o very frightened
at an amount of plain-speaking, neither in itself immoral, nor, on the
whole, impertinent. Had he docked his work of everything condemned by
prudish theories, he might have made it more conventionally decent;
but Michelet would have been puzzled to recognize himself in the poor
maimed cripple that would then have borne his name.

Nor will a reader of average shrewdness mistake the religious drift of
a book suppressed by the Imperial underlings in the interests neither
of religion nor of morals, but merely of Popery in its most outrageous
form. If its attacks on Rome seem, now and then, to involve
Christianity itself, we must allow something for excess of warmth, and
something for the nature of inquiries which laid bare the rotten
outgrowths of a religion in itself the purest known among men. In
studying the so-called Ages of Faith, the author has only found them
worthy of their truer and older title, the Ages of Darkness. It is
against the tyranny, feudal and priestly, of those days, that he
raises an outcry, warranted almost always by facts which a more
mawkish philosophy refuses to see. If he is sometimes hasty and
onesided; if the Church and the Feudal System of those days had their
uses for the time being; it is still a gain to have the other side of
the subject kept before us by way of counterpoise to the doctrines
now in vogue. We need not be intolerant; but Rome is yet alive.

Taken as a whole, Mr. Michelet's book cannot be called unchristian.
Like most thoughtful minds of the day, he yearns for some nobler and
larger creed than that of the theologians; for a creed which,
understanding Nature, shall reconcile it with Nature's God. Nor may he
fairly be called irreverent for talking, Frenchman like, of things
spiritual with the same freedom as he would of things temporal.
Perhaps in his heart of hearts he has nearly as much religious
earnestness as they who call Dr. Colenso an infidel, and shake their
heads at the doubtful theology of Frederic Robertson. At any rate, no
translator who should cut or file away so special a feature of French
feeling would be doing justice to so marked an original.

For English readers who already know the concise and sober volumes of
their countryman, Mr. Wright, the present work will offer mainly an
interesting study of the author himself. It is a curious compound of
rhapsody and sound reason, of history and romance, of coarse realism
and touching poetry, such as