llandus, who
at once responded to the call, only however to find the sick man in
deepest trouble, on account of the sternness with which he had exercised
his judicial functions. He acknowledged that he had often been the means
of inflicting capital punishment when the other judges would have passed
a milder sentence in the belief that he was rescuing the condemned from
greater crimes, which they would inevitably commit, and securing the
salvation of their souls through the repentance to which their ghostly
adviser would lead them prior to their execution. Bollandus at once
perceived that he had to deal with the over-scrupulous conscience of one
who had striven, according to his light, to do his duty. He therefore
produced his breviary, and proceeded to read and expound the hundred and
first psalm, "I will sing of mercy and judgment;" making such a very
pertinent application of it to the magistrate's case, as led him to cry
out with tears, "What comfort thou hast brought me, Father! now I die
happy." A consideration of these numerous and apparently inconsistent
engagements may not be without some practical use in this age. Looking
at the varied occupations of Bollandus and his fellows, and at the
massive works which they at the same time produced, who can help smiling
at the outcry which the advocates for the endowment of research, as they
style themselves, raised some time ago against the simple proposal of
the Oxford University Commission, that well-endowed professors should
deliver some lectures on their own special subjects? Such a practice,
they maintained, would utterly distract the mind from all original
investigation of the sources. Such certainly was not the case with the
Bollandists, who yet could make time carefully--far more carefully than
most modern historians--to investigate the sources of European history.
But then the Bollandists were real students, and had neither lawn tennis
nor politics to divert them from their chosen career.

Bollandus again is a healthy study for us moderns in the triumph
exhibited by him of mind over matter, of the ardent student over
physical difficulties. His rooms were no pleasant College chambers,
lofty, commodious, and well-ventilated; on the contrary the apartments
where the volumes commemorating the saints of January saw the light were
two small dark chambers next the roof, exposed alike to the heat of
summer and the cold of winter, in the Jesuit House at Antwerp. In them
w