of the French clergy are educated.  He comes up a raw, eager, ignorant provincial, full of zeal for knowledge, full of reverence and faith, and first goes through the distinguished literary school of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, of which Dupanloup was the founder and the inspiring soul.  Thence he passed under the more strictly professional discipline of St. Sulpice:  first at the preparatory philosophical school at Issy, then to study scientific theology in the house of St. Sulpice itself at Paris.  At St. Sulpice he showed special aptitudes for the study of Hebrew, in which he was assisted and encouraged by M. le Hir, “the most remarkable person,” in his opinion, “whom the French clergy has produced in our days,” a “savant and a saint,” who had mastered the results of German criticism as they were found in the works of Gesenius and Ewald.  On his faith all this knowledge had not made the faintest impression; but it was this knowledge which broke down M. Renan’s, and finally led to his retiring from St. Sulpice.  On the one side was the Bible and Catholic theology, carefully, scientifically, and consistently taught at St. Sulpice; on the other were the exegesis and the historical criticism of the German school.  He came at length to the conclusion that the two are incompatible; that there was but a choice of alternatives; and purely on the ground of historical criticism, he says, not on any abstract objections to the supernatural, or to miracles, or to Catholic dogma, he gave up revealed religion.  He gave it up not without regrets at the distress caused to friends, and at parting with much that was endeared to him by old associations, and by intrinsic beauty and value; but, as far as can be judged, without any serious sense of loss.  He spent some time in obscurity, teaching, and studying laboriously, and at length beginning to write.  Michel Levy, the publisher, found him out, and opened to him a literary career, and in due time he became famous.  He has had the ambiguous honour of making the Bible an object of such interest to French readers as it never was before, at the cost of teaching them to find in it a reflection of their own characteristic ways of looking at life and the world.  It is not an easy thing to do with such a book as the Bible; but he has done it.

As a mere history of a change of convictions, the Souvenirs are interesting, but hardly of much importance.  They are written with a kind of Epicurean serenity and dignity, avoiding all exaggeration and violence, profuse in every page in the delicacies and also in the reticences of respect, not too serious to exclude the perpetual suggestion of a well-behaved amused irony, not too much alive to the ridiculous and the self-contradictory to forget the attitude of composure due to the theme of the book.  He warns his readers at the outset that they must not look for a stupid literalness in his account.  “Ce qu’on dit de soi est toujours poesie”—­the reflection of states of mind and varying humours,