these three fragments of the dismembered kingdom. It is quite possible that the two great German powers may find it necessary to surrender their non-German dominions. If this should happen, it will be the fault of Prussia herself should she not find more than compensation in the leadership, and perhaps ultimately in the sovereignty, of a free and united Germany.

ART. VIII.-PORT ROYAL.

Port Royal: a Contribution to the History of Religion and Literature in France. By Charles Beard, B.A. 2 vols. Longman and Co.

1861.

IN a retired valley, eighteen miles from Paris, was situated the monastery of Port Royal, which has written its name in indelible characters on the history of the seventeenth century, and the religious and literary annals of Europe. From the commencement to the close of its eventful existence, its destiny seemed to lie at the mercy of external circumstances, of which, by its very constitution, and its solitary position, it might have been expected to be especially independent. For a century the fate of a little community of nuns, whose time was passed in a perpetual round of religious observances, conventual austerities, and unpretending charities--and of a still smaller group of recluses who had abandoned the highest honours of their professions, personal wealth, and court-favour, for the meanest manual labour and the most absorbing studies—agitated the mind of the French nation and of educated Europe, and divided the attention of successive kings and ministers of state with the fortunes of the great French monarchy. The name of "Port Royal," by what we might be excused for calling a specially providential relation of events, spread from the narrow confines of conventual asceticism into the wider circles of a great religious controversy, and a much greater intellectual epoch. The true founder of the monastery sought to bury it in the deepest obscurity of complete isolation from the world, and the humblest poverty; yet, almost from the day of its new birth under her auspices, down to that of its destruction by the orders of an absolute king, its name was seldom long absent from the lips of influential Frenchmen, and its fortunes were anxiously canvassed in the councils of each successive Roman Pontiff. The history of such a community is necessarily difficult of narration, for it touches on the most opposite phases of humanity

the outward world of political and theological turmoil, and the inner life of religious meditation and lonely study. These act and react upon each other in so remarkable and unexpected a manner, and we are hurried from one to the other with such bewildering abruptness, that, in such sudden contrasts, we have scarcely time to realise either.

It is not surprising, then, that we have been left very much to gather from the general history of the times, on the one side our knowledge of the external features of Port Royal, and on the other, to create for ourselves, from the disconnected and necessarily one-sided biographical memorials of the Port Royalists themselves or their inveterate enemies, some imperfect picture of the internal spirit which animated the community in the persons of its most eminent confessors. A more philosophical and connected account has been at last completed in France by M. St. Beuve, and Mr. Beard has given us in the present volumes the results of his own labours on the same subject, drawn necessarily in great part from the same original materials. In doing so he has, we need hardly say, supplied an important want to the English reading public; and for the manner in which he has executed his difficult task he merits, and without doubt will receive, the thanks of all genuine English students. The subject itself is one which, in many respects, lies so far apart from English habits of thought and feeling, and yet in others is so closely connected with the stock information of the most ordinary reader, that the historian is necessarily distracted between the opposite fears of overdoing or neglecting his duties as an expositor and interpreter of facts; while, in the very important point of the artistic arrangement of his materials, he shares the fate of the community of Port Royal itself, and is carried to and fro between the world and the cloister in a manner which produces a constant alternative between the strict chronological sequence and that connected with the delineation and development of personal character. That Mr. Beard has been entirely successful in dealing with this artistic dilemma we do not assert. He has sometimes unnecessarily anticipated events out of their places in point of time, and thus added, without cause, to the amount of that repetition from which no narrator could wholly escape. Sometimes-but rarely-he has delayed too long the mention of a concurrent fact; and he has, we think, been needlessly lavish of those résumés of facts, the want of which is, we admit, the much more usual failing of historians. But none of these drawbacks from artistic faultlessness are sufficiently great or striking in Mr. Beard's case to derogate materially from the interest or perspicuity of his narrative. He writes in a pure and unaffected English style; his thoughts are

easily and gracefully expressed, and are always worthy of attention. His labour has been evidently one of love, and he brings to his task a mind familiar with those cognate subjects of theology and literature which are essentials in a writer on such a theme, and one not unpractised in the dialectics of scholastic speculation. Of the "recluse" spirit he gives a much more congenial estimate than we often meet with in a Protestant historian; and perhaps it is in the excess of his appreciation of its mental and moral advantages, in comparison with its attendant ill effects on the character, that we are most disposed to find fault with his implied conclusions. But an excess of sympathy such as this is a merit in a historian of any great movement; for it may be safely said that the writer who does not feel more strongly on the subject of his theme than the mass of his readers, will fail in impressing their minds to any perceptible extent.

The history of Port Royal is to a great extent that of the Jansenist controversy-a name which carries us at once out of France into the Netherlands, where a Jansenist church "still maintains a precarious existence." But the life of Jansenism lay in the French school of thought on which that epithet was imposed by its adversaries, and whose fortunes are inextricably mixed up with the disputed contents of Jansen's posthumous work; and Jansenism virtually ceased to exist when the last Port Royalists faded away from the memory of Europe in their obscure and isolated dispersion. Whatever pretensions may be advanced on behalf of its other phases, French Jansenism is that which is identified with the great outburst of cultivated thought in the bosom of a corrupt society, and is that with which alone we are concerned in the history of Port Royal.

The history of the monastery divides itself naturally into several marked stages. The first commences with its regeneration under the auspices of Angélique Arnauld. The second introduces to it, as its spiritual director, St. Cyran, the devoted friend and fellow-student of Jansen; and by this connection of course the germs of its Jansenist tendencies are implanted. But it is not until "a bulky pamphlet" by Arnauld was "hurled at the head" of Nicholas Cornet, syndic of the Faculty of Theology at Paris, who had called the attention of that body to seven heretical Jansenist propositions, that the recluses of Port Royal assumed their new character in the field of theological controversy, and that the taint of heresy began to be attached to the community of simple nuns. From that time until what is called the "Peace of the Church," by which the Jansenist controversy in France was hushed up for a time, both recluses and nuns experienced all the vicissitudes which

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theological rancour could inflict; and the monotony of conventual life was exchanged for one continued struggle of conscientious scruples against external authority and scholastic casuistry. In this period, the great name of Blaise Pascal inaugurates the European triumphs of the Port Royalists in the more extended field of literary celebrity; and the schools of Port Royal emerge from their humble but useful labours in the retired valley to their wider fame as the founders of a new system of education.

The "Peace of the Church" seems to bring us back to the limits of the convent and the hermitage; but the scenes through which the community has passed have left their indelible stamp on its inmates; and we are necessarily henceforward dealing with a power in the State, into whose life the secular and artificial spirit is creeping more and more; and as the older members one by one sink under the infirmities of age, or the premature physical decay entailed by their austerities, we feel that we are living in an altered atmosphere as well as in a new generation. It scarcely surprises us that the links between the controversial world without and the conventual seclusion, which had been in appearance severed, are ere long restored by the jealous and implacable hatred of the Jesuits. Great names still illuminate this twilight of decaying life; but they only provoke more speedily the inevitable storm. The slow death which had been assigned to the community by the gradual extinction of its members is at last precipitated by an act of rashness or weakness on the part of their spiritual director; and the scattering of the remaining Port Royalists, the destruction of the monastery, and the disinterring, with every mark of ignominy, of the bones of the dead, close that page in the history of Europe which is connected with the name of " Port Royal."

The first period of its history is, as we have intimated, one of secluded conventual life. The year 1602, in which Angélique Arnauld became abbess, is the true date of its foundation, although it had existed as a Cistercian house, nominally under the Benedictine rule, for four centuries previously. The bounty of Mathilde, wife of the Lord of Marli, of the house of Montmorenci, in coöperation with the Bishop of Paris, in the year 1204, laid the material foundation of the institution of which La Mère Angélique was the spiritual builder. In the interval between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, the monastery had participated in the general degeneration of the religious houses; its conventual rules had become merely nominal, and its funds were applied to the purposes of luxury and pleasure. From this state of things it was rescued by the unforeseen results of a scandalous transaction which we should have supposed would have

led to its still deeper moral degradation. Antoine Arnauld, a distinguished member of an eminent legal family, succeeded in persuading the abbess of Port Royal to receive, as her coadjutrix and successor, his little girl of ten years of age; at the same time that he secured for another child, still younger, the office of abbess of St. Cyr. As if to add to the ill-omen of this ecclesiastical scandal, the little abbess of Port Royal was sent to pass her novitiate at the abbey of Maubuisson, under the religious superintendence of a sister of "La Belle Gabrielle," herself notorious for shameless profligacy. Who would have anticipated that from such a source and out of such training could come the severe renovator of conventual discipline? But not only was the election of this child-abbess scandalous in itself—its confirmation by the Holy See was obtained by the use of actual fraud. Bulls in favour of Jacqueline Arnauld had been refused; they were now procured in favour of Angélique Arnauld (the spiritual name of the young nun), who was represented as seventeen years of age; and the death of the actual abbess of Port Royal, in the same year, placed a child not yet eleven years old in the undisputed possession of this ecclesiastical dignity.

Jacqueline or Angélique Arnauld was the third of a family of twenty children, ten of whom arrived at years of maturity. The Arnauld family was to Port Royal what that monastery was to Jansenism-the heart and life-spring of its existence. In speaking of the fortunes of the community, we are in so many words giving the family history of the descendants of Antoine Arnauld. His eldest son, Robert Arnauld d'Andilly,-so called from the estate which formed part of his mother's dowry,-a successful and popular courtier, was for years the connecting link between Port Royal and the great world, and for the last thirty years of his life one of its devout recluses. One of his sons, Charles Henri de Luzançi, and his five daughters, were also connected with it. The second child of Antoine Arnauld, Madame le Maître, took refuge from an unhappy marriage in the same seclusion. Two of her sons, Antoine le Maître, the celebrated advocate, and Isaac de Saçi, the translator of the Scriptures, were drawn away from the world by this common attraction. The little abbess of St. Cyr plays an important part in the history of Port Royal as La Mère Agnès. Three younger daughters of Antoine Arnauld were also nuns of the convent, and two more sons, Henri, Bishop of Angers, one of the principal champions of Jansenism, and Antoine Arnauld, the youngest of this numerous family, and the celebrated doctor of the Sorbonne, became eventually, in their respective spheres, the mainstay and chief ornaments of Port Royal. And when, on the