upon us. The falcon, for its part is content
when virtue, by the sacrifices which she makes, secures for it
greater advantages than it could obtain by the force of its own claws.
Desiring a profit from virtue, its interest is that virtue should
exist; and so the wise man, by the surrender of his material
privileges, attains his one aim, which is to secure free enjoyment of
the ideal.

THE PETTY SEMINARY OF SAINT NICHOLAS DU CHARDONNET.

PART I.

Many persons who allow that I have a perspicuous mind wonder how
I came during my boyhood and youth to put faith in creeds, the
impossibility of which has since been so clearly revealed to me.
Nothing, however, can be more simple, and it is very probable that if
an extraneous incident had not suddenly taken me from the honest but
narrow-minded associations amid which my youth was passed, I should
have preserved all my life long the faith which in the beginning
appeared to me as the absolute expression of the truth. I have said
how I was educated in a small school kept by some honest priests, who
taught me Latin after the old fashion (which was the right one), that
is to say to read out of trumpery primers, without method and almost
without grammer, as Erasmus and the humanists of the fifteenth and
sixteenth century, who are the best Latin scholars since the days of
old, used to learn it. These worthy priests were patterns of all that
is good. Devoid of anything like _pedagogy_, to use the modern phrase,
they followed the first rule of education, which is not to make too
easy the tasks which have for their aim the mastering of a difficulty.
Their main object was to make their pupils into honourable men. Their
lessons of goodness and morality, which impressed me as being the
literal embodiments of virtue and high feeling, were part and parcel
of the dogma which they taught. The historical education they had
given me consisted solely in reading Rollin. Of criticism, the natural
sciences, and philosophy I as yet knew nothing of course. Of all that
concerned the nineteenth century, and the new ideas as to history
and literature expounded by so many gifted thinkers, my teachers knew
nothing. It was impossible to imagine a more complete isolation from
the ambient air. A thorough-paced Legitimist would not even admit the
possibility of the Revolution or of Napoleon being mentioned except
with a shudder. My only knowledge of the Empire was derived from the
lodge-keeper of th