primerie of the Abbé Migne to the south of the Luxembourg gardens and the Observatory, and a few hundred yards beyond the Barrière d'Enfer. This is a vast establishment directed entirely by the Abbé himself. It contains all the processes necessary for printing, as type-founding, stereotype, satinage, brochure, et réliure, with the exception of papermaking. It is indeed a very wonderful institution, especially considered as created and governed by one single clergyman, whose previous studies could not

the University. One fact will suffice: several students committed suicide in the Parisian colleges! The most recent of these suicides * has thrown great light on these awful mysteries; and notwithstanding the attempts taken to conceal it from the public, the whole of Paris resounded with the fact for several days. A Government student of fifteen years of age, quitted his college without leave; on his return he was condemned to solitary confinement for three hours. On entering the place of confinement he attempted to hang himself, but without success; after several attempts he tied his cravat to a chair, and strangled himself by straining against it. The same day his comrades produced his will, written by his own hand. The following is a copy of it. 'I bequeath my body to pedants, and my soul to the Manes of Voltaire and J. J. Rousseau, who have taught me to despise the vain superstitions of this world. I have always acknowledged a Supreme Being, and my religion has ever been the religion of nature.' This will was immediately circulated among the colleges of Paris. Copies were eagerly made of it and circulated; and the students joined in admiration of this appalling crime, as if it were an act of the most heroic devotion. "Un pareil récit,' adds M. H. de Riancey, en dit plus que toutes les réflexions. Il fallait arriver aux dix-neuvième siècle et l'Université Impériale pour voir ce forfait inoui jusque-là, le suicide de l'enfance.""

* Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire de l'Instruction publique, iii. p. 109. 1818.

have been very favourable to such an enterprise. It was stated to me that there were 200 workmen employed on the premises.

The Abbé had been pre-informed of our visit, and received us very obligingly, giving us an account of his designs, and carrying us through every part of his establishment. He is evidently born with a genius for command. His principal aim is to give to the world a complete collection, in a very portable form, and at a very economical rate, of all the Greek and Latin fathers of the Church 2. He said that he had long had this plan in his mind, and had never rested till he had begun to put it into execution. "And with what means did you begin?" nothing," he replied, "but la bonne volonté; a man, sir, could build a church like your St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey if he had but a good will to do it." "But you had friends to support you?" "No, I had many opponents and enemies." "But the Bishops of your Church?” They, sir, at first, were all against me; but seeing that I was in earnest, they have now come round and support me. I have just received a letter from one of them, who writes to me thus:

"With

Now, my good friend, draw me out a prospectus of your plan for publishing the Fathers; in the plan, which you draw, speak you en Evéque for me; I will

2 Aussi qu'un cours très complet sur chaque branche de la science ecclésiastique. (MS. note by M. l'Abbé Migne.)

adopt it and sign it, and send it round to all my clergy as a recommendation of your enterprise; and mind, send me your edition of St. Chrysostom; not the Greek but the Latin, for at my age one does not study Greek.'-And, sir," added the Abbé Migne,— as a letter from another prelate was here very à propos put into his hands-" Here is a despatch from one of my former opponents, who is now become one of my principal supporters, and he sends me enclosed a preface, written in his own hand, to be prefixed to a great work by the late Cardinal Luzerne, of which he has very handsomely presented me with the MS., and which will soon appear from my press here-it is a treatise on the subject of the Catholic Hierarchy." Thus saying, the Abbé put the preface into my hands it was written on a large quarto sheet, of which it filled, I think, three sides; I was much interested by reading in this same preface, an acknowledgment from the episcopal author of it, in his own hand, of the validity of Anglican ordinations3, and

3 L'auteur de la préface n'avait certainement pas l'intention d'émettre une opinion quelconque sur la question controversée de la validité des ordres de l'Eglise Anglicane ; il disait seulement : "L'une des innovations les plus funestes du protestantisme fut de détruire la hiérarchie ecclésiastique en proclamant l'égalité des pouvoirs entre tous les ministres de l'évangile. L'Eglise Anglicane fut la seule des sectes protestantes qui conserva son épiscopat, et se défendit contre les erreurs presbyteriennes." L'observation de l'auteur ne peut s'appliquer qu'à la forme extérieure ; évidemment elle ne touche en rien à la validité ou non-validité des ordres anglicanes, ni à la succession apostolique de l'épiscopat anglais.

of the apostolicity of the Anglican episcopate: a truth which, it is well known, Romanist writers, especially in the English colonies, have lately begun zealously to controvert (the Abbé himself has recently reprinted, in the twenty-fifth volume of his course of theology, the work of Kenrick, the Roman Catholic coadjutor of Philadelphia against the validity of the Anglican orders), thus reviving the exploded tale, abandoned in shame by their ancestors, and unabashed by the honest confessions of Bossuet, Courayer, Colbert, and Lingard. The episcopal prefacer's words are, "Parmi les communions Protestantes, l'Eglise Anglicane fut la seule qui conserva son Episcopat." It ought to be mentioned, as a reason which I have heard assigned for the prelate's reluctance in the first instance to give his formal sanction to M. Migne's bold undertaking, that some other French ecclesiastics had formerly engaged in literary enterprises in which they had failed, and that he was apprehensive that the Abbé might add to the number of unsuccessful ecclesiastical speculators.

As yet the works of Tertullian, Cyprian, Arnobius, &c., and a part of St. Jerome and St. Augustine, are all that have appeared of the Latin collection. The price of each volume, containing about 1200 pages at least, of very large octavo closely printed, does not exceed seven or eight francs; the number of the copies of this collection will not be more than 2200. The Tertullian, Minutius Felix, and St. Cyprian, have

been superintended by two of the most learned men in France, both Benedictines, Dom Guéranger and Dom Pitra.

If the undertaking should prove successful, it will tend, perhaps, more than any design of the present day to familiarize the mind of the literary public with the great writings of Christian antiquity, and will supply a popular library of patristic theology for the use of parochial divines, as well as academic students and thus it cannot fail to render signal service to the cause of Christianity.

When M. Migne spoke of the aid which he hoped to afford thereby to the Church of Rome, I ventured to assure him that no one would welcome his publications with greater satisfaction than the Bishops and Clergy of England, who were, I believed, generally speaking, quite as conversant with the works of the Fathers as their brethren of France; and accordingly I took eleven copies of his patrologie (he gives eleven as ten), being convinced that I should find many candidates for them among my literary friends.

Since this visit I have been looking at his St. Cyprian, and in it, at the famous passage quoted by Romanists, as from the De Unitate Ecclesiæ, cap. iv. The passage is here boldly inserted in the text, where one reads, Qui Cathedram Petri, super quem fundata est Ecclesia, deserit, in Ecclesia se esse confidit? These few words have exercised a wonderful influence over the fortunes of the world. Believed to be genuine by