ion. Christianity he looked upon as the highest moral expression
of artistic perfection, and he regarded it with the same admiration he
accorded to the Antinous and the Venus of Milo. He was not, however, by
nature a pagan as some men are--men who, in the words of De Musset,
"Sont venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux"; but the atmosphere in
which his early years had been spent had been so antagonistic to the
impulses of his nature, his inner life had been so cramped in and
starved, that when at length the key of gold opening the prison door let
in the outer air, his spirit revelled in all the wild extravagance so
often accompanying sudden and long wished-for emancipation. His nature
was perhaps not one that could have been attuned to a perfect harmony
with that of a Greek or Roman of the golden days, but one better
calculated to enjoy the hybrid atmosphere of the Italian Renaissance;
and he would have been in his element in the Rucellai Gardens,
conversing with feeble little Cosimino, or laughing with Buondelmonte
and Luigi Alamanni. He did not believe in the narrative of the Bible,
but its precepts and tendencies he appreciated and admired, although, it
must be confessed, he did not always put himself out to follow them. In
his heart he utterly rejected all idea of a future life, since it was
incompatible with his conception of the artistic unity of this; but he
would blandly acknowledge to himself that there are perhaps things we
cannot comprehend, and that beauty may have no term. He assimilated, so
far as in him lay, his duties as a priest with his ideas as a man of
culture; and his sermons were ever of love; sermons which, winged as
they were with impassioned eloquence, were deservedly popular with all:
from the scholar, who delighted in them as intellectual feasts, to the
fashionable Paris woman of the second empire, who was enchanted at
finding in the quasi-fatalistic and broadly charitable views enunciated
therein means whereby her vulgar amours might be considered in a light
more pleasing to herself and more consoling to her husband.

On the Sunday afternoon preceding the evening on which we introduce him
to the reader the Abbe had departed from his usual custom, and, by
especial request of his cure, had preached a most remarkable sermon upon
the Personality of Satan. It is a vulgar error to suppose that men
succeed best when their efforts are enlivened by a real belief in the
matter in hand. Not only some me