withdrew and returned to Thonon. A contemporary manuscript, preserved at Geneva, adds that, at these insult ing words, old Beza's gentle expression changed to sternness. He pointed to his empty bookshelves, whose precious contents had been sold to provide for the suffering refugees from France, and, opening the door for his guest, let him go with a vade retro, Sathanas.1

To get possession of Geneva, and to be enthroned there, not only as bishop, but as secular prince, was one of Francis's earliest and latest dreams.2 To what lengths of wrong-doing he was impelled by it will not be known until the secrets of all hearts are revealed. He is known to us almost exclusively by the mendacious panegyrics of his friends, and by his own copious but not, ordinarily, incautious correspondence. Neither in these nor in other documents do we find anything to convict him of actual

1 Nevertheless, the story that Beza was actually convinced and converted was studiously circulated at the time, and is repeated to this day in the Lives of Francis. On the grave authority of an after-dinner story told by a pot-companion of that chaste monarch, Henry IV., it is alleged that the cause which held this blameless old man to his principles was-licentiousness! One may find the charge and the story gracefully reproduced by Lady Herbert, p. 97. The facts of the case, as any well-informed person might see, make the charge simply absurd. But it would be unjust to hold her ladyship to a rigid moral responsibility for lack of information. Beza was never under a vow of celibacy, so that there was not that to bind him even to the

measure of self-denial exacted of the French ecclesiastic of the period. According to this story, he took refuge, for his vices, in the one corner of the earth where they were sure to be austerely and rigorously punished; and refused wealth and asylum in Italy where the state of society and law on this point waswhat it was. It is interesting to read the Bull in which the pope and two score Italian prelates put their virtuous hands to this disgraceful libel.

Francis clung fast to the title of prince as well as bishop, to the day of his death; and his will, the autograph of which is shown, with other relics, at the family seat at Thôrens, gives instructions for his burial in his own cathedral at Geneva, in case the town should be recovered to the Catholic religion after his death.

conscious complicity with the atrocious crime of the Escalade of 1602. What might have been if the perfidious projects which the Duke was continually nursing in his revengeful bosom had been rebuked instead of encouraged by his favourite clergyman, we can only guess. Perhaps it would have made no difference in the course of that wretched prince whom our saint publicly extols for his piety and for all the Christian virtues, but whom, in a private conversation with Mother Angélique,3 he denounces in a whisper for his "dirty tricks," as "clever in men's eyes but in the eyes of God a reprobate." Perhaps it might not have changed the duke's course; but it would have been better for the memory of the saint.

The history of this prince's reign is stained on every page with plots to seize Geneva by perfidy, by purchased treachery, by ambuscade, by secret attack in times of plighted peace, under cover of assurances of his friendship; so that it was not with to what guileless unsuspicion as might be the bearing of the question, that Francis once answered his sovereign's inquiry, What should be done with Geneva: "There is no doubt that heresy would be weakened throughout Europe if this town, the very seat of Satan, could be reduced and subjugated." And he went on to indicate at length the things that made this little town of 15,000 souls the metropolis and radiating centre of the reformed faith. Then, proposing certain spiritual methods, he added: "I know these remedies are small and slow, but is there anything else that

3 Sainte Beuve (Port Royal, i. 257) quotes this discrepancy with admiration in proof of Francis's practical shrewdness and finesse. If it is right to speak of a saint as taking pride in anything, Francis was proud of his bluff, outspoken sincerity, "á l'ancienne gauloise." "Je ne sais nullement l'art de mentir, ni de dissimuler, ni de feindre avec dextérité. Ce que j'ai sur les lèvres, c'est justement ce qui sort de ma pensée je hais la duplicité comme la mort."-Marsollier, liv. viii., $18.

could be done in this unhappy and degenerate age?" And then, in response to a word of encouragement from the duke, he added slyly: "As to the destruction of the town, that is not exactly in my line nor to my taste. Your Highness has more expedients for that than I could dream of."1 He conceals many things, but does not hide his feelings towards the city-his city, as he calls it "that den of thieves and outlaws." He writes to the Pope: "This town is to heretics and devils what Rome is to angels and Catholics. Every good Catholic, but most of all the Pope and the Catholic princes, ought to do his best to have this Babylon demolished or converted."

Simultaneously with the preparations for the consecration of Francis as Bishop and Prince of Geneva, the Duke, stimulated by such talk as this from his spiritual adviser, carried on his secret preparations for that Escalade which, had it succeeded, would have anticipated, in the course of history, the horrors of the sack of Magdeburg by those of the sack of Geneva. It was plotted for the darkest night in the year, the 12th of December, o.s., 1602. About the end of November, Francis, returning thanks to the Chapter of his Cathedral for their congratulations on his appointment, bade them "Goodbye for the present, expecting soon to meet you again in your own city." 2 Thence he went into retreat to prepare for the solemnities of his consecration. His confessor on this occasion was that noted Scottish Jesuit, Father Alexander, who stood a few nights later at the foot of the scaling-ladders and shrived the ruffians, one by one, as they crept up the wall of Geneva to their work of midnight assassination.3 How the cruel and

1 Deuxième Discours au Duc de Savoie. Euvres, xiv., 76.

2 Letter 42.

3 This fact has recently been developed by Mr. Th. Claparède in a paper read before the Archæological Society of Geneva.

No. 227.-VOL. XXXVIII.

perfidious plot was foiled, and how the Duke slunk back to Turin foaming with disappointed rage, is it not told with glee in every Genevese family the world over, as often as the 12th of December comes round? One of the exasperating sights that met the Duke's eye as he rode homeward through Annecy, was the long train of sumpter-mules sent by his orders from Turin, laden with church decorations and altar furniture and with eighty hundredweight of wax candles, to be used in the decoration and illumination of St. Peter's at Geneva, when its prince-bishop should celebrate mass at Christmas in his own cathedral church.

It is possible that for fear of displeasing the saint's "sweetness," these preparations had all been concealed from his too sensitive mind; that he had no conjecture about the mysterious movement of troops through his diocese; that his remark to his canons had no reference to any thing in particular; and that the new bishop, looking out of his window at Annecy at the train from Turin, wondered in his heart where in the world all that church gear could be going to. We should wrong his blessed memory if we were to say that his guilt was demonstrated. But many a wretch has justly been hanged on less evidence of complicity in less atrocious crime.

It is not needful to pursue further the course of the life of Francis de Sales. The traits manifest in his earlier life (though veiled in most of his recent biographies) are to be recognised in all his subsequent career.*

4 His labours in the Pays de Gex were quite of the same character with those in the Chablais, except that, instructed by his two years' experiment in the Chablais, he scattered no more of his rhetorical pearls before swine, but began at once with force. See Claparède, Histoire des Eglises Reformées du Pays de Gex; Brossard, Histoire politique et religieuse du Pays de Gex: Bourg-en-Bresse, 1851; Guillot, Fr. de Sales et les Protestants; Genève, 1873. The legendary story of the mission in Gex may be read in any of the Lives of Francis.

D D

It would be easy, if only the torrent of fulsome panegyric would assuage long enough to give the opportunity, to present his character in more pleasing aspects. There were noble and beautiful things in Francis. But one tires of seeing this adroit and courtier-like fanatic, with his duplicity and his cold-blooded cruelty, recommended in standing advertisements to the abused public as "a model of Christian saintliness and religious virtue for all time;" as having lived "a life as sweet, pure, and noble as any man by divine help has been permitted to live upon earth;" and " and as having been "admirable for his freedom from bigotry in an age of persecution." Neither can we enter fully into sympathy with those to whom "it is a matter of entire thankfulness to find a distinctively Anglican writer setting forward" the ferocious NEWHAVEN, Con., U.S.A.

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and perfidious dragonnades by which he extinguished Christian light and liberty in the provinces south of Lake Leman, and smote that lovely region with a blight that lingers on it visibly until this day, as a true missionary task to reclaim souls from deadly error, and bring them back to the truth." 1 That writer would render a good service, not only to history but to practical religion, who should give the world a true picture of Francis de Sales, with all his singular graces and with his crying faults; and so supersede the myriads of impossible fancy-portraits with nimbus and wings, with eyes rolling in mystical rapture, and with the everlasting smirk of "sweetness" and gentleness.

1 The quotations are from "Opinions of the Press" in Messrs. Rivingtons' Catalogue.

LEONARD WOOLSEY BACON.