gerated. To the petty incidents of party warfare and the ignoble tactics of selfish ambition it imparts all the interest of that mightier conflict which has been waging since the world began: the conflict between truth and falsehood; between the empiric and the philosopher. It is well that we should be sometimes led to meditate on the transcendental side of all politics. The tendency of the present age is to lead us in the opposite direction. There can be no fear that what men call scholastic subtleties' should ever regain an undue ascendency over our minds. That we should become gradually disabled from rising to general views, and cease to attach much importance to principles, is a far less improbable contingency. Against such dangers as these we find our best antidote in such writers as De Quincey. His inability to judge practical questions; his erroneous estimates of particular men and particular events; are no drawback to his value as a searcher after abstract truth. And to all who in these modern days do still feel a yearning after some spiritual and idealistic confirmation of hereditary beliefs; who would fain have some deeper foundation for their attachment to ancient institutions than either a dumb tradition or the slight excess of all but evenlybalanced evidence, we can most heartily commend the entire works of this author. Though they do not give him what he seeks in express terms, they will teach him where to find it for himself. A great master of English composition; a critic of uncommon delicacy; an honest and unflinching investigator of received opinions; a philosophic inquirer, second only to his first and sole hero: De Quincey has departed from us full of years, and left no successor to his rank. The exquisite finish of his style, with the scholastic rigour of his logic, form a combination which centuries may never reproduce, but which every generation should study as one of the marvels of English literature. ART. II.-1. Les Moines d'Occident depuis Saint Benoît jusqu'à Saint Bernard. Par le Comte de Montalembert, l'un des Quarante de l'Académie Française. 2. The Monks of the West, from St. Authorized Translation. Vols. i.-ii. 1861. Tt. i.-ii. T is somewhat more than a quarter of a century since M. de Montalembert, in the fervour of youthful enthusiasm, produced his Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary'-the prototype of a host of romantico-religious biographies which have appeared in France, D 2 6 France, and which have their parallels among ourselves in such productions as the 'Lives of the English Saints,' edited by Dr. Newman, and the 'Life of St. Thomas Becket,' by Mr. Morris, Canon of Northampton.' The work now before us was begun soon after the publication of the Life of St. Elizabeth;' but the prosecution of it was interrupted by the author's entrance on that political career in which his eloquence made him one of the most conspicuous members of Louis Philippe's parliament, and in which, while there was not a little that might be regarded as indiscreet, extravagant, or grievously mistaken, no one could have failed to discern throughout a high and honourable mind, sincere conviction, undaunted courage, and disinterested zeal. The composition was resumed, he tells us, in consequence of some words spoken in honour of the monastic orders by Pius IX. amidst the enthusiasm which followed on his election, when the author seems to have dreamed that a new reign of the Roman Church, and of liberty through the Roman Church, was inaugurated; and it is now dedicated to the same Pope at a time when all around him is gloomy-when, after years of reactionary policy, after having been long obliged to rely on foreign arms for protection from the people of his own city, he finds himself stripped of the greater part of his territory, and helplessly at the mercy of princes who style themselves his children, and while, unlike the terrible Gregories and Innocents of older days, he does not venture to launch against them anything more awful than feeble and querulous protestations. But, sadly changed as is the Pope's condition, Count Montalembert's consistent devotion to him is something more than the mere show of constancy to a name : if there was a common cause between the author and his patron in 1847, there was also in 1860 a special ground of community in the feeling with which each must regard the man to whom M. de Montalembert is compelled to look as his despotic sovereign, and the Pope as his dangerous protector. M. de Montalembert had at first intended to write only a life of St. Bernard; but the undertaking has grown in his hands. As Bernard's career in the twelfth century would not have been possible but for the labours of Gregory VII. in the eleventh, a life of Gregory seemed to be necessary as the prelude to the life of Bernard. But the seventh Gregory (or Hildebrand) had only carried out a work which was begun five centuries earlier by St. Gregory the Great; and Gregory the Great, in his monasticism, was a follower of St. Benedict of Nursia: nay, Benedict himself, the great monastic legislator of the West, did not appear until monachism had for nearly three centuries existed in the East; so that the story must go back to Gregory the Great, to Benedict, and, and, far beyond, to Antony and Paul, the hermits of the Egyptian desert.* We confess that we cannot quite follow this reasoning. No doubt a biographer of St. Bernard ought to be acquainted with the earlier history of monachism, and with very much more of earlier history; and we are far from complaining that, through M. de Montalembert's idea of his duty as a biographer, we may reckon on much pleasant reading in addition to what a mere life of St. Bernard might have seemed to promise. But it is a somewhat alarming doctrine that the biography of a man eminent in any way must include lives of all his eminent predecessors in the same line; that the biographer of Napoleon the First, for example, must hold himself bound to begin with Nimrod and Sesostris; the biographer of George Stephenson with Tubal-Cain ; and the biographer of Gifford or Jeffrey with the patriarch Photius, of Constantinople, who is, we believe, the earliest of known reviewers. M. de Montalembert has undoubtedly read his authorities well, although his pages do not give us the idea of any very excessive labour, and although his protestations as to the amount of time and pains bestowed on things which make little show† are only such as might be made by every man who has been engaged in any sort of literary inquiry. In the work of a Frenchman, we take the quotation of Greek writers through Latin translations as a matter of course,‡ and, if M. de Montalembert sometimes quotes a secondary authority in a matter for which such an authority is really sufficient, we honour him for his superiority to that pedantry of small critics which will never allow a writer to cite anything less imposing than the most recondite volumes in the British Museum or the Bibliothèque Impériale.§ The book may be best described as a popular account of the subject, although executed with a love and a labour which * Introd. pp. iii.-iv. + Ibid., p. cclxxvi. There is another French peculiarity in quotation,-that of culling out such words of the original authorities as are supposed to be important or characteristic, and stringing them together incoherently in the notes. As an example the following note from vol. ii. p. 311 may serve:-'Sæculari pompa se comitante Fanum quod a Francis colebatur diabolico machinamento equam Franci et universa multitudo cum gladiis et fustibus . . Regina quem sedebat inantea non movit.' This is, as we have said, the usual style of French quotation, and we do not specially blame M. de Montalembert for following the custom of his countrymen. But it certainly seems intended to combine superfluity with deficiency, and to be as utterly useless as possible. The true view of this matter is, we think, given by Mr. Hallam:-"The utility, for the most part, of perusing original and contemporary authors, consists less in ascertaining mere facts than in acquiring that insight into the spirit and temper of their times, which it is utterly impracticable for any compiler to impart.'— Middle Ages, i. 219, ed. 1841. are are beyond the mere literary workman. And as such we gladly welcome it. If (in so far as we may judge of it by the present specimen) it contain little that is new to the student who has a moderate acquaintance with Church history, it presents old facts with freshness and life, and it will be useful by reaching many who do not profess to be students of Church history. Nor do we think that there is any serious cause of apprehension lest the author's views as a Romanist should do harm to members of our own communion; for those must be very ill instructed members of the English Church who can be misled by M. de Montalembert's Roman peculiarities or even by the eloquence with which they are enforced. He has, indeed, learnt something since the publication of his first work,-perhaps more than he suspects or would allow. There is nothing here like the tone in which he affected five-and-twenty years ago to speak of 'La chère Ste. Elisabeth;' and legends such as he then related with an appearance of simple credence worthy of a 'Canon of Northampton' are here often treated in a style which reminds us of Paulus or Strauss. M. de Montalembert has found out the falsity of some ideals which once enjoyed all his reverence, and he has discovered that there may be good where in his earlier days he did not imagine that it could be found. The new work opens with an Introduction, which occupies about half of the first volume. This is perhaps the most interesting portion of the whole, as being that in which we see most of the author's mind; but, as it appears to have been written later than the body of the book, and for the most part treats of later matters, we shall follow the order of production and of subject rather than that of arrangement. 6 Passing over the Introduction, therefore, we find that the First Book opens with a sketch of the Roman Empire after the Peace of the Church;' and a very dark sketch it is. M. de Montalembert tells us that, when Constantine made Christianity the religion of the empire, the corruption of Roman life was advanced beyond all possibility of cure; that it continued to advance, notwithstanding all the checks which the new faith could oppose to its progress; and that, in short, the Gospel must be considered to have failed in the empire. Some part of this appears to us very questionable. That the Christianity of the empire suffered grievously from the infection of Roman morals, there can be no question; and, of course, when Christianity was professed, the same evils were far more scandalous than they had been under heathenism. But if the general corruption was worse after the time of Constantine than before, M. de Montalembert has at least given no proof that it was. We cannot, however, go far in the book book without discovering a reason why, if things were not really worse, they ought, in our author's opinion, to have been so; for M. de Montalembert has in a very high degree that characteristic which Arnold, in speaking of Mitford, called an acute feeling of his own times.' This shows itself not only in the Introduction (where it might be expected as a thing of course), but throughout the narrative chapters also there is a continual war of allusions' -the only kind of war which was possible for a French oppositionist in the beginning of 1860, whatever may be the effect of the changes announced in the name of the Emperor Napoleon towards the end of that year. We need not remind our readers how steadily this war has been carried on through all possible channels-academic discourses, allegorical histories and essays, and the like—with an ingenuity which was intended to leave the authorities whom it assailed no other alternative than that of choosing between silence and censure, as the least dangerous way of admitting that the parallels of history were against them. And thus we find, before reading many pages, that this is not only a history of Western Monachism, but a covert attack on the monarchy of the 2nd of December. Imperialism, according to M. de Montalembert, has been the great curse of the world. was, above all other evil influences, the influence of the emperors that marred the Christianity of Rome. It was the imperialism of Constantinople, and the connexion of the Church with the Byzantine state, that ruined the Christianity of the East. And Rome and the East are made to serve as types of modern France. There is, for example, no mistaking the inner meaning of such passages as the following: It 'The senate, excluded from all political action since the time of Diocletian, subsists only as a sort of great municipal council, whose business it is to dishonour in history the name and the title of the most august assembly that ever governed men. Nothing ever equalled the abjectness of these Romans of the Empire. With their ancient liberty, all virtue, all manliness have disappeared; there remains nothing but a society of functionaries, without vigour, without honour, and without rights. Without rights, I say, for in all the imperial world no one possessed even the shadow of a real and a sacred right. This I boldly affirm, in opposition to all the learned panegyrists of that government; for the Roman empire, the type and cradle of all modern slaveries, has found numerous apologists and admirers in our days, when people are glad to feel the necessity of justifying the present by theories borrowed from the past.'-i. 22-3. And if the history of the monks engaged our author's attention under Louis Philippe, the following note may show that it has since acquired a fresh charm for him: 'At. |