e was coming on
him, and a stormy sunset after a brilliant day. He lost his sister-in-
law, to whom he owed all his fortunes, and who had watched ever since
over him and his wife like a mother; then he lost his wife herself under
most painful circumstances; then his best-beloved daughter. Then he
married again, and lost the son who was born to him; and then came, as to
many of the best in those days, even sorer trials, trials of the
conscience, trials of faith.

For in the meantime Rondelet had become a Protestant, like many of the
wisest men round him; like, so it would seem from the event, the majority
of the university and the burghers of Montpellier. It is not to be
wondered at. Montpellier was a sort of halfway resting-place for
Protestant preachers, whether fugitive or not, who were passing from
Basle, Geneva, or Lyons, to Marguerite of Navarre's little Protestant
court at Pan or at Nerac, where all wise and good men, and now and then
some foolish and fanatical ones, found shelter and hospitality. Thither
Calvin himself had been, passing probably through Montpellier and
leaving--as such a man was sure to leave--the mark of his foot behind
him. At Lyons, no great distance up the Rhone, Marguerite had helped to
establish an organised Protestant community; and when in 1536 she herself
had passed through Montpellier, to visit her brother at Valence, and
Montmorency's camp at Avignon, she took with her doubtless Protestant
chaplains of her own, who spoke wise words--it may be that she spoke wise
words herself--to the ardent and inquiring students of Montpellier.
Moreover, Rondelet and his disciples had been for years past in constant
communication with the Protestant savants of Switzerland and Germany,
among whom the knowledge of nature was progressing as it never had
progressed before. For--it is a fact always to be remembered--it was
only in the free air of Protestant countries the natural sciences could
grow and thrive. They sprung up, indeed, in Italy after the restoration
of Greek literature in the fifteenth century; but they withered there
again only too soon under the blighting upas shade of superstition.
Transplanted to the free air of Switzerland, of Germany, of Britain, and
of Montpellier, then half Protestant, they developed rapidly and surely,
simply because the air was free; to be checked again in France by the
return of superstition with despotism super-added, until the eve of the
great French Rev