French Classics Part 19

And where is the man so blinded as to digest the falsehoods which the motives to vice imply? Where is the wretch desperate enough to reason in this manner:

"I love to be esteemed; I will, therefore, devote myself exclusively to acquiring the esteem of those men who, like me, will in a few days be devoured by worms, and whose ashes will in a few days, like my own, be mixed with the dust of the earth; but I will not take the least pains to obtain the approbation of those n.o.ble intelligences, of those sublime spirits, of those angels, of those seraphims, who are without ceasing around the throne of G.o.d; I will not take the least pains to have a share in those praises with which the great G.o.d will one day, in the sight of heaven and of earth, crown those who have been faithful to him.

"I love glory; I will therefore apply myself exclusively to make the world say of me: That man has a taste quite exceptional in dress, his table is delicately served, there has never been either base blood or plebeian marriage in his family, n.o.body offends him with impunity, he permits none but a respectful approach; but I will never take the least pains to make envy itself say of me: That man fears G.o.d, he prefers his duty above all other things, he thinks there is more magnanimity in forgiving an affront than in revenging it, in being holy than in being n.o.ble in the world's esteem, and so on.

"I am very fond of pleasure; I will therefore give myself wholly up to gratify my senses, to lead a voluptuous life, to have the spectacle follow the feast, debauchery the spectacle, and so on; but I will never take the least pains to secure that _fullness of joy_ which is at _G.o.d's right hand_, that _river of pleasure_ whereof he gives to drink to those _who put their trust under the shadow of his wings_.

"I hate constraint and trouble; I will apply myself therefore exclusively to escape the idea of emotions of penitence, above all, the idea of prison cells, of exile, of the rack, of the stake; but I will brave the chains of darkness with their weight, the demons with their fury, h.e.l.l with its torments, eternity with its horrors. I have made my decision; I consent to curse eternally the day of my birth, to look eternally upon annihilation as a blessing beyond price, to seek eternally for death without being able to find it, to vomit eternally blasphemies against my Creator, to hear eternally the howlings of the d.a.m.ned, to howl eternally with them, and to be eternally, like them, the object of that sentence, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels." Once more, Where is the wretch desperate enough to digest these propositions? Yet these are the motives to vice.

To ill.u.s.trate the point-blank directness, the almost excessive fidelity, amounting to something very like truculence, with which Saurin would train his guns and fire his broadsides into the faces and eyes of his hearers, let the following, our final citation, serve; we quote from the conclusion to a powerful sermon on infidelity:

Let us here put a period to this discourse. We turn to you, my brethren.... You congratulate yourselves for the most part,... on detesting infidelity, and on respecting religion. But shall we tell you, my brethren, how odious soever the men are whom we have just been describing, we know of others more odious still. There is a restriction in the judgment which the prophet p.r.o.nounces on the first, when he calls them, in the words of my text, the most foolish and the most brutish among the people; and there are men who surpa.s.s them in brutality and in extravagance.

Do not think we exceed the truth of the matter, or that we are endeavoring to obtain your attention by paradoxes. In all good faith, I speak as I think, I find more refinement, and even, if I may venture to say so, a less fund of corruption in men who, having resolved to abandon themselves to the torrent of their pa.s.sions, strive to persuade themselves, either that there is no G.o.d in heaven, or that he pays no attention to what men do on earth; than in those who, believing in a G.o.d who sees them and heeds them, live as if they believed nothing of the sort. Infidels were not able to support, in their excesses, the idea of a benefactor outraged, of a Supreme Judge provoked to anger, of an eternal salvation neglected, of a h.e.l.l braved, _a lake burning with fire and brimstone_, and _smoke ascending up for ever and ever_. It was necessary, in order to give free course to their pa.s.sions it was necessary for them to put far away from their eyes these terrifying objects, and to efface from their minds these overwhelming truths.

But you, you who believe that there is a G.o.d in heaven, you who believe yourselves under his eye, and who insult him without remorse and without repentance, you who believe that this G.o.d holds the thunderbolt in his hand to crush sinners, and who live in sin, you who believe that there are devouring flames and chains of darkness, and who brave their horrors, you who believe the soul immortal, and who concern yourselves only with time; what forehead, what forehead of bra.s.s, is the one you wear!

One thing in just qualification of the praise due to Saurin for his pulpit eloquence requires to be added. When he attempts the figure of apostrophe, as he frequently does, personifying inanimate objects and addressing them in the way of oratoric appeal, he is very apt to produce a frigid effect, the absolute opposite of genuine eloquence. Nothing but imagination white-hot with pa.s.sion justifies, in the use of the orator, the expedient of such apostrophe as this which Saurin affects. With Saurin, both the necessary imagination and the necessary pa.s.sion seem somehow to fail; and he possessed neither the perfect judgment nor the perfect taste, nor yet the fine feeling, that might have chastised the audacities to which his ambition incited him. His rhetorically bold things he did in a certain cold-blooded way; so that, with him, what should have been the climax of oratoric effectiveness, or else not been at all, produces sometimes instead a reaction and recoil of disappointment. We thus indicate a shortcoming in Saurin which deposes this great preacher, one is compelled to admit, despite his remarkable merits, from the first into the second rank of orators.

Both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant lines of French pulpit eloquence are continued down to our own day. Lacordaire, Pere Felix, Pere Hyacinthe, of the Catholics, Frederic Monod, Adolph Monod, Coquerel, of the Protestants, are names worthy to be here set down; and it may be added that Eugene Bersier, deceased in 1889, challenges on the whole not unequal comparison with the men treated in this chapter for pulpit power. He may be described as a kind of nineteenth-century Bossuet, tempered to Ma.s.sillon, among French Protestant preachers.

But there is no Louis XIV. now to cast over any great preachers, even of the Roman Catholics, the illusive, fact.i.tious, reflected glory of the person and court, the sentence and seal, of the "most ill.u.s.trious sovereign of the world."

The seventeenth-century sacred eloquence of France, the sacred eloquence, that is to say, of the "great" French age, will always remain a unique tradition in the history of the pulpit.

XIII.

FeNELON.

1651-1715.

If Bossuet is to Frenchmen a synonym for sublimity, no less to them is Fenelon a synonym for saintliness. From the French point of view, one might say, "the sublime Bossuet," "the saintly Fenelon," somewhat as one says, "the learned Selden," "the judicious Hooker." It is as much a French delight to idealize Fenelon an archangel Raphael, affable and mild, as it is to glorify Bossuet a Michael in majesty and power.

But saintliness of character was in Fenelon commended to the world by equal charm of person and of genius. The words of Milton describing Eve might be applied, with no change but that of gender, to Fenelon, both the exterior and the interior man:

Grace was in all his steps, heaven in his eye, In every gesture dignity and love.

The consent is general among those who saw Fenelon, and have left behind them their testimony, that alike in person, in character, and in genius, he was such as we thus describe him.

Twice, in his youth, he was smitten to the heart with a feeling of vocation to be a missionary. Both times he was thwarted by the intervention of friends. The second time, he wrote disclosing his half-romantic aspiration in a glowing letter of confidence and friends.h.i.+p to Bossuet, his senior by many years, but not yet become famous. Young Fenelon's friend Bossuet was destined later to prove a bitter antagonist, almost a personal foe.

Until he was forty-two years old, Francois Fenelon lived in comparative retirement, nouris.h.i.+ng his genius with study, with contemplation, with choice society. He experimented in writing verse. Not succeeding to his mind, he turned to prose composition, and, leading the way, in a new species of literature, for Rousseau, for Chateaubriand, for Lamartine, and for many others, to follow, went on writing what, in ceasing to be verse, did not cease to be poetry.

The great world will presently involve Fenelon in the currents of history. Louis XIV., grown old, and become as selfishly greedy now of personal salvation as all his life he had been selfishly greedy of personal glory, seeks that object of his soul by serving the Church in the wholesale conversion of Protestants. He revokes the Edict of Nantes, which had secured religious toleration for the realm, and proceeds to dragoon the Huguenots into conformity with the Roman Catholic Church.

The reaction in public sentiment against such rigors grew a cry that had to be silenced. Fenelon was selected to visit the heretic provinces, and win them to willing submission. He stipulated that every form of coercion should cease, and went to conquer all with love. His success was remarkable. But not even Fenelon quite escaped the infection of violent zeal for the Church. It seems not to be given to any man to rise wholly superior to the spirit of the world in which he lives.

The l.u.s.ter of Fenelon's name, luminous from the triumphs of his mission among the Protestants, was sufficient to justify the choice of this man, a man both by nature and by culture so ideally formed for the office as was he, to be tutor to the heir prospective of the French monarchy. The Duke of Burgundy, grandson to Louis XIV., was accordingly put under the charge of Fenelon to be trained for future kings.h.i.+p. Never, probably, in the history of mankind, has there occurred a case in which the victory of a teacher could be more ill.u.s.trious than actually was the victory of Fenelon as teacher to this scion of the house of Bourbon. We shall be giving our readers a relishable taste of St. Simon, the celebrated memoir-writer of the age of Louis XIV., if out of the portrait in words, drawn by him from life, of Fenelon's princely pupil, we transfer here a few strong lines to our pages. St. Simon says:

In the first place, it must be said that Monseigneur the Duke of Burgundy had by nature a most formidable disposition. He was pa.s.sionate to the extent of wis.h.i.+ng to dash to pieces his clocks when they struck the hour which called him to what he did not like, and of flying into the utmost rage against the rain if it interfered with what he wanted to do. Resistance threw him into paroxysms of fury. I speak of what I have often witnessed in his early youth. Moreover, an ungovernable impulse drove him into whatever indulgence, bodily or mental, was forbidden him. His sarcasm was so much the more cruel, as it was witty and piquant, and as it seized with precision upon every point open to ridicule. All this was sharpened by a vivacity of body and of mind that proceeded to the degree of impetuosity, and that during his early days never permitted him to learn any thing except by doing two things at once. Every form of pleasure he loved with a violent avidity, and all this with a pride and a haughtiness impossible to describe; dangerously wise, moreover, to judge of men and things, and to detect the weak point in a train of reasoning, and to reason himself more cogently and more profoundly than his teachers.

But at the same time, as soon as his pa.s.sion was spent, reason resumed her sway; he felt his faults, he acknowledged them, and sometimes with such chagrin that his rage was rekindled. A mind lively, alert, penetrating, stiffening itself against obstacles, excelling literally in every thing. The prodigy is, that in a very short time piety and grace made of him a different being, and transformed faults so numerous and so formidable into virtues exactly opposite.

St. Simon attributes to Fenelon "every virtue under heaven"; but his way was to give to G.o.d rather than to man the praise of the remarkable change which, during Fenelon's charge of the Duke of Burgundy, came over the character of the prince.

The grandfather survived the grandson; and it was never put to the stern proof of historical experiment whether Fenelon had indeed turned out one Bourbon entirely different from all the other members, earlier or later, of that royal line.

Before, however, the Duke of Burgundy was thus s.n.a.t.c.hed away from the perilous prospect of a throne, his beloved teacher was parted from him, not indeed by death, but by what, to the archbishop's susceptible and suffering spirit, was worse than death, by "disgrace." The disgrace was such as has ever since engaged for its subject the interest, the sympathy, and the admiration of mankind. Fenelon lost the royal favor.

That was all--for the present; but that was much. He was banished from court, and he ceased to be preceptor to the Duke of Burgundy. The king, in signal severity, used his own hand to strike Fenelon's name from the list of the household of his grandson and heir. The archbishop--for Fenelon had previously been made archbishop of Cambray--returned into his diocese as into an exile. But his cup of humiliation was by no means full. Bossuet will stain his own glory by following his exiled former pupil and friend, with hostile pontifical rage, to crush him in his retreat.

The occasion was a woman, a woman with the charm of genius and of exalted character, a Christian, a saint, but a mystic--it was Madame Guyon. Madame Guyon taught that it was possible to love G.o.d for himself alone, purely and disinterestedly. Fenelon received the doctrine, and Madame Guyon was patronized by Madame de Maintenon. Bossuet scented heresy. He was too much a "natural man" to understand Madame Guyon. The king was like the prelate, his minister, in spirit, and in consequent incapacity. It was resolved that Fenelon must condemn Madame Guyon. But Fenelon would not. He was very gentle, very conciliatory, but in fine he would not. Controversy ensued, haughty, magisterial, domineering, on the part of Bossuet; on the part of Fenelon, meek, docile, suasive. The world wondered, and watched the duel. Fenelon finally did what king James's translators misleadingly make Job wish that his adversary had done--he wrote a book, "The Maxims of the Saints." In this book, he sought to show that the accepted and even canonized teachers of the Church had taught the doctrine for which, in his own case and in the case of Madame Guyon, condemnation was now invoked. Bossuet was pope at Paris: and he, in full presence, denounced to the monarch the heresy of Fenelon. At this moment of crisis for Fenelon, it happened that news was brought him of the burning of his mansion at Cambray with all his books and ma.n.u.scripts. It will always be remembered that Fenelon only said: "It is better so than if it had been the cottage of a poor laboring-man."

Madame de Maintenon, till now his friend, with perfect frigid facility separated herself from the side of the accused. The controversy was carried to Rome, where at length Fenelon's book was condemned--condemned mildly, but condemned. The pope is said to have made the remark that Fenelon erred by loving G.o.d too much, and Fenelon's antagonists by loving their fellow-man too little. Fenelon bowed to the authority of the Church, and meekly in his own cathedral confessed his error. It was a logical thing for him, as loyal Catholic, to do; and he did it with a beautiful grace of humility. The Protestant spirit, however, rebels on his behalf, and finds it difficult even to admire the manner in which was done by him a thing that seems so unfit to have been done by him at all. Bossuet did not long survive his inglorious triumph over so much sanct.i.ty of personal character, over so much difficult and beautiful height of doctrinal and practical instruction to virtue. Fenelon seems to have been reported as preaching a funeral sermon on the dead prelate.

"I have wept and prayed," he wrote to a friend, "for this old instructor of my youth; but it is not true that I celebrated his obsequies in my cathedral, and preached his funeral sermon. Such affectation, you know, is foreign to my nature." The iron must have gone deep, to wring from that gentle bosom even so much cry as this of wounded feeling.

It is hard to tell what might now have befallen Fenelon, in the way of good fortune--he might even have been recalled to court, and re-installed in his office of tutor to the prince--had not a sinister incident, not to have been looked for, at an inopportune moment occurred. The "Telemachus" appeared in print, and kindled a sudden flame of popular feeling, which instantly spread in universal conflagration over the face of Europe. This composition of Fenelon's the author had written to convey, under a form of quasi-poetical fiction, lessons of wisdom in government to the mind of his royal pupil. The existence of the ma.n.u.script book would seem to have been intended to be a secret from the king--indeed, from almost every one, except the pupil himself for whose use it was made. But a copyist proved false to his trust, and furnished a copy of "Telemachus" to a printer in Holland, who lost no time in publis.h.i.+ng a book so likely to sell. But the sale of the book surpa.s.sed all expectation. Holland not only, but Belgium, Germany, France, and England multiplied copies as fast as they could; still Europe could not get copies as fast as she wanted them.

The secret of such popularity did not lie simply in the literary merits of "Telemachus." It lay more in a certain interpretation that the book was supposed to bear. "Telemachus" was understood to be a covert criticism of Louis XIV., and of the principle of absolute monarchy embodied in him. This imputed intention of the book could not fail to become known at Versailles. The result, of course, was fatal, and finally fatal, to the prospects, whatever these may have been, of Fenelon's restoration to favor at court. The archbishop thenceforward was left to do in comparative obscurity the duties of his episcopal office in his diocese of Cambray. He devoted himself, with exemplary and touching fidelity, to the interests of his flock, loving them and loved by them, until he died. It was an entirely worthy and adequate employment of his powers. The only abatement needful from the praise to be bestowed upon his behavior in this pastoral relation is that he suffered himself sometimes to think of his position as one of "disgrace." His reputation meantime for holy character and conduct was European. His palace at Cambray, hospitably open ever to the resort of suffering need, indeed almost his whole diocese, lying on the frontier of France, was by mutual consent of contending armies, treated in war as a kind of mutual inviolable ground, invested with privilege of sanctuary. It was an instructive example of the serene and beautiful ascendency sometimes divinely accorded to ill.u.s.trious personal goodness.

There had been a moment, even subsequently to the affair of the "Telemachus" publication, when it looked as if, after long delay, a complete worldly triumph for Fenelon was a.s.sured, and was near. The father of the Duke of Burgundy died, and nothing then seemed to stand between Fenelon's late pupil and the throne, nothing but the precarious life of an aged monarch, visibly approaching the end. The Duke of Burgundy, through all changes, had remained unchangingly fast in his affectionate loyalty to Fenelon. Sternly forbidden, by the jealous and watchful king, his grandfather, to communicate with his old teacher, he yet had found means to send to Fenelon, from time to time, rea.s.suring signals of his trust and love. Fenelon was now, in all eyes, the predestined prime minister of a new reign about to commence. Through devoted friends of his own, near to the person of the prince at court, Fenelon sent minutes of advice to his pupil, which outlined a whole beneficent policy of liberal monarchical rule. A new day seemed dawning for France. The horrible reaction of the Regency and of Louis XV. might, perhaps, have been averted, and, with that spared to France, the revolution itself might have been accomplished without the Revolution.

But it was not to be. The Duke of Burgundy first buried his wife, and then, within a few days, followed her himself to the grave. He died sincerely rejoicing that G.o.d had taken him away from the dread responsibility of reigning.

"All my ties are broken," mourned Fenelon; "there is no longer any thing to bind me to the earth." In truth, the teacher survived his pupil but two or three years. When he died, his sovereign, gloomy with well-grounded apprehension for the future of his realm, said, with tardy revival of recognition for the virtue that had perished in Fenelon: "Here was a man who could have served us well under the disasters by which my kingdom is about to be a.s.sailed."

Fenelon's literary productions are various; but they all have the common character of being works written for the sake of life, rather than for the sake of literature. They were inspired each by a practical purpose, and adapted each to a particular occasion. His treatise on the "Education of Girls" was written for the use of a mother who desired instruction on the topic from Fenelon. His argument on the "Being of a G.o.d" was prepared as a duty of his preceptors.h.i.+p to the prince. But the one book of Fenelon, which was an historical event when it appeared, and which stands an indestructible cla.s.sic in literature, is the "Telemachus." It remains for us briefly to give some idea of this book.

The first thing to be said is, that those are mistaken who suppose themselves to have obtained a true idea of "Telemachus" from having partly read it at school, as an exercise in French. The essence of the work lies beyond those few opening pages to which the exploration of school-boys and school-girls is generally limited. This masterpiece of Fenelon is much more than a charming piece of romantic and sentimental poetry in prose. It is a kind of epic, indeed, like the "Odyssey," only written in rhythmical prose instead of rhythmical verse; but, unlike the "Odyssey," it is an idyllic epic written with an ulterior purpose of moral and political didactics. It was designed as a manual of instruction--instruction made delightful to a prince--to inculcate the duties inc.u.mbent on a sovereign.

Telemachus, our readers will remember, was the son of Ulysses. Fenelon's story relates the adventures encountered by Telemachus in search for his father, so long delayed on his return from Troy to Ithaca. Telemachus is imagined by Fenelon to be attended by Minerva, the G.o.ddess of wisdom, masked from his recognition, as well as from the recognition of others, under the form of an old man. Minerva, of course, constantly imparts the wisest counsel to young Telemachus, who has his weaknesses, as had the young Duke of Burgundy, but who is essentially well-disposed, as Fenelon hoped his royal pupil would finally turn out to be. Nothing can exceed the urbanity and grace with which the delicate business is conducted by Fenelon, of teaching a bad prince, with a very bad example set him by his grandfather, to be a good king. The style in which the story is told, and in which the advice is insinuated, is exquisite, is beyond praise. The "soft delicious" stream of sound runs on, as from a fountain, and like "linked sweetness long drawn out." Never had prose a flow of melody more luscious. It is perpetual ravishment to the ear. The invention, too, of incident is fruitful, while the landscape and coloring are magical for beauty. We give a few extracts, to be read with that application in mind to Louis XIV., and to the state of France, which, when the book was first printed, gave it such an exciting interest in the eyes of Europe. Telemachus, after the manner of aeneas to Queen Dido, is relating to the G.o.ddess Calypso, into whose island he has come, the adventures that have previously befallen him. He says that he, with Mentor (Minerva in disguise), found himself in Crete. Mentor had been there before, and was ready to tell Telemachus all about the country. Telemachus was naturally interested to learn respecting the Cretan monarchy. Mentor, he says, informed him as follows:

The king's authority over the subject is absolute, but the authority of the law is absolute over him. His power to do good is unlimited, but he is restrained from doing evil. The laws have put the people into his hands, as the most valuable deposit, upon condition that he shall treat them as his children. It is the intent of the law that the wisdom and equity of one man shall be the happiness of many, and not that the wretchedness and slavery of many should gratify the pride and luxury of one. The king ought to possess nothing more than the subject, except what is necessary to alleviate the fatigue of his station, and impress upon the minds of the people a reverence of that authority by which the laws are executed. Moreover, the king should indulge himself less, as well in ease as in pleasure, and should be less disposed to the pomp and the pride of life than any other man. He ought not to be distinguished from the rest of mankind by the greatness of his wealth, or the vanity of his enjoyments, but by superior wisdom, more heroic virtue, and more splendid glory. Abroad he ought to be the defender of his country, by commanding her armies; and at home the judge of his people, distributing justice among them, improving their morals, and increasing their felicity. It is not for himself that the G.o.ds have intrusted him with royalty. He is exalted above individuals only that he may be the servant of the people. To the public he owes all his time, all his attention, and all his love; he deserves dignity only in proportion as he gives up private enjoyments for the public good.

Pretty sound doctrine, the foregoing, on the subject of the duties devolving on a king. The "paternal" idea, to be sure, of government is in it; but there is the idea, too, of limited or const.i.tutional monarchy. The spirit of just and liberal political thought had, it seems, not been wholly extinguished, even at the court, by that oppression of mind--an oppression seldom, if ever, in human history exceeded--which was enforced under the unmitigated absolutism of Louis XIV. The literature that, with Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, the Encyclopaedists, prepared the Revolution, had already begun virtually to be written when Fenelon wrote his "Telemachus." It is easy to see why the fame of Fenelon should by exception have been dear even to the hottest infidel haters of that ecclesiastical hierarchy to which the archbishop of Cambray himself belonged. This lover of liberty, this gentle rebuker of kings, was of the freethinkers, at least in the sympathy of political thought. Nay, the Revolution itself is foreshown in a remarkable glimpse of conjectural prophecy which occurs in the "Telemachus." Idomeneus is a headstrong king, whom Mentor is made by the author to reprove and instruct for the Duke of Burgundy's benefit. To Idomeneus--a character taken, and not unplausibly taken, to have been suggested to Fenelon by the example of Louis XIV.--to this imaginary counterpart of the reigning monarch of France, Mentor holds the following language. How could the sequel of Bourbon despotism in France--a sequel suspended now for a time, but two or three generations later to be dreadfully visited on the heirs of Louis XIV.--have been more fully foreshadowed? The "Telemachus":

Remember that the sovereign who is most absolute is always least powerful; he seizes upon all, and his grasp is ruin. He is, indeed, the sole proprietor of whatever his state contains; but, for that reason, his state contains nothing of value; the fields are uncultivated, and almost a desert; the towns lose some of their few inhabitants every day; and trade every day declines. The king, who must cease to be a king when he ceases to have subjects, and who is great only in virtue of his people, is himself insensibly losing his character and his power, as the number of his people, from whom alone both are derived, insensibly diminishes. His dominions are at length exhausted of money and of men: the loss of men is the greatest and the most irreparable he can sustain. Absolute power degrades every subject to a slave. The tyrant is flattered even to an appearance of adoration, and every one trembles at the glance of his eye; but, at the least revolt, this enormous power perishes by its own excess. It derived no strength from the love of the people; it wearied and provoked all that it could reach, and rendered every individual of the state impatient of its continuance. At the first stroke of opposition, the idol is overturned, broken to pieces, and trodden under foot.

Contempt, hatred, fear, resentment, distrust, and every other pa.s.sion of the soul unite against so hateful a despotism. The king who, in his vain prosperity, found no man bold enough to tell him the truth, in his adversity finds no man kind enough to excuse his faults, or to defend him against his enemies.

So much is perhaps enough to indicate the political drift of the "Telemachus." That drift is, indeed, observable everywhere throughout the book.

We conclude our exhibition of this fine cla.s.sic, by letting Fenelon appear more purely now in his character as dreamer and poet. Young Prince Telemachus has, Ulysses-like, and aeneas-like, his descent into Hades. This incident affords Fenelon opportunity to exercise his best powers of awful and of lovely imagining and describing. Christian ideas are, in this episode of the "Telemachus," superinduced upon pagan, after a manner hard, perhaps, to reconcile with the verisimilitude required by art, but at least productive of very n.o.ble and very beautiful results.

First, one glimpse of Tartarus as conceived by Fenelon. It is the spectacle of kings who on earth abused their power that Telemachus is beholding:

Telemachus observed the countenance of these criminals to be pale and ghastly, strongly expressive of the torment they suffered at the heart. They looked inward with a self-abhorrence now inseparable from their existence. Their crimes themselves had become their punishment, and it was not necessary that greater should be inflicted. They haunted them like hideous specters, and continually started up before them in all their enormity. They wished for a second death, that might separate them from these ministers of vengeance, as the first had separated their spirits from the body--a death that might at once extinguish all consciousness and sensibility. They called upon the depths of h.e.l.l to hide them from the persecuting beams of truth, in impenetrable darkness; but they are reserved for the cup of vengeance, which, though they drink of it forever, shall be ever full. The truth, from which they fled, has overtaken them, an invincible and unrelenting enemy. The ray which once might have illuminated them, like the mild radiance of the day, now pierces them like lightning--a fierce and fatal fire, that, without injury to the external parts, infixes a burning torment at the heart. By truth, now an avenging flame, the very soul is melted like metal in a furnace; it dissolves all, but destroys nothing; it disunites the first elements of life, yet the sufferer can never die. He is, as it were, divided against himself, without rest and without comfort; animated by no vital principle, but the rage that kindles at his own misconduct, and the dreadful madness that results from despair.

If the "perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets" that the "Telemachus"

affords is felt at times to be almost cloying, it is not, as our readers have now seen, for want of occasional contrasts of a bitterness sufficiently mordant and drastic. But the didactic purpose is never lost sight of by the author. Here is an aspect of the Elysium found by Telemachus. How could any thing be more delectably conceived and described? The translator, Dr. Hawkesworth, is animated to an English style that befits the sweetness of his original. The "Telemachus:"