ces.

The style in which Salmasius, Budæus, and Scaliger entertained their friends is not wholly unknown to him; and how the Spelmans of old, and the Whitakers of recent times, wrote their letters, may be learned at the expense of a transient fatigue. But let no one address himself to M. Valery's volumes, with the hope or the fear of being involved in any topics more sacred, more crabbed, or more antiquated than befits an easy chair, a winter's evening, and a fireside. Reading more pleasant, or of easier digestion, is hardly to be met with in the Parisian epistles of Grimm, Diderot, or La Harpe.

Our pilgrims first take up the pen at Venice. They had ransacked the Ambrosian Library, examined the Temple of Venus at Brescia, admired the amphitheatre at Verona, and visited the monastery of their order at Vicenza; though, observes Germain, "Ni là ni ailleurs, nos moines ne nous ont pas fait goûter de leur vin." Some gentlemen of the city having conducted them over it, "On ne saurait," adds he, "faire attention sur le mérite et les manières honnêtes de ces messieurs, sans réfléchir sur nos moines et admirer leur insensibilité. Aussi n'étudient ils pas; ils disent matins avant souper; ils mangent gras; portent du linge, pour ne rien dire du peculium, et de leur sortie seuls." In short, there is already peeping out, from behind our good Germain's cowl, one of those Parisian countenances, on the quick, movable lines of which flashes of subacid merriment are continually playing.

On reaching Florence, the migratory antiquarians form a new acquaintance, alike singular and useful, in the person of Magliabechi, the librarian of the Grand Duke. Another man at once so book-learned, so dirty, and so ill-favored, could not have been found in the whole of Christendom. The Medicæan Library was his study, his refectory, and his dormitory; though, except in the depth of winter, he saved the time of dressing and undressing, by sleeping in his clothes and on his chair; his bed serving the while as an auxiliary book-stand. Fruit and salads were his fare; and when sometimes an anchovy was served up with them, the worthy librarian, in an absent mood, would not unfrequently mistake, and use it for sealing-wax. Partly from want of time, and partly from the consciousness that an accurate likeness of him would be a caricature on humanity at large, he would never allow his portrait to be taken; though what the pencil was not permitted to do, the pens of his acquaintance have so attempted, that he

would have judged better in allowing the painter to do his worst. Michel Germain describes him, as "Varillas multiplied by three." Now Menage tells us that happening once to say that every man was hit off by some passage or other in Martial, and having been challenged to prove it with respect to Varillas, he immediately quoted Dimidiasque nates Gallica palla tegit." Short indeed, then, must have been the skirts of Magliabechi, according to Germain's arithmetic.

His bibliographical appetite and digestion formed, however, a psychological phenomenon absolutely prodigious. Mabillon called him "Museum inambulans, et viva quædam bibliotheca." Father Finardi, with greater felicity, said of him, "Is unus bibliotheca magna," that being the anagram of his Latinized name, Antonius Magliabechius.

Having established a correspondence with this most learned savage, the Benedictines proceeded to Rome, where they were welcomed by Claude Estiennot, the procurator of their Order at the Papal court. He also devoted his pen to their entertainment. Light labor for such a pen! Within eleven years he had collected and transcribed fortyfive bulky folios, at the various libraries of his society in the several dioceses of France, adding to them, says Dom Le Cerf, “réflexions très sensées et judicieuses;" a praise which probably no other mortal was ever able to gainsay or to affirm.

Germain found Rome agitated with the affair of the Quietists. His account of the dispute is rather facetious than theological. Just then a Spaniard had been sent to the galleys, and a priest to the gallows; the first for talking, the second for writing scandals, while the great Quietist Molinos was in the custody of the Inquisition. Marforio, says Germain, is asked by Pasquin, why are you leaving Rome, and answers "Chi parla è mandato in galera; chi scrive è impiccato; chi sta quieto va al sant' officio." Marforio had good cause for his hurry; for the scandal which (as Germain pleasantly has it) "broke the priest's neck" was merely his having said that "the mare had knocked the snail out of its shell;" in allusion to the fact of the pope's having been forced out of his darling seclusion and repose, to be present at a certain festival, at which a mare or palfrey was also an indispensable attendant. rogues continued to repeat the jest notwithstanding," observes the reverend looker-on.

"The

He gathered other pleasant stories, at the expense of his holiness, and these heretical

aspirants after a devotional repose of the soul. Some of them are not quite manageable in our more fastidious times, without the aid of a thicker veil than he chose to employ. For example, he tells of a Quietist bishop who, to escape an imaginary pursuit of the police, scaled the roof of his mansion in his night-dress, and so, running along the tops of the adjacent houses, unluckily made his descent through one of them into which he could not have entered, even in full canonicals and in broad day, without a grievous damage to his reputation. Then follows a fine buffo catastrophe, and when (says Germain) "the whole reaches the ears of Nostro Signore, the holy man has a good laugh, and orders the bishop to quit Rome without delay." Yet Germain himself breaks out into hot resentment against "the wretched and abandoned Molinos," and proposes to Magliabechi (in seeming seriousness) to arrest the progress of the evil, by publishing a manuscript discovered in their Italian tour, from which it would appear that the bones of a wicked Bohemian lady, of the name of Guillemine, who, three centuries ago, propagated nearly the same enormities, were at length taken, with public execration out of her grave, and scattered to the winds.

Molinos, however, was strong in the protection of Christina, who then dwelt at Rome. Her abandonment of the faith of her illustrious father was accepted there, not only as a cover for a multitude of sins, but as an apology for the assumption of an independent authority beneath the very shadow of the Vatican. Mabillon, accompanied by Germain, presented to her his book "De Liturgiâ Gallicanâ," in which, to her exceeding discontent, she found herself described as Serenissima." "My name," she exclaimed, "is Christina. That is eulogy enough. Never again call me, and admonish your Parisians never to call me, Serenissima." Germain left her with the fullest conviction that the epithet was altogether out of place; but "after all," he says, "she gave us free access to her library-the best thing she could do for us." So great were her privileges, or such the weakness of the lazy Innocent XI, that, as we learn from these letters, an offender on his way to prison, having laid hold on the bars of one of her windows as a sanctuary, was violently rescued by her servants, whereupon they were tried and sentenced to be hanged. Christina wrote to the judge to inform him, that if her servants died any other than a natural death, they should not die alone. The judge com

plained to the Pope; but his holiness laughed at the affair, and terminated it by sending her Majesty a peace-offering, which she contemptuously handed over to the complainant.

Germain looked upon the religious observances of Rome with the eye of a French encyclopediste. He declares that the Romans burn before the Madonna and in their churches, more oil than the Parisians both burn and swallow. "Long live St. Anthony!" he exclaims, as he describes the horses, asses, and mules, all going, on the saint's festival, to be sprinkled with holy water, and to receive the benediction of a reverend father. "All would go to ruin, say the Romans, if this act of piety were omitted. So nobody escapes paying toll on this occasion, not Nostro Signore himself." Then follows an account of a procession to St. Peter's on the reception of certain new converts, which is compressed into a single paragraph purposely long, intricate, and obscure; "a sentence, says Germain, "which I have drawn out to this length to imitate the ceremony itself." Soon after we meet him at the cemetery of Pontianus, "where," he observes, with all the mock gravity of Bayle, "there lie 50,263 martyrs, without counting the women and children. Each of us was allowed to carry off one of these holy bodies. That which fell to my share had been too big for the hole in which it was found. I had infinite trouble in disinterring it, for it was quite wet, and the holy bones were all squeezed and jammed together. I am still knocked up with the labor."

The Pope himself fares no better than the ceremonies and relics of his church. "If I should attempt," he says, "to give you an exact account of the health of his holiness, I must begin with Ovid, In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas.' At ten he is sick, at fifteen well again, at eighteen eating as much as four men, at twenty-four dropsical. They say he has vowed never to leave his room. If so, M. Struse declares that he can never get a dispensation, not even from himself, as his confinement will be, de jure divino. The unpleasant part of the affair is, that they say he has given up all thoughts of creating new cardinals, forgetting in his restored health the scruples he felt when sick; like other great sinners."

Indolent and hypochondriacal as he was, Innocent XI. had signalized himself, not only by the virtues which Burnet ascribes to him in his travels, but by two remarkable edicts. One of them, which could not be decorously quoted, regulated the appearance on the

rather as being the most apposite to our immediate purpose.

In this correspondence three of the most eminent of the congregation of St. Maur transmit from Italy such intelligence and remarks as appear to them best adapted to interest other three of the most eminent of their brotherhood at Paris. If the tabletalk of the refectory of St. Germain des Près was of the same general character, the monks there had no better title to the praise of an ascetic social intercourse, than the students or the barristers in the halls of Christ Church, or of Lincoln's Inn. It would be difficult to suppose an appetite for gossip more keen, or more luxuriously gratified.

The writers and the receivers of these letters were all men devoted by the most sacred vows to the duties of the Christian priesthood; yet in a confidential epistolary intercourse, extending through eighteen successive months, no one of them utters a sentiment, or discusses a question, from which it could be gathered that he sustained any religious office, or seriously entertained any religious belief whatever. It may be that our Protestant divines occasionally transgress the limits within which modesty should confine the disclosure, even to the most intimate friends, of the interior movements of a devout spirit. But all hail to our Doddridges and Howes, to our Venns and Newtons! whose familiar letters, if sometimes chargeable with a failure in that graceful reserve, yet always glow with a holy unction, and can at least never be charged with the frigid indifference which these learned Benedictines exhibit on the subjects to which they had all most solemnly devoted their talents and their lives.

Visiting, for the first time, the places which they regard as the centre of Christian unity, as the seat of apostolic dominion, as the temple towards which all the churches of the earth should worship, as the ever-salient fountain of truth, and as the abode of him who impersonates to his brother men the Divine Redeemer of mankind, not a solitary word of awe or of tenderness falls from their pens-not a fold of those dark tunics is heaved by any throb of grateful remembrance or of exulting hope. They could not have traversed Moscow or Amsterdam with a more imperturbable phlegm; nor have sauntered along the banks of the Seine or the courts of the Louvre in a temper more perfectly debonnaire.

Protestant zeal may be sometimes rude,

bitter, and contumelious in denouncing Roman Catholic superstitions. It is a fault to be sternly rebuked. But how adequately censure these reverend members of that communion, who, without one passing sigh or indignant phrase, depict the shameful abuses of the holiest offices of their Church, with cold sarcasms and heartless unconcern!

Rome combatted her Protestant antagonists by the aid of the Jesuits in the world, and of the Benedictines in the closet. Yet to those alliances she owes much of the silent revolt against her authority which has characterized the last hundred years; and of which the progress is daily becoming more apparent. The Jesuits involved her in their own too well merited disesteem. The Benedictines have armed the philosophy both of France and Germany with some of the keenest weapons by which she has been assailed. It was an ill day for the papacy, when the congregation of St. Maur, at the instance of Benard, called the attention of their fellowcountrymen to the mediaval history of the Church, and invited the most enlightened generations of men whom Europe had ever seen, to study and believe a mass of fables of which the most audacious Grecian mythologist would have been ashamed, and at which the the credulity of a whole college of augurs would have staggered.

It was but a too prolific soil on which this seed was scattered. At the moment when, in the integrity of his heart, Mabillon was propagating these legends, the walls of his monastery were often passed by a youth whose falcon eye illuminated with ceaseless change one of the most expressive countenances in which the human soul ever found a mirror. If the venerable old man had foreseen how that eye would one day traverse his Benedictine annals, in a too successful search for the materials of the most overwhelming ridicule of all which he held holy, he would cheerfully have consigned his unfinished volumes, and with them his own honored name, to oblivion. Not so would Michel Germain, Claude Estiennot, and the brethren for whose amusement they wrote, have comtemplated, if they could have foreknown, the approaching career of the young Alouet. Though they clung to the Church of Rome with all the ardor of partisans, and though their attachment to her was probably sincere, their convictions must have been faint, unripe, and wavering. The mists of doubt, though insufficient to deprive them of their faith in Christianity, had struck a damp and abiding chill into their hearts. If they had

lived long enough to know the patriarch of Ferney, they would have been conscious of the close affinity between his spirit and their

own.

How could it have been otherwise? From disinterring legends and traditions revolting to their hearts and understandings, they passed to Rome, there to disinter foul masses of holy bones, to contemplate sacred processions of mules and asses, to find a corpulent, self-indulgent valetudinarian sustaining the character of the vicar of Christ, and to discover that the basest motives of worldly interest dictated to the papal court the decisions for which they dared to claim a divine impulse and a divine infallibility. From such follies and such pretensions these learned persons turned away with immeasurable contempt. The freedom of thought which unveiled to them these frauds, left them disgusted with error, but did not carry them forward to the pursuit of truth. Without the imbecility to respect such extravagances,

they were also without the courage to denounce and repudiate them. Their superior light taught them to expose and ridicule religious error; it did not teach them to embrace unwelcome truth. In that book which is the "religion of Protestants," they might have read that "the light is the life of men"—that is, of men who obey and follow its guidance. There also they might have learned that "the light which is in us may be darkness," that is, may once illuminate the inquisitive intellect, and darken the insensible heart. The letters which they have bequeathed to us, interesting as they are in other respects, afford melancholy proof how deeply the younger Benedictines of the congregation of St. Maur were already imbued with the spirit of that disastrous philosophy which was destined, before the lapse of another century, to subvert the ancient institutions of their native land, and, with them, the venerable fabric of their own illustrious Order.