ion
which they had together in terms of the warmest sympathy.

The defects of his own mind were reflected in the education which he
imparted. He was not sufficiently rational or scientific. It might
have been thought that his two hundred pupils were all destined to be
poets, writers, and orators. He set little value on learning without
talent. This was made very clear at the entrance of the Nicolaites
to St. Sulpice, where talent was held of no account, and where
scholasticism and erudition alone were prized. When it came to a
question of doing an exercise of logic or philosophy in barbarous
Latin, the students of St. Nicholas, who had been fed upon more
delicate literature, could not stomach such coarse food. They were
not, therefore, much liked at St. Sulpice, to which M. Dupanloup,
was never appointed, as he was considered to be too little of a
theologian. When an ex-student of St. Nicholas ventured to speak of
his former school, the old tutors would remark: "Oh, yes! in the time
of M. Bourdoise," as much as to say that the seventeenth century was
the period during which this establishment achieved its celebrity.

Whatever its shortcomings in some respects, the education given at St.
Nicholas was of a very high literary standard. Clerical education has
this superiority over a university education, that it is absolutely
independent in everything which does not relate to religion.
Literature is discussed under all its aspects, and the yoke of
classical dogma sits much more lightly. This is how it was that
Lamartine, whose education and training were altogether clerical,
was far more intelligent than any university man; and when this is
followed by philosophical emancipation, the result is a very frank and
unbiased mind. I completed my classical education without having read
Voltaire, but I knew the _Soirees de St. Petersbourg_ by heart, and
its style, the defects of which I did not discover until much later,
had a very stimulating effect upon me.

The discussions on romanticism, then so fierce in the world outside,
found their way into the college and all our talk was of Lamartine and
Victor Hugo. The superior joined in with them, and for nearly a year
they were the sole topic of our spiritual readings. M. Dupanloup did
not go all the way with the champions of romanticism, but he was much
more with them than against them. Thus it was that I came to know of
the struggles of the day. Later still, the _solvuntur object