The bicentenary of Mabillon, the famous Benedictine historian, was celebrated
at the Church of Germain-des-Pres, where he lived and worked for the last forty years of his life. Though the ceremony was religious, presided over by the Coadjutor of the Archbishop of Paris, and largely attended by Benedictine monks, some of the most distinguished members of the Institute were present. This was as it should be, for Mabillon was a Maitre-es-Arts of the University of Paris before he entered the Benedictine Order, and for two centrtries has been the common glory of the lay University as well as the Church of France. The Paris correspondent of the Times notes the irony underlying the celebration by the Church of one of the founders of the critical method in history at a time when critical research is proscribed and persecuted by anti-Modernists. Mabillon, it will be remem- bered, was the author of the famous treatise "De re diplo- matick" which is still the classical tett-book of the Poole des Chartes.
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