To this last detail we may add that in discussing

the famous Berlin wire to Pretoria after the failure of the Jameson Raid the admirable Saxon Monarch concluded his remarks with the declaration : " Je n'aurais pm envoys ce telegramme-

lk." In our diplomatist's lucid synopsis of Danubian topics we meet the Viennese Minister of Foreign Affairs, Count Golu- chowski, appropriately called, says Sir Horace, "a sanguine Sarmatian with the most perfect Parisian gloss." No one who has met the great contemporary Kossuth (or, let us hope, only the Desk) of to-day will criticise this portrait of that son of Anak, the tall Count Albert Apponyi

" To a strikingly handsome physique and bearing, this aristo- cratic leader—I had almost written tribune—of the people unites the rarest command of language and of languages. By common consent the most eloquent speaker in the Hungarian Parliament, he would be able to address with equal fluency and effect a

French, an English, or a German audience. [But] surely the most recent events in Hungary show only too clearly that the party to which Count Apponyi now lends the prestige of his name and the magic of his eloquence is—one would fail to believe unconsciously—impelling the Magyar State to the verge of a slope—the pente savonneuse of French parlance—down which it can only glide to destruction, carrying with it the great Central European Empire."

The merits of this book, if viewed not only as the story of a long diplomatic life, but as literature, are visible in every chapter. To judge from Sir Horace Rumbold's work,

despatch-writing is no obstacle to the formation of a vigorous, picturesque, well-phrased style, free from neologisms, pointed here and there by suggestive vitriolic touches, and last, not least, entirely free, in the passages relating to English palatial and society life, from the Byzantinism which so

often defaces our modern records of fashimable personality and incident. MANY books have been written about Port-Royal, and several biographies of Angelique, its most distinguished Abbess. But the subject is always fresh and interesting,. and though the present book is very thick and closely printed and almost too full of detail and dissertation to be a literary success, we have read it from beginning to end with real pleasure. It is, in fact, an unusual kind of book. It bears every sign of being written by an amateur, but this remark is not meant as a reproach. The author is hampered by no thought of pleasing the public or the critics, by no considera- tion of length, and not much of proportion. She—we are pretty sure of the pronoun—writes to please herself and a few chosen readers, who will be so much interested in her whole subject that they will find no fault with its present- ment.

In the annals of the religious life, or indeed in the history of Christianity, there are few more remarkable names to be found than that of Jacqueline Arnanld, known as La Mere Angelique. She stands with St. Francois de Sales and Madame de Chantal among those reformers who woke up Christendom in the early seventeenth century, after the religious wars had driven out all spirituality and made religion a matter of politics and worldly advantage, as much on one side as the other.

The circumstances in which Jacqueline Arnauld, as a child of eight years old, became coadjutrice of Port-Royal reflect little credit on the strong-willed, characteristic family of Arnauld. Her father, Antoine Arnauld, was the son of a sturdy old Huguenot soldier, and the grandson of an intendant des finances. Antoine himself was an advocate famous for his eloquence, and a strict Churchman, probably converted at the same time as his Royal patron, Henry IV. He married a daughter of M. Marion, lawyer and courtier; and " A. K. H." is anxious to be convinced that this old man, rather than his more respectable son-in-law, was responsible for the fraud by which two of Antoine's daughters were provided for in the Church. There were plenty of such scandals every day, no doubt, and the life then led in convents and abbeys was not likely to entitle these institutions to much respect. But there were limits, and it is really startling to read that these worthy members of the higher bourgeoisie, the noblesse de robe, represented the child Jacqueline as seventeen years old instead of eight, because it was well known that at her real age the Pope would never have sanctioned the appointment. By some arrangement of the same kind, M. Marion and IL Arnauld established Jacqueline's sister Jeanne, afterwards La Mere Agnes, five years old, as Abbess of St.-Cyr. Thus the two girls were provided for, though not in posts of the highest importance, such as were accepted by ladies of noble or partly Royal blood.

La Mere Angelique spent two years of her childhood in being trained for her future office at Maubuisson, one of the most scandalous abbeys in France, ruled by Madame d'Estrees, sister of the famous Gabrielle. From this bad atmosphere she was recalled by the death of the old Abbess of Port- Royal, and at eleven years old she became the actual ruler of a community whose life, though easy and frivolous, seems to. have been free from serious moral evil. As a child she was happy enough, enjoying her own importance and the spoiling of her nuns, but as she grew up the restless energy of her character began to develop. She was an independent girl, fond of the world, with none of the peaceful gentleness and resignation which some people, mistakenly, regard as the special characteristics of a nun. At seventeen it was a question whether Angelique would fly from her convent, break her vows, perhaps even escape to the Huguenot aunts, true to their father's religion, who lived at La Rochelle. But. then a certain young Capuchin, Pere Basile, came wandering- by and offered to preach in the convent chapel. It was a distraction for the Abbess and her nuns. They listened to the sermon. Pere Basile, not a man of any special worth, went on his way, but his words woke an echo in the young- Abbess's heart that was never again silent. As if by a miracle, she learned the meaning of the Christian religion and of the life to which she had vowed herself. It was a. great instance of that sudden grace of God on which: the • Angaique of Port-Royal : 18914644 By A. H. H. London: Skeflington. and Son. [10e. net.]

Angelique, still so young, became the stern reformer of her convent. Henceforth the world was her enemy. No compromise was possible. She had not the happy mysticism of St. Teresa; the religion of Port-Royal rivalled that of the Carmelites in austerity, but had never its inward light-heartedness. And to our thinking this was one of the chief causes why Port-Royal and Jansenism failed to gain a hold on the Church in France. The atmosphere was too strong and strained, too gloomy, too severe, to be endured by more than a few chosen souls. The Jesuits were wiser in their generation, when they made repentance easy for that world of thoughtless sinners. " A. K. H." writes of the Mere Angelique and all her doings with sympathy and deep admiration, but yet speaks of " the terrible creed of Port- Royal." Considering all this, and reading the whole tragic story, one does not wonder at its end.

It is a strange history, the development of Angelique's character, her thankless work in reforming Maubuisson, her establishment in Paris, where she gained such a great influence over women of the world like Madame de Sable, Madame de Longueville, and Princess Marie de Gonzague, afterwards Queen of Poland, with whom she carried on a correspondence even now fascinating to read, full of wisdom and nobility of soul. She was one of those " violent " who take the kingdom " by force," and this very character, eager and rash, led her into great pitfalls and sorrows. She trusted too implicitly in such Churchmen as Zamet, Bishop of Langres, and injured herself and her influence by allowing him to place her at the head of his new Order of the Holy Sacrament, which was to reform Paris by beautiful singing, white robes, and scarlet crosses. The direction of the celebrated St-Cyran was in one way a support to her and to Port-Royal ; in another way, perhaps, it led on to their ruin. He pushed them on to greater austerities, and made a deeper gulf between them and the world outside, neither to its advantage nor theirs. The story of the "relentless strength" and inexorableness shown by him in his dealings with Angelique's own sister, Marie-Claire, leaves on the mind an impression of painful overstrain. Perhaps, to appreciate a man of St.-Cyran's kind rightly, it needs a clearer realisation of the whole circum- stances of the time than is easily to be attained by modern minds.

The very words "Port-Royal" bring other striking figures to our minds : the Arnaulds, one and all, father, mother, brothers, sisters, so many of whom either followed Angelique and Agnes into "religion," or defended the Order and wrote for it in the world outside, or gained peace in cultivating fruit trees as hermits at Port-Royal des Champs. And as the early part of the history is shadowed by Richelieu, so does the sun of a wider, more modern world rise with Blaise Pascal and his sister Jacqueline, she indeed, in her beautiful life and early death, quite as remarkable a woman as the Abbess Angelique herself.

- Many of the Abbess's early troubles were caused by the interference of the monks of the Order of St. Bernard, who had little sympathy with her plans for reform. "A. K. H. " says : " It should be remembered that the founder of an Order followed by nuns as well as monks, invariably put the former under the spiritual charge of the latter." The word " invariably " is too strong. We would remind the author that at Fonte- wrault, for instance, the Abbess, by the founder's will, ruled monks and nuns alike.

The book ends with Angelique's saintly death, and does not go on to the terrible trials and persecutions that followed for her heroic community, the final ruin of which, in its vindictive cruelty, is a dark stain on the last years of Louis XIV. and Madame de Maintenon.

SELECT HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS.* WE agree with Dr. Reich that there is a practical need which this book is designed to meet. The need consists in the fact that students of history, if they are to be students in any serious sense of the word, must have recourse to the sources of history. Dr. Reich puts the point soundly, and without

• Select Documents illustrating Mediaeval and Modern History. By Emil Beicb, D.J. London : P. S. King and Son. [21s. net.I "In teaching History, as has long been recognised, even the younger, let alone the older hearers, ought to be made acquainted with some of the original documents in which the causes, motives, or results of great historical movements have been crystallised, at least partially. We say partially ; for it would be a grave error to consider any one historic document as having been penned with perfect sincerity. In but too many documents the more important causes and motives have found no explicit expression. Yet, with all the shortcomings of historic documents, there still remains in many of them something of that atmo- sphere' which was perhaps the real moving force of the events or institutions recorded in the documents. The teacher, by repeated study of the document itself, and by the auxiliary reading of reference books such as are here indicated for every one document, may, and as we venture to submit ought, to acquire that sense of historic `atmosphere' without which his teaching will remain dry and inefficient."