funeral oration he was chosen to pronounce in the church of St. Eustache, April 4, 1791), has written most eloquently on that topic; and in the whole range of French polemics I know nothing so full of manly logic and genuine energy of style as his celebrated " Apologie des Jésuites" (8vo. Soleure, 1778). He afterwards conducted, with Rabaud St. Etienne, that firebrand newspaper, La Feuille Villageoise, in which there was red-hot enthusiasm enough to get all the châteaux round Paris burnt but the work of his youth remains an imperishable performance. My object is simply to consider " the Jesuits" in connection with literature. None would be more opposed than I to the introduction of polemics into the domain of the "belles lettres," or to let angry disputation find its way into the peaceful vale of Tempé, "Pour changer en champ-clos l'harmonieux vallon !" MILLEVOYE. The precincts of Parnassus form a "city of refuge," where political and religious differences can have no access, where the angry passions subside, and the wicked cease from troubling. Wherefore to the devil, its inventor, I bequeath the Gunpowder Plot; and I shall not attempt to rake up the bones of Guy Faux, or disturb the ashes of Doctor Titus :-not that Titus, "the delight of the human race," who considered a day as lost when not signalized by some benefaction; but Titus Oates, who could not sleep quiet on his pillow at night unless he had hanged a Jesuit in the morning. I have often in the course of these papers introduced quotations from the works of the Jesuit Gresset, the kind and enlightened friend of my early years; and to that pure fountain of the most limpid poetry of France I shall again have occasion to return: but nothing more evinces the sterling excellence of this illustrious poet's mind than his conduct towards the "order," of which he had been an ornament until matters connected with the press caused his withdrawal from that society. His "Adieux aux Jésuites deserve the admiration which they excited at that period. indicate the spirit of this celebrated composition: "Je dois tous mes regrets aux sages que je quitte! Et si dans leurs foyers désormais je n'habite, Car ne les crois point tels que la main de l'envie Si tu ne les connais que sur ce qu'en publie Ils te sont encore inconnus !" are on record, and A single passage will To the sages I leave here's a heartfelt farewell! And my dearest affections shall cling round them still: Full gladly I mix'd their blessed circles among. But to come at once to the pith and substance of the present inquiry, viz. the influence of the Jesuits on the belles lettres. It is one of the striking facts we meet with in tracing the history of this "order," and which D'Israeli may do well to insert in the next edition of his " Curiosities of Literature," that the founder of the most learned, and by far the most distinguished literary corporation that ever arose in the world, was an old soldier who took up his "Latin Grammar" when past the age of thirty; at which time of life Don Ignacio de Loyola had his leg shattered by an eighteen-pounder, while defending the citadel of Pampeluna against the French. The knowledge of this interesting truth may encourage the great captain of the age, whom I do not yet despair of beholding in a new capacity, covering his laurelled brow with a doctor's cap, and filling the chancellor's chair to the great joy of the public and the special delight of Oxford. I have seen more improbable events than this take place in my experience of the world. Be that as it may, this lieutenant in the Caçadores of his imperial majesty Charles V., called into existence by the vigour of his mind a race of highly educated followers. He was the parent-stock (or, if you will, the primitive block) from which so many illustrious chips were hewn during the XVIIth century. If he had not intellect for his own portion, he most undeniably created it around him he gathered to his standard men of genius and ardent spirits; he knew how to turn their talents to the best advantage (no ordinary knowledge), and, like Archimedes at Syracuse, by the juxtaposition of reflectors, and the skilful combination of mirrors, so as to converge into a focus and concentrate the borrowed rays of the sun, he contrived to damage the enemy's fleet and fire the galleys of Marcellus. Other founders of monastic orders enlisted the prejudices, the outward senses, and not unfrequently the fanaticism of mankind; their appeal was to that love for the marvellous inherent to the human breast, and that latent pride which lurked long ago under the torn blanket of Diogenes, and which would have tempted Alexander to set up a rival tub. But Loyola's quarry was the cultivated mind; and he scorned to work his purpose by any meaner instrumentality. When in the romantic hermitage of our Lady of Montserrat he suspended for ever over the altar his helmet and his sword, and in the spirit of most exalted chivalry resolved to devote himself to holier pursuits-one eagle glance at the state of Europe, just fresh from the revival of letters under Leo X., taught him how and with what weapons to encounter the rebel Augustinian monk, and check the progress of disaffection. A short poem by an old schoolfellow of mine, who entered the order in 1754, and died a missionary in Cochin China, may illustrate these views. The Latin shows excellent scholarship; and my attempt at translation can give but a feeble idea of the original. PERVIGILIUM LOYOLA In Maria Sacello, 1522. Cùm bellicosus Cantaber è tholo Suspendit ensem, "Non ego lugubri Splendidior sine clade victor. Corda Deo dare gestit ardor: Örbe novo reparabit ultor ! Tellus gigantis sentit iter: simul Idola nutant, fana ruunt, micat Christi triumphantis trophæum, Cruxque novos numerat clientes. DON IGNACIO LOYOLA'S VIGIL In the Chapel of our Lady of Montserrat. 66 Had aught to daunt, I trow; Glory!" he cried, "with thee I've done! To track thy footsteps, Saviour God! Yes, THOU shalt reign! Chain'd to thy throne, And to its conqueror bow. Proudly on Thee bestow." Straight on the marble floor he knelt, A vivid furnace glow; Vidêre gentes Xaverii jubar India repair'd half Europe's loss; Professor Robertson gravely opines that Ignatius was a mere fanatic, who never contemplated the subsequent glories of his order; and that, were he to have revisited the earth a century after his decease, when his institute was making such a noise in the world, he would have started back, "Scared at the sound himself had made." Never did the historian adopt a more egregious blunder. Had he had leisure or patience to con over the original code, called INSTITUTVM SOC. JESV, he would have found in every paragraph of that profound and crafty volume the germs of wondrous future development; he would have discovered the longhidden but most precious "soul of the licentiate Garcias " under the inscription that adorns the title-page. Yes, the mind of Loyola lies embalmed in the leaves of that mystic tome; and the ark of cedar-wood, borne by the children of Israel along the sands of the desert, was not more essential to their happy progress unto the land of promise than that grand depository of the founder's wisdom was to the march of intellect among the Jesuits. Before his death, this old veteran of Charles V., this illiterate lieutenant, this crippled Spaniard from the "imminent and deadly breach" of Pampeluna (for he too was lame, like Tyrtæus, Talleyrand, Lord Byron, Sir W. Scott, Tamerlane, and Appius Claudius), had the satisfaction of counting twelve "provinces" of his order established in Europe, Asia, Brazils, and Ethiopia. The members of the society amounted at that epoch (31st July, 1556), sixteen years after its foundation, to seven thousand educated men. Upwards of one hundred colleges had been opened. Xavier had blown the trumpet of the Gospel over India; Bobadilla had made a noise in Germany; Gaspar Nunes had gone to Egypt; Alphonso Salmeron to Ireland. Meantime the schools of the new professors were attracting, in every part of Europe, crowds of eager pupils: industry and zeal were reaping their best reward in the visible progress of religion as well as literature : "Fervet opus, redolentque thymo fragrantia mella!" At the suppression of the order, it numbered within a fraction of twenty thousand well-trained, well-disciplined, and well-taught members. There is an instinct in great minds that tells them of their sublime destinies, and gives them secret but certain warning of their ultimate grandeur: like Brutus, they have seen a spirit of prophetic import, whether for good or evil, who will meet them at Philippi: like Plato, they keep correspondence with a familiar dauwv: like Napoleon, they read their meridian glories of successful warfare in the morning sun;-sure as fate, Loyola saw the future laurels of his order, and placed full reliance on the anticipated energy of his followers yet unborn: the same reliance which that giant fowl of Arabia, the ostrich, must entertain, when, depositing its monstrous egg on the sands, it departs for ever, leaving to the god of day the care of hatching into life its vigorous young. Industry, untiring ardour, immortal energy were the characteristics of these learned enthusiasts. Some cleared away the accumulated rubbish of the friars, their ignorant predecessors; and these were the pioneers of literature. Some gave editions of the Fathers or the Classics, hitherto pent up in the womb of MS.; these were the accoucheurs of knowledge. Others, for the use of schools, carefully expurgated the received authors of antiquity, and suppressed every prurient passage, performing, in usum Delphini, a very meritorious task. I need not say to what class of operators in surgery these worthy fathers belonged. Some wrote "commentaries" on Scripture, which Junius undervalues; but with all his acquirements, I would sooner take the guidance of Cornelius à Lapide in matters of theology. Finally, some wrote original works; and the shelves of every European library groan under the folios of the Jesuits. There is not, perhaps, a more instructive and interesting subject of inquiry in the history of the human mind than the origin, progress, and workings of what are called monastic institutions. It is a matter on which I have bestowed not a little thought, and I may one day plunge into the depths thereof in a special dissertation. But I cannot help adverting here to some causes that raised the order of the Jesuits so far above all the numerous and fantastical fraternities to which the middle ages had previously given birth. Loyola saw the vile abuses which had crept into these institutions, and had the sagacity to eschew the blunders of his predecessors. Idleness was the most glaring evil under which monks and friars laboured in those days; and hence incessant activity was the watchword of his sons. The rules of other "orders" begot a grovelling and vulgar debasement of mind, and were calculated to mar and cripple the energies of genius, if it ever happened exceptionally to lurk under the weeds of Francis or of Dominick :" but all the regulations of the Jesuits had a tendency to develop the aspirings of intellect, and to expand the scope and widen the career of talent. The system of mendicancy adopted by each holy brotherhood as the ground-work of its operations, did not strike Loyola as much calculated to give dignity or manliness to the human character; hence he left his elder brethren in quiet possession of that interesting department. When cities, provinces, or kings founded a Jesuits' college, they were sure of getting value in return; hence most of their collegiate halls were truly magnificent, and they ought to have been so. When of old a prince wished to engage Zeno as tutor to his son, and sought to lower the terms of the philosopher by stating, that with such a sum he could purchase a slave, "Do so, by all means, and you will have a pair of them," was the pithy reply of the indignant Stoic. I do not undervalue the real services of some "orders" of earlier institution. I have visited with feelings of deep respect the gorgeous cradle of the Benedictine institute at Monte Cassino; and no traveller has explored Italy's proud monuments of Roman grandeur with more awe than I did that splendid creation of laborious and persevering men. I have seen with less pleasure the work of Bruno, la Grande Chartreuse, near Grenoble; he excluded learning from the solitude to which he drew his followers: but I have hailed with enthusiasm the sons of Bernard on the Alps ministering to the wants of the pilgrim; and I knew, that while they prowled with their mountain-dogs in quest of wayworn travellers, their brethren were occupied far off in the mines of Mexico and Peru, soothing the toils of the encaverned slave. But while I acknowledged these benefactions, I could not forget the crowds of lazy drones whom the system has fostered in Europe: the humorous lines of Berchoux, in his clever poem "La Gastronomie," involuntarily crossed my mind: "Oui, j'avais un bon oncle en votre ordre, élevé C'était là du couvent la véritable gloire ! Garni des biens exquis qu'enfante l'univers, Vins d'un bouquet céleste, et mets d'un goût divers! "Cloîtres majestueux! fortunés monastères ! Retraite du repos des vertus solitaires, VII. The Songs of France. ON WINE, WAR, WOMEN, WOODEN SHOES, PHILOSOPHY, FROGS AND FREE TRADE. (Fraser's Magazine, October, 1834.) [The Fraser which introduced this first of Prout's four batches of the "Songs of France" was the one containing Maclise's comical portrait of William Godwin, author of "Thoughts on Man," representing him as a very dwarf, bonneted by a disproportionately huge hat, and with his hands clasped high up behind him, apparently just between the shoulder-blades. The philosophic novelist who imagined Caleb Williams is further embellished in this grotesque limning with ponderous spectacles, a shapeless sack-coat, shortish trousers, and clumping Wellingtons-the latter so visibly as to be almost audibly walking. As further illustrative of the time at which this paper of Prout's first appeared, it may be mentioned here that next to it in that number of Regina, in the October of 1834, was an article on the "Dinner to Earl Grey," in the preceding month at Edinburgh, in going whither to assist in the taking down of the speeches at which, for the Morning Chronicle, Charles Dickens, then little more than a stripling, contributed to that journal his first morsel of descriptive reporting-a humorous fragment, not only identified as from the hand of "Boz" by the editor of the present volume, but reproduced by him in extenso and in stenographic characters in his monograph of "Charles Dickens as a Journalist.' Maclise's pencillings for this seventh of the Prout Papers, when reprinted in the 1836 edition, were two in number; one of them being the vignette on the engraved title-page of the second volume, in celebration of "The Planting of the Vine in Gaul;" the other that sentimental sketch of "Meet me by Moonlight alone," in which the young draughtsman portrayed himself, as in an imaginary glimpse of Paradise, half reclining on one of the primrose paths of dalliance under green leaves at the feet of L. E. L., still in her gigot sleeves, the picture-all moonshine!] CHAPTER I.-WINE AND WAR. "Favete linguis! Carmina non priùs HOR. Carmen Sæculare. "With many a foreign author grappling, Thus have I, Prout, the Muses' chaplain, PROUT'S Trans. of Horace. THAT illustrious utilitarian, Dr. Bowring, the knight-errant of free trade, who is allowed to circulate just now without a keeper through the cities of France, will be in high glee at this October manifestation of Prout's wisdom. The Doctor hath found a kindred soul in the Priest. To promote the inter K |