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he held to be pure and sovran truth in the face of a superstitious error. The Bishop of Evreux and his compeers, forgetting or overlooking the very different signification once intended by the word substance,' frankly demanded a reception for the doctrine of transubstantiation as taught by the Council of Trent: viz. for the corporeal presence in the Eucharist of the whole substance (matter and form) of the Body of Christ, by virtue of a miraculous power of consecration residing in every celebrant. This the Huguenot denied, since he beheld in the Sacrament only a pious and thankful commemoration of the death of Christ; and in anxiety to get this opinion of his friend's condemned, the King seemed curiously able to forget that he had ever himself been a professor of such a tenet. Perhaps the disputants did not wish to come to terms, or even to modify the expression of their dissidence; certainly no healer of the breach was there to give a less material meaning to the 'substance' in dispute, or to suggest to Du Plessis that a Divine Presence in the creatures of bread and wine' might be spiritually discerned. The King, so far from mediating in any way, rather hurried on an unfavourable verdict; the book was condemned, and the author left the place, dispirited and ill, partly,' says his wife, from overwork, partly from the heart-break (crêve-cour) of seeing himself so treated, but ' above all, that all that he had dreamed of for the instruction of the people, and for the edification of many should have turned to trouble and scandal, to which he would have pre'ferred a thousand deaths.'

Sully's account of this disputation is not favourable to Du Plessis, in spite of his own Protestant sympathies and convictions. He had endeavoured, but in vain, to prevent the encounter by the King's authority. Du Perron, the Bishop of Evreux, was no bigot, but he succeeded in showing that Du Plessis had erred in many of his citations, and that he had not thought enough upon the subject. La chose se passa ainsi qu'un chacun sait: Du Plessis se défendit à faire pitié, et en sortit à sa honte.' What do you think of your Pope?" said Henry to Sully during the argument, 'for Du Plessis is 6 among Protestants what the Pope is to Catholics.' I think, Sire,' replied the sage Minister, that he is more Pope than you imagine, for he is at this moment giving a red hat to M. d'Evreux. If our religion had no better support than his 'crossed arms and legs, I would quit it instantly.'*

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Du Plessis returned to Saumur, to a government once

bestowed on him by a friendly and grateful master; and there he attended to its affairs, but unluckily not in silence. He published, as Madame Charlotte tells us, an account of the conference, of its sentence, and of its injustice. The King was incensed by this publicity, and himself so long faithless in the spirit, he brought a charge of faithlessness against his secretary, deprived him of the superintendence of the mines, and disgraced him.

The account of M. du Plessis' sufferings both in mind and body is pathetic in the extreme, but our space does not permit us to trace out the consequent reverses of the governor; neither does it allow us to describe either how his great school rose at La Flêche, or how it was ruthlessly destroyed by a king who wished to hand it over to the Jesuits, or yet how he laboured at the formation in Saumur of one of those Protestant academies which then adorned the provincial cities of France. Of this college (as of its contemporaries at Die, Vitré, Castres, Orthez, Sedan, Nismes, and La Rochelle) no trace now remains, and yet this was but one out of the many schools full of vigorous intellectual life which were lost to France by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Of the whole number Montauban alone remains. In Saumur all memory of the academy has faded, though the name of one street in the town certainly points to the presence of a Protestant temple,' and another yet recalls its old Protestant governor, Philip du PlessisMornay.

There at Saumur, where he continued to dwell after his disgrace at court, his domestic troubles also greatly increased. In October, 1605, his son Philip, the one for whom Madame Charlotte wrote the memoirs, was killed in battle in Flanders. Blessed close of life,' cries the heart-broken mother, for one born in the Church and brought up in the fear of God to fall in action, and in an honourable cause; but for us his parents only the beginning of a grief that can but end with our lives.' This prediction was soon verified. Madame du Plessis never recovered from the shock; and in a month after the funeral of their heir, her husband found himself in constant attendance at her death-bed. Her pen had been laid aside:- Reasonable it is,' she wrote on the last half page, that this my book should close with him, since it was only undertaken to describe to him our pilgrimage through life; and it has pleased God that ere this his own should more sweetly and swiftly close. Were it not that I dread the grief for M. du Plessis, I should be greatly wearied if I also survive him.' She did

not survive him, since she died on the night of Sunday, 14th of May, 1506

'Non, ce n'est point mourir;

C'est courir à la vie,'

her husband said; but then, in spite of this sure and certain hope, his grief broke out again :—

'Âme, pour te chanter il me faut des sirènes,

Âme, pour te pleurer j'ay besoin de fontaines.'

As the years went on his prospects did not brighten, and at last he left Saumur. He bade farewell to the black impregnable castle that stands above the river-to the westering links of Loire as they disappear into the Forest of the Nyd d'Öyseau -to the temple where he had worshipped, and to the narrow streets above whose sombre courtyards the shadow of his historical griefs still seems to hang. He retired to his estates, and to the Castle of La Forêt-sur-Sèvre. There he fell a prey to the triple evils of solitude, sorrow, and ill health; and he was harassed by petty squabbles among the pastors of his church. In his despair he determined to travel, concerned only that, wherever it might fall, some pious stranger should bury his body, and record that the exile had died as true to his convictions as to his king. This last was a needless care, for he never left France. Death came to him there to unriddle the mystery of such an unsuccessful life; and he sickened at home in November, 1623, of what is called continued fever." Preachers and physicians crowded round his pillow. The latter were helpless, and the former were pitiless, harassing his departing spirit with small quarrels and doctrinal niceties. But at last one pastor, more humane than the others, told him that he was dying. It is well,' he replied; I am content.' He gave his blessing to his children, and to the church that was in Saumur, forgave his enemies, and made himself ready for the end; and then as the grey and cheerless November dawn struggled up above the leafless forest trees, his spirit took its flight to the home of the saintly and the victorious.

The Church for which he had laboured and suffered was just entered on the enjoyment of her hundred years of peace, to be awakened from her repose by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and then to be cast out of France as a thing heretical, unnational, disloyal, and accurst. It was a mistake at which humanity shuddered at the time, and which history has had ever since to deplore. By an act of tardy justice, the legislation of the 18th Germinal (in the tenth year of the Republic) secured to French Protestants equal civil rights

with the rest of their countrymen, and they have ever since been allowed a fair share in the State. What has been the result of a measure which kings so long thought to be either dangerous or impossible? The late war furnishes an answer to the question. Foremost in all works of mercy the Protestants and their pastors have taken their part, or more than their part, in the care of the wounded and the dying, and Protestants of Alsace, forcing their way through lines of watchful Germans and by the defiles of the Vosges, joined the levies of the east of France in sufficient numbers to justify M. Erckmann's boast, that he and his coreligionists are French in spirit and in love. Furthermore, we hope that it is not to trespass too much on private feelings if we venture to recall one fact connected with this new edition of the Memoirs of Madame de Mornay. Since it saw the light in 1869, the accomplished lady who prepared it has herself had to send to the ramparts of Paris all the males of her house, with the single exception of her father, that veteran statesman of eighty-three, who still serves France with his energies, while he represents her in all that the country has of best. To lay down Madame de Witt's volume at this moment is but to turn, we confess, from one sad page of past past French history to another only too vividly present. But if in the sixteenth century frantic passions could be calmed, guilty excesses repressed, and internal wounds healed, as we know them to have been by the prudent, powerful, and economical government of Henri IV., surely in the nineteenth century we need not altogether despair. Yet may France venture to borrow a motto from one of her old Huguenot houses, and live to prove what the De la Tremouilles once carved upon the walls of Vitré, Resurgam!'-although in her long and varied history she has not experienced a crisis of disaster and revolution more terrible than that of the present hour.

ART. VIII.-1. Ierne. A Tale. By W. STEUART TRENCH, Author of Realities of Irish Life.' 2 vols. London: 1871.

2. Irish Federalism: its Meaning, its Objects, and its Hopes. By ISAAC BUTT. Dublin: 1870.

IT

T is generally admitted that about forty years ago there was hardly any country which afforded to the sketcher of human character a more picturesque and original field than Ireland. The social anomalies engendered through the whole frame of

society by unequal laws, gave an unbounded variety of play to the Celtic temperament, and presented to the novelist and poet a greater mixture of lights and shadows than could be found in happier lands or in less turbulent times. To the inspiration of this exciting period we owe all the best Irish novels; for it is more than a generation since we began to be entertained with the graphic and amusing illustrations of Irish life and manners by the Banims, Carleton and Griffin, the Munster legends of Croker, and the traits and stories of Barrington, Otway, and Lover; and we must go back still further to the romantic tales of Lady Morgan and the unsurpassed Irish pictures of Miss Edgeworth. The conditions of Irish novelwriting have since become less favourable; for English law, by reducing to order a most formidable scene of confusion, and introducing vast changes and ameliorations which have touched every nerve of Irish social life, has put an end to the more startling contrasts, and all but destroyed that sort of picturesqueness in which, as Sydney Smith observed, utility and order are the last ingredients. Besides, a great change has come over the temper of the Irish people during the last thirty years. It was always considered strange that a race existing for ages under conditions that might well darken the lot and sour the temper of any people, should have possessed a temperament so lively and mirthful- Miraris, ' tam exhilaratam esse nostram servitutem?'—yet there are indications that the thoughtless and warm-hearted gaiety, which the weight of adversity could not crush, has yielded to other influences, and that, to use the words of an Irish novelist, the native humour of the people is not so rich and racy as in days of yore.' Whether we may trace this change to the famine, or to emigration, or to political and religious causes, the fact is undoubted that the Irishman has become more bitter and more sad than his ancestors of former generations. It would be all but impossible to find now in the south of Ireland-and certainly not in any modern Irish novel-the peasant of Sir Jonah Barrington, so full of sportive eccentricities, irascible but good-natured, furious without revenge, and violent without animosity, using a language replete with the keenest humour and the rarest idiom of equivocation. Englishmen, with their scanty knowledge of Irish character, too fondly anticipated that, after the liberal legislation of forty years, we should reap an ample harvest of gratitude and confidence, that the strenuous old impulse of opposition would disappear, and that feelings of resentment and distrust would die out under the many proofs of English anxiety to do justice.

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