took an unfortunate direction, and whose piety degenerated into excess. After various adventures as a kind of itinerant preacher of the doctrines of mysticism, and after the publication of several works, which led to serious disputings, she was arrested and thrown into prison. Fenelon had become acquainted with her at the time he was preceptor to the Duke of Burgundy. He was struck by the unction and sincerity of her manner; and when she descanted before him on the love, the pure disinterested love of God, she touched a nerve of exquisite sensibility, which vibrated to his very heart. When he heard of her imprisonment, the same liberal spirit which we have admired in the mission at Rochelle, led him to reprehend such a measure in regard to a mere error of opinion, and that opinion entertained by a helpless and unprotected woman. In the meantime, Bossuet had composed a book, condemning certain propositions extracted from the writings of Madame de Guyon. Many persons thought the proceeding injudicious and uncalled for; it was giving importance to opinions that deserved it not; it was giving to error, if error it was, a degree of publicity it could not otherwise have obtained. They were of opinion that the wisest plan was to let the error, like the mormonism and millerism of our day, die away of itself. In the number of those who so reasoned was Fenelon. When called upon by Bossuet to concur in the approbation to his book, upon these motives he declined it. His refusal was construed into an approval of the errors of Madame de Guyon, whose cause, as a persecuted woman, he had already espoused. Not content with enlisting the other bishops of France in his cause, and sending angry letters to Fenelon, Bossuet took a more decided step. He hastened to the presence of Louis the fourteenth, and throwing himself at his feet, exclaimed: "Sire, I ask pardon for not having sooner revealed the fanaticism of my brother prelate." Fenelon finding his opinions misrepresented, sought to explain his views in his book entitled"The Maxims of the Saints," a work which proved, in his regard, at once a source of The much present uneasiness, though in the end of still greater triumph. This publication served only to make matters worse. powerful pen of Bossuet was wielded against it, and he declared that nothing short of a formal retractation of the work would satisfy him. The storm continually increasing, Fenelon determined to carry his cause to Rome. He requested the king's permission, and it was immediately granted; but Louis was determined to be beforehand in his appeal to the holy see. A letter to the Pope was drawn up by Bossuet, and written in the monarch's own hand. It denounced to the Pope the "Maxims of the Saints" as a very dangerous book; condemned by bishops, by doctors and a multitude of learned religious men; that the writer had offered explanations, but that they could not be supported. Louis concluded by assuring his holiness, that he would use all his authority to cause the decision of the holy see to be carried into execution." When Fenelon's friends learned the tenor of this letter, they advised him to go in person to Rome. He accordingly applied to the king for permission, under any restrictions his majesty should think proper to impose. The only answer was an order for Fenelon to proceed immediately to his diocess of Cambray, to remain there till farther orders, and to stop in Paris no longer than his affairs rendered absolutely necessary. He submitted to the king's commands without a murmur, remaining but twenty-four hours in Paris. As he departed from the capital to his place of exile, he cast a tender look towards the seminary of St. Sulpice, which he was never more to behold. He could not but contrast the placid hours he had passed in that peaceful retreat, with the stormy scene in which he was now tossed. A motive of delicacy forbade him to visit it now; he feared that he might involve in his own disgrace, its worthy superior, whom he so affectionately loved. He wrote him a hasty letter, of which the following is a part: "Sir, I abstain from bidding you farewell, anxious to avoid the risk of involving you in any thing unpleasant. I love and revere you too much, not to be more careful of your interests and that of your community, than of my own. They are not contented with attacking my book; they have used all their endeavors to calumniate me personally. But be under no anxiety regarding me: God will preserve me. Pray to Him for me; for I have much need of it in my sufferings; and continue to love a man, whose heart is full of kindness, confidence, gratitude and veneration towards you. I commend you to God, and farewell." On reaching Cambray, Fenelon published a pastoral letter, explanatory of his opinions on the controverted topics. This drew forth a letter from Bossuet, full of acrimony and personality. This was the first act of hostility. The trumpet of defiance was sounded, the war was begun. Then were seen to advance into the arena two combatants, equal in prowess, but different in character. One of them was armed at full proof in the panoply of the schools, and covered with laurels gained in former combats in the cause of the Church; his age and repeated victories might have dispensed him from further service, but his mind, still vigorous and superior to the weight of years, preserved in a green old age, all the fire of his early years. The other was in the full vigor of youth, enjoying a high reputation for his eloquence and the loftiness of his genius, and was a consummate master of language and dialectics. Nothing was above his comprehension, nothing on which he could not throw the radiance of intellect, and whatever he touched became not only elegant but plausible. Before these champions became rivals they had been friends; both were estimable for the high purity of their morals, both ornaments of the Church, of the court and of human naturę. One was regarded as the sun setting in full majesty ; the other as the sun who promised to fill the earth with his glory could he but disengage himself from the eclipse in which he was unhappily involved. Our limits will not admit even of a general view of this war of the press which was carried on with astonishing rapidity; and with sorrow be it said, with a sacrifice of charitable feeling, painful to all the friends of religion. In justice to Fenelon we must cite the avowal made by him at the opening of the contest. "I must decline making a direct answer to several accusations, unwilling as I am to exhibit a scene, the unbecomingness of which is already too obvious. I will send my regular reply to his holiness, as I feel as anxious to spare my brother as he has been zealous to calumniate me." He thus addresses Bossuet: "I beg you to believe, sir, that there needs nothing to make me respect you with an inviolable attachment. Faith holds us together in matters of doctrine; as to the heart, mine feels nothing but respect, zeal, and tenderness towards you. Heaven is my witness that I speak truly." Again: "You may perceive, sir, that I am alike incapable of duplicity, or of a timid policy. Though I dread more than death whatever partakes of pride and arrogance, yet I trust that God will not desert me, and that, by uniting patience and humility with due firmness, I shall do nothing either weak or base. From this you may judge of my sincerity in the assurances I have given you. It remains for you to say how we shall live together hereafter. The manner which would be most conformable to my desires and inclinations, would be that which will afford me the means of seeing, of hearing, of consulting, and of respecting you as much as ever." "I wish to heaven," he continues, "that you had not constrained me to break the silence which I preserved till the last extremity. He who sees the secrets of all hearts knows with what docility I wished to await the decision of the holy Father, and how cheerfully I would have condemned my book had he pronounced it worthy of condemnation. You may imagine, sir, if you please, that you have the right to defend the Church against me, as an Augustine did against the heretics of his time. But a bishop who submits his book to the holy see, and who remains silent after he has submitted it, should not be compared either to a Pelagius or a Julian. You might have sent your objections to Rome, secretly and in concert with me. I would have given no apology, no book, no manuscript to the public. The judge only should have examined my defence; the whole Church would have await ed in peace the judgment of Rome; and that judgment, whatever it might have been, would have put an end to the business. The condemnation of my book, if bad, being followed by my entire and unreserved submission, there would have been no danger of any ill ensuing; we should not, in any respect, have failed in our duty to truth; love, peace, and the decorum of the episcopal order would have been preserved." TO BE CONTINUED. WE Froin the British Critic. A BRETON COLLEGE UNDER NAPOLEON. Concluded from page 19. were not alone in their warlike intentions, the whole of Brittany was on the eve of insurrection. During the day time all was apparently peaceful, but scarce had the Angelus sounded when the peasants might be seen rubbing up the rusty firelocks which had served in the old Chouan wars, and organizing companies under various leaders. The women too had their appointed tasks; every morning at sunrise processions were to be seen moving along the plain or crossing each other in some narrow gorge; these were the females of different villages on their way to some chapel specially consecrated to the Blessed Virgin, or to the patron saint of the village church. On learning these preparations the students at once applied to the Chevalier de Margadel, a gentleman who lived in a neighboring chateau and constituted him their leader. They then determined to consecrate themselves to the cause on which they had embarked, by a special ceremony, the details of which we shall give in the author's own words. E are not going to follow our young heroes throughout the whole of their career; their exploits are far too warlike to appear in our peaceful pages; we shall, however, endeavor by a general outline to bring out the religious character which appears through the whole of their conduct. We suspect that a few of the circumstances which M. Rio relates will be pronounced by some to belong to the class which we English comprise under the very laconic formula of French. It, however, seems somewhat hard that Frenchmen should be blamed for being French, especially as Englishmen are celebrated for exercising the privilege of being English in whatever quarter of the globe they may chance to be. At the same time it must be allowed that there is a certain mawkish sentimentality which is undoubtedly French, and which has become so more than ever since the Revolution. M. Rio's book is not, however, tainted with this species of Gallicanism; sentimentality is all very well on certain occasions, but it does not love the sulphurous atmosphere of a field of battle, nor the vicinity of cannon balls. Reserve is a portion of our national character, but we should not for all that pronounce contemptuouslying in an old chapel by the sea side, which upon the strong expressions and outbursts of feeling which characterize a Frenchman, as long as they are natural; and the part which our author bore in the scenes which he describes is a sufficient guarantee for his expressions coming from the heart. But to proceed with our narrative: the students VOL. II.-No. 2. "We should have liked nothing better than to have done the deed in a church, in the face of open day, or else at the fall of even had now fallen into ruin. This notion was however overruled by the wiser portion of us, as being by far too imprudent a challenge to the vigilance of the local authorities, and it was decided that, instead of assembling by night in a building specially consecrated to prayer, we should meet at 10 mid-day in the upper story of an insignificant looking house, in the Rue de la Préfecture, nearly fronting the public offices, where we all fully believed that the pacha of our department was drawing up his lists of proscription. A sort of altar was got up in a wretched room unillumined by a single ray of the sun; a crucifix, borrowed under a most specious pretext, was there placed between four wax tapers which had been smuggled in the night before. It was like going over again one of those ceremonies, at which many of us could remember to have been present in our childhood, which, though begun in devotion, often terminated with the mournfulness of a funeral, when the priest stepped down from the altar to mount the scaffold; the resemblance could not fail to strike every one, and to impress us with a deep seriousness. Accordingly most of us felt an involuntary shuddering either on entering this den, or as he stretched out his hand to touch the gospels. We felt as much awe as if we were in a church, and some of us were so completely in the power of this illusion that they first put out their hand as if to take holy water, and then mechanically made the sign of the cross. The prime mover in the ceremony was Bainvel, a student in theology, and our future lieutenant; his tonsure and half ecclesiastical habit gave a sort of religious tone to the whole scene. It was he who held in his hand the form of the oath which we had drawn up beforehand; he presented it to each of those who were to take it, as they came one by one to kneel down before the altar." They swore never to close with usurpation, and to die, if it were necessary, rather than abandon their comrades; the first words were meant for a school-boy imitation of Hannibal's famous oath; "the second clause was nothing but the sacramental expression of the deep and earnest feeling which, at the approach of a common danger, had taken the place of mere school companionship, and which, at the bivouac and on the field of battle, was soon touchingly to develop into a brotherhood at once of Christians and of soldiers." If it were not for the unfortunate allusion to Hannibal, we might fancy ourselves transported to the "Allons enfants de la patrie, As soon as the clock struck four, all the students capable of bearing arms, three hundred and fifty in number, by various detachments, quitted the town and repaired to their appointed rendezvous, the chateau of their chosen leader, the chevalier. They found all ready for them; his eldest daughter, a beautiful girl of fifteen, distributed amongst them the white cockades which she and her sister had been employed in working the whole of the previous night; she then tied the cross of St. Louis on her father's breast, and they all set gaily forward, with the setting sun shining brightly about them, and promising them a succession of days as beautiful as that which was now closing. The scene which occurred when they first came up with the Chouan army could hardly, we think, have occurred anywhere but in Brittany; the behavior of the sailors certainly gives a brigand look to the whole, which reminds one of the wildness of Salvator Rosa, but with this exception, those who know the habitual devotion of the Breton peasant will at once recognize the truth of the following picture. "Suddenly we perceived from a rising ground a number of columns of smoke, which arose from a little valley over the hamlet of Brech, and soon after we were able to make out groups of peasants and of sailors, who were heaping wood on the fire under their kettles. Our cry of joy did not require the aid of the echo in order to reach them, and we had no need to answer the qui vive of the sentinels to make ourselves known. The whole of this band of countrymen, who had thus on a sudden become our brothers in arms, vied with each other in demonstrations of fraternal kindness; all pressed forward to make us sit down and partake of the dinner, which was boiling in a long file of cauldrons, slung on stakes, which crossed each other at the upper extremity. Never had nuptial feast seemed to us half so good. The sight of those famous Chouans of whom we had heard so much-the songs and the disputes of the sailors, some of whom it was too evident had broken their fast that day-the noisy voices of the card players-the anxious air of the older peasants who were mending their rusty firelocks, and smoking their pipes all the time—the busy labors of the younger men, who were bringing from the village enormous cakes of rye-bread hot from the oven, pitchers of cider, dry fagots to boil the soup, and the wooden bowls out of which they were to eat-all this together made up a scene equally new and striking to us, while at the same time, the confused hum of these various sounds was in itself enough to raise our spirits. All on a sudden the Angelus rung from the steeple of the neighboring parish church; in a moment the most animated conversations ceased as by enchantment; every face at once grew serious, every head was bared under the burning sun. Though their postures were varied, there was a oneness of expression on their features as each repeated in a low tone the angel's salutation. All this sudden transformation of a camp into a place of prayer, at once hallowed our enthusiasm, and made us more hopeful than ever of the success of our arms." It was not long before these young warriors found numerous opportunities of trying their valor; in a desultory combat which took place soon after near Auray, they chased their opponents to the gates of Vannes. After the battle they were as much distinguished for their humanity in saving the prisoners, as they had been for their courage in the field. They had miscalculated their own powers of hating, when they took Hannibal for their model; nor was this humanity a mere schoolboy humanity, for if they had chosen to wreak their vengeance on their enemies, the world would not have blamed them. The greater part of them had lost fathers or grandfathers in the revolution, not in the open field, but in some wholesale massacre or on the scaffold; many of them had seen their mothers perish before their eyes, for the horrid contest spared neither sex nor age; and the names of the noble families in the district who had been swept away, and whose inheritance was now occupied by strangers, were fresh in the memory of all. With these domestic wounds still bleeding about them, it required a deeper feeling than common humanity in them to dismiss the prisoners unharmed. The recollections which had inspired them with the power of performing this act of Christian charity, and which had haunted them in the midst of the battle, were drawn from a source which never forsook the Breton peasant. The field on which they had fought was within sight of the church of St. Anne d'Auray, a place consecrated to the Breton by the recollection of numerous pilgrimages, on which he had accompanied his parents from his earliest childhood. The very morning of the battle many of the Chouans were on their knees in the church, when the cry of alarm interrupted their devotions, and made them rush out hastily, signing themselves with the cross; and after the battle, the shrine of St. Anne was covered with the wax tapers which the peasants brought to burn before the altar, in the chapel specially dedicated to |