Few in these days can have read him, unless in the Methodist version of John Wesley.  Amongst those few, however, happens to be myself; which arose from the accident of having, when a boy of eleven, received a copy of the De Imitatione Christi, as a bequest from a relation, who died very young; from which cause, and from the external prettiness of the book, being a Glasgow reprint, by the celebrated Foulis, and gaily bound, I was induced to look into it; and finally read it many times over, partly out of some sympathy which, even in those days, I had with its simplicity and devotional fervor; but much more from the savage delight I found in laughing at Tom’s Latinity. That, I freely grant to M. Michelet, is inimitable; else, as regards substance, it strikes me that I could forge a better De Imitatione myself.  But there is no knowing till one tries.  Yet, after all, it is not certain whether the original was Latin.  But, however that may have been, if it is possible that M. Michelet[A] can be accurate in saying that there are no less than sixty French versions (not editions, observe, but separate versions) existing of the De Imitatione, how prodigious must have been the adaptation of the book to the religious heart of the fifteenth century!  Excepting the Bible, but excepting that only in Protestant lands, no book known to man has had the same distinction.  It is the most marvellous bibliographical fact on record.

[Footnote A:  “If M. Michelet can be accurate.”  However, on consideration, this statement does not depend on Michelet.  The bibliographer, Barbier, has absolutely specified sixty in a separate dissertation, soixante traductions, amongst those even that have not escaped the search.  The Italian translations are said to be thirty.  As to mere editions, not counting the early MSS. for half a century before printing was introduced, those in Latin amount to two thousand, and those in French to one thousand.  Meantime, it is very clear to me that this astonishing popularity, so entirely unparalleled in literature, could not have existed except in Roman Catholic times, nor subsequently have lingered in any Protestant land.  It was the denial of Scripture fountains to thirsty lands which made this slender rill of Scripture truth so passionately welcome.]

3.  Our English girls, it seems, are as faulty in one way as we English males in another.  None of us lads could have written the Opera Omnia of Mr. a Kempis; neither could any of our lasses have assumed male attire like La Pucelle.  But why?  Because, says Michelet, English girls and German think so much of an indecorum.  Well, that is a good fault, generally speaking.  But M. Michelet ought to have remembered a fact in the martyrologies which justifies both parties,—­the French heroine for doing, and the general choir of English girls for not doing.  A female saint, specially