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of the church of St. Germain's. For the relief of this venerable scholar, Mabillon, then in his thirty-fifth year, was withdrawn from his charge of St. Denys to St. Germain's; where he passed the whole of his remaining life in the execution of that series of works which have placed his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 demeanor still more admirable for self-denial, humility, and loving kindness. To mitigate the sufferings of D'Achery and to advance his honor, had become the devoted purpose of his affectionate assistant. Taking his seat at the feet of the old man, Mabillon humored 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 honor of that contribution to the literary wealth of France. ted to "grapple with whole libraries," they committed to him the Titanic labor 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 labors 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 reverence 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 honor, 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 spite of them all, Mabillon's book will live in perpetual honor and remembrance, as the great and inexhaustible reservoir of knowledge respecting the ecclesiastical, religious, and monastic Nor was this the greatest of his self-sacri- history of the middle ages; and, therefore, fices in thus gratifying the feelings of the aged though incidentally, respecting the secular antiquarian. Benard and the other brethren condition and intellectual character of manof the congregation had, from their first set- kind during that period. In those nine folios tlement at St. Germain, meditated a complete lie, in orderly method and chronological arhistory of their order. During forty suc- rangement, vast accumulations of authentic cessive years they had accumulated for the facts, of curious documents, and of learned purpose a body of materials of such variety disquisitions; like some rich geological deand magnitude as to extinguish the hopes posit, from which the genius of history may and baffle the exertions of all ordinary men. hereafter raise up and irradiate the materiHaving found, at length, in Mabillon, one fit-als of a philosopical survey of the institu tions, 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. a Nor will this knowledge be found in the state of rude and unorganized matter. Mabillon was not a mere compiler; but was also a learned theologian, and à 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 odor 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 fas tidious 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 Philippe Bastide; and to him Mabillon addressed a defense, in every line of which his meekness and his love of truth beautifully balance and sustain each other. "I have ever been persuaded," he says, "that in claiming for their order honors 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 the monk himself, but for his order, seems to me allowable because the praise is desired, not for 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. It 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 defense of my work to the Divine Providence. It was not of my own will that I engaged on it. My brethren did me the honor 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 candor 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'Archery was, how- | dictine Saints could not have declined to interever, the only salon in which he could exert fere without some loss of honor and some these talents. There, for the gratification of abandonment of the cause of which he had his aged friend, and doubtless for his own, become the illustrious advocate. It related he was accustomed on certain evenings to to the authorship of the treatise "De Imitaentertain a circle of scholars devoted, like tione Christi"-of all uninspired writings inthemselves, to antiquarian researches. The comparably the most popular, if the popuhotels of Paris, in his day, were thronged larity of books may be inferred from the with more brilliant assemblies-even as, in continuance and extent of their circulation. our own times, réunions of greater aristo- That it was written, either in the fourteenth, cratic dignity have adorned that Faubourg or at the commencement of the fifteenth cenof St. Germain, in which these gatherings of tury, was a well-ascertained fact; and that the learned took place. But neither the the author was a monk might be confidently Bourbon lilies nor the Imperial eagles ever inferred from internal evidence. But was he protected a society more distinguished by Thomas à Kempis, one of the regular canons the extent and depth of the knowledge they of Mont St. Agnes, near Zwol? or was he were able to interchange. In that ill-fur- the Benedictine Jean Gersen? This was the nished dormitory of the decrepit monk, might point at issue; and with what learning, zeal, be seen Du Cange, reposing for a moment and perseverance it was debated, is well from his scrutiny into all the languages and known to all the curious in such matters; histories of mankind; and Baluze, rich in and may be learned by others from the noinexhaustible stores of feudal and ecclesias- tice prefixed by Thuilliers to his edition of tical learning; and D'Herbelot, uurivalled in the posthumous works of Mabillon. It is oriental literature; and Fleury, in whom the only so far as his pen was diverted from its Church of Rome reveres the most perfect of Cyclopean toils by this protracted warfare, her annalists; and Adrian de Valois, whose that we are concerned with it at present. superlative skill in deciphering 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 favor; and Bossuet, in the meridian of his genius, who both, if not habitual guests at the monastery, lived in an affectionate confidence with Ma--in reliance, as he said, on certain manubillon, 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 Cistercian fraternities, solicited his aid in their various literary pursuits. Leibnitz applied to him for intelligence regarding the house of Brunswick; and even Madame de la Valliere sued for his interest to procure for one of her kindred advancement in that world from which she had herself retired to penitential solitude. Like other luminaries in the same literary firmament, he was now followed by his attendant satellites; nor was his orbit seldom disturbed by the too close vicinity of the bodies amidst which he was constrained to pass. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, a Flemish printer then living at Paris (Joducus Badius Ascentius was his Latinized name) published two editions of De Imitatione, in which Thomas, of the village of Kemp, in the diocese of Cologne, was, for the first time, announced as the author. Francis de Tol, or Tob, a German, in two other editions, followed this example; and was himself followed by Sommatius, a Jesuit scripts of the work in the handwriting of Thomas à Kempis, then to be seen at Antwerp and Louvain. But in the year 1616, Constantine Cajitano, a Benedictine monk, published at Rome another édition, in the title-page of which Gersen was declared to be the author; partly on the authority of a manuscript at the Jesuits' College at Arona, and partly in deference to the judgment of Cardinal Bellarmine. Round Cajitano rallied all the champions of the Gersenian cause. The partisans of Thomas à Kempis found an equally zealous leader in the person of Rosweid, a Jesuit. Bellarmine, himself a member of the same company, was, as the Kempists maintained, induced by Rosweid to abandon the Gersenian standard. The Benedictines, on the The theological, or rather the conventual, contrary, assert that the Cardinal gave in his world was at that time agitated by a contro- adhesion to their adversaries only by proversy in which the great eulogist of the Bene-nouncing the words, "As you will," in order to silence the importunities with which the | decision of the archiepiscopal palace, in the anxious Kempists were disturbing his dying form of a book entitled "Vindicia Kempenbed. ses," which drew from Mabillon his "Animadversiones" on the argument of Testelette. A truce of ten years followed; after which another council was held, under the presidency of Du Cange; and although they pronounced no formal sentence, yet the general inclination and tendency of their opinions appears to have been hostile to the claims of Gersen, which have ever since been regarded by the best judges with suspicion, if not with disfavor. Whatever the fact may be regarding Bellarmine's latest opinion, the next chieftain who appears on this battle-field is Francis Waldegrave; who, with true English pertinacity and party spirit, traversed the continent, to bring up to Cajitano a vast reinforcement of manuscripts, pictures, and other proofs collected from all the German, Swiss, and Italian abbeys. Missiles from either side darkened the air; when, between the combatants, appeared the majestic form of Richelieu himself, who, having employed the royal press at the Louvre to print off a new edition of the De Imitatione, enjoyed the honor of being solicited by the disputants on either side for his authoritative suffrage, and had the pleasure of disappointing both, by maintaining to the last a dignified neutrality. Agitated by this vehement dispute, and mourning the silence of her infallible head, the Roman Catholic Church were at length rejoiced to repose in the oracular dictum of St. Francis de Sales, who declared that the authorship was to be ascribed neither to Thomas à Kempis nor to Gersen, but to Him by whose inspiration the Scriptures themselves had been written! On the death of Rosweid, the commander of the Kempists, his bâton passed to Fron- It is probably on account of the darkness teau, a regular canon, who signalized his ac- of the regions through which they pass, that cession to the command by a work called the pens of antiquarians, philologists, and "Thomas Vindicatus." This, for the first theologians are so much used as belligerent time, drew into the field the congregation of weapons. Though the most peaceful of St. Maur, who, by their champion, Dom mankind, Mabillon, while waging war with Quatremaire, threw down the guantlet in the the Kempists on one flank, was engaged in form of a pamphlet entitled "Gersen Asser- a contest not less arduous with the Bollantus." It was taken up by the Jesuit, George dists on the other. Papebroch, one of the Heser, the author of what he called "Diop-most learned of that learned body, had pubtra Kempensis." That blow was parried by Quatremaire, in a publication to which he gave the title of "Gersen iterum Assertus." And then the literary combatants were both surprised and alarmed to learn that the Pre-"De Re Diplomaticâ." After laying down. vôt of Paris considered their feud as dangerous to the peace of that most excitable of cities; and that they could no longer be permitted to shed ink with impunity in the cause of either claimant! Thus the controversy was transferred to the safe arbitrament of Harlay, the archbishop of that see; who, having no other qualification for the task than the dignity he derived from his mitre, convened at his palace a solemn council of the learned, which, under his own presidency, was to investigate the pretensions of Thomas and of Gersen. Of this conclave Mabillon was a member; and, after much deliberation, they pronounced a sentence which affirmed the title of Gersen to the honor of having written this ever-memorable treatise. An ultimate appeal to public opinion lies against all adjudications, let who will be the author of them; and in due season the Father Testelette made that appeal against the lished a book on the art of verifying the charters and other ancient public acts deposited in the various archives of Europe. In 1681 Mabillon answered him in a treatise, rules for distinguishing the false instruments from the true-rules derived from the form of the character, the color of the ink, the nature of the penmanship, the style and orthography of the instrument, the dates, seals, and subscriptions-he proceeded to show, by more than 200 examples, how his laws might be applied as a test; and how, by the application of that test, the manuscripts on which Papebroch chiefly relied might be shown to be valueless. Whatever may be thought of the interest of this dispute, (which, however, involves questions of the very highest practical importance,) no one probably will read with indifference the answer of Papebroch to his formidable antagonist : "I assure you," he says, "that the only satisfaction which I retain in having written. at all on this subject is, that it has induced you to write so consummate a work. I confess that I felt some pain when I first read it, at finding myself refuted in a manner so conclusive. But the utility and the beauty | way; though it must not be concealed that of your treatise have at length got the better of my weakness; and, in the joy of contemplating the truth exhibited in a light so transparent, I called on my fellow student here to partake of my own admiration. You need have no difficulty, therefore, in stating publicly, whenever it may fall in your way, that I entirely adopt and concur in your opinions." While Papebroch, thus gracefully lowering his lance, retired from the lists, they were entered by Father Germon, another Jesuit; who, armed with two duodecimo volumes, undertook to subvert the new Benedictine science. His main assault was aimed at the assumption pervading Mabillon's book, that the authenticity and the authority of an ancient charter were the same. He suggest ed that forgery was a very wide-spread art, and had probably flourished with peculiar vigor in remote and ignorant ages. Mabillon was content to reply that, throughout his extensive researches, he had never found a proof of any such imposture. His disciples assailed the sceptical Germon by far more elaborate hostilities. In one form or another the dispute has descended to our own times. At the commencement of it, in the seventeenth century, in France, it yielded (as what French dispute will not yield?) some. choice entertainment. The Jesuit, Hardouin, anticipating our contemporary, Strauss, resolved all these ancient instruments, and with them a large part of the remains of antiquity, into so many monkish and mythical inventions. Thus, he declared that the odes of Horace were written in some Benedictine monastery; and that Lalage herself was nothing more than a monkish poetical symbol of the Christian faith. Whither such theories tended Hardouin clearly enough perceived; but he sheltered himself by offering up his thanks to God that he had been denied all human faith, in order (as he said) that the total want of it might improve and strengthen his divine faith. Boileau's remark on the occasion was still better: "I have no great fancy for monks," he said, "yet I should be glad to have known Brother Horace and Dom Virgil." Father Anacreon might have been recognized by the great satirist in the person of the reverend Armand Jean le Bouthillier de Rancé, who, having been appointed, at the age of ten, to a canonry at Notre Dame, became, in less than three years afterwards, the author of a new edition of the Anacreontic Odes, a work of undoubted merit in its the young canon was happy in the possession of a learned tutor, as well as of powerful patrons; for Richelieu was his godfather and kinsman, Bossuet his friend, Marie de Medicis his protector, Francis de Harlay (afterwards archbishop of Paris) the associate of his youthful revels, and De Retz his instructor in intrigue and politics. Eminent alike in the field and at the Sorbonne, De Rancé would occasionally throw aside his hunting frock for his cassock, saying to Harlay, "Je vais ce matin prêcher comme un ange, ce soir chasser comme un diable." The pupil of the coadjutor was, of course, however, an eye-sore and an offense to Mazarin ; and being banished by him to Verret, this venerable archdeacon and doctor in divinity (such were then his dignities) converted his chateau there into so luxurious a retreat, that the cardinal himself might have looked with envy on the exile. The spirit of this extraordinary churchman, was, however, destined to undergo a change, immediate, final and complete. De la Roque relates, that having hurried to an interview with a lady of whom he was enamored, he found her stretched in her shroud, a disfigured corpse. Marsollier's story is, that his life was saved by the rebound of a musketball from a pouch attached to his shooting belt. It is agreed on all sides that, under the deep emotion excited by some such startling occurrence, he retired from the world, and became first the founder, and then the Abbé of the monastery of La Trappe, of the Cistercian Order, where he remained till his death. During the forty intervening years, he was engaged in solving the problem-what are the maxima of selfinflicted mortifications which, in the transit through this world to the next, it is possible to combine with the minima of innocent selfgratifications? While occupied in this rueful inquiry, it happened that De Rancé lighted on a treatise which Mabillon had recently published under the title of "Traité des Etudes Monastiques." To M. de la Trappe, it appeared that the book was designed as an indirect attack on himself and his community; and he made his appeal to the world he had abandoned, in a publication entitled "Reponse au Traité des Etudes Monastiques." În reluctant obedience to the commands of his spiritual superiors, Mabillon published Reflexions sur la Réponse de M. l'Abbé de la Trappe," which drew from De Rancé another volume, entitled 'Eclaircissements sur |