from some remarks (vol. ii. p. 274.) that he never had a cricket-bat in his hand in his life: the subjects which Mr. Howitt really understands are excellently treated, with good taste and feeling, except where an unlucky person in a shovel hat and coat of fuliginous hue crosses his path. And so we must break off, indulging our readers with some lines composed in the true spirit of antiquity on the subjects we have touched upon. Twice thirty years have passed since a young nobleman of high fame at Eton school evinced his taste and learning by the production of the following poem; and the Marquis of Wellesley still lives, not only to enjoy the high reputation which he gained in his early years, and which he never despised,* even amid the far greater triumphs which his genius achieved in other fields of glory: but to know that in the long interval that has since elapsed, and among the illustrious scholars and statesmen who have arisen to claim "both Minervas as their own," not one has since appeared who could show a laurel wreath of brighter verdure, or more enduring lustre, than that which adorned his youthful brows. AD GENIUM LOCI. O levis Fauni et Dryadum sodalis, Qui meos colles et aprica semper Mobili lustras pede, nunc susurros Dic, ubi attollat melius superbam Scilicet saltu tibi destinato Excubas custos operosus, almæ Dum malum noctis piceæ tenello Lauream sed campus Apollinarem Te rosâ pulchrum caput impedita Lætus huc faustusque adeas, precamur. See a letter in a late Quarterly Review from the Marquis Wellesley to Mr. Croker on the scholarship of Mr. Pitt. Among our statesmen as scholars, we might mention with the highest approbation the names of Wellesley, Pitt, Fox, Grenville, Frere, Canning, Lord Holland, and Lord Aberdeen. In the law, Lord Tenterden is the most illustrious name since the days of the great Lord Hardwicke. Of living names we dare not speak; but we know what the English Bar was in the days of Juvenal. "Gallia Causidicos docuit facunda Britannos." A VISIT TO PORT-ROYAL-DES-CHAMPS. Mr. URBAN, Paris, Jan. 4. YOU must be so very old a gentleman, and at the same time you take so young and warm an interest in whatever dignifies human nature, and gives a moral charm to mortal sufferings, that I need make no apology for sending you a fresh wreath from an old tomb, an account of Port-Royaldes Champs, as visited in the year of our Lord 1837. Much do I regret that I was not myself of the party, but a friend and I in Paris have resolved to take advantage of the first clear frost to make a winter pilgrimage to the spot; and although the account now sent you seems hardly to leave room for addition or improvement, we may possibly glean a few fallen fruits, or gather some sear sweet-smelling leaves to send you. In your early days, with the productions of which I was familiar when a boy, in volumes that had amused my great-grandfather, the fate of PortRoyal-des-Champs was too recent, and the principles which led to its destruction had run out too little of their time to allow men calmly to weigh their real nature or to trace their remote consequences. It is for us to learn lessons that were hidden to them let me point to a few of these. : First, as to the principles of the Port-Royalists, be it observed, that, much as they possessed in common with true Protestantism, which appeals to the law and testimony against all error, they maintained principles of self-destruction, and that in two points. Attaching themselves to the Papacy, while they persisted in holding doctrines which were too purely scriptural for that power to tolerate, with their eyes open they put themselves within reach of the bolt that smote them, instead of sheltering themselves, as so many thousands of the Reformes did, in Protestant countries, obeying our Lord's own words, when persecuted in one city, "flee ye into another." But it was not only by fatally clinging to the Papacy that the Port-Royalists put their heads, as it were, into the lion's mouth, and secured their own destruction, but still more perhaps by their retiring from Paris into a solitude; by preferring a monastic seclusion to the society in which God had placed them, and in which they ought to have shone as lights in the world, holding forth the word of life, amid a crooked and perverse generation. Who will venture to say what might have been the results, had the single family of the Arnaulds alone remained in Paris, as the salt of the earth there; had each of the great Arnauld's six sisters and six nieces married and been mothers of families, to whom they might have communicated, under God's blessing, their own piety and attachment to Holy Scripture? Why such a powerful and proselytising family influence might have been formed, as all the craft and all the learning of the Jesuits would have found it impossible to shake. Society in France might have taken exactly the opposite direction from what it did take, and might have guarded sound doctrine against all invasion from Rome. We have a specimen of the results of a Jansenist education in Racine. It gave him such a profound conviction of the reality of religious experience, that he returned from a life of gaiety to seek true happiness in that experience at the close of his days. Voltaire, on the other hand, gives us the result of a Jesuit education. Taught in youth to distrust all convictions except that, if it can be called conviction, of blind submission to the doctrines of the church, as dictated by a living infallible head, he shook off a yoke at once galling and absurd. But both these men were types of whole classes of men; and, unhappily for France, Jesuitism was put down only when too late, and was not succeeded by Jansenism or Protestantism, but by its own natural issuescepticism in doctrine, and the dissolution of manners which is sure to follow on tampering, as the Jesuit doctors did, with the authority of conscience. Let England therefore take warning. There are men now busily at work, some of them declared Jesuits, others secretly such, and both endeavouring to seduce our very best-disposed families to adopt all that was dangerous in the Port-Royalists, without perhaps directly opposing, the time not being yet come for that, but without giving the slightest countenance to their redeeming qualities. The grand object of such proselyting Papists is first to undermine all of a Protestant's confidence in the Bible, and in his own religious experience. They tell him that there are a thousand chances to one that his interpretation, being one among a thousand, is wrong; and that any peace of mind he may have enjoyed from believing what he finds in his Bible, and what he sees reflected as it were in the doctrines and discourses of the Church of England, is but a delusion, and owned to be such by converts to Popery, whom they will artfully quote. Thus do they endeavour to bring a poor creature, trembling for his salvation, to submit implicitly to anything that may be alleged as the doctrine of the church. This is a course, it is evident, which may succeed with some, but which may produce a very opposite effect on clear and strong minds. These last perceive at once that intimate conviction is of the essence of faith; but that if such intimate conviction may attach itself to a wrong view in reading Scripture, may misapprehend a meaning there, and for truth embrace error, you do not remove these difficulties by transferring the mind from the Bible to the voluminous writings of Roman Catholic doctors, often mistaking one another and differing from each other. Such men, therefore, will either return to Protestantism, or, forgetting that our Lord makes the rich man's brethren in the parable responsible for what was revealed through Moses and the Prophets, they may become thorough and hopeless sceptics. The next grand object of Popish prosely. tisers is to get persons of a religious and susceptible cast of mind to retire from the world into convents. Should this take place in England, as in France during the reigns of Louis the Fourteenth, of the Regent, and of Louis the Fifteenth, we may expect all the vices of the latter period, followed by the same consequences, revolution, war, and a profound and wide-spread immorality. ANTHONY. PORT-ROYAL-DES-CHAMPS IN 1837. We were taken last week to PortRoyal-des-Champs, in company with as two friends, who admired, like ourselves, the piety of the solitaires who once shed a lustre on that retreat, and who could appreciate the taste and attic savour for which the writers of the school of Port-Royal are so remarkable. All who have read the history of that nunnery of the order of St. Benedict, are aware that it was founded in 1204, by Mathilde de Garlande, wife of Mathieu I. of Marly, cadet of Montmorency, and that for upwards of four centuries it underwent the common destiny of all convents, in a gradual relaxation of piety, and neglect of the rules of discipline. This was the state of things until 1608, when Maric Angelique Arnauld, sister of the great Arnauld, appointed abbess at the age of eleven, boldly undertook to reform the convent, and did so with amazing success. From that time it became both a model for other institutions of a like kind, and the means of restoring their piety. The doctrine of grace, preached by Saint Paul, as taught by Saint Augustine, as more lately revived by Jansenius in the Church of Rome, as proclaimed, in fine, by the Reformers of the 16th century, formed the groundwork of the instruction, and was the foundation of the faith of the Nuns of the Holy Sacrament: nor is it possible to doubt, when we contemplate the self-denial and the charity of which several of them gave proof, and the holy lives they led, that they were influenced by a living faith, notwithstanding more than one error in doctrine and in practice peculiar to the communion in which they were born, and from which they found it difficult completely to disentangle themselves. It was thus that the spectacle of virtue and peace, reigning in that retreat consecrated to religion, soon drew to it several personages belonging to the highest classes of society. The Duke and Duchess de Luynes were the first to leave the court and settle there; they were shortly after followed by the Duke and Duchess de Liancourt and by the Duchess de Longueville, princesses of the blood-royal: all these noble persons had very plain lodgings built for them on the grounds of PortRoyal, so that they could avail themselves of the convent's religious exercises, and copy the edifying examples they had under their very eyes. Much about the same time, that is towards the middle of the 17th cen. tury, the famous Anthony Arnauld, doctor in Sorbonne, (who had, among the religieuses of Port Royal, his mother, six of his sisters, and six of his neices,) Arnauld d'Andilly his brother, Anthony le Maistre, an advocate who had acquired great reputation for eloquence, his two brothers, Simon de Maistre de Sericourt, who had followed the profession of arms, and Isaac Louis Le Maistre de Saci, so well known by his translation of the Bible, and five or six other friends, disgusted with the world, chose for their retreat from it Port-Royal-desChamps, and passed several years there in penitence, dividing their time between the culture of the ground, the repairing of the buildings belonging to the Abbey, the instruction of the young persons boarded at the convent, the education of the youth committed to their care, and the composition of the learned works which have immortalised them the Logic of Arnauld; the Greek and Latin Methods of Lancelot ; Nicole's Morals; the Ecclesiastical History of Le Nain de Tillement, and other celebrated works, had their sole origin there. At this school, noted at once for Christianity and for learning, there were formed men of remarkable merit both in government and in literature; among others the two brothers Bignon, the one counsellor of state, the other first president of the grand council; Achille de Harly, and Bagnols, both members of the royal council. Every one is aware that it was at Port-Royal, also, that Jean Racine, the great French poet, was brought up, and that there he received those seeds of piety which, though buried for a time by worldliness and vanity, burst forth in his own soul at a later period of life. The seven odes in which he sings of the landscape of Port-Royal in general, its woods, its pond, its meadows, its flocks, and its gardens in particular, and which date from an age when, very young as yet, he studied under such masters as we have mentioned; his Abrégé de l'Histoire de Port-Royal, and Memoire justificatif des Religieuses of that Abbey, which he composed at a later period, when his heart, prompted by grace, returned to religion, prove sufficiently how warmly attached he was to an institution to which he was indebted, under God, for all that had given him a reputation as a writer and as a Christian. The immortal Pascal himself, who had a sister and niece at Port-Royal, entered also into a connection with the solitaires of the Abbaye-des-Champs, which ended only with his life, and he must even have spent some time under the same roof with the Arnaulds and Nicoles. It was thus that, amid an age of right worldly glory and religious hypocrisy, some poor young women, whose only riches were the faith they carried in their hearts, and whose only glory was the sanctity of their lives, became the bond of connexion which drew together and attached to the same spot, around the cross of the Crucified, whatever was most distinguished at the court of the great King, and most learned in the society and at the university of Paris. But the Jesuits were too powerful at Rome and at the court of Louis XIV. to make it possible that PortRoyal should escape their malice. There was too much regard paid there to the Word of God, and too little to human traditions, to make it possible that these astute men and declared foes of all sincere and lively Christianity, should not bring to bear against it the honour of the holy see and papal infallibility; the merits of Christ and the sovereignty of grace were too much exalted there not to scandalize such men'; there was too much success in the instruction and education of youth not to stir up the jealousy of ambitious ecclesiastics who aimed at arrogating for themselves a monopoly in that department; their formidable adversaries, Arnauld and Pascal, were too devoted to this monastery, and shed upon it too bright a fame, for them ever to forgive it: accordingly, they swore that it should be destroyed, and the quarrel on the subject of the book written by Jansenius was but the occasion which was taken advantage of in order to consummate this their purpose. After about a century of vexations and persecutions of all sorts which it would take too long to recall here, and by means of which they succeeded in reducing by various means the number of the nuns by three-fourths, and in dispersing them in various directions, an overwhelming shout of joy resounded among the followers of Loyola: Port-Royal fell! "On Tuesday the 29th of October 1709," says the author of the Supplement to the History of Port-Royal by Racine, the police lieutenant, D'Argenson, empowered by an arret of the council-royal, passed three days before, bringing with him twenty-two lettres du cachet, accompanied by two commissaires du Chatelet and a recorder, escorted by the prevot de la maréchaussée and by three hundred archers, transported himself at seven in the morning to the convent of PortRoyal. He there invested the house, occupied all the entrances, gave orders to the servants, made them first bring him all the law titles and papers, which he sealed and this first part of his commission being fulfilled, he announced his orders to the nuns. They were in all fifteen nuns of the choir, including the prioress, and seven laysisters (converses). Without resistance, protestation, or murmur, they resigned themselves to their fate, reciting their usual office amid the archers who conveyed them. Some of them were so old and feeble, that they had to be taken away on litters. They were conveyed to as many different religious houses, so that there might in no case be two together to console each other. But the implacable persecutors of Port-Royal, in order to deprive the exiles and their friends of all hope of return, resolved that the very buildings should disappear; this was settled by another arret of the council, dated 22nd January 1710, and which was promptly executed. The venerable monastery was demolished, together with the whole of the buildings which from time to time had risen by its side. The materials were sold, and efforts were made to obliterate every vestige of the walls. But even the bare soil retained something sacred; it inclosed the remains of Le Maistre, Arnauld, Racine, and other illustrious personages whose memory was the more fondly cherished on account of the calamities of the times. In 1711 the sepulchres were opened; the dead who had wished to GENT. MAG. VOL. IX. be eternally reunited were exhumed, and dispersed among the churches of Paris and the burying-grounds of the surrounding villages. Accordingly we came expecting to find nothing but ruins, and even less than ruins, on the classic corner of Christian ground we had resolved to visit. Even this anticipation could not change our purpose. Port-Royal-des-Champs is situate three leagues from Versailles towards the south, somewhat to the right of the road leading to Chevreuse and Dampierre. You reach it after traversing a small plain of considerable uniformity of surface, and little interrupted by disturbances of the soil; but all at once, just as you are coming upon the spot, the ground sinks, the road carries you downwards, and a bye-road conducts you to rather a steep slope of the little valley once inhabitated by the nuns of the Holy Sacrament. When you have once reached the foot of this slope, you find yourself in an amphitheatre, with the blue sky over head, and closed in by low hills covered half way up with green herbage and tufted with wood for the rest of their height. There is nothing to strike one in the landscape; all is simple and uniform; silence and repose are its only charms. But on further consideration, you say to yourself that nothing could have been better chosen as a retreat for persons who had divorced themselves from the world; and you can conceive that in such an escape from all noise, from every thing likely to distract the attention, this very absence of scenery, which might in some measure dissipate the mind while it gratified the eye, a Christian's thoughts would naturally take an upward direction, and look for repose only in Heaven. On the slope of the knolls that bound the glen on the east stood the houses built for the residence of de Longueville and de Liancourt, of which there now remains only a cellar spared by the demolishers of 1710; while on a rising ground towards the west stood the dwelling-house of Anthony Arnauld and his friends and companions in this retreat. Of this latter residence, there remains a small building of red brick and of ancient construction; its stair21 |