each monastic cell bears on its quiet walls such scenes from the shining band of the Florentine on whose face fell heaven's mildest light. These poems of Aubrey de Vere-to characterise them largely are scenes from the life of Christ in man; and there is something in them-in their gladness, their luminousness, their peace-which suggests Frà Angelico, the halo of Christian art.'

Before we take our final leave of Mr. de Vere, we would illustrate by one quotation the felicity with which he moves in lighter and more lyric measure. There are few poets of the present generation, despite their almost exclusive devotion to the lyric Muse, who can write more charming verse than this :

In Spring, when the breast of the lime-grove gathers
Its roseate cloud; when the flush'd streams sing,
And the mavis tricks her in gayer feathers;
Read Chaucer then; for Chaucer is Spring!

'On lonely evenings in dull Novembers,

When rills run choked under skies of lead,
And on forest-hearths the year's last embers,
Wind-heap'd and glowing, lie, yellow and red;

'Read Chaucer still! In his ivied beaker

With knights, and wood-gods, and saints emboss'd,
Spring hides her head till the wintry breaker
Thunders no more on the far-off coast.'

ART.

ART. III.-Le Père Joseph et Richelieu (1577-1638).
Gustave Fagniez. Deux Tomes. Paris, 1894.

IN

Par

N his very brilliant, learned, and profound inaugural Lecture delivered last summer before the University of Cambridge which we most cordially congratulate on Lord Acton's acceptance of the Chair of Modern History-the new Professor brought out very forcibly, with lavish wealth of illustration, the difficulties which in our day beset the preliminary studies and the finished work of the historian. His chief source of embarrassment in preparation arises from the superabundance of his materials. All the State papers of every country in Europe are open to the inquirer, and the mass of original matter is inexhaustible. The Vatican archives alone, now made accessible to the world, filled 3,239 cases when they were sent to Paris, and they are not the richest.' When the study of the accumulated treasures of ten Courts-and we are as yet but at the beginning of the documentary age-has been duly accomplished, the historian is only on the threshold of his subject. He has to develope the gift of historical thinking, which is better than historical learning, as well as the power to discern truth from falsehood, certainty from doubt: for the use of history turns far more on certainty than on abundance of acquired information. Under such conditions it is superfluous to add that success is only possible under the sternest limitations. But there is one golden sentence besides, for the sterling manliness and the opportune utterance of which we beg to offer our heartiest acknowledgments. 'I exhort you,' said Lord Acton to his distinguished audience, never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.'

burg, Spain, Holland, Austria, Mantua, Savoy, Sweden, Tuscany, Venice, and the Papal Court. His work bears evidence of wide reading and research, and affords a further and striking illustration of the harvests which remain to be gathered from fields which might well be deemed to have been long since exhausted. For it is not a little singular that more than two centuries and a half should have passed, before the literature of a nation so rich as France is in historians should have possessed a full biography of the famous Father Joseph, the confidant and lifelong associate of one of its greatest statesmen.

A singular fatality has hitherto enshrouded Father Joseph's memory. More than one elaborate record due to the pious regard of the Sisters of Calvary for their founder has been compiled, but has remained entombed in the dust of a convent library or has passed into almost complete oblivion. When the Calvairiennes, immediately on Father Joseph's death, requested Lepré Balain to write his memoirs, the worthy priest was so impressed with the twofold and irreconcilable lives which his subject embraced, that he decided to divide his task between two independent works: one designed to portray the spiritual guide, the mission priest, the ardent controversialist; the other to describe his secular and political career. The religious biography, of ample dimensions and hitherto unpublished, remains to this day in manuscript in the convent library of the Capucins in the Rue de la Santé; and, as we gather from M. Fagniez's remarks, has been a sealed book until the publication of the volumes before us: although, from the date of its completion (1648), only ten years after Father Joseph's death, and from the information which the writer had at his command, its contents are of the highest authority. A stranger destiny awaited the secular division of Lepré Balain's labours, which for some generations was only known through an imperfect copy in the National Library at Paris, where it had attracted the historian Ranke's attention, and was quoted by him as the MS. Memoirs of Father Joseph. Meanwhile, the complete autograph copy-at least, M. Fagniez affirms it to be in the same handwriting as Lepré Balain's biography in the Rue de la Santé-after passing through the hands of divers collectors, was purchased at a sale in 1856 for the British Museum, and lay amongst the buried treasures of the Egerton department of the Library until it was unearthed by M. Fagniez. This precious document, which embraces ten years more than the Parisian MS. and comprises 887 pages, under the title of 'Supplément à l'Histoire,' is the veritable second life by Lepré Balain. It is based on papers and information furnished by

Père

Père Ange de Mortange, Joseph's friend and secretary for many years, and was drawn up to inform the world of the secret of the most brilliant events which have occurred throughout Europe.'

It is supposed-for we are here in the region of conjecture— that the Sisters of Calvary were dismayed at the dryness and length of Lepré Balain's narrative, whose style M. Fagniez stigmatises as detestable even for the period when he wrote, pedantic, diffuse, bombastic, and confused. At any rate, they searched for a second biographer to produce a more succinct and readable history. This time the task was entrusted to a Benedictine monk, a certain Dom. Damien Lherminier, to whom the pious and grateful sisterhood supplied all the materials at their command. Once more the fates were unpropitious. The original has disappeared from the Capucin convent of Mans, and nothing is preserved of it save the table of contents and a few scattered notes, from which we learn that Dom. Lherminier confined himself rigorously to Joseph's monastic life, to his missions, and to the institution and direction of the order of Calvary. In 1702 a fresh biographer appeared in the person of the Abbé Richard, who compiled from the published Memoirs of the day a paltry work in honour of the house of du Tremblay. Discontented with the reward which he received from the family, he published two years later, under the title of 'Le véritable Père Joseph,' a bitter satire on his own biography, and simultaneously exercised his hireling pen on yet a third brochure in refutation of his own ill-tempered calumnies,-a piece of audacious effrontery which apparently escaped detection at the hands of his contemporaries. To Le véritable Père Joseph' M. Fagniez ascribes the origin of the unenviable reputation which has so long attached to Richelieu's intimate associate. Nor does M. Fagniez's own work by any means reach the standard of an ideal historical biography. That the life of a man so various' as Father Joseph, with his intermingled concern in things secular and sacred, presents exceptional difficulties, we have learned to our cost, and we are not disposed to question this plea, for which the authority of Lepré Balain may be justly urged. Yet there was opportunity for condensation without risk of obscurity in the twelve hundred large octavo pages comprised in these two volumes. Subsidiary matters, albeit of importance in their day, should be so deftly sketched in as to relieve and not to confuse the effect of the picture as a whole. To magnify his office is the besetting snare of the biographer, and M. Fagniez's prolixity is the less excusable, because it is indulged in over that portion

of

of his history which has been amply portrayed by others. With all due allowance for their significance and for the part which Father Joseph played in their settlement, we grow intensely fatigued with the tangled minutiæ of the petty struggle in the Valtellina, with the elaborate unravelling of negotiations about the Mantuan succession, with the details of diplomatic intrigue at the Diet of Ratisbon, with the wearisome preliminaries to peace between France and Austria. We miss the genius which can seize upon salient features and group them as a living whole. We miss, too, the clear crisp style which gives to French literature so much of its singular charm. These defects must not, however, blind us to the importance of M. Fagniez's pages in presenting us with at least a more adequate view of Father Joseph's character and career than can be found in any other work with which we are acquainted.

The early years of Father Joseph need not detain us long. François Le Clerc du Tremblay-such was his name before he entered the Capucin Order-was descended on his father's side from a long line of able and upright magistrates; through his mother, Marie de la Fayette, he belonged to the haute noblesse of France. Born in 1577, he displayed remarkable precocity; and those who love to trace after-ability to hereditary tendencies, or to read in the child the father of the man, will see in his lineage the origin of his great talents and commanding power, and in the incidents of his earliest years the forecast of his subsequent piety and vocation. It is recorded that, when only four years old, he astonished a distinguished company gathered round his father's table by reciting the story of our Lord's Passion, and broke down through emotion when he came to the entombment; that four years later he had himself begged to be sent from home to the Collège de Boncourt, lest his mother's tenderness should coddle and spoil him; that before he was ten he could declaim in Latin for an hour together, and translate Plutarch from French into that then universally known language; and that his father's death a year later filled him with a deep sense of life's uncertainty, and, aided by descriptions of the charms of asceticism brought under his notice at this impressionable age, begot in him that sense of a monastic vocation to which he eventually yielded. For the present he pursued with eagerness all the branches of a liberal education as then prescribed under a great diversity of professors -riding, fencing, military exercises of all kinds, drawing and mathematics, the two last being taught by one and the same master,—or, under the solemn conduct to and fro of his appointed écuyer, attended the classes of the teachers of Spanish and

Italian.