as it gave him so many opportunities of collecting materials for his memoirs. At the same time, it is impossible not to regret that the time in which he lived was so poor a one; the theatre so narrow; the actors so indifferent. Had his lot fallen on a time when great men were occupied in doing great things,— at one of those epochs when the life of a nation seems to be aroused, and thought and resolution are stimulated into a widespread activity, he might, with his great powers and high sympathies, have written memoirs that would have been much better worth having. It is a great thing to have the vices, the hypocrisies, and intrigues of a worn-out and hollow age exposed by the fine analysis of a merciless wit; but it is a much greater thing to have what is worthy of admiration recorded by a man who has the capacity to admire.

We see at once both the shortcomings of the age and the peculiar cast of St. Simon's own mind reflected in all that he did and wrote concerning matters of religion. He found little to reverence, and much to suspect, in the religious conduct of those around him. This attitude of indifference is partly to be attributed to his natural temper, but partly also to the disgust which must have been awakened in any man of sense and honour by the low intrigues of the clique of fanatics who traded on the growing infirmity of the old king. St. Simon was a man of piety, both by nature and by education; but he was not a man of enthusiasm, much less of zeal. He could not bring himself to care much for any of the religious factions of his day; although, had he lived at a different period, he would have been quite capable of appreciating the fervour of a genuine and simple piety. He regarded with real feelings of indignation and alarm the forced subjection of the Gallican church to the famous Bull Unigenitus; but then his alarm was grounded on reasons purely political. By his friendship with the Dukes of Beauvilliers and Chevreuse he was constantly thrown among the Quietists, and by his position at Versailles he was brought into constant communication with the Jesuits; but he stood aloof from the interests of either party. He loved the Duke and Duchess of Beauvilliers better than any people beyond his own family; but he always speaks of them, and the other admirers of Fénélon, as a little knot of bewildered devotees. He dreaded the Jesuits, and considered their alliance with Madame de Maintenon to be the bane of France; but he took care to keep on a very good footing, and to be very friendly and familiar, with the king's confessor. He has described at very considerable length the impressions produced on him by all he had seen of Fénélon and of Father Tellier; but admirable as the portraits of the two are in effectiveness of design, and skill

of execution, we know that, to have regarded the subject from a point of view so wholly artistic, implies that sort of coldness and perhaps timidity in the painter, which may possibly make him better as an observer, but certainly lowers him as a man. We may be sure that, in the description of Fénélon there are many touches from the life; but we should perhaps have liked St. Simon better, although we might have enjoyed this portion of his memoirs less, if he had been a little blind to the faults of the Archbishop of Cambray. "Fénélon," he says, "had more coquetry than a woman; but he showed it in his whole manner, not in petty trifles: his passion was to please; and he took as much care to captivate the valet as the master, the lowest as the highest. He had talents exactly made for the purpose: sweetness, a power of insinuation, graces springing fresh from a natural source, a mind facile, ingenuous, copious, and agreeable, of which he held, so to speak, the tap, so as to be able to pour from it the exact quality and quantity suitable to each person. Without undertaking to fathom him, one may boldly say, that he had the greatest possible desire to attain eminence of place; and yet he did the work of his diocese so well, and seemed to enjoy the peace of his quiet life so thoroughly, that none but those who knew what he had been, and what he wished to be, could have detected the real feelings of his heart." So mixed are the motives of even the best men, that it is only probable that St. Simon may have been right in ascribing some part of Fénélon's excellence to his "passion for making himself loved;" but a man with a generous love of goodness would scarcely have singled out this passion as the master-key to the whole of Fénélon's career.

So, too, when he has to record the choice of another confessor for the king in place of Father la Chaise, and is thus led to sketch the character of the person selected, he uses terms of the utmost unreserve and severity, which, if taken as the index of his real thoughts, are strangely at variance with his outward behaviour. "Tellier," he says, "both from taste and habit, led a hard life; he knew of no existence but that of assiduous and uninterrupted work; and he exacted such work from others without ever making any allowances, and without even understanding that any ought to be made. His head and his health were of iron, and his conduct was in keeping; his natural disposition was cruel and stern. Imbued with the maxims and principles of the Society of Jesus, so far as his hard nature could mit him to yield himself to others, he was profoundly false and deceitful; concealing himself under a thousand folds of disguise, and when he dared to show himself, asking for every thing and giving nothing, and laughing at his most solemn promises when

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it did not suit him to keep them. He was a terrible man, aiming at nothing short of the destruction of all whom he hated; and after obtaining power, he no longer concealed his aims." Very probably St. Simon was justified in using this language, which is strong; but in the next page we find that Father Tellier, soon after he was appointed the king's confessor, sent a Jesuit, who had formerly been St. Simon's tutor, to open friendly relations with St. Simon; that the overture was favourably received, and that St. Simon kept on excellent terms with Tellier during the whole time that Tellier was powerful. Of course, it may be said that it was but worldly wisdom to do so, and that St. Simon could not have held on at court unless he had made friends with the mammon of unrighteousness. This is true; but it makes a considerable difference in our estimate of a man's character, whether we find that he does or does not possess that suppleness of nature which lies at the bottom of worldly wisdom. Among the persons who were acute enough to see the real character of the confessor, some few would have spurned all connection with him; while others would naturally take care not to commit themselves in any violent or underhand act, but would prudently make friends with the closet-friend of Madame de Maintenon. St. Simon was one of the latter class; and we know something more about him when we find that this was the case.

But if St Simon did not display any great relish for the religious contests and controversies of his day, there was one subject in which he took the most deep and lively interest. He devoted himself heart and soul to the cause of his order. He was absorbed in the thought of the greatness to which the "dukes and peers" of France were entitled, and of which they had been robbed. It is easy to see in the attitude he assumed in prosecuting his claim to honours the reflex of his personal position. He was the son of a precise formal courtier, long the favourite of a king; he had been brought up by his mother to believe that he must in some way assert himself, or so unfriended a man would be sure to be neglected; he lived in habits of familiarity with noblemen shut out from the great prizes of the new régime, but still sustained by the consciousness of their ancient dignities. And yet it must be confessed, that St. Simon's persistency in claiming what he believed to be his due was justified by something better than the exigencies of his personal ambition. He saw that the power of the nobility was shaken, if not shattered; he believed that this was a most serious evil for the state; and he wished, if he could, to stay the last stroke, which would complete the work of destruction. The particular point which he made all-important seems at this day trivial, and even ludicrous; but we think that some

of his modern French critics have too hastily assumed that he was entirely wrong. The king and the parliament had acted together to depress the nobility; and it was the great aim of St. Simon to repress the usurpations, each petty in itself, by which the parliament strove to mark its growing sense of superiority. There is certainly something absurd in the quarrel about the "bonnet," which occupies so many pages of the memoirs; but, on the other hand, we must admit that, unless a losing side contests every little point resolutely, it invites its own downfall. We must remember, that the contest took place in the last years of the reign of Louis XIV.; and it was not unreasonable to insist, that if the nobles could but hold their ground during the king's life, they might do more at a future time. Originally, the peers, that is, the grand feudatories holding directly of the king, and such other high barons as the king was pleased to summon, alone constituted the parliament; but they were assisted by legists in their deliberations. Gradually these legists came to be a constituent part of the assembly; and the peers, though holding the place of honour, had little real influence in the proceedings of parliament. Lastly, when, under Richelieu and Louis XIV., the nobles were reduced step by step to a lower position, the legal portion of the parliament grudged the peers even the outward marks of deference. The president, always a lawyer, took the votes of the assembly; and the crowning insult protested against by St. Simon was, that the president took the votes of the princes of the blood with his head uncovered, but replaced his "bonnet" on his head when he came to the dukes and peers. For many years St. Simon made it the object of his life to get this innovation set aside. He even made himself so prominent and officious as to draw down on him the unfavourable wishes of the king; but still he persevered. He also deeply resented the promotion of the king's illegitimate children to a rank intermediate between that of princes of the blood and that of dukes and peers, because it was a slur on the latter that any person not acknowledged to be of the royal family should be placed above them. The opposition which this promotion excited brought the Duke of Maine into a close understanding with the parliament; and St. Simon and his supporters had then a very difficult game to play; for the Duke of Maine had the king's ear, and his support enabled the parliament to set the dukes and peers at defiance.

In the year, however, before the king's death, it seemed as if there was a chance of matters taking a favourable turn for the remonstrants. The Duke of Maine had been raised to the rank of a prince of the blood, and declared capable of succeed

ing to the crown; and gross as was the scandal of such an elevation, yet St. Simon was almost, if not quite, consoled for it by its involving the abolition of the intermediate rank, which he had regarded with so much horror. And shortly after he had thus attained the summit of his wishes, the Duke of Maine proposed to settle the affair of the "bonnet." St. Simon stigmatises this proposal as being really the fruit of the blackest treachery. He thinks the Duke of Maine feared lest, after the king's death, the parliament and the nobility should join to deprive the bastards of all their honours; and that he therefore arranged a plot by which the two parties should be separated by an irreconcilable difference. He used the president of the parliament as his instrument; and after getting the dukes to state their claim, on an understanding that the parliament would yield, he made the president turn round and refuse to admit the claim in a manner so insulting as to awaken a feeling of the utmost indignation in the peers. The Duke of Maine having thus effected his object, having committed the parliament to support him, and provided against the junction he feared, finally broke off all negotiation on the point, by saying that he found that a member of the royal family, the Princess of Condé, would never consent to the affair of the "bonnet" being arranged as the peers wished, because it was only proper that some mark of distinction should show their inferiority to the princes of the blood-royal. Thus the matter ended; and certainly, after reading all that St. Simon has to say on the subject, the antiquarian researches into which he digresses, the bitterness of the language he employs, and the foulness of the motives he imputes to his adversaries, it seems a little ludicrous to find that the termination of the whole was due to the caprice of a lady who was generally acknowledged to be imbecile. But subsequent events showed that there was still some little power left with the nobles; and, small as it was, it might have been worth securing. We are inclined to think that wiser men than St. Simon might have taken much the same view of the affair as he did; although they would, perhaps, have been more moderate in their language, and more temperate in estimating the importance of what they were doing.

We know, indeed, that his views were substantially shared by one man, who, if longer life had been granted him, might have changed the history of France. The remarkable and enlightened prince who, in 1711, succeeded to the title of Dauphin, was, we cannot refuse to believe, penetrated with a wise conviction, that the growth of bureaucracy threatened the stability of the French monarchy. St. Simon gives the out