M. Renan caused a translation of this letter to appear in the Journal des Débats of the 15th of September,-no easy matter, as may be supposed, in that fury of rage against Germany; and, on the 16th of September appeared M. Renan's own reply. The Augsburg Gazette refused to insert this reply of M. Renan's; and perhaps no one circumstance was more significant than this of the temper of Germany at the time. There was not a word (it is needless to say) in M. Renan's letter which could give just offence; but, nevertheless, the organ of the victorious nation, having itself challenged a discussion, refused to insert the courteous reply of the vanquished party. It might have been thought that under these circumstances M. Strauss would withdraw with displeasure from his connection with a newspaper which took this view of what was fair and honourable. But it was not so. On the contrary, he wrote a reply to M. Renan's letter, and inserted it in the Augsburg Gazette on the 2nd of October, 1870, at a time when the Prussian blockade of Paris of course prevented M. Renan from receiving the newspaper. By this ingenious method of controversy, M. Strauss was able to appear to challenge a champion of the opposite side to an impartial discussion, then to permit the suppression of that champion's reply; then to write to him again in a still more violent tone (with misrepresentations on which I need not dwell), and to choose a moment for this rejoinder when his antagonist could not possibly receive or reply to it. All this he did as one philosopher communing with another philosopher, and with the consciousness that he belonged to an entirely virtuous nation, which was justly chastising a nation sunk in ignorance and corruption.

I have said that M. Strauss permitted the suppression in the Augsburg Gazette of M. Renan's letter. He chose, however, to give it to the world in another fashion. He translated it into German and published it, along with his own two letters, for the benefit of a German military infirmary.

The Nouvelle lettre à M. Strauss (September 1871) in which M. Renan gently recounts these transactions, and indicates some particulars in which the great German people may seem still to fall short of perfection, affords perhaps as good an instance as this century has to show of the sarcastic power of the French language in hands that can evoke its subtleties and manoeuvre its trenchant blade. The paragraph which I quote below appears as if its only anxiety were to make excuses for M. Strauss. But it would be hard to find any passage since Pope's 'Atticus' which it would be more disagreeable to have addressed to one.

Il est vrai que vous m'avez fait ensuite un honneur auquel je suis sensible comme je le dois. Vous avez traduit vous-même ma réponse, et l'avez réunie dans une brochure à vos deux lettres. Vous avez voulu que cette brochure se vendit au profit d'un établissement d'invalides allemands. Dieu me garde de vous faire une chicane au point de vue de la propriété littéraire ! L'œuvre à laquelle vous m'avez

fait contribuer est d'ailleurs une œuvre d'humanité, et si ma chétive prose a pu procurer quelques cigares à ceux qui ont pillé ma petite maison de Sèvres, je vous remercie de m'avoir fourni l'occasion de conformer ma conduite à quelques-uns des préceptes de Jésus que je crois les plus authentiques. Mais remarquez encore ces nuances légères. Certainement, si vous m'aviez permis de publier un écrit de vous, jamais, au grand jamais, je n'aurais eu l'idée d'en faire une édition au profit de notre Hôtel des Invalides. Le but vous entraîne; la passion vous empêche de voir ces mièvreries de gens blasés que nous appelons le goût et le tact.'

From the temper of mind which calls forth M. Renan's strongest expressions of repulsion, this temper of domineering dogmatism and blind conceit,-let us pass to the opposite extreme. Let us turn to the race from which M. Renan sprang, the race whose character is traceable in all that he has written. The nationality of the romantic, emotional, unpractical Celt, surviving in his western isles and promontories from an age of less hurrying effort, less sternly moulded men, has fallen into the background of the modern world. Yet every now and then we are reminded--by some persistent loyalty, as in la Vendée, to a dethroned ideal; by some desperate incompatibility, as in Ireland, with the mechanism of modern progress-that there exists by our side a nation whose origin, language, memories, differ so profoundly from our own. M. Renan is a Celt who has become conscious of his Celtic nature; a man in whom French savoir-vivre, German science, are perpetually contending with alien and ineradicable habits of mind,- comme cet animal fabuleux de Ctésias, qui se mangeait les pattes sans s'en douter.' This mixed nature, the result, as one may say, of a modern intelligence working on a temperament that belongs to a far-off past, and making of him'un romantique protestant contre le romantisme, un utopiste prêchant en politique le terre-à-terre, un idéaliste se donnant inutilement beaucoup de peine pour paraître bourgeois,' has rendered M. Renan's works unintelligible and displeasing to many readers. Twy-natured is no nature' is the substance of many a comment on the great historian's union of effusive sympathy and destructive criticism. But there is a sense in which a man may be double-minded without being hypocritical, and the warp and woof of his nature, shot with different colours, may produce for this very reason a more delicate and changing charm. In his essay on Celtic poetry M. Renan has abandoned himself to his first predilections. Nowhere is he more unreservedly himself than when he is depicting that gentle romance, that half humorous sentiment, that devout and pensive peace, which breathe alike in Breton, in Welsh, in Irish legend, and which, after so many a journeying into the imaginary or the invisible world, find their truest earthly ideal in the monasteries of Iona or Lindisfarne. Here it is that we discern his spiritual kin; among these saints and dreamers whose fancy is often too unrestrained, their emotion too femininely sensitive, for commerce with

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the world, these populations who to the faults inherent in weakness have too often added the faults that are begotten of oppression, but yet have never wholly sunk to commonness, nor desisted from an unworldly hope. There have been races which have had a firmer grasp of this life. There have been races which have risen on more steady and soaring wing when they would frame their conceptions of another. But there has been no race, perhaps, which has borne witness more unceasingly, by its weakness as by its strength, to that strange instinct in man's inner being which makes him feel himself as but a pilgrim here; which rejects as unsatisfying all of satisfaction that earth can bring, and demands an unknown consolation from an obscurely encompassing Power.

'O frères de la tribu obscure,' exclaims M. Renan, 'au foyer de laquelle je puisai la foi à l'invisible, humble clan de laboureurs et de marins, à qui je dois d'avoir conservé la vigueur de mon âme en un pays éteint, en un siècle sans espérance, vous errâtes sans doute sur ces mers enchantées où notre père Brandan cherchait la terre de promission; vous parcourûtes avec saint Patrice les cercles de ce monde que nos yeux ne savent plus voir. . . . Inutiles en ce monde, qui ne comprend que ce qui le dompte ou le sert, fuyons ensemble vers l'Éden splendide des joies de l'âme, celuilà même que nos saints virent dans leurs songes. Consolons-nous par nos chimères, par notre noblesse, par notre dédain. Qui sait si nos rêves, à nous, ne sont pas plus vrais que la réalité ? Dieu m'est témoin, vieux pères, que ma seule joie, c'est que parfois je songe que je suis votre conscience, et que par moi vous arrivez à la vie et à la voix.'

Enough, perhaps, has now been said to give a general conception of the sum of powers and tendencies which M. Renan brings to bear on the complex problems of man's life and destiny. We have seen that his mind is stored with wide-reaching knowledge, thoroughly penetrated with the scientific spirit. We have seen at the same time that he is by instinct conservative; that his sympathies are aristocratic rather than democratic; but aristocratic in the highest sense, as desiring to fortify or replace the aristocracy of birth by an aristocracy of unselfish wisdom, which may serve as a barrier against the ignoble deference too often paid to wealth alone. We have seen, again, that this philosophy which he preaches is in himself no merely nominal or idle thing; but has enabled him not only to bear himself with dignified firmness under the mild persecution of modern days, but also—a harder achievement—to recognise, though a Frenchman, the faults of France, and in the crisis of an embittered struggle to admit with generous largeness the essential worth and mission of the foe. Lastly, we have traced his sympathies to their deeper roots, and have discerned in his vein of emotion-ever between a smile and a sigh-the latest self-expression of a gentle old-world race, the dreamy prophesyings of the Merlin of a later day.

We shall thus, it may be hoped, be better qualified to estimate (in a succeeding paper) M. Renan's views on those great matters to which

his thoughts have mainly turned; man's position, namely, in the spiritual universe, as he has himself in different ages regarded it, or as to us it may now appear; and especially the story, full of ever new interest and wonder, which tells how one conception of man's Creator and his destiny has overcome the rest, and one life of perfect beauty has become the model of the civilised world.

FREDERIC W. H. MYERS.

PAWNBROKING ABROAD AND AT HOME.

THE accumulative power of money, is very great, and against it, when heaped up in large masses, society has always had to protect itself. Solon and Moses both forbade usury. The former allowed moderate rates of interest; the latter guarded against the evils of debt by including the debtor who had become his creditor's servant within the scope of the year of jubilee. The absolute ownership of the soil of the earth by individuals is a comparatively recent invention, so that in the olden days a man could rarely pledge more than his person or his property. The disorders of usury gave birth both in Greece and Italy to various remedies, of which the chief was the establishment of banks or money-changers' tables, at which loans could be had on the deposit of articles of value. The Tрaneiraι of Athens were regarded as holding an honourable office, and at Alexandria rich men were urged, and even constrained, to deal in money and to lend to the public. As at Athens, the banker was regarded with esteem, and his office was hereditary. The Roman law condemned a robber to restore double the value of the article he had stolen; the usurer fourfold.' Cicero speaks 2 of the long-established tables' of the money-dealers; and to these, centuries before, the Consul Lavinus is related by Livy to have urged the senators themselves to carry their plate and jewels in order to raise funds for the expenses of the Punic war. There were also in Rome the Mensa Trallianorum, kept by the natives of Tralles in Lydia, who especially affected this branch of business, and the Mensa Olearia, at which oil, one of the prime necessaries of life, was lent to the poor of the city.

In the early middle ages there seems to have been no effort made to check the ravages of the Jews and usurers. In the twelfth century the Lombards became known as money-dealers. Mention is made by Matthew Paris of a Papal Nuncio named Etienne, who was sent on a journey to collect money for the Pope from bishops, abbots, and priors under threat of excommunication if not paid on a certain day. The envoy had the happy idea of carrying with him a Lombard, or banker, who was prepared to buy or lend money on the security of the sacred vessels or other plate. The Lombards soon had their establishments

De re Rusticâ.

2 Pro Cacinâ.

VOL. IX.-No. 52.

3 T