somme de ce qu'il pouvait donner, personne ne l'egalait.
Chacun de ses deux cents eleves existait distinct dans sa pensee;
il etait pour chacun d'eux l'excitateur toujours present, le motif
de vivre et de travailler. Il croyait au talent et en faisait la
base de la foi. Il repetait souvent que l'homme vaut en proportion
de sa faculte d'admirer. Son admiration n'etait pas toujours assez
eclairee par la science; mais elle venait d'une grande chaleur
d'ame et d'un coeur vraiment possede de l'amour du beau.... Les
defauts de l'education qu'il donnait etaient les defauts meme de
son esprit. Il etait trop peu rationnel, trop peu scientifique. On
eut dit que ses deux cents eleves etaient destines a etre tous
poetes, ecrivains, orateurs.

St. Nicolas was literary. Issy and St. Sulpice were severely
philosophic and scientific, places of "_fortes etudes_"; and the writer
thinks that they were more to his own taste than the more brilliant
literary education given under Dupanloup. In one sense it may be so.
They introduced him to exactness of thought and precision of
expression, and they widened his horizon of possible and attainable
knowledge. He passed, he says, from words to things. But he is a writer
who owes so much to the form into which he throws his thoughts, to the
grace and brightness and richness of his style, that he probably is a
greater debtor to the master whom he admires and dislikes, Dupanloup,
than to the modest, reserved, and rather dull Sulpician teachers, whom
he loves and reveres and smiles at, whose knowledge of theology was
serious, profound, and accurate, and whose characteristic temper was
one of moderation and temperate reason, joined to a hatred of display,
and a suspicion of all that seemed too clever and too brilliant. But
his witness to their excellence, to their absolute self-devotion to
their work, to their dislike of extravagance and exaggeration, to their
good sense and cultivation, is ungrudging and warm. Of course he thinks
them utterly out of date; but on their own ground he recognises that
they were men of strength and solidity, the best and most thorough of
teachers; the most sincere, the most humble, the most self-forgetting
of priests:--

Beaucoup de mes jugements etonnent les gens du monde parcequ'ils
n'out pas vu ce que j'ai vu. J'ai vu a Saint-Sulpice, associes a
des idees etroites, je l'avoue, les miracles que nos races peuvent