produire en fait de bonte, de modestie, d'abnegation personelle.
Ce qu'il y a de vertu a Saint-Sulpice suffirait pour gouverner un
monde, et cela m'a rendu difficile pour ce que j'ai trouve
ailleurs.

M. Renan, as we have said, is very just to his education, and to the
men who gave it. He never speaks of them except with respect and
gratitude. It is seldom, indeed, that he permits himself anything like
open disparagement of the men and the cause which he forsook. The
shafts of his irony are reserved for men on his own side, for the
radical violences of M. Clemenceau, and for the exaggerated reputation
of Auguste Comte, "who has been set up as a man of the highest order of
genius, for having said, in bad French, what all scientific thinkers
for two hundred years have seen as clearly as himself." He attributes
to his ecclesiastical training those excellences in his own temper and
principles on which he dwells with much satisfaction and thankfulness.
They are, he considers, the result of his Christian and "Sulpician"
education, though the root on which they grew is for ever withered and
dead. "La foi disparue, la morale reste.... C'est par le caractere que
je suis reste essentiellement l'eleve de mes anciens maitres." He is
proud of these virtues, and at the same time amused at the odd
contradictions in which they have sometimes involved him:--

Il me plairait d'expliquer par le detail et de montrer comment la
gageure paradoxale de garder les vertus clericales, sans la foi
qui leur sert de base et dans un monde pour lequel elles ne sont
pas faites, produisit, en ce que me concerne, les rencontres les
plus divertissantes. J'aimerais a raconter toutes les aventures
que mes vertus sulpiciennes m'amenerent, et les tours singuliers
qu'elles m'ont joues. Apres soixante ans de vie serieuse on a le
droit de sourire; et ou trouver une source de rire plus abondante,
plus a portee, plus inoffensive qu'en soimeme? Si jamais un auteur
comique voulait amuser le public de mes ridicules, je ne lui
demanderais qu'une chose; c'est de me prendre pour collaborateur;
je lui conterais des choses vingt fois plus amusantes que celles
qu'il pourrait inventer.

He dwells especially on four of these virtues which were, he thinks,
graven ineffaceably on his nature at St. Sulpice. They taught him there
not to care for money or success. They taught him the old-fashioned
French polit