they are well judging who devote the best gifts of nature and of learning to the instruction of the illiterate, the praise of wisdom is not to be denied to such as write with the more ambitious aim of stimulating the nobler intellects amongst us to enterprises commensurate with their elevated powers. No strenuous effort for the good of mankind was ever yet made altogether in vain; nor will those of our author he fruitless, though the results may fall far short of his aspirations. The general currents of thought and action can never be diverted from their channels, except by minds as rarely produced as they are wonderfully endowed. Energy, decision, and a selfreliance, independent of human praise or censure, are amongst their invariable characteristics. To this sublime order of men the Recluse of Stamford Rivers does not belong. Nor can a place be assigned to him among those calmer spirits, whose inventive genius, or popular eloquence, has enabled them from their solitudes to cast on the agitated masses of society seeds of thought destined at some future period to change the aspect of human affairs. He is an independent more than an original thinker. He is rather exempt from THE PORT-ROYALISTS.* [EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1841.] ALL religions, and all ages, have their saints; of a steep cleft or hollow, intersecting the motheir men of unearthly mould; self-conquerors; notonous plain across which he has been sublime even in their errors; not altogether passing. The brook which winds through the hateful in their very crimes. If a man would verdant meadows beneath him, stagnates into understand the dormant powers of his own na- a large pool, reflecting the solitary Gothic arch, ture, let him read the Acta Sanctorum. Or, if" too the water-mill, and the dove-cot, which rise high this price of knowledge," let him at least from its banks; with the farmhouse, the deacquaint himself with the legends of the later cayed towers, the forest-trees, and the innumeheroes of the Gallican church. Of all ascetics rable shrubs and creepers which clothe the they were the least repulsive. They waged slopes of the valley. France has many a lovewar on dullness with the ardour of Dangeau lier prospect, though this is not without its and St. Simon, and with still better success. beauty; and many a field of more heart-stirring While macerating their bodies in the cloisters interest, though this, too has been ennobled by of Port-Royal, they did not cease to be French heroic daring; but through the length and men and French women of the Augustan age. breadth of that land of chivalry and of song, While practising the monastic virtue of silence the traveller will in vain seek a spot so sacred their social spirit escaped this unwelcome re- to genius, to piety, and to virtue. That arch straint, in a body of memoirs as copious as is all which remains of the once crowded mothose which record the splendour and the mise- nastery of Port-Royal. In those woods Racine ries of Versailles. In a series of volumes, of first learned the language-the universal lanwhich the above is the first, the author is about guage-of poetry. Under the roof of that` to tell their story in the language (vernacular humble farmhouse, Pascal, Arnauld, Nicole, and erudite) of his country and his times. A De Saci, and Tillemont, meditated those works, rapid sketch of it may be of use in directing which, as long as civilization and Christianity the attention of our readers to one of the most survive, will retain their hold on the gratitude remarkable episodes in ecclesiastical history.and reverence of mankind. There were given He whose journey lies from Versailles to innumerable proofs of the graceful good huChevreuse, will soon find himself at the brow mour of Henry the Fourth. To this seclusion Reuchlin, Geschichte von Port-Royal. Der Kampf retired the heroine of the Fronde, Ann Genedes Reformirten und des Jesuistischen Katholicismus.vieve, Duchess of Longueville, to seek the 1 ter Band: bis zum Tode Angelica Arnauld. (Reuchlin, peace which the world could not give. Madame History of Port-Royal. The Struggle of the Reformed de Sevigne discovered here a place tout and the Jesuitical Catholicism. 1st vol.: to the death of Angelique Arnauld.) 8vo. Leipsic, 1839. propre a inspirer le desir de faire son salut." From the Petit Trianon and Marly, there came | Mere Angelique, by which she has since been hither to worship God, many a courtier and celebrated in the annals of the church. many a beauty, heart-broken or jaded with the very vanity of vanities-the idolatry of their fellow mortals. Survey French society in the seventeenth century from what aspect you will, it matters not, at Port-Royal will be found the most illustrious examples of what imparted to that motley assemblage any real dignity or permanent regard. Even to the mere antiquarian, it was not without a lively interest. At the eve of his departure to the conquest of the holy sepulchre, the good knight, Matthieu de Marli, cast a wistful gaze over the broad lands of his ancestors, and intrusted to his spouse, Mathilde de Garlande, the care of executing some work of piety by which to propitiate the Divine favour, and to insure his safe return. A Benedictine monastery, for the reception of twelve ladies of the Cistertian order, was accordingly erected, in imitation of the cathedral at Amiens, and by the same architect. Four centuries witnessed the gradual increase of the wealth and dignity of the foundation. Prelates of the houses of Sully and Nemours enlarged its privileges. Pope Honorius III. authorized the celebration of the sacred office within its walls, even though the whole country should be lying under a papal interdict; and of the host consecrated on the profession of a nun, seven fragments might be solemnly confided to her own keeping, that, for as many successive days, she might administer to herself the holy sacrament. Yet how arrest by spiritual immunities the earthward tendency of all sublunary things? At the close of the reign of Henry IV., the religious ladies of Port-Royal had learned to adjust their "robes a grandes manches" to the best advantage. Promenades by the margin of the lake relieved the tedium of monastic life. Gayer strains of music than those of the choir, might be heard from the adjacent woods; and if a cavalier from Paris or Chevreuse had chanced to pursue his game that way, the fair musicians were not absolutely concealed nor inexorably silent. So lightly sat the burden of their vows on those amiable recluses, that the gayest courtier might well covet for his portionless daughter the rank of their lady abbess. Such at least was the judgment of M. Marion. He was advocate-general to Henry IV., and maternal grandfather of Jaqueline Marie Angelique and of Agnes Arnauld. Of the arts to the invention of which the moderns may lay claim, that of jobbing is not one. M. Marion obtained from "the father of his people" the coadjuterie of the abbey of Port-Royal for the high-spirited Jaqueline, then in her eighth year; and that of St. Cyr for the more gentle Agnes, over whom not more than five summers had passed. The young ladies renounced at once the nursery and the world. A single step conducted them from the leading strings to the veil. Before the completion of her first decade, Angelique, on the death of her immediate predecessor, found herself, in plenary right, the abbess and the ruler of her monastery; and, in attestation of her spiritual espousals, assumed the title and the name of the To the church, however, must not be imputed this breach of ecclesiastical discipline. In the ardour of his parental affections, the learned advocate-general was hurried into acts for which he would have consigned a criminal of lower degree to the galleys. He obtained the requisite bulls from Rome by forged certificates of his granddaughter's age; and to this treason against the holy see, Henry himself was at least an accessary after the fact. Hunting in the valley of Port-Royal, the gay momarch trespassed on the precincts of the sacred enclosure. To repel the royal intruder, a child, bearing in her hand the crosier, which bespoke her high conventional rank, issued from the gates of the abbey at the head of a solemn procession of nuns, and rebuked her sovereign with all the majesty of an infant Ambrose. Henry laughed and obeyed. Marion's detected fraud would seem to have passed for a good practical joke, and for nothing more. In the result, however, no occurrence ever contributed less to the comedy of life, or formed the commencement of a series of events more grave or touching. It would be difficult or impossible to discover, in the history of the church, the name of any woman who has left so deep an impress of her character on the thoughts and the conduct of the Christian commonwealth. The family of Arnauld held a conspicuous station among the noblesse of Provence, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In a later age, a member of that house enjoyed the singular honour of at once serving Catharine de Medicis as her procureur-general, and of defeating, sword in hand, at the head of his servants, the force sent to assassinate him on the day of St. Bartholomew. Returning to the bosom of the church, which had thus roughly wooed him, he transmitted his fortune and his office to his son, Antoine Arnauld, the husband of Catharine Marion. They were the happy parents of no less than twenty children. Of these the youngest was the great writer who has imparted to the name of Arnauld an imperishable lustre. Five of the daughters of the same house assumed the veil, in the abbey of Port-Royal. Their mother, Catharine Marion, was admitted in her widowed into that society. Pomponne, the minister of Lonis XIV.; Le Maitre, unrivalled among the masters of forensic eloquence in France; and De Saci, the author of the best version of the Holy Scriptures into the French language, were three of her grandsons. Before her death, the venerable matron had seen herself surrounded, in the monastery and the adjoining hermitages, by eighteen of her descendants in the first and second generations; nor until the final disper sion of the sisterhood, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, had the posterity of Antoine and Catharine Arnauld ceased to rule in the house of which Mere Angelique had, seventy years before, been the renowned reformer. To those who believe that the psychological distinction of the sexes may be traced to physical causes, and that, where they neither marry nor are given in marriage, those distinctions | taught, the visible presence of her Redeemer will for ever disappear, the character of Ange- was daily manifested-all spoke to her of a lique is less perplexing than to the advocates high destiny, a fearful responsibility, and of of the opposite theory. Her understanding, objects for which all sublunary ties might well her spirit, and her resolves, were all essen- be severed, and a sacrifice wisely made of tially masculine. She was endued with the every selfish feeling. Nor need a Protestant various faculties by which man either extorts fear to acknowledge, that on a heart thus conor wins dominion over his fellow-men; secrated to the service of her Maker, rested with address, courage, fortitude, self-reliance, the holy influence, familiar to all who meekly and an unfaltering gaze fixed on objects at adore the great source of wisdom, and reveronce too vast to be measured and remote to ently acquiesce in his will. As a science, be discerned but by the all-searching eye of religion consists in the knowledge of the relafaith. Among the Israelites of old, she would tions between God and man; as a principle, in have assumed the office of judge; or would the exercise of the corresponding affections; have given out oracles in the forests of an- as a rule of duty, in the performance of the accient Germany. tions which those affections prescribe. The principle may thrive in healthful life and energy, though the science be ill understood and the rule imperfectly apprehended. For, after all, the great command is Love; and He from whom that command proceeded, is himself Love; and amidst all the absurdities (for such they were) of her monastic life, Angelique was still conscious of the presence of a Father, and found the guidance of a friend. Born in the reign, and educated near the court, of a Bourbon, the lighter and more gentle elements of her nature found exercise even under the paralyzing influences of an ascetic life; for Angelique was gay and light of heart, and St. Benedict himself might have forgiven or applauded the playful sallies of his votary. In scaling the heights of devotion, she could call to her own aid, and that of others, all the resources of the most plaintive or impassioned music. To flowers, and to the glad face of nature, she gave back their own smiles with a true woman's sympathy. With such literature as might be cultivated within the walls of her convent, she was intimately conversant; and would have eclipsed Madame de Sevigne's epistolary fame, had it been permitted to her to escape from theological into popular topics. Concentrated within a domestic circle, and bestowed on a husband or a child, the affections, which she poured out on every human being who claimed her pity, would have burned with a flame as pure and as intense as was ever hymned in poetry or dreamed of in romance. A traveller on the highways of the world, she must have incurred every peril except that of treading an obscure and inglorious path. Immured by superstition in a cloister, she opened the way at once to sublunary fame and to an immortal recompense; and has left an example as dangerous as it may be seductive to feebler minds, who, in a desperate imitation of such a model, should hazard a similar self-devotion. When at the age of eleven years, Angelique became the abbess of Port-Royal, few things were less thought of by the French ladies of the Cistertian order than the rule of their austere founder. During the wars of the League, religion, by becoming a watchword, had almost ceased to be a reality; civil war, the apology for every crime, had debased the national character; and the profligacy of manners which the last generation expiated by their sufferings, may be distinctly paid back to the age of which Davila has written the political, and Bassompierre the social history. Society will still exert a powerful influence even over those by whom it has been abandoned. When Gabrielle d'Etrees reigned at the Louvre, beads were told and masses sung in neighbouring cloisters, by vestals who, in heathen Rome, would have been consigned to a living sepulchre. In a monastery, the spiritual thermometer ranges from the boiling to the freezing point with but few intermediate pauses. From the ecstasies of devotion there is but one step to disgust, and thence to sensuality, for most of those who dare to forego the aids to piety and virtue which divine wisdom has provided in the duties and the affections of domestic life. Angelique, indeed, might be fitted for a nunnery; for such was the strength, and such the sacred harmony of her spirit, that while still a sojourner on earth, she seemed already While this downward progress was advanca denizen of heaven. When a child, she un- ing at Port-Royal, it happened that a Capuchin derstood as a child; enjoying the sports, the friar sought and obtained permission to preach rambles, and the social delights which the there. Of the man himself, the chroniclers of habits of Port-Royal had not then forbidden. the house have left a scandalous report; but With advancing years came deeper and more they gratefully acknowledge the efficacy of his melancholy thoughts. She felt, indeed, (how sermon. Angelique listened, and was concould she but feel?) the yearnings of a young verted. Such, at least, is her own statement; heart for a world where love and homage and unstirred be all the theological questions awaited her. But those mysteries of our being, connected with it. How deep was the impresof which the most frivolous are not altogether sion on her mind, may be gathered from her unconscious, pressed with unwonted weight own words;-"Often," she exclaims, "did I A spouse of Christ; a spiritual wish to fly a hundred leagues from the spot, mother of those who sustained the same awful and never more to see my father, mother, or character-her orisons, her matins, and her kindred, dearly as I love them. My desire was vesper chants, accompanied by unearthly to live apart from every one but God, unknown music and by forms of solemn significance; to any human being, concealed and humble, the Gothic pile beneath which she sat en- with no witness but himself, with no desire throned; and the altar where, as she was but to please him." Her dignity as abbess on her. she now regarded as a burden. Even her himself then hazarded an encounter with the projected reforms had lost their interest. To formidable termagant. He returned with a live where her holy aspirations would be thwarted, and where. examples of holiness would not be found, was to soar to a more arduous, and therefore a more attractive sphere of self-denial. whole skin, but boasted no other advantage. Next appeared at the abbey gates a band of archers. After two days of fruitless expostulations, they broke into the enclosure. Madame now changed her tactics. She took up a deThat such fascinations snould dazzle a young fensive position, till then unheard of in the lady in her seventeenth year, is, it must be science of strategy. In plain terms, she went confessed, no very memorable prodigy; but to to bed. A more embarrassing manoeuvre was cherish no ineffectual emotions was one of the never executed by Turenne or Condé. The characteristics of the Mère Angelique, as it is, | siege was turned into a blockade. Hour after indeed, of all powerful minds. To abdicate hour elapsed; night succeeded to day, and day her ecclesiastical rank, and by breathing a to night; but still the abbess was recumbenttainted moral atmosphere, to nourish by the unapparelled, unapproachable. Driven thus force of contrast the loftier Christian graces, to choose between a ludicrous defeat and a were purposes ultimately executed, though for sore scandal, what Frenchman could longer awhile postponed. She paused only till the hesitate? Bed, blankets, abbess and all, were sisterhood of Port-Royal should have acquired, raised on the profane shoulders of the archers, from her example or teaching, that sanctity of lifted into a carriage, and most appropriately manners in which her creed informed her that turned over to the keeping of the Filles Penithe perfection of our nature consists. To the tentes at Paris. elder ladies, the prospect had few charms. But the will of their young abbess prevailed. They laid at her feet their separate possessions, abandoned every secular amusement, and, closing the gates of their monastery against all strangers, retired to that uninterrupted discharge of their spiritual exercises to which their vows had consigned them. Much may be read, in the conventual annals, of the contest with her family to which the Mère Angelique was exposed by the last of these resolutions. On a day, subsequently held in high esteem as the "Journée du Guichet," her parents and M. D'Andilly, her eldest brother, were publicly excluded, by her mandate, from the hallowed precincts, despite their reproaches and their prayers, and the filial agonies of her own heart. That great sacrifice accomplished, the rest was easy. Poverty resumed his stern dominion. Linen gave place to the coarsest | woollens. Fasting and vigils subdued the lower appetites; and Port-Royal was once more a temple whence the sacrifices of devotion rose with an unextinguished flame to heaven, thence, as it was piously believed, to draw down an unbroken stream of blessings to earth. Far different were the strains that arose from the neighbouring abbey of Maubisson, under the rule of Mde. d'Etrees. That splendid mansion, with its dependent baronies and forests, resembled far more the palace and gardens of Armida, than a retreat sacred to penitence and prayer. She was the sister of the too famous Gabrielle, to whose influence with Henry she was indebted for this rich preferment. Indulging without restraint, not merely in the luxuries but in the debaucheries of the neighbouring capitol, she had provoked the anger of the king, and the alarm of the general of the order. A visitation of the house was directed. Madame d'Etrees, imprisoned the visiters, and well-nigh starved them. A second body of delegates presented themselves. Penances, at least when involuntary, were not disused at Maubisson. The new commissioners were locked up in a dungeon, regaled with bread and water, and soundly whipped every morning. Supported by a guard, the general And now was to be gratified the lofty wish of Angelique to tread in paths where, unsustained by any human sympathy, she might cast herself with an undivided reliance on the Arm which she knew could never fail her. From the solemn repose of Port-Royal, she was called, by the general of the order, to assume the government of the ladies of Maubisson. Thetis passing from the ocean caves to the Grecian camp, did not make a more abrupt transition. At Maubisson, the compromise between religious duties and earthly pleasures was placed on the most singular footing. Monks and nuns sauntered together through the gardens of the monastery, or angled in the lakes which watered them. Fètes were celebrated in the arbours with every pledge except that of temperance. Benedictine cowls and draperies were blended in the dance with the military uniform and the stiff brocades of their secular guests; and the evening closed with cards and dice and amateur theatricals, until the curtain fell on scenes than which none could more require than friendly shelter. Toil and care might seem to have fled the place, or rather to have been reserved exclusively for the confessor. Even for him relief was provided. Considerately weighing the extent of the labours they habitually imposed on him, his fair penitents drew up for their common use certain written forms of self-arraignment, to which he, with equal tenderness, responded by other established forms of conditional absolution. But the lady entered, and Comus and his crew fled the hallowed ground which they had thus been permitted to defile. She entered with all the majesty of faith, tempered by a meek compassion for the guilt she abhorred, and strong in that virgin purity of heart which can endure unharmed the contact even of pollution. "Our health and our lives may be sacrificed," she said to her associates in this work of mercy; 66 but the work is the work of God:" and in the strength of God she performed it. Seclusion from the world was again established within the refectory and the domain of Maubisson. Novices possessing a "genuine vocation" were admitted. Angelique directed at once the secular and the spiritual affairs of the convent. All the details of a feudal principality, the education of the young, the care of the sick, the soothing of the penitents, the management of the perverse, the conduct of the sacred offices, alternately engaged her time; and in each she exhibited a gentleness, a gayety, and a firmness of mind, before which all resistance gave way. The associates of Madame d'Etrees retained their love of good cheer, and Angelique caused their table to be elegantly served. They sang deplorably out of tune, and the young abbess silently endured the discord which racked her ear. To their murmurs she answered in her kindest accents. Their indolence she rebuked only by performing the most menial offices in their service; and inculcated self-denial by assigning to herself a dormitory, which, to say the truth, would have much better suited the house-dog. The record of the strange and even sordid self-humiliations to which she thought it right to bow, can hardly be read without a smile; but, whatever may have been the errors of her creed, a more touching picture has never been drawn of the triumphs of love and of wisdom, than in the record left by Madame Suireau des Anges of this passage of the life of Angelique Arnauld. But Madame d'Etrees was not yet at the end of her resources. A company of young men, under the guidance of her brother-in-law Count de Sauze were observed one evening to loiter near the house of the Filles Penitentes. By the next morning she was under their escort at the gates of Maubisson. Burst open by main force, they again admitted the ejected abbess. The servant who opposed her entrance was chastised on the spot. Patients who now occupied as an hospital the once sumptuous chambers of the abbatial lodge, instantly found themselves in much more humble lodgings. Cooks resumed their long neglected art, and Madame d'Etrees provided a dinner worthy of her former hospitality and her recent privations. But in the presence of Angelique, the virago was abashed. To intimidate or provoke her rival, proved alike impossible: it might be more easy to overpower her. De Sauzé and his confederates made the attempt. They discharged their pistols and flourished their drawn swords over her head, with unmanly menaces. She remained unmoved and silent. The screams which the occasion demanded, were accordingly supplied by the intrusive abbess. Clamour and outrage were alike ineffectual. At length Madame d'Etrees and her respectable confessor, aided by De Sauzé, laid their hands on Angelique, and thrust her from the precincts of the monastery. Thirty of the nuns followed her in solemn procession. Their veils let down, their eyes cast on the earth, and their hands clasped in prayer, they slowly moved to a place of refuge in the neighbouring town of Pontoise! But alas, for the vanity of human triumphs! -waving banners, and burnished arms glitter through the advancing column of dust on the road from Paris to Maubisson. Scouts announce the approach of two hundred and fifty well-appointed archers; Madame d'Etrees and her cavaliers escape by the postern. A despe rate leap saves the worthless life of her confessor. Her partisan, the Mere de la Sure, "a nun by profession, but otherwise resembling a trooper," mounts through a trap-door to a hiding-place in the ceiling, thence to be shamefully dragged by an archer whom she still more shamefully abused. Then might be seen through the gloom of night, a train of priests and nuns drawing near with measured steps to the venerable abbey; on either side a double file of cavalry, and in each horseman's hand a torch, illuminating the path of the returning exiles. Angelique resumed her benignant reign; but not in peace. Brigands led by De Sauze, and encouraged by her rival, haunted the neighbouring forests; and though protected by the archers, the monastery remained in a state of siege. Shots were fired through the windows, and the life of Angelique was endangered. Strong in the assurance of Divine protection, she demanded and obtained the removal of the guard. Her confidence was justified by the event. Madame d'Etrees was discovered, was restored to her old quarters at the Filles Penitentes, and in due time transferred-not without good cause-to the chatelet; there to close in squalid misery, in quarrels, and intemperance, a career which might, with almost equal propriety, form the subject of a drama, a homily or a satire. For five successive years Angelique laboured to bring back the ladies of Maubisson to the exact observance of their sacred vows. Aided by her sister Agnes, the abbess of St. Cyr, she established a similar reform in a large proportion of the other Cistertian nunneries of France. All obstacles yielded to their love, their prudence, and their self-devotion. A moral plague was stayed, and excesses which even the sensual and the worldly condemned, were banished from the sanctuaries of religion. That in some, the change was but from shameless riot to hypocritical conformity; that in others, intemperance merely gave way to mental lethargya and that even the most exalted virtues of the cloister held but a subordinate and an equivocal place in the scale of Christian graces, is indeed but too true: yet assuredly, it was in no such critical spirit as this, that the labours of Angelique were judged and accepted by Him, in the lowly imitation of whom she had thus gone about doing good. "She has done what she could," was the apology with which he rescued from a like cold censure the love which had expressed itself in a costly and painful sacrifice; nor was the gracious benediction which rewarded the woman of Bethany withheld from the abbess of Port-Royal. To that tranquil home she bent her steps, there to encounter far heavier trials than any to which the resentment of Madame d'Etrees had exposed her. Accompanied by a large number of the nuns of Maubisson, Angelique returned to the valley of Chevreuse. They brought with them neither silver nor gold, though rich in treasures of a far higher price in the account of their devout protectress. Poverty, disease, and death, were however in their train. Rising from the marshes below, a humid fog hung continually on the slopes of the adjacent hills |