weakness, sustained me in my sorrow, and sent His angel to chasten me in the hour of my sinful pride.' ·

"Many years after, in a peaceful convent, hidden from the outer world by a dense and flowering wood, an aged nun lay dying. So rigidly austere, so full of noble self-sacrifice, had been her religious life, that the sisters, who knelt around her, instead of praying for her soul, only besought her intercession when she should reach her radiant home in the skies. Sister Angela-such was her name in religion-smiled sweetly as they came, one by one, to clasp her dying hand, and blest them with pious tenderness.

"Oh, how unworthy I am! she cried-'I who was so selfish and so vain, that I would surely have been lost in the miserable world I loved so well, had not an angel saved me.'

"The nuns gazed at her with wondering faces. 'Dear Sisters,' she continued, 'that angel once lived with me upon this earth. We played as children together. We were one in heart and soul while she lived. She was a mortal then: she is an angel now. Farewell! I go to join my angel.'

"As her spirit fled, a beautiful child with a golden aureola around her head, and shining wings upon her shoulders, appeared by her side, and softly whispered: 'Come away, dearest sister! Come away to the beautiful land!'

"And her spirit rushed out to meet the Angel, and together they soared up to the throne of God."

When Charles had read the tale, he looked curiously at the simple autograph on the last page—“Mary Quain."

"Surely," he thought, as he refolded the manuscript, and tied the blue riband around it again, "this is the outpouring of a virgin heart! May not a poem, or a picture, or a tale, contain within itself the essence of the soul from whose depths it was evolved? And do I not find in this simple story high conceptions, warm sympathies, and delicate fancies that must have had their source in the fountain of purity itself?"

That night, when the chain of consciousness that bound his spirit down to the small details of life was snapped asunder, Charles found himself in many terrible perils by sea and land— now toppling over some dizzy precipice-now dying of some loathsome disease-now lying wounded in furious battle-now plunged into the depths of the ocean-now starving on some lonely island; but always rescued from death by one brave, self-devoted woman, who dragged him back from the fatal gulf, healed his wretched distemper, drew him forth uninjured from the bottom of the sea, and brought him food in his famished solitude. How strange it was that this ministering angel should be-Mary Quain!

(To be continued.)

A COURT WIT OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

IN the historic fane where the bones of the sainted confessorking (and of some of his successors who were neither saints nor confessors) are reverently enshrined-where storied urns, sculptured trophies, and heraldic devices perpetuate the memory of achievements that heightened the lustre of noble birth, and of others, nobler by their deeds than birth or blood could make them in this "God's acre," where, despite incongruous surroundings, the Catholic genius of the spot still seems to "breathe a benison o'er the sleeping dust," and the solemn stillness is only broken at intervals by the sounds that float through Gothic windows and open doors-sounds of the busy life of the busiest city in the world, for the full tide of metropolitan traffic sweeps past the Abbey-the loiterer among the tombs, as he paces the cloister side of the nave, may notice among the mortuary slabs a mural tablet, informing him that here lies Charles de Saint Denis, Seigneur de Saint Evremond, who, when in the flesh, boasted of noble Norman blood; in early life joined the armies of France under Condé, Turenne, and other illustrious captains, and, giving proof of his loyalty and valour, rose to the grade of maréchalde-camp; cultivated philosophy and literature, polishing, adorning, and enriching the French language; and, having gained the praise and applause of everybody, died on the 9th of September, 1703, at the patriarchal age of ninety. In the estimation of his mourning friends, who erected this tablet, he was the most distinguished of contemporary writers; but their immediate posterity have long since reversed this too partial verdict, and he whom they styled "vir clarissimus inter præstantiores ævi sui scriptores," is now rarely quoted.

Of an old Norman stock, tracing its descent from Sanctus Evermundus, Abbot of Fontenay-sur-Orne, in the Bessin, who lived in the seventh or eighth century, and whose relics are preserved at Creil, near Paris, he belonged to the old French. noblesse. His long span of life takes in one of the most eventful periods in the history of Europe. Born on the 1st of April, 1613, at Saint-Denis-le-Guast, near Coutances, and sent to Paris in 1622 to commence his education, he entered early in life that great centre of intellectual and political activity-that great arena upon which the eyes of Europe have been so often riveted with absorbing interest. After four years at the Jesuits' College of Clermont, under the Père Cannaye, and one year at the University of Caen, he returned to Paris in 1627, and, having completed his course of philosophy at the College of Harcourt,

was deep in the study of law when the taking of Rochelle broke the political power of the Calvinist party, and crowned with success one of Richelieu's life-labours. It was a warlike age, and the young Norman' noble quickly caught the spirit of the time. With the characteristic ardour of a Frenchman, he threw himself into the ranks that then constituted the most victorious army in Europe; was present at the sieges of Landrecies and Arras, and the taking of Dunkirk, and took part in the battles of Fribourg and Nortlingen, where he was wounded, and his troop almost entirely cut to pieces. Shortly after came the Fronde, that dance of death, in which Frenchmen, after fighting the foreigner, turned their swords against each other-an episode in history destined to repeat itself more than two centuries later. But St. Evremond, although something of a scoffer, was no frondeur. He refused the command of the artillery, offered him by the Duc de Longueville, who, in the outbreak of the civil war, had returned to his government of Normandy, whither St. Evremond repaired in 1649. The event showed his sagacity. The following year the princes were arrested and imprisoned at Vincennes, and, for his adherence to the court party, St. Evremond was rewarded with the commission of maréchal-de-camp, and a pension of 3,000 livres. But St. Evremond soon after had the misfortune to offend Mazarin by his caustic wit, which procured him the entrée of the Bastille, a distinction he would no doubt have gladly declined. After two or three months' detention in that gloomy prison-fortress, he crossed over to Flanders, where he served until an armistice between France and Spain was signed; and then returned to Paris, to mingle in the frivolities of the gayest and most brilliant court in Europe. Having again fallen under the displeasure of the first minister, speedy flight barely saved him from pining out the remainder of his days in the dreaded Bastille. He sought and found a safe asylum in London, whither he had previously accompanied the embassy sent by the French king to congratulate Charles II. on his restoration. His reputation as a wit and cavalier, and one of the beaux esprits of the French court, had preceded him, and readily procured him access to what was euphemistically termed "good society." English society was then beginning to throw off the rigid restraints imposed by sad-visaged Puritans during the Commonwealth, and to adopt the ease and freedom of living introduced by the merry monarch and his dissolute court. Among the court wits of the Restoration period with whom he renewed acquaintance were, the variously-gifted, but ill-fated Duke of Buckingham

"A man so various that he seem'd to be
Not one, but all mankind's epitome;"

Lord D'Aubigny, son of the Earl of March, a Canon of Notre

Dame, who was subsequently raised to the cardinalate, but died. a few hours after the Papal courier arrived with the biretta; that staunch loyalist and chevalier, sans peur et sans reproche, the Duke of Ormond; Lord Arlington, one of the famous (or infamous) Cabal ministry; and the Earl of St. Albans, Lord Chancellor to Queen Henrietta. He seems also to have mixed much in the society of the professional litterateurs and savants of that epoch; the poets Cowley and Waller, and the speculative writers, Sir Kenelm Digby and Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher of Malmesbury. At this time Hobbes was writing his "History of the Causes of the Civil Wars in England," and Waller, like a modern Tityrus, making the woods of Penshurst resound with the praises of Sacharissa, and celebrating the "happy restoration of King Charles" in that melodious verse which so pleased Clarendon's critical ear, and in which he showed his versatility as a courtier no less than as a poet. The rollicking Rochester, following the bad example of his sovereign-that "merry monarch, scandalous and poor"-was "blazing out his youth and his wealth in lavish voluptuousness;" and that sweet songster, Sedley-who

and helped to make King James's daughter a queen, as the king had made his daughter a countess was ravishing all ears with his enchanting lyrics. Milton was composing his great epic, to be given to the world five years later by Simmons, the bookseller; while Dryden was aiding Sir William Davenant in raising the character of the British stage-quantum mutatus ab illo !— before he set about improving the poetical diction of his native language in those trenchant satires that for verve and vigour have never been surpassed. Cowley was attracting readers by his pointed wit and Pindaric art; Wycherley's popular plays were superseding those of Beaumont and Fletcher; Bunyan, in a cell in Bedford jail, was evolving, from the depths of his inner consciousness, that strange allegory that was to preserve from oblivion the still stranger story of its author's life; Butler was carefully revising his inimitable burlesque until, finished to the pruned nail, it was all that grotesque fancy, keen wit, and quaint diction could make it; Andrew Marvel, the patriotic member for Hull, was acquiring more distinction by his sturdy refusal of a place at court and the gift of a thousand pounds, offered him by Charles II., than by his poetry; Locke's leisure from public duties was devoted to the slow moulding and maturing of his work on the human understanding; while the diarists, Evelyn and Pepys, shrewdly observant of the men and manners around them, were jotting down their quaint gossiping chronicles in which are preserved "the very age and body of the time," its

form and pressure. St. Evremond, amid these congenial surroundings, whiled away his days of exile in cultivating a reputation as a fashionable litterateur-a court wit, who occasionally condescended to dabble in literature at a time when wit-writing was much in vogue, throwing off, currente calamo, essays "for private circulation only," until compelled to exchange for a time this agreeable lettered ease for a sojourn in a country not quite so well adapted to his French tastes-the dull, watery waste of the land of Cuyp. The atmosphere of London, at all times more or less murky, had become surcharged with those noxious vapours that heralded the great plague, the horrors of which are so graphically described in Defoe's thrilling narrative. St. Evremond hastened to the Hague, where he remained while the pestilence decimated London, turning the city into a vast charnel-house, returning four years after the great fire had swept away four hundred streets and thirteen thousand houses.

St. Evremond was much struck with the simplicity of manners and comparative purity of morals in Holland, where, according to his showing, there was much democratic freedom but little democratic licence. They were not all like the heavy boors who glance at us with Bacchanalian leer from the canvas of Brauwer and Teniers, smoking huge clay pipes, and quaffing deep draughts of sluggish lager-beer, but sturdy, home-bred burghers, who,

"When the whiskered Spaniard all the land with terror smote,"

held their ground for thirty-seven years against the ablest general of his age. Old courtier as he was, and at a time when courts were not the purest places in the world, and "the fierce light that beats upon a throne," whenever its rays penetrated beyond the outer precincts, must have revealed many ugly blots on royal escutcheons, he still notes as a healthy feature in Dutch society, "a certain reservedness, and a tradition of chastity handed down from mother to daughter like an article of faith"-a social virtue conspicuous by its absence in the higher grades of society both in England and France at that period.

For change of scene he moves into Flanders, stopping at Breda, where the peace between England and Holland was being negotiated; and, having visited Brussels, Liége, and Spa, returns to the Hague, content to live "in a nation where pleasures are scarce," and "finding a languishing amusement in the contemplation of the grave Dutch virtues," until the English king, having settled a pension upon him, he returned to London in 1670, to pay court to Hortensia Mancini at her villa in Chelsea, the rendezvous of all the wits and witlings of both sexes. Chelsea was then a suburban village, remarkable for the salubrity of its atmosphere; for, as yet, town had not extended its fashionable frontiers so far westward; and some miles of fresh