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the same stock to whom Francis I. allud- of interest by dedicating to him, when ed in his memorable challenge: "Here are four of us, gentlemen of La Guyenne : Sauzac, Montalembert, and La Chasteigneraye, ready to encounter all comers." The parental grandfather of our hero was an emigrant; his maternal grandfather a retired Indian merchant or civil servant; and Mrs. Oliphant, after expatiating on "the beautiful melancholy face, replete with tragic associations," of the expatriated noble, exclaims:

Thus stands Jean de Montalembert at one side of the portal; and on the other James Forbes, with trim peruke and calm countenance, strong in English order, prosperity, and progress, expecting nothing but good, hearing of nothing but victory, raises with cheerful confidence the curtain of life for the new actor about to step upon that tragic stage. No young beginner could have had predecessors more perfect in their typical character; no new soul could have more perfectly embodied in one those two great currents of the past.*

The father, Marc René, the son of Jean, had served with the British army in India, and thus, it would seem, became acquainted with Mr. Forbes. Instead of settling down in England, he and his wife were constantly on the move. By some lucky accident he carried the first news of the abdication of Napoleon to Louis XVIII.; and in due season he was rewarded for his zeal and fidelity by being named a peer of France and minister plenipotentiary to Stuttgart.

I

scarcely a year old, the great work (" Oriental Memoirs" in forty-two volumes quarto) by which the name of Forbes was to live for ages to come. He watched over his young charge with the fondest affection; but Charles was eight when it was finally determined, after a painful struggle for both, that he should go to school at Fulham, and the event is thus announced in a letter, dated Albemarle Street, 28th April 1818, from the grandfather to the mother:

The day of our separation arrived last week, to me a trial of no common kind, for except at short intervals, I have never lived alone for fifty-one years until now, and I felt it deeply. I told him I would take him after breakfast, or, if he liked it better, he might dine with me and we would go to the school in the evening. He hesitated a little and then said: "As I am to go, I had rather go at once."

They set off accordingly, and, when about half-way, the boy suddenly flung his arms round the grandfather's neck and adjured him by the love of truth which he had so sedulously inculcated, to answer one question truly : —

"You know, my dear grandpapa, that I have left my papa and mamma, my brother and sister at Stuttgart, to be your child; and now you and I are everything to each other until we see them again. Tell me therefore - but you must tell me truly—if since we left Paris have been the boy you expected and wished me to be, and if you love me as much as when We must suppose that the Scotch wife we were there all together?" It was almost was as much absorbed by political move-him that he had been all, and even more than too much for me; but I could with truth assure ments and intrigues as the French hus- all, I anticipated. Then said he, “I am the band, and was equally ready to throw off happiest boy in the world, nor shall I drop the parental cares and duties which might one tear when you leave me;" nor did he. have interfered with the exciting stir and bustle of her life; for, from the time he was fifteen months old, the boy was given over entirely to the keeping of James Forbes, who had already afforded strongest and strangest manifestation

the

the course of the following year, and He lost his affectionate grandfather in forthwith took up his abode in Paris with his father and mother, who were too much occupied with diplomacy and society to pay much attention to the bringing up of their children: Charles, Arthur (two years younger), and Elise. The first glimpses we get of his mental progress are from the diaries which he began keeping when he was thirteen, and continued with occasional breaks through life. At this early age he anticipated the

of Christianity, and, with a view to its on the way to see everything worth seecompletion, to waste no more time on the ing, and duly recording his impressions politics or history of his own time. Three as they arise. Received at once into the notes of admiration in red ink are set gay circles of the Swedish capital, he was against this entry in the original journal. with difficulty induced to lay aside his He attends the debates in the Chamber stiffness and reserve; his manner natuof Peers, and finds them d'une médiocrité rally enough gave offence to the lighteffrayante. In fact his thoughts, his hearted and haply frivolous companions plans, his subjects of interest, were those who were forced upon him; he was voted of a matured intellect, of a formed man, a prig; and it was not till some time after who felt "cabin'd, cribb'd, confined" with- his arrival, when his really gentle and unin the walls of a lecture room; and we assuming nature began to be recognized, can well believe that it was a glowing that one of the leading belles, the Comrecollection of what he had suffered from tesse d'Ugglas, ventured to confide to want of free expansion for body and mind him that she had thought him pédant et at Sainte-Barbe, in the universitarian bar-altier. This was a stunning blow to his rack as he called it. that made him long self-love, and a valuable lesson which (he after exclaim at Eton: "What a differ- intimates) he was not likely to forget. ence between this place and the houses where we were educated-true prisons walled up between two streets in Paris, everywhere surrounded by roofs and chimneys, with two rows of miserable trees in the midst of a paved or gravelled court, and a wretched walk every week or fortnight among the suburban lanes !

Yet he quitted Sainte-Barbe with regret. His pained and softened fancy ranged over and reproduced hours upon hours of consciously improving study or delightful interchange of heart and mind; and he must now look his last of the familiar places and faces, must break away from his books and his loved companions, to be thrown upon the wide world, and become more deeply impressed than ever with "the profound uselessness of life." “Je me fais vieux," he sets down; giving vent to a sentiment of frequent recurrence in the mouths of young people in their teens. Far from looking forward with fervent expectations of enjoyment to his approaching introduction to society, he foresaw no gratification in mingling undistinguished in the crowd:

"I can imagine Pitt or Fox coming out of the House of Commons where they had struck their adversaries dumb by their eloquence, and enjoying a dinner-party. I can imagine Grattan amusing himself, after fifty years of glory, playing hide-and-seek with children. But for an obscure and unknown individual, lost in the crowd of other men, or at the best numbered only among the élégants who feel themselves obliged to wander every evening into three or four houses where they are half stifled under pretence of enjoying themselves, I see neither pleasure nor honour in it. I see only a culpable loss of time, and mortal weariness."

Happen what might, in whatever society, congenial or uncongenial, he might be thrown, he would never merit the description of pédant et altier again. He actually consents to take part in a special quadrille, got up for a ball at the French embassy "which," he says, we were to have the absurdity of dancing before the king and queen; "the ladies initiated him into its mysteries, and (as he confesses with a mixture of shame and complacency) it went off very well. All this time he is studying the institutions of the country, drawing grave political conclusions, and keeping his enthusiasm for great things alive by corresponding with his friends. "Do not, I beseech you," he writes to Rio, "abandon yourself to that political discouragement which Burke justly calls the most fatal of all maladies. Do not despair of the cause which you have adopted, or give up sound principles, because a generation without faith and without soul seems to dishonour them by pretended attachment."

In another letter to Rio he says, "I am reading Kant, which I find horribly difficult. M. Cousin recommended me to

give myself up to this study; but I shall not follow his advice." He distrusted Kant's philosophy, as tending to undermine faith, and he lent a ready ear to the Abbé Studach, of whom he says, "I have made a precious discovery here, that of a Catholic priest, who is at the same time a philosopher, and who believes that faith may be reached by knowledge. His toleration is as great as his knowledge." The abbé brought him acquainted with a school boasting numerous disciples in the Bavarian and Austrian universities, In this mood he starts to join his fa- which undertook to combine religion with ther, then French ambassador at Stock-philosophy; but metaphysics were never holm, vià Belgium and Holland, lingering much to his taste, and he was wont to

arrive at conviction by a shorter road | There is a well-known saying of his, than argument. Truths divine did not quoted by M. Fossier, “ Je suis le premier come to him mended by the tongue of a de mon sang qui n'ai guerroyé qu'avec la theologian they came by insight, by in- plume; mais qu'elle devienne un glaive tuition, by inspiration; and they went à son tour." He had no real military arforth from him with the lightning flash of dour, and the pen in his hands was a genius, in spontaneous and irresistible more trenchant weapon than the sword. bursts. Burke and Grattan attracted During this interval of suspense he him far more than Kant and Schelling. wrote an article on Sweden, which was "Grattan above all," says Rio, "as the submitted to M. Guizot, as editor of the unwearied champion of the greatest of" Revue Française," for insertion in that causes, acquired rapidly the grandeur of the hero of a crusade to the eyes of his young admirer, whose enthusiasm, heightened day by day by the fame of O'Connell's patriotic orations, led him a little later to make an excursion, full of attractions for him, into the country of that great man."

as well as public consequences which it | brought him back to his original convicinvolved. His father was on the eve of tion that O'Connell was the heaven-born resigning his post as ambassador: his advocate of the most sacred of causesbrother, one of the royal pages, had a man to whom no impartial historian escaped through a window at the peril of would refuse the epithet of "great." his life, and was equally without a career. The abolition of the hereditary peerage was threatened, and, with it, the road to distinction on which he had confidently reckoned. The cause of the Church was not likely to be advanced by the change of dynasty, and, as to freedom, he was not many days in arriving at the conclusion that "it never gains by such violent movements: it lives by slow and successive conquests, perseverance, and patience." In a word, the glorious Three Days grew less and less glorious as he dwelt upon them: his sympathies, by some law of his nature, were invariably with the losers in the political conflict: Je n'aime pas les causes victorieuses, was his frequent avowal :

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Mrs. Oliphant thinks that it was this visit to Ireland that decided the future of Montalembert. He had come to see the Liberator and was disappointed, but he had seen the Island of the Saints, the island in which Liberty was making common cause with Faith, in which the standard of patriotism was waved from the altar by the priest; and he came back burning with eagerness to bring about a conjunction of the same kind in France. But if the train was laid in this. fashion, it was fired by his being brought into simultaneous contact with two men who more or less influenced all the remainder of his life. These were the Abbé de la Mennais and the Père Lacor

daire.

Félicité de la Mennais, born 19th June, Victrix causa Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni. 1782, at Saint-Malo, was the son of a In this state of uncertainty as to the line shipowner who had received letters of he should take in French politics, his nobility from Louis XVI., so that he was views reverted to Ireland, and in the legally entitled to the noble prefix which, August of that momentous year, 1830, he in a fit of democratic equality, he laid is crossing the mountains of Kerry, on aside after 1834. Neglected by his his way to "interview" the Liberator. father, whom he had offended by refusing He travelled on horseback with a lively to engage in commerce, he was adopted and intelligent Irish boy for his guide. by an uncle, who left him to himself with The weather and the splendid scenery the use of a good library. His unguided were at their best. His spirits rose, his reading was of the most desultory kind, bosom swelled, his expectations were on until he was fifteen, when, resolving to tiptoe, when he dismounted from his pursue a regular course of study, he took hired steed at Derrynane. But here, up his abode with his brother in a retired alas! the picturesque part of the pilgrim-house near Dinan, where, besides amasage ended, and prosaic reality began. sing an immense amount of classical and The motley frieze-coated throng that general erudition, he mastered the Fabesieged the entrance, squabbling and thers and historians of the Church. He vociferating about their own petty griev- took the tonsure in 1811, and entered the ances, was not a favourable example of a little seminary of Saint-Malo, founded by nation rising in its majesty for the vindi- his brother, but made no further step in cation of its rights; and the figure of the the ecclesiastical profession till 1815, great man himself, which had loomed so when he was ordained priest by the grandly at a distance through the mist, Bishop of Rennes, having first written to was reduced to very moderate dimensions his sister that it most assuredly was not by familiarity and proximity. Nor was his taste that he indulged in deciding for his enthusiasm revived by seeing O'Con- it. A tract, in which he had assailed nell, soon afterwards, the centre of a Napoleon at the beginning of 1814, comnumerous and disorderly meeting, at pelled him to take refuge in England which, adapting his tone to his audience, during the Hundred Days, and for some he exhibited the rude coarseness of the time after his return and settlement in demagogue and indulged in language Paris he was glad to earn his livelihood rather vernacular than high-flown. But as an assistant tutor to the Abbé Carron his inexperienced critic lived to learn that popular influence is not obtained or retained by pure patriotism or heroic flights, any more than revolutions are made with rose-water; and due reflection

in a school. One fine morning he awoke and found himself famous, or (to use his own words) he found himself invested with the power of Bossuet. The first volume of his "Essai sur l'Indifférence