and keep order in the episcopal palace, and who mount guard over Monseigneur's smile. To please a bishop is a foot in the stirrup for a sub-deacon. One must make his own way; the apostolate never disdains the canonicate. And as there are elsewhere, rich coronets, so there are in the church rich mitres. There are bishops who stand well at court, rich, well endowed, adroit, accepted of the world, knowing how to pray, doubtless, but knowing also how to ask favours, making themselves, without scruple, the viaduct of advancement for a whole diocese; bonds of union between the sacristy and diplomacy; rather abbés than priests, prelates rather than bishops. Lucky are they who can get near them. Men of influence as they are, they rain about them, upon their families and favourites, and upon all of these young men who please them, fat parishes, livings, archdeaconates, almonries, and cathedral functions-steps towards episcopal dignities. In advancing themselves they advance their satellites; it is a whole solar system in motion, The rays of their glory empurple their suite. Their prosperity scatters its crumbs to those who are behind the scenes, in the shape of nice little promotions. The larger the diocese of the patron, the larger the curacy for the favourite. And then there is Rome. A bishop who can become an archbishop, an archbishop who can become a cardinal, leads you to the conclave; you enter into the rota ; you have the pallium, you are auditor, you are chamberlain, you are monseigneur, and from Grandeur to Eminence there is only a step, and between Eminence and Holiness there is nothing but the whiff of a ballot. Every cowl may dream of the tiara. The priest is, in our days, the only man who can regularly become a king; and what a king; the supreme king. So, what a nursery of aspirations is a seminary. How many blushing chorus-boys, how many young abbés, have the ambitious dairy-maid's pail of milk on their heads? Who knows how easily ambition disguises itself under the name of a calling, possibly in good faith, and deceiving itself, saint that it is! Monseigneur Bienvenu, an humble, poor, private person, was not counted among the rich mitres. This was plain from the entire absence of young priests about him. We have seen that at Paris "he did not take." No glorious future dreamed of alighting upon this solitary old man. No young ambition was foolish enough to ripen in his shadow. His canons and his grand-vicars were good old men, rather common like himself, and like him, immured in that diocese, from which there was no road to promotion, and they resembled their bishop, with this difference, that they were finished, and he was perfected. The impossibility of getting on under Monseigneur Bienvenu was so plain, that as soon as they were out of the seminary, the young men ordained by him procured recommendations to the Archbishop of Aix or Auch, and went immediately to present them. For, we repeat, men like advancement. A saint who is addicted to abnegation is a dangerous neighbour; he is very likely to communicate to you, by contagion, an incurable poverty, an anchylosis of the articulations necessary to advancement, and, in fact, more renunciation than you would like; and men flee from this contagious virtue. Hence the isolation of Monseigneur Bienvenu. We live in a sad society. Succeed; that is the advice which falls drop by drop, from the overhanging corruption. We may say, by the way, that success is a hideous thing. Its counterfeit of merit deceives men. To the mass, success has almost the same appearance as supremacy. Success, that pretender to talent, has a dupe-history. Juvenal and Tacitus only reject it. In our days, a philosophy which is almost an official, has entered into its service, wears its livery, and waits in its antechamber. Success; that is the theory. Prosperity supposes capacity. Win in the lottery, and you are an able man. The victor is venę rated. To be born with a caul is everything. Have but luck, and you will have the rest; be fortunate, and you will be thought great. Beyond the five or six great exceptions, which are the wonder of their age, contemporary admiration is nothing but shortsightedness. Gilt is gold. To be a chance comer is no drawback, provided you have improved your chances. The common herd is an old Narcissus, who adores himself, and who applauds the common. That mighty genius, by which one becomes a Moses, an Eschylus, a Dante, a Michael Angelo, or a Napoleon, the multitude assigns at once and by acclamation to whoever succeeds in his object, whatever it may be. Let a notary rise to be a deputy; let a sham Corneille write Tiridate; let a eunuch come into the possession of a harem; let a military Prudhomme accidentally win the decisive battle of an epoch; let an apothecary invent pasteboard soles for army shoes, and lay up, by selling this pasteboard instead of leather for the army of the Sambre-et-Meuse, four hundred thousand livres in the funds; let a pack-pedlar espouse Usury and bring her to bed of seven or eight millions, of which he is the father and she the mother; let a preacher become a bishop by talking through his nose; let the steward of a good house become so rich on leaving service that he is made Minister of Finance ;-men call that Genius, just as they call the face of Mousqueton, Beauty, and the bearing of Claude, Majesty. They confound the radiance of the stars of heaven with the radiations which a duck's foot leaves in the mud. XIII. WHAT HE BELIEVED. We need not examine the Bishop of D from an orthodox point of view. humour of respect. Before such a soul we feel only in the F should be taken for granted. Moreover, given certain natures, and we admit the possible development of all the beauties of human virtue in a faith different from our own. What he thought of this dogma or that mystery, are secrets of the interior faith known only in the tomb where souls enter stripped of all externals. But we are sure that religious difficulties never resulted with him in hypocrisy. No corruption is possible with the diamond. He believed as much as he could. Credo in patrem, he often exclaimed; and, besides, he derived from his good deeds that measure of satisfaction which meets the demands of conscience, and which say in a low voice, "thou art with God." We think it our duty to notice that, outside of and, so to say, beyond this faith, the Bishop had an excess of love. It is on that account, quia multum amavit, that he was deemed vulnerable by "serious men," "sober persons,” and "reasonable people;" favourite phrases in our sad world, where egotism receives its key-note from pedantry. What was this excess of love? It was a serene benevolence, overflowing men, as we have already indicated, and on occasion, extending to inanimate things. He lived without disdain. He was indulgent to God's creation. Every man, even the best, has some inconsiderate severity which he holds in reserve for animals. The Bishop of Dhad none of this severity peculiar to most priests. He did not go as far as the Brahmin, but he appeared to have pondered over those words of Ecclesiastes: "Who knows whither goeth the spirit of the beast ?" Ugliness of aspect, monstrosities of instinct, did not trouble or irritate him. He was moved and afflicted by it. He seemed to be thoughtfully seeking, beyond the apparent life, for its cause, its explanation, or its excuse. He seemed at times to ask changes of God. He examined without passion, and with the eye of a linguist deciphering a palimpsest, the portion of chaos which there is yet in nature. These reveries sometimes drew from him strange words. One morning, he was in his garden, and thought himself alone; but his sister was walking behind him; all at once he stopped, and looked at something on the ground; it was a large, black, hairy horrible spider. His sister heard him say: "Poor thing! it is not his fault." Why not relate this almost divine childlikeness of goodness? Puerilities, perhaps, but these sublime puerilities were those of St. Francis of Assisi and of Marcus Aurelius. One day he received a sprain rather than crush an ant. So lived this upright man. Sometimes he went to sleep in his garden, and then there was nothing more venerable. Monseigneur Bienvenu had been formerly, according to the accounts of his youth, and even of his early manhood, a passionate, perhaps a violent man. His universal tenderness was less an instinct of nature than the result of a strong conviction filtered through life into his heart, slowly dropping in upon him, thought by thought; for a character, as well as a rock, may be worn into by drops of water. Such marks are ineffaceable-such formations are indestructible. In 1815, we think we have already said, he attained his seventy-sixth year, but he did not appear to be more than sixty. He was not tall, he was somewhat fleshly, and frequently took long walks that he might not become more so; he had a firm step, and was but little bowed, a circumstance from which we do not claim to draw any conclusion.Gregory XVI., at eighty years, was erect and smiling, which did not prevent him from being a bad bishop. Monseigneur Bienvenu had what people call "a fine head," but so benevolent that you forgot it was fine. When he talked with that infantile gaiety that was one of his graces, and of which we have already spoken, all felt at ease in his presence, and from his whole person joy seemed to radiate. His ruddy and fresh complexion, and his |