Germania. Monseigneur, M. Bourget will flood Chantilly with AngloSaxon visitors! Oh those English barbarians! I was told that they had an intelligent man among them some time ago: Matthew Arnold, I think they called him; and it appears that he charged his countrymen with a deficiency in general ideas. I was never able to judge of his own abilities, for I never read his works. Now I fancy I see M. Brunetière supervising, in his despotic way, the most unimportant details. By his advice, the librarian upsets all the books. To a shelf in a dark corner he consigns the suspicious Baudelaire, and Goncourt, and Zola, while he sets in full view, in all the glory of a costly binding, the works of a critic who shall be nameless, side by side with those of the famous Bishop of Meaux. Do you see that haughty prelate sweeping by? Mark his majestic step. I try to avoid him. He reasons so inveterately from à priori principles, and he cannot understand the historical method. When I first came here, we had a discussion on the liberties of the Gallican Church and the infallibility of the Pope, but we disagreed at the very outset. Poor Bossuet, he is so very far behind the age!

The DUC D'AUMALE. I cannot abide men who, with proud prelatical perversity, set their ideals only in the past. They do not seem to have the slightest suspicion of the mischief they bring about in the world. Twenty-five years ago the monarchist cause was ruined by the intransigeance of the Pretender, a prelate in his way. He refused to abandon the white flag and the fleurs de lys of Saint-Louis. Sapristi, as if Henri Quatre hesitated to make concessions to his people! There was a prince. He knew what tact and good policy meant. Thanks to your efforts, our countrymen have at last shaken off the yoke of many an exploded notion.

RENAN. Yes, on the whole, when I survey the past I am well satisfied with myself. There has been some progress, and on the lines. I set down. Yet I cannot conceal my disappointment, fanatics are too many in our country. Of course I do not wish for one moment to see fanaticism disappear completely. It would be disconcerting to see no more bigotry, one is so used to it! but I must own that I was truly grieved when the other day, at Notre Dame, Père Ollivier displayed such an improper concern for primary causes.

The DUC D'AUMALE. And no one approved him.

RENAN. It is true that sincere Catholics, a class of men with whom I was alway's careful to remain on excellent terms, and to whom I made

every concession in my power, felt deeply distressed at the preacher's tone. But they attack the manner of his speech and not the matter. And Père Ollivier is no exception. He has brothers in the spirit in all parties. Bigoted Radicals, anti-clerical free-thinkers, illiberal Paris municipal councillors, all the miserable little Homais's who are mouthing in provincial Masonic lodges or at the tribune of the Chamber of Deputies. The dogmatic critics, too: be their creeds political, social, critical, or theological, they are all narrow. Some of these men reason like their seventeenth-century ancestors; the others have reached the intellectual development of the Jacobins. They are all obstinately turned towards the past, and they are all interesting specimens for the psychologist to observe-survivals of primitive types, as naturalists would say. See, for instance, how that unmistakable twin-brother of Père Ollivier's, M. Brunetière, has narrowed down the range of my cherished Revue des Deux-Mondes; see his attitude towards my dear friend M. Berthelot. Of course, M. Berthelot believes as resolutely in Science as his opponent disbelieves in it, and both proclaim that they have an infallible method to get at the truth—an egregious mistake, forsooth! but an excusable mistake. I fell into a like error when I wrote a book on the future of Science, in a moment of juvenile enthusiasm. It was at most a venial sin, and I did not shrink from publishing it in my old age, the style seemed so brilliant. Neither M. Brunetière nor M. Berthelot can be right; they have not that detachment from their own theories and writings which is the distinctive mark of the philosopher's mind. The progress of M. Brunetière towards a less reasonable way of looking at things is slow, and his inconsistencies and mistakes are many. I feel sure that, in spite of his literary triumphs at home and abroad, he is worried with political ambition. What a pity it is that Chantilly does not send a deputy to Parliament !

The DUC D'AUMALE. You are very pessimistic as to the merits of our leading academicians. Why, you have two brilliant disciples among them.

RENAN. France and Lemaître? They amuse me hugely. They will be at Chantilly to criticise their fellow-immortals, and when the season is over they will write articles impartially comparing Chantilly and the Goncourt Academy. Yes, your gift was a decidedly happy inspiration.

The DUC D'AUMALE. I confess that I had some misgivings as

to the wisdom of the step I took. I acted on the first impulse, soldierlike, without troubling about consequences.

RENAN. And the unfailing devotion to the Republic of Letters that was your sole incentive, has made you more illustrious than any of your predecessors. Ah, there they are once more! Look at that sorry crew! They occupied the chair to which you were elected. There they are, a mournful procession-Gomberville, Huet, Boivin, Saint-Aignan, Colardeau, La Harpe, Lacretelle, Droz, Montalembert. How ironical it seems! They were all famous men in their time. They had their battles to win, their critics to bear with, their flatterers to distrust. La Harpe and Montalembert alone are remembered to-day. And what a singular fame has fallen to the lot of La Harpe! He lives because criticasters persist in borrowing from him their most original ideas. Stretching over two hundred years in the past, and with a glorious future in store, thanks to your munificence, the Academy unceasingly acts its part in the comedy of life. Let us watch and smile on. You see that shady myrtle grove: there the lyric poets brood over their bygone joys, or sing once more their plaintive songs of love. Peace be with them! Towards that sloping lawn yonder let us rather bend our footsteps. The philosophers that resort thither are ever bathed in the brightest rays of light. They are a little company with whom it is pleasant to converse. They are neither haughty nor pedantic, because they know what an arduous task it is to catch the faintest glimmer of truth. They are full of fondness for mankind and forbearance for human weaknesses, because they have had an unusual share of suffering and pain. Here, Monseigneur, we are not called upon to answer the question, What is truth? That was our task when we dwelt among the sons of men; here we meekly and patiently await the day when all difficulties will be removed, all doubts set aside, and the great mystery of life revealed. We have given up striving to get at the truth, and the natural curiosity of our minds is satisfied with hypotheses. Now we discuss the origin of man, and the destinies of the world; now we build up the flimsy structure of some system of philosophy, or fathom the eternal laws that guide the footsteps of the sun and stars, suspend the clouds on high, and cause the showers to descend; and now we pleasantly deal with the flutter created in the French capital by your gift to the Institute of the Chateau of Chantilly.

CH. BASTIDE.

THE NAVY AND THE MONEY-BAG

IR RICHARD HAWKINS has said that the land is natural

SIR

to men, but the sea to fishes. Our fathers, whether they remembered his maxim or not, were accustomed to act upon it when they were preparing lads for a seafaring life. They sent them into ships young, in order to break them the sooner, and the more effectually, to the conditions of an existence which must always have about it something unnatural-that is to say, unlike to, and remote from, the habits of the mass of men. All who go upon the sea are not sailors, even when they are more than mere passengers. But those who are to handle the ship must needs be, and it has at least hitherto always been the case that, when they were 'good, they were "a people by themselves." That this brought with it certain limitations, and inflicted certain deficiencies, is true enough; but they were visible only when the sailor came ashore, and they were well incurred if he was the better fitted to do his proper work, on his own element.

It was from a conviction of the truth of this, that our naval officers were taken in very early boyhood. Moreover, the existence being a hard one, they were rarely chosen from among the rich. This does not mean that they were not commonly gentlemen, but only that they were younger sons, and sons of younger sons. Some, it is true, were not even so much as this—Troubridge, for example, whose father was a baker in Westminster, and who began as cabin-boy in a merchant ship. Our elastic system, or want of system, permitted of a wide choice for our staff of officers. At the one end it took in the son of the King, and at the other John Campbell, Mitchell, Cook, and Bowen, the pressed men, volunteers, and masters' mates, who could fight their way to the front. It allowed of much jobbery, of much making of false musters, of the promotion now and then of a ruffian from before the mast; but, on the whole, it swept in good men from all quarters. In that struggle, where interest, fortune, and capacity were all fighting together, there was a chance that the fittest would survive; and there was this to be said for it, that the King was not bound in his choice to

one class only-to the nobles, as was the case in France, or, as is coming to be the case with us, to the sons of those families which are in a position to spend a not inconsiderable sum of money in preparing their boys for an unremunerative profession. History shows that our old free condition can venture to be judged by its results. No fighting force, by land or sea, has ever shown a better average of capacity in its chiefs than the English Navy, from the day when the formation of a corps of officers was begun, in the reign of Charles II, down to the Crimean War.

Yet immediately after that war we began to be in doubt whether what had answered our purpose so long, and so well, would serve any longer, and we came to a negative conclusion. The Britannia was established to give the future midshipman a period of preliminary training. It is not my purpose to argue for, or against, the wisdom of the decision. I only note that the necessity of passing the boy through this school added one hundred pounds of school fees, and other expenses, to the cost of sending him into the Navy. Still, this was not very much. His keep and schooling might have cost not much less at home, and what sacrifice there was could still be borne by the retired officer, or other gentleman of no great means, who wished to see his son serve the Queen on the quarter-deck. Besides, the cadet who left the Britannia, during the first years of its existence, still went from her to the old practical training. He went to a masted ship, where he would be at once stationed aloft, and set to do boat-work in all conditions. This gave him at once the early training in the real work of his trade, which has always, and, as it seems to me, rightly, been held to be the secret of the efficiency of our old corps of officers. They learnt to rely on themselves, to act for themselves, to deal with difficulties, and "to do the next thing" at once, instinctively, and without having to stop in order to remember a book lesson. Neither is it a small matter that they were brought very directly in contact with petty officers, coxswains of boats, captains of tops, and so on, and learnt to know the seaman whom they were to command, and to know him on kindly terms. When a lad had the misfortune not to have "the hand," his deficiency was soon detected. There are men, who are not necessarily fools in other relations of life, who could never learn to steer a boat, or drive a pair of horses, so as to get the best out of them. There are some who will not try. The practical test once applied to the cadet from the day he joined his ship soon revealed his incapacity, or his want of "zeal.”