voting being suspended till thirty. He broke ground as a debater on the 8th September, 1835, in opposition to a measure for the restriction of the press proposed by the Broglie and Thiers ministry. This was followed by other speeches, all of a liberal tendency, the general effect of which is described by Sainte-Beuve :

"When he reappeared in the Chamber," says Sainte-Beuve, "he had the right to say anything, to dare anything, so long as he retained that elegance of aspect and diction which never forsook

him.

He could utter with all freedom the most passionate pleadings for that liberty which was the only excess of his youth. He could develop without interruption those absolute theories which from another mouth would have made the Chamber shiver, but which pleased them from his. He could even give free course to his mordant and incisive wit, and make personal attacks with impunity upon potentates and ministers. In one or two cases the Chancellor called him to order for form's sake; but the favor which attends talent NEW SERIES.-VOL. XVIII., No. 1

Montalembert never wanted.

We are,

There is one remarkable quality in which Montalembert's writings, including the earliest, resemble Bolingbroke's. They be delivered as speeches, or parts of are rhetorical and declamatory: they might speeches, with full effect. To become an orator, the writer obviously wants nothing but voice, manner, and readiness, which therefore, surprised to learn from competent authorities (M. Fossier, confirmed by Mrs. Oliphant) that he began by speaking from copious notes, and did not trust to improvisation till it was forced upon When him by the exigencies of debate. what may be called his oratorical education was complete, he could not only introduce a prepared passage so as not to betray the preparation-which a master of the art, Lord Brougham, pronounces its highest achievement-but turn every pass, ing incident or interruption to account, and reply with telling force upon the instant to all or any who roused his indignation or his scorn. About the end of the debate on the Droit d'Enseignement in 1844, which had called out all his powers, he was fairly entitled to take rank amongst the best French orators of his day; none of whom, however, except perhaps Berryer in the Chamber of Deputies and Dupin at the Bar, can be placed in the highest class :: the habit of reading speeches (hardly extinct yet), and of speaking from the tribune, having checked the progress of parliamentary oratory in France. Montalembert did not shine by lofty sustained imagery, like Burke and Grattan, the objects of his early admiration; nor by polished rhetoric, flights of fancy, or strokes of humor, like Canning. His strength lay in earnestness, elevation of thought and tone, rapidity, ready command of energetic language, boldness, conviction, passion, heart. His vehemence, his vis vivida, was power: when he warmed to his subject, he carried all before him with a rush. He had all, or almost all, that is comprised in the action of Demosthenes. Sainte-Beuve says:

'He has few gestures, but he possesses the most essential qualities which produce successful action. His voice, pure and sustained (d'une

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