of an unjust excommunication should not prevent us from doing our duty."

The partisans of the Jesuits were themselves alarmed at these censures, but they dared not speak. The wise and disinterested exclaimed against the scandal, and the rest of the nation against the absurdity.

Nevertheless, Le Tellier triumphed, until the death of Louis XIV.: he was held in abhorrence, but he governed. This wretch tried every means to procure the suspension of cardinal De Noailles; but after the death of his penitent, the incendiary was banished. The duke of Orleans, during his regency, extinguished these quarrels by making a jest of them. They have since thrown out a few sparks; but they are at last forgotten, probably for ever. Their duration, for more than half a century, was quite long enough. Yet, happy indeed would mankind be, if they were divided only by foolish questions unproductive of bloodshed!

CÆSAR.

It is not as the husband of so many women and the wife of so many men, as the conqueror of Pompey and the Scipios, -as the satirist who turned Cato into ridicule, as the robber of the public treasury, who employed the money of the Romans to reduce the Romans to subjection,--as he who, clement in his triumphs, pardoned the vanquished, as the man of learning, who reformed the calendar,-as the tyrant and the father of his country, assassinated by his friends and his bastard son, that I shall here speak of Cæsar. I shall consider this extraordinary man only in my quality of descendant from the poor barbarians whom he subjugated.

-

You will not pass through a town in France, in Spain, on the banks of the Rhine, or on the English coast opposite to Calais, in which you will not find good people who boast of having had Cæsar there. Some of the townspeople of Dover are persuaded that Cæsar built their castle; and there are citizens of Paris who believe that the great châtelet is one of his fine works. Many

a country squire in France shows you an old turret which serves him for a dove-cote, and tells you that Cæsar provided a lodging for his pigeons. Each province disputes with its neighbour the honour of having been the first to which Cæsar applied the lash: it was not by that road but by this, that he came to cut our throats, embrace our wives and daughters, impose laws upon us by interpreters, and take from us what little money we had.

The Indians are wiser. We have already seen that they have a confused knowledge that a great robber, named Alexander, came among them with other robbers; but they scarcely ever speak of him.

66

An Italian antiquary, passing a few years ago through Vannes in Brittany, was quite astonished to hear the learned men of Vannes boast of Cæsar's stay in their town. "No doubt," said he, you have monuments of that great man?" "Yes," answered the most notable among them, we will show you the place where that hero had the whole senate of our province hanged, to the number of six hundred !

"Some ignorant fellows, who had found a hundred beams under ground, advanced in the journals, in 1755, that they were the remains of a bridge built by Cæsar; but I proved to them, in my dissertation of 1756, that they were the gallows on which that hero had our parliament tied up. What other town in Gaul can say as much? We have the testimony of the great Cæsar himself. He says, in his Commentaries, that we are fickle, and prefer liberty to slavery.'* He charges us with having been so insolent as to take hostages of the Romans, to whom we had given hostages, and to be unwilling to return them unless our own were given up. He taught us good behaviour."

"He did well," replied the virtuoso, "his right was incontestable. It was, however, disputed; for you know that when he had vanquished the emigrant Swiss, to the number of three hundred and sixty-eight thousand, and there were not more than a hundred and ten

* De Bello Gallico, lib. iii.

thousand left, he had a conference in Alsace with a German king named Ariovistus, and Ariovistus said to him- I come to plunder Gaul, and I will not suffer any one to plunder it but myself;'-after which these good Germans, who were come to lay waste the country, put into the hands of their witches two Roman knights, ambassadors from Cæsar; and these witches were on the point of burning them and offering them to their gods, when Cæsar came and delivered them by a victory. We must confess that the right on both sides was equal, and that Tacitus had good reason for bestowing so many praises on the manners of the ancient Germans."

This conversation gave rise to a very warm dispute between the learned men of Vannes and the antiquary. Several of the Bretons could not conceive what was the virtue of the Romans, in deceiving one after another all the nations of Gaul, in making them by turns the instruments of their own ruin, in butchering onefourth of the people, and reducing the other threefourths to slavery.

"Oh! nothing can be finer," returned the antiquary. "I have in my pocket a medal representing Cæsar's triumph at the Capitol; it is in the best preservation." He showed the medal. A Breton, a little rude, took it and threw it into the river, exclaiming― "Oh! that I could so serve all who use their power and their skill to oppress their fellow-men! Rome deceived us, disunited us, butchered us, chained us; and at this day, Rome still disposes of many of our benefices;—and is it possible that we have so long and so many ways been a country of slaves?"

To the conversation between the Italian antiquary and the Breton, I shall only add, that Perrot d'Ablancourt, the translator of Cæsar's Commentaries, in his dedication to the great Condé, makes use of these words-" Does it not seem to you, sir, as if you were reading the life of some Christian philosopher?" Cæsar a Christian philosopher! I wonder he has not been made a saint. Writers of dedications are remarkable for saying fine things, and much to the purpose."

* Keen, searching, and unanswerable satire !-T.

CALENDS.

THE feast of the Circumcision, which the church celebrates on the first of January, has taken the place of another called the Feast of the Calends, of Asses, of Fools, or of Innocents, according to the different places where and the different days on which it was held. It was most commonly at Christmas, the Circumcision, or the Epiphany.

In the cathedral of Rouen there was, on Christmasday, a procession, in which ecclesiastics, chosen for the purpose, represented the prophets of the Old Testament who foretold the birth of the Messiah, and (which may have given the feast its name) Balaam appeared, mounted on a she-ass; but, as Lactantius's poem, and the Book of Promises, under the name of St. Prosper, say that Jesus in the manger was recognised by the ox and the ass, according to the passage of Isaiah "The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib" (a circumstance, however, which neither the gospel nor the ancient fathers have remarked) it is more likely that, from this opinion, the Feast of the Ass took its name.

Indeed, the Jesuit Theophilus Raynaud testifies that, on St. Stephen's day, there was sung a hymn of the Ass, which was also called the Prose of Fools; and that on St. John's day another was sung, called the Prose of the Ox. In the library of the chapter of Sens, there is preserved a manuscript on vellum, with miniature figures representing the ceremonies of the Feast of Fools. The text contains a description of it, including this Prose of the Ass; it was sung by two choirs, who imitated at intervals, and as the burden of the song, the braying of that animal.*

There was elected in the cathedral churches a bishop or archbishop of the Fools, which election was confirmed by all sorts of buffooneries, played off by

For a full description of this egregious ceremony, see Hone's "Religious Mysteries," p. 162.

way of consecration. This bishop officiated pontifically, and gave his blessing to the people, before whom he appeared bearing the mitre, the crosier, and even the archiepiscopal cross. In those churches which held immediately from the Holy See, a pope of the Fools was elected, who officiated in all the decorations of papacy. All the clergy assisted at the mass, some dressed in women's apparel, others as buffoons, or masked in a grotesque and ridiculous manner. Not content with singing licentious songs in the choir, they sat and played at dice on the altar, at the side of the officiator. When mass was over, they ran, leaped and danced about the church, uttering obscene words, singing immodest songs, and putting themselves in a thousand indecent postures, sometimes exposing themselves almost naked. They then had themselves drawn about the streets, in tumbrels full of filth, that they might throw it at the mob which gathered round them. The looser part of the seculars would mix among the clergy, that they might play some fool's part in an ecclesiastical habit.

This feast was held in the same manner in the convents of monks and nuns, as Naudé testifies in his complaint to Gassendi, in 1645, in which he relates that, at Antibes, in the Franciscan monastery, neither the officiating monks nor the guardian went to the choir on the day of the Innocents. The lay-brethren occupied their places on that day, and, clothed in sacerdotal decorations, torn and turned inside out, made a sort of office. They held books turned upside down, which they seemed to be reading through spectacles, the glasses of which were made of orange-peel; and muttered confused words, or uttered strange cries, accompanied by extravagant contortions.*

The second register of the church of Autun, by the secretary Rotarii, which ends with 1416, says, without specifying the day, that at the feast of Fools, an ass was led along with a clergyman's cape on his back, the attendants singing-He haw! Mr. Ass, He haw!

The readers of the Scottish Novels will find some use made of this mummery in "The Abbot."-T.