retreat was an odd compound of bel esprit,, was full of sick and wounded. Many of It was not till the 13th of May, 1648, that Mother Angélique and a portion of the nuns returned to Port-Royal in the Fields. The dilapidated mansion had been repaired. and the surrounding grounds, drained and cultivated by the exertions of the increasing band of recluses, were healthier than before. Mother Agnes asserted that the place inspired a devotion which was not felt elsewhere; and if, she said, the nuns of Paris, of whom many preferred to remain in the city, had experienced the sensation, they would desire the wings of the dove, that they might fly there and be at rest. She seemed unconscious, like her sister Anne, that her feelings were derived from incidents associated with the locality, and not from the locality itself. It was here that conviction first dawned upon her mind when the fascination of novelty and the ardour of youth conspired to maintain her in a perpetual joyfulness. These were days never to be renewed, and the recollections of that glorious time haunted the scenes in which they were born, and impregnated every nook with the primitive spirit. The war of the Fronde, at the commencement of 1649, gave for a while a new aspect to the monastery. The people of the neighbourhood brought their moveables to this sanctuary to preserve them from the ravages of the hostile armies. The courts were crammed with beasts and fowls till the scene reminded the nuns of Noah's ark. The church was closely packed with corn, peas, pots, and pans, and all manner of miscellaneous effects. The dormitory Such as we have seen Mother Angélique she always remained. We pass on to the year 1651 that we may get a glimpse of another remarkable woman, Jacqueline Pascal, who then entered the monastery. 'Heaven,' says M. Cousin, has granted her, with the loveliness of a woman, all the gifts of genius. She was inferior to her brother Pascal neither in intellect nor in character.' At the age of fourteen she won the annual prize which was given at Rouen for the best poem on the Immaculate Conception. When her name was announced, Corneille rose on her behalf and thanked the President in verse. M. Cousin considers that the poem of Jacqueline surpasses that of the author of the Cid,' and it must be confessed that the woman who was the equal of Pascal, and the superior of Corneille, must have been one of the marvels of the world. But we cannot accept the estimate of M. Cousin, who is prone to exaggerate the merits of his heroines to a degree which we should not have expected from the rigorous precision of a metaphysician. Whether or not he has fallen in love with them, according to the theory of M. Saint-Beuve, he certainly writes of them with the blindness of a lover. Jacqueline Pascal, in moral force of character, was not inferior to her celebrated brother, but she was no more his rival in intellect, if we are to judge from her writings, than she was a hundred feet high. In 1646 her father fell upon the ice and broke his leg. Two brothers in the neighbourhood, who, though they were not surgeons by profession, had acquired great skill in the setting of limbs, attended him on the occasion. They were as well versed in the Port-Royal divinity as in the treatment of fractures, and introduced the Pas cals to the writings of Saint-Cyran, Janse- | change. She discarded her corset, cut her nius, and Arnauld. In the autumn of 1647 hair, and wore a head dress which was Jacqueline accompanied her brother to larger and more troublesome than the veil. Paris, and having been strongly impressed Prevented from entering the convent, she by the treatises of the Port-Royalists, she adopted the conventual life in her home. was induced to go to their church. The The moral courage this required was imsermons completed what the books had mense, for it was opposed to all which precommenced, and she made up her mind to vailed around her, and was certain to probecome a nun. She at last disclosed her voke incessant censure and ridicule. In desire to her father. He answered that Port-Royal it was the system, and everyhis days would probably not be many, and thing there contributed to make it as easy as he entreated her to have patience till he it was difficult in the world. But here again was in his grave. In the mean time he we come upon the errors and follies which promised that she should live as she mingled with her high resolves, and depleased. She thanked him, gave no direct prives them of much of their praise. It reply to his request that she would not de- almost seemed as if the votaries of Portsert him, but said that he should not have Royal held pain to be piety, and comfort reason to complain of her disobedience. to be wickedness. They were not content It is seldom that good qualities are mixed to declare war with criminal sensuality; together in the mind in their just propor- they thought that physical deprivation was tions. Jacqueline's grand merit was the an essential part of moral beauty. Jacquehomage she paid to the conclusions of her line expressed a doubt whether dirt was conscience, and the inflexible resolution the most perfect state of man; but it was with which she acted upon her convictions. encouraged and practised by some in the Her defect was to yield too much to her monastery, and was quite as rational as personal desires, and to give too little many of their other observances. It would weight to the feelings of others. She was be difficult to say whether particular pornot by nature deficient in domestic affec- tions of their rules are most fantastic or tion, but it was overborne by her conven- revolting. In the dreary directions which tual aspirations, and the intensity of her Jacqueline drew up for the management of individual will. The touching appeal of the children at Port-Royal, she states that her father deserved a warmer answer, and in the brief periods of recreation each must a more hearty compliance. In truth, in all play by herself to avoid making a noise! her traits, Jacqueline was a complete per- As if the noise of childish sports was a sin! sonification of the virtues and errors of They were strictly forbidden to caress each Port-Royal. Within its walls there was a other, or to show marks of fondness, for bond of affection which rivalled in its nature was not to be directed, but extinstrength the ties of nature, but the tone guished. Good and bad, they confounded adopted to those without was hard and it all in a common anathema, and, not conchilling. The fountain of love in the tent to root out the weeds from the heart, monastery itself was never dry, but the they converted it to a desert. stream was not suffered to flow beyond. In 1649 she went with her father to stay with her sister Madame Perier in Auvergne. She never left her room except at meals or to go to church, and if any one intruded on her privacy it was evident that the interruption was irksome to her. She passed the winter without a fire, and would never approach it when she came down to dinner. Her abstinence was so great that she destroyed her health, and when it seemed necessary, from her debility, to increase the allowance of food, her stomach was unable to bear it. The candles she consumed showed how little she slept, and it is surprising that exhausted nature did not sink under the discipline. The dress of the monastery was so trying to novices, that by fretting the body it acted injuri ously on the mind. Jacqueline resolved to prepare herself beforehand for the During the sojourn of Jacqueline with her sister, a monk employed her, as she had a turn for poetry, to translate some of the Latin hymns of the church into vernacular verse. She imparted the project to her friends at Port-Royal, and they enjoined her to desist. They told her it was a talent of which God would not demand from her an account, and that humility and silence were the attributes of her sex. It was still the same delusion. They would not permit the use of gifts for fear they should be abused. The notion was at the root of the monastic system itself. They fled from the world they should have ameliorated and adorned, for fear the world should overcome them. It was not strength but weakness which drove them into retirement, and to preserve their individual health they ran from the infected, whom they should have remained to cure. When it was literally a physical malady instead | refused. Mother Angélique and Mother In September, 1651, her father died. Being now her own mistress, she determined to gratify her cherished project without further delay and enter Port-Royal. Her brother fondly hoped that she would defer her intention for a couple of years, and remain to soothe his grief and relieve his solitude. He was hurt when he found she was bent upon leaving him, although she spoke of it at first as a temporary trial of the conventual life. She entered the monastery, in January, 1652, when she was twenty-six years of age, and two months afterwards she wrote to her brother to declare her final resolution. It is just,' she said, 'that others should do a little violence to their feelings to compensate me for what I have done for the last five years. To compensate her, that is, for not abandoning a loving father! Such was one side of the spirit of Port-Royal, often selfish in its seeming self-denial. When she sent word to her brother that she should take the veil on All-Saints' day, he went to her, nearly wild with the pain produced in his head by the announcement, and implored her to postpone the final step, that he might have time to get reconciled to the project. He could only obtain a fortnight's respite, which he rejected as useless. To have satisfied the affection, consoled the sorrow, participated in the thoughts, and cheered the home of Pascal, will not seem to healthy minds a less worthy and religious act than to have shut herself up in Port-Royal. Irritated perhaps by the ungenerous obstinacy of his sister, Pascal availed himself of his legal rights to avoid putting the portion bequeathed her by her father into her power. This step threw her into an agony of distress which nearly cost her her life. Unable to endow the monastery with her inheritance, she must either forego the vocation which was the predominant passion of her soul, or submit to be received gratuitously, which was gall to the proud independence of her mind. To escape the alternative she desired to be admitted as one of the lay sisters who were the menials of the establishment, and in fact worked for their scanty board. But this request was Later events displayed under a more favourable aspect the true grandeur of her character. The Jesuits, who hated PortRoyal because, being famous and influential, it was yet not Jesuit, procured at Rome the condemnation of five propositions which they professed to have extracted from the Augustinus' of Jansenius, the friend of St. Cyran. A formulary, as it was called, founded on the bull of the pope, was drawn up in 1656, and ordered by the parliament in 1657 to be signed by all the ecclesiastics of the kingdom. The command slept till May, 1661, when it was determined to put it in force, and the nuns of Port-Royal-the very focus of Jansenism-were required to sign it. For some time previously this party was satisfied to draw a distinction between a question of fact and a question of doctrine. They admitted that the doc trine was false, and that the Pope was empowered to pronounce upon it, but they denied that it was to be found in the work of Jansenius. To satisfy the conscience of the Port-Royalists a declaration was attached to the formulary, of which the substance, according to Jacqueline, was to require simple silence as to the fact, and obedience to the bull as to the doctrine. The Jansenist divines consented to the compromise, but the inflexible Jacqueline repudiated it with indignation. She treated it as an evasion, and a cowardly relinquishment of the truth. To bind themselves to silence and to leave their adversaries free to speak and to triumph was for practical purposes to admit that the propositions were in Jansenius. This she said was consenting to a lie if it was not denying the truth, and she protested loudly against virtually signing a statement that a doctrine was in a book where they themselves had not seen it. Nor was she a whit more willing to give up Jansenius himself While admitting that they were bound to obey the Holy See in matters of faith, she in reality rebelled against it, maintaining that the author and his doctrine were alike holy, and that they ought to defend them to death. Her position was a triple invasion of Roman Catholicism. Not only was it a private judgment, not only was it a lay judgment, but it was the judgment of a woman. She herself alluded to this objection. I know it is not for women to defend the truth, although unhappily it may be said that, when the bishops have not the courage of women, the women ought to have the courage of bishops. But if we are not to defend the truth we can at least die for it, and suffer all things rather than abandon it.' That the Ministers to whom God had confided his gospel, should be so unfaithful to it pierced her, she said, to the heart. What is it,' she exclaimed, we fear? Banishment and dispersion, loss of property-if you will, imprisonment and death; but is not this our glory, and ought it not to be our joy?' Her letter, full of such indignant expostulations as these, she, a simple woman trained up in the obedience of the Roman Catholic system, had the courage to send to the great Doctor of her church and party, Antoine Arnauld, who had agreed to adopt the declaration, and was believed to have been concerned in drawing it up. She did not dispute his creed, for it was the same with her own. It was his betrayal of the belief he held, the duplicity, the cowardice, which she denounced, and, by the boldness with which she up braided him, showed him how to be daring in a righteous cause. She declared that if the compromising conduct continued the agitation would kill her, and kill her it did. She expired on the 4th of October, 1661, a martyr to her lofty sense of moral rectitude, and the disgrace of shrinking, at the dictation of power, from the avowal of truth. The Mother Angélique had gone to her reward in the preceding August. On her death-bed she checked a nun who was taking down her words. She was answered that the dying remarks of a preceding abbess had been of considerable use. Ah,' she said, that dear mother was very humble and very simple-minded, but I am neither.' Doubtless she had her hours of pride, for she had accomplished mighty things, and could not look round upon her holy flock, and the celebrated men who had gathered round her house, or mark her influence over the minds of others, and the impulse which her example had given to piety throughout France, and not be tempted to feel some complacency at the contemplation of her work; but if a mo mentary vanity ever intruded, it was quickly expelled, and she was as truly humble as she was good. Not only as the reformer of her convent does she occupy the chief place among its celebrities, but she appears to have been really the most remarkable, as was testified by her associates and successors when they proudly called her the 'Great Mother Angélique.' It would be doing these holy women a grievous injustice, and would entirely destroy the value of their example, to suppose that they were actuated by the hope of that fame which has eventually fallen to them. It was the hatred which Port-Royal excited, the opposition it provoked, the injustice it suffered, which raised it to the place which it occupies in the eye of the world, and, far from presenting a field for ambition, its insignificant endowments, its homely buildings, and its secluded position, seemed to doom it to perpetual obscurity. The decisive part of the life of Mother Angélique was passed in an arduous struggle with lukewarmness, laxity, or vice, and she could have no notion that her steady devotedness and gentle wisdom would ever be heard of beyond the walls of the convent which they adorned. The incidents of her career which most attract the reader were, after all, but brief episodes in her humble, unobtrusive existence, and were done in a corner and not in the market-place. The day of the wicket' was a domestic scene which subsequent events alone caused to be recorded; and if anything could have added to the grief which the Abbess felt in that memorable conflict, it would have been the knowledge that the particulars would one day be published to the world. The noble remonstrance of Jacqueline Pascal against the covert surrender of the most cherished principles of the Port-Royal community was contained in a private letter which was never intended to see the light, and would doubtless have passed into oblivion except for the splendour of her brother's reputation, which, like a sun, illuminated every object within its system. The conflicts of mind which killed her were on behalf of views which were discountenanced by the great name of her sect, and she undoubtedly must have supposed that her sorrows and remonstrances would be buried with her in the tomb. Even as it is, the names of Mother Angélique and Jacqueline Pascal have waited two centuries for the honour which, however little it was desired, was so eminently their due. It was in the party of the Jansenists that Roman Catholicism made its nearest approach to the Protestant creed, and rarely indeed have any adherents of the Papal church shone forth with such a pure and steady light as the Nuns of Port-Royal. IN the year 1841, when the long struggle between the Melbourne Government and its political opponents was drawing rapidly to a close, Sir Robert Peel, as the head of the Conservative party in the House of Commons, conceived the circumstances of the juncture to be so ripe as to justify his taking into his own hands the critical office of moving a decisive vote against the exist ing Administration. The ground which he chose for the attack was their admitted failure in many legislative measures of prime Parliamentary and national importance. Those, he contended, who are unable to legislate, are disentitled to govern; and to this effect was the spirit not less of his motion than his speech. Mr. Macaulay was then a combatant of the first class in all the more historical debates of that assembly, which now laments his absence without hope of his return. He gave to the question, as was his wont, a retrospective turn. He joined issue with Sir Robert Peel, not upon his minor premiss, assert ing that the Melbourne Government had failed in many of its great legislative undertakings, but upon his major, which declared success in legislation to be an essential condition of the right to hold office. He made his appeal to the last century, and contended that for decade after decade of years, from the Hanoverian succession onwards, legislation of the higher class was almost a dead letter. And his facts were, we conceive, entirely beyond dispute. The long course of some fifty years produced nothing, that can be quoted in that class, except the Septennial Act; for the useful and sensible consolidation of the Stocks, which represented the then formless and chaotic national Debt, by Mr. Pelham, was a measure not entitled to take any very high rank in the history of statesmanship, either from boldness of design or from difficulty of execution. At the close of those fifty years came the Acts, which had for their aim the raising a revenue from our American Colonies by the authority of Parliament. The general, perhaps the universal, opinion of our own time is, that the Septennial Act was a beneficial measure, and that the laws for taxing America were highly ill-advised; but, setting aside the merits of these laws, we must admit in both cases that they were important. As having been important, they are apparent exceptions to the general stagnation of legislative enterprise during the first half century of the Hanoverian dynasty. Yet they are only apparent exceptions; for they were alike expedients of the moment to meet a pressing necessity. The taxing acts were intended to relieve the finances labouring under the effects of war, and were passed by men innocent, as it seems, of political intention. The Septennial Act was simply intended to bar the constituency from the exercise of the franchise at a moment when its temper was unfavourable to the actual settlement of the Crown in the line of Brunswick. Not even in these cases, and far less in any others, do we find any recognition of the principle, in the sense in which it is now understood, that it is the duty of Governments and Parliaments to watch not only over the maintenance but over the improvement of the laws, and to study their progressive adaptation to the ever shifting exigencies of society. This abrogation or abeyance of the legislative office in regard to political and social improvement was in the main to be considered as the price which we paid for the rescue of the constitution of the country: from what used to be called in the homely |