wrote me from your bed of sickness. I acknowledge your tenderness and I thank you with all my heart; but forgive me, I entreat you, if I still refuse your advice to leave: remember that I am not my own mistress; my duty is to remain where Providence has placed me, and to oppose my own body, if need be, to the daggers of the assassins who would attack the King. I should be unworthy of our mother, who is as dear to you as to myself, if danger could induce me to fly far away from the King and from my children.' (Vol. ii. p. 402.)

Before we take leave of these interesting collections, one class of letters remains to be noticed, which are, from their singular freshness, vivacity, and originality, the most captivating of all. We mean the copious correspondence of Madame Elisabeth, the King's sister, with her two ladies-in-waiting and confidential friends, Madame de Bombelles and Madame de Raigecourt. The authenticity of these letters cannot be questioned, for they proceed directly from the custody of the representatives of the ladies to whom they were addressed. The three sons of Madame de Bombelles entered the Austrian service, and the youngest of them (who had possession of his mother's letters) became the third and last husband of the Empress Marie Louise. Through Countess de Flahault, when Ambassadress of France at Vienna, these letters were communicated to the present editor, and they have since been collated with another copy of them belonging to the Marquis de Castéja, who married Madame de Bombelles' daughter in 1819. Some of the letters of the Princess to her other friend, Madame de Raigecourt, had already been inaccurately given to the world by M. Ferraud; but they have now been revised and published in their integrity by M. Feuillet de Conches from the original documents in the possession of the present Marquis de Raigecourt. We are thus particular in explaining the history of these papers because they are wholly exempt from the suspicions which have been thrown on some other parts of the collection; and it would be desirable to obtain an equally clear and explicit account of every paper to which a great name has been affixed.

No character in modern history lives in a purer light than that of Madame Elisabeth. She shared the sufferings of her brother; she refused to forsake him when she might have left France; she was of all the victims of the Revolution the purest and the most innocent. But without at all diminishing the admiration inspired by her virtues, these letters exhibit her character from an entirely new and unexpected point of view. Far from being the resigned and half-celestial creature who sacri

ficed herself to the tenderness of her affections and the ardour of her faith, Madame Elisabeth was of all the Royal Family of France the most remarkable for the extreme vivacity of her disposition, for her brilliant humour, for her high spirits and enjoyment of life, and for a proud sense of what was once her own great position. Born a Princess and a child of France, she exulted in the pleasures she possessed and the pleasures she could confer on others. To her tastes, her habits, and her ardent convictions, the Revolution, with its brutality and its irreligion, was abominable. From the first day when the storm broke on the marble galleries of Versailles, she retained no illusions, she advocated no concessions. Her courageous heart would have found it easier to break in a bold resistance, than to temporise and exhaust the slow torments of lingering destruction. Yet that was the fate to which she was doomed by the fault of others, rather than by her own; and with a complete knowledge of the extent of that hopeless sacrifice, undeceiving and undeceived, she made it, not only without a murmur, but with a gaiety and gallantry of heart, tempered only by her profound faith in the justice of God and the truth of His religion. She met those perils-she describes those scenes of horror-with a light and unshrinking touch. Even when you trace in the animated irregularity of her style the flutter of the keenest emotion, half-concealed from the friends. she was addressing, she shows not a sign of fear; and she allows nothing to check the natural flow of her spirits, except the consciousness of her own imperfections, measured by the standard of divine endurance and divine purity. Yet, with these elevated thoughts and motives ever present to her mind, she is not a whit the less a woman of the world, eagerly sharing in every pursuit and enjoyment and passion of the hour, and owning that it costs her more to relinquish her horses, her gardens, her dairy, and her freedom, than she cares to admit. This strong infusion of youthful gaiety and active tastes, mingled with the fervour of her religious sentiments, gives a new aspect to the character of Elisabeth; but it only renders her more attractive and more original.

We can hardly hope to preserve in a foreign language the peculiar playfulness of her style in these letters, but the following extracts may give some idea of them. The first in the series was written to Madame de Bombelles the day after the capture of the Bastille:-

'15th July, 1789.

'How kind you are, dearest! All the dreadful events of yesterday had not made me cry; but your letter, which gives me the consola

tions of your friendship, has cost me a flood of tears. I should be grieved to go away without you. I don't know whether the King will leave Versailles. I would do whatever you wish, if that were to happen. I don't know what I really desire on that point. God knows what is best to be done. We have a pious man at the head of the Council, perhaps He will enlighten him. Take care of your self, and pray don't come out-though, ma petite, I make the sacrifice of seeing you. I love you more than I can tell. At all times, at every moment, I shall feel the same. I hope the evil is not so great as one imagines. What makes me think so is the quiet of Versailles. We were not quite certain yesterday that M. de Launay had been hanged: somebody else had been taken for him. I shall cling, as you advise me, to the chariot of Monsieur (the Comte de Provence), but I am afraid the wheels are good for nothing. Adieu, dearest, I embrace you as fondly as I love you.' (Feuillet de Conches, vol. i. p. 233.)

Here follows an outburst from the brave little fanatic, whose religion was not always of the most saintlike temper:

'Paris, 20th January, 1790. 'As this letter will not see the post-office in France I may write to you rather more at my ease. The Assembly has crowned the measure of its follies and impieties by giving to the Jews admission to all offices. The debate was long, but the rightminded people had, as usual, the worst of it. As yet they have only admitted the Jews who had privileges; but you will see the whole nation will soon have the same advantages. It was reserved for our age to receive in friendship the only people whom God has marked with a sign of reprobation, to forget the death inflicted on our Saviour by that people, and the benefits that Saviour has ever scattered over France. I can't tell you what a rage I am in at this decree. But we must wait and submit with resignation to the punishment reserved to us by Heaven, for this offence will never be allowed to remain unavenged. Our present position proves that God has His days of vengeance, and that if He is long-suffering of evil, He does nevertheless punish it with force, when the ingratitude of mankind has reached its height.

'You will see, or you have already seen, what the Assembly has done to prevent its members from holding offices. [The Assembly had just decreed the non-re-eligibility of its members.] I don't know that it is a good thing. I am afraid it will only render them more violent. Since the King has taken this step which puts him, as they say, at the head of the Revolution, and strips him, as I say, of the little remaining Crown he had still on his head, the Assembly has not done a thing for him. It is fiercely bent on the destruction of the Clergy. To-day they are going to decide that there are to be no eldest sons. Every sort of extravagance is going on, and no good will come of it.' (Vol. i. p. 304.)

1st March, 1790.

We are not yet sure that the Emperor (Joseph) is dead. But

one might lay a wager it is so. How Europe will be knocked about! They say his niece has died in her confinement: the happier she, though I am not envious of her lot. As I have always been extremely curious, I should like to see the end of this Revolution. Yet if the days of persecution for the faith were to return, ah! I would ask Heaven to release me from the world first, for I don't feel I have at all the courage to support it. It is true that there is an old proverb which says "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb," and I doubt not that we should experience it, if the time came. You will think me rather mad. For fear you should find out that you are not erring in thinking so, I leave you and embrace you with all my heart.' (Vol. i. p. 313.)

These touches must suffice to give an impression of the Princess's character-ardent, intolerant sometimes, resolute in opposing danger, dauntless in exposing deceit, foreseeing more clearly than others the track that lay before her, shrinking at times from the shadows that crossed it, but pursuing it at last to the bitter end, in faith and love not unworthy of her Divine Master.

Whatever may have been the errors of judgment and the defects of character of the members of the Royal Family of France-and, as we have seen, they are unreservedly laid bare, by themselves, in these confidential letters to their nearest connexions-it can never be forgotten that their unparalleled misfortunes plead like angels' tongues in their favour. No doubt it may be easy to trace even those misfortunes, in part, to the singular want of tact and resolution exhibited by the King in all the important emergencies of his life-to the wilfulness of the Queen, her inexperience of politics, and her foreign extraction-to the total want of intelligence of the time and of the Revolution, from which even the acuteness of Madame Elisabeth did not exempt her. But with the whole evidence now before the world, which enables us to follow them into the recesses of their thoughts and feelings, we rise from the perusal of these papers with increased sympathy with sufferings, borne in so noble and Christian a spirit.

ART. V.-1. The Irish Church: its History, with Statistics. By WILLIAM SHEE, Serjeant-at-Law, M.P. for the County of Kilkenny. Second edition. 1863.

2. Remarks on the Irish Church Temporalities. By MAZIERE BRADY, D.D. Dublin: 1865.

3. Facts respecting the Present State of the Church in Ireland. By the Rev. ALFRED T. LEE. London: 1865.

4. The Irish Church; an Historical and Statistical Review. By HERBERT S. SKEATS. London: 1865.

5. The Income and Requirements of the Irish Church, being a Reply to Serjeant Shee. By Archdeacon STOPFORD. Dublin 1863.

IRELAND occupied in the sixteenth century a position with

out parallel in European history. While the Reformation was affecting the whole breadth of society in other nations, altering political and social relations, correcting theological doctrines, and going hand in hand with literary and scientific advancement, the most western country of Europe, isolated for centuries from all the liberalising culture of the Continent, and steeped in inconceivable misery and degradation, felt no quickening within, not even a sympathetic movement in connexion with Protestant impulse. Unlike other nations, it had no period of religious inquiry, no spiritual insurrection against the corrupt formalism of Rome, no Celtic Luther to give voice, direction, and triumph to the principles of a new movement. In the utter absence of that rising and vigorous middle class, with its compact force, its self-consistency, and its hardihood of character, to which England and Scotland owed their reforming activity, the sister country remained a stranger to all the new social forces that were then stamping themselves upon the expanding civilisation of Britain. The Reformation which was imported in the middle of the sixteenth century was an entirely foreign and artificial system, which at once arrayed itself against the strong nationalism of the island, and never at any period exhibited that social expansiveness which was so much needed for moulding into religious unity races so widely different in all their traditions and training. The new hierarchy merely displaced the old, but proposed to itself no quiet career of diffusion and growth, and devised no wise and proper methods for the conversion of the native population. Thus it came to pass that the mass of the people kept to their