ever from all delights less elevated than those of a devotional life. He had not, however, long to await the proof that the exclusive use of this etherial dietary is unfriendly to the health both of these gross bodies of ours, and of the sluggish minds by which they are informed. The flesh revolted; and, to subdue the rebellion, ascetic rigours were required. Then (alas for the bathos) that base and unfortunate viscus, the stomach, racked his head with insufferable pains. Compelled at length to fly for relief to a Benedictine convent at Nogent, he there soothed his aching brows by traversing, and mourning over, the ruins which the impious ravages of the Huguenots had brought upon the monastic buildings. Then passing, for relief, to another monastery at Corbie, he recovered his health; through the intercession of St. Adelhard, the patron saint of the place, as he piously believed; though a less perfect faith might have been tempted to ascribe the cure to the active employments in the open air in which the abbot of Corbie compelled him to engage.

With restored health, Mabillon was next transferred, by the commands of his superior, to the royal abbey of St. Denys; there to act as curator of the treasures which the profaneness of a later age has scattered to the winds. This was no light trust. Amidst countless monuments of the illustrious dead, and of the greatness of the French monarchy, the collection contained one of the arms in which the aged Simeon had raised the infant Jesus in the Temple; and the very hand which the sceptical Thomas had stretched out to touch the wounded side of his risen Lord!

It was just one year before the birth of Mabillon, that the congregation of St. Maur had taken possession of the monastery of St. Germain des Près at Paris. At the time of his arrival at St. Denys, Dom Luc d'Achery, a Benedictine monk, was engaged at St. Germain's, in one of those gigantic undertakings to which Benard had invited his fraternity. It was a compilation from the libraries of France of the more rare and valuable letters, poems, charters, and chronicles relating to ecclesiastical affairs, which had been deposited in them either in later or remoter ages. These gleanings (for they were published under the name of Spicilegium), extend over thirteen quarto volumes. Such, however, were the bodily infirmities of the compiler, that, during forty-five years, he had never been able to quit the infirmary. There he soothed his occasional intermissions of pain and study, by weaving chaplets of flowers for the embellishment of the altars of the church of St. Germain's.

For the relief of this venerable scholar, Mabillon, then in his thirty-fifth year, was withdrawn from his charge of St. Denys

to St. Germain's; where he passed the whole of his remaining life in the execution of that series of works which have placed his name at the head of the competitors for the palm of erudition in what was once the most erudite nation of the world, at the period of her greatest eminence in learning. The commencement of his fame was laid in a demeanour still more admirable for self-denial, humility, and loving kindness. To mitigate the sufferings of D'Achery and to advance his honour, had become the devoted purpose of his affectionate assistant. Taking his seat at the feet of the old man, Mabillon humoured his weakness, stole away his lassitude, and became at once his servant, his secretary, his friend, and his confessor. From the resources of his far deeper knowledge, guided by his much larger capacity, he enabled D'Achery to complete his Spicilegium,-generously leaving him in possession of the undivided honour of that contribution to the literary wealth of France.

Nor was this the greatest of his self-sacrifices in thus gratifying the feelings of the aged antiquarian. Benard and the other brethren of the congregation had, from their first settlement at St. Germain, meditated a complete history of their Order. During forty successive years they had accumulated for the purpose a body of materials of such variety and magnitude as to extinguish the hopes and baffle the exertions of all ordinary men. Having found at length in Mabillon one fitted to 'grapple with ' whole libraries,' they committed to him the Titanic labour of hewing out of those rude masses, an enduring monument to the glory of Benedict and of his spiritual progeny. He undertook the task, in the spirit of obedience and of love. In the printed circular letters with which he solicited the aid of the learned, he joined the name of D'Achery to his own; and kept alive the same friendly fiction, by uniting their names in the title-page of every volume of the Acta Sanctorum Ordinis Sancti Benedicti, which appeared in D'Achery's lifetime.

The literary annals of France, though abounding in prodigies, record nothing more marvellous than the composition of that book by a single man, in the midst of other labours of almost equal magnitude. From the title alone it might be inferred that it was a mere collection of religious biographies; and, if such had been the fact, they who are the deepest read in Roman Catholic hagiology would probably prefer the perusal of the writers of ordinary romance; since, with less irreverence for sacred things, they are usually more entertaining, and not less authentic. For in recording the lives of those whom it is the pleasure of the Church to honour, her zealous children regard every incident redounding to their glory, as resting on so firm and broad a

basis of antecedent probability, as to supersede the necessity for any positive evidence; -nay, as to render impious the questioning of such testimonies as may be cited, even when most suspicious and equivocal. This argument from probability is especially insisted on, when any occurrences are alleged as miraculous that is, as improbable for, if probable, they cease to be miracles. Of these probable improbabilities, few writers are better persuaded or more profuse than Mabillon.

-

But apart from the extravagancies of his monkish legends, and in despite of them all, Mabillon's book will live in perpetual honour and remembrance as the great and inexhaustible reservoir of knowledge respecting the ecclesiastical, religious, and monastic history of the middle ages; and, therefore, though incidentally, respecting the secular condition and intellectual character of mankind during that period. In those nine folios lie, in orderly method and chronological arrangement, vast accumulations of authentic facts, of curious documents, and of learned disquisitions; like some rich geological deposit, from which the Genius of history may hereafter raise up and irradiate the materials of a philosophical survey of the institutions, habits, and opinions which have been transmitted from those remote generations to our own. Thence also may be readily disinterred picturesque narratives without end; and inexhaustible disclosures both of the strength and of the weakness of the human heart.

Nor will this knowledge be found in the state of rude and unorganised matter. Mabillon was not a mere compiler; but was also a learned theologian, and a critic and scholar of the first order. When emancipated from the shackles of human authority, he knew how to take a wide survey of the affairs of men, and could sketch their progress from age to age with a free and powerful hand. To each volume which he lived to complete, he attached a prefatory review of the epoch to which it referred; and those Prolegomena, if republished in a detached form, would constitute such a review of the ecclesiastical history of that perplexing period, as no other writer has yet given to the world. It would, indeed, be a review based throughout upon assumptions which the Protestant Churches with one voice contradict. But if, for the immediate purpose, those assumptions were conceded, the reader of such a work would find himself in possession of all the great controversies which agitated the Christian world during several centuries; and of the best solutions of which they are apparently susceptible. Nor is it an insignificant addition to their other merits, that the Latin in which these ponderous Tomes are written, if often such

as Cicero would have rejected, is yet better adapted than the purest Ciceronian style, for the easy and unambiguous communication of thought in modern times the phraseology and the grammar, those of the Court of Augustus; the idioms and structure of the sentences, not seldom those of the Court of Louis Quatorze.

In the reign of that most orthodox Prince, to have given assent to any fact on which the Church had not set the seal of her infallibility, was hazardous; much more so to dissent from any fact which her authority had sanctioned. Yet even this heavy charge was preferred against Mabillon by some of his Benedictine brethren, before a general chapter of the Order. Among the saints of whom the fraternity boasted, there were some whose relation to the Order he had disputed; some whose claims to having lived and died in the odour of sanctity he had rejected; some whose very existence he had denied. So at least we understand the accusation. His antagonists maintained that it was culpable, thus to sacrifice the edification of the faithful to a fastidious regard for historical evidence; and injurious, so to abandon a part of the glories of their society, which, by mere silence, might have been maintained inviolate. Among those who invoked the censure of their superiors on the reckless audacity of Mabillon's critical inquiries, the foremost was Dom Phillippe Bastide; and to him Mabillon addressed a defence, in every line of which his meekness and his love of truth beautifully balance and sustain each other.

It

'I have ever been persuaded,' he says, 'that in claiming for their order honours not justly due to it, monastic men offend against the modesty of the Gospel as grievously as any person who arrogates to himself individually a merit to which he is not really entitled. To pretend that this is allowable because the praise is desired, not for the monk himself, but for his order, seems to me no better than a specious pretext for the disguise of vanity. Though disposed to many faults, I must declare that I have ever had an insuperable aversion to this; and that therefore I have been scrupulous in inquiring who are the saints really belonging to my own order. is certain that some have been erroneously attributed to it, either from the almost universal desire of extolling, without bounds, the brotherhood of which we are members, or on account of some obscurity in the relations which have been already published. The most upright of our writers have made this acknowledgment; nor have the Fathers Yebez and Menard hesitated to reduce the number of our saints by omitting those whom they thought inadmissible. I thought myself also entitled to make a reasonable use of this freedom; though with all the caution which could be reconciled with reverence for truth. I commit the defence of my work to the Divine Providence. It was not of my own will that I engaged on it. My brethren did

me the honour to assign the task to me; and if they think it right, I shall cheerfully resign the completion of it to any one whose zeal may be at once more ardent and more enlightened than my own.'

In the Benedictine conclave the cause of historical fidelity triumphed, though not without a long and painful discussion. In proof of the touching candour which Mabillon exhibited as a controversialist, we are told that he spontaneously published one of the many dissertations against his book, to manifest his esteem and affection for the author of it. But before subscribing to this eulogium, one would wish to examine the arrow which he thus winged for a flight against his own bosom. Recluse as he was, he was a Frenchman still; and may have quietly enjoyed a little pleasantry even at the expense of a friend-for he was a man of a social spirit, and not altogether unskilled in those arts by which society is amused and animated.

The sick chamber of D'Achery was, however, the only Salon in which he could exert these talents. There, for the gratification of his aged friend, and, doubtless, for his own, he was accustomed on certain evenings to entertain a circle of scholars devoted, like themselves, to antiquarian researches. The hotels of Paris in his day were thronged with more brilliant assemblies,

even as, in our own times, Réunions of greater aristocratic dignity have adorned that Faubourg of St. Germain in which these gatherings of the learned took place. But neither the Bourbon Lilies nor the Imperial Eagles ever protected a society more distinguished by the extent and depth of the knowledge they were able to interchange. In that ill-furnished dormitory of the decrepid monk, might be seen Du Cange, reposing for a moment from his scrutiny into all the languages and histories of mankind; and Baluze, rich in inexhaustible stores of feudal and ecclesiastical learning; and D'Herbelot, unrivalled in oriental literature; and Fleury, in whom the Church of Rome reveres the most perfect of her annalists; and Adrian de Valois, whose superlative skill in decyphering the remains of the first dynasties of France was so amusingly combined with almost equal skill in finding fault with his own generation, as to provoke an occasional smile even in the most thoughtful of those grave countenances; and, more eminent than all these, Fénélon, then basking in the noon of royal favour, and Bossuet, in the meridian of his genius, who both, if not habitual guests at the monastery, lived in an affectionate confidence with Mabillon, which they were unable to maintain with each other.

Nor were these the only relations which he had formed with the world beyond his convent walls. The Jesuits, the Bollandists of Antwerp, and the chroniclers of the Carthusian and Cis