The poor whose sufferings now weighed upon her heart were of those on whom poverty falls hardest, from the softness and ease in which they have been nurtured. "When she saw those old soldiers and wandering priests, those magistrates without bread, those widows and young mothers scarcely able to find clothes for their children, so many respectable families in want of the mere necessaries of life, the tears filled her eyes, and she felt almost ashamed of the security and abundance which she enjoyed with her aunt."

By dint of thinking and praying she came at last to the conviction that an appeal to public charity was the only possible means of affording effectual succour to all this misery. She at first thought of making a quête in Holstein; but her views gradually extended much farther. By inquiries as to the actual state of the emigrants, she discovered that there were at least forty thousand to support, and she set to work to beg by letter through every part of Europe. One of her most active assistants in this work of charity was the Count de Stolberg, then president of the Lutheran Consistory of the province. His wife, a Protestant like himself, was gentle, charitable, and pious. The intimacy thus established with Madame de Montagu led subsequently to the conversion of both. The work thus begun soon became universal; money flowed in to Madame de Montagu on all sides, but unhappily appeals for aid in still greater abundance; she was compelled to husband her resources. "My niece," Madame de Tessé would say laughingly, "gives everybody twelve sous less than they want to make them happy." But the twelve sous which she spared were for the daily bread of some other petitioner.

She was continually rummaging in her boxes and cupboards for something to sell or to give. She ended by making away with the black dress which she had worn in mourning for her mother, and which she treasured piously as a kind of relic; another time she sold her office-book. She gave everything,her labour, her time, her sleep. The common distress touched her own family as well as others, but she scrupled to give them anything but the price of her own labour. One day Madame de Tessé, seeing her labouring hard to finish some embroidery, guessed that some one was waiting for the price of it, and gave her a gold box of the weight of six louis, bidding her give it to the emigrant whom she most desired to help. Madame de Montagu sent it at once to her father-in-law, M. de Beaune, for whom she had been labouring. It was in the month of January, 1798, and the old chief of the coalition of Auvergne had not wood to light his fire.

"You are out of place here, my dear niece," said Madame de

Tessé to her one day. "To do all you want to do, you ought to be either a saur grise or the Empress of Russia."

Madame de Montagu ended a long life full of good works in 1839, on the 21st of January, the feast of S. Francis of Sales, to whom she had ever borne a special devotion, and to whose character of mingled sweetness and strength her own bore a marked resemblance. Her sweetness, like his, was, to use his own words, won at the sword's point, though the victory had been early won. The most lively remembrance of Madame de Montagu's early youth was that of her own conversion, which took place at twelve years old. Till that time she had been indocile, impetuous, and changeable, governed by outward impressions and altogether unmanageable; she would pass in one moment from violent anger to overflowing penitence, to fall back again the next moment into the very faults over which she had been weeping. With these natural dispositions she became, even before her first communion, gentle, patient, studious, and submitted not only to the common obligations of her state, but to severer rules which she traced out for herself. Her piety throughout life had a singularly attractive power even over those who had no sympathy with piety in general. Her aunt's philosophical friend, M. de Mun, used to say that Madame de Montagu was the only dévote who ever gave him a desire to save his soul. With a heart singularly alive to the tenderest affections of kindred, she was subjected to the trial of surviving many whom she loved. In early life her two first children had been snatched from her in infancy.

At the death of the first her sorrow was so uncontrollable that her father-in-law took alarm, and stole away the picture of her baby from her. The next day he found her drawing it from memory; she was sitting, her eyes red with weeping, before the empty cradle, with the nurse by her side, whom she was painting also. M. de Beaune grew impatient with this indulgence of her grief, and, not to displease him, she ceased from that moment to speak of her child, and even went into society with him, thinking in her unselfish care for others that he needed the distraction; but the efforts which she made injured her health. The death of her second child was marked by a still more touching incident. After having watched the agony of her little girl the whole night through, as she was praying and weeping by her lifeless body, she was told that her sister, Madame de Grammont, who was then at the hotel de Noailles, had just given birth to her first child. This news, which at any other time would have been most joyful, at that moment could not have failed to increase her grief; but, to her husband's astonishment, she rose, dressed, asked if her eyes showed that she had been

crying, and told him that she was going to her sister. He tried in vain to dissuade her; she was afraid that the young and happy mother would be uneasy at her absence, and that some one would tell her the cause. She went therefore to the hotel de Noailles, saw the new-born baby in his cradle, embraced her sister with a calm and smiling countenance. She thought to return as she went, but her strength failed her; before she could reach her carriage, she fell fainting in an adjoining room. The aged Duke de Noailles passed his last years under the care of his beloved daughter. In his last illness she ventured to speak to him more urgently upon religion than she had ever dared to do in her life before. He listened with visible emotion -received the last sacraments from the curé of Fontenay, and died peacefully in her arms. Attala de Montagu, who had been born during the exile of his family in Holstein, met with an accident when out hunting, the effects of which proved fatal. He died at the age of twenty-eight, giving most edifying marks of faith, courage, and resignation. M. de Montagu died the death of the just in January, 1834. His loss left a great void in the hearts of his wife and children; but they had no anxiety for his eternal happiness; he had not waited till the last hour to reconcile himself with God. M. de Lafayette closed a very different career a few months afterwards. Madame de Montagu survived her husband about five years, and then went peacefully to rest. Her children crowded around her at the first news of her illness; her face lighted up with joy when she heard their footsteps; she would fain not have grieved them even by her death, which she saw approaching, and yet she was joyful at the thought of rejoining those who had gone before her to heaven. She neither feared nor desired death, but asked her children to repeat with her "Thy will be done." This had been her watchword throughout life; it was her passport in death. Mass was celebrated in her room; she followed the prayers in a kind of rapture, and her thanksgiving was interrupted only by the agony of death. A few hours afterwards she fell asleep in the Lord, in the seventy-third year of her age.

We strongly recommend any of our readers who may be still unacquainted with it, to possess themselves of this charming memoir of Madame de Montagu, which, in addition to its other claims on our attention, se vend au profit des pauvres,―for the benefit of the poor whom she so dearly loved, and to whom, in the quaint phrase of her peasants at Fontenay, she was pire qu'une mère. Her labours in the Euvre des Emigrés, and the sweet, loving, and hopeful spirit in which she worked, strongly remind us of another confessor of those days, the saintly Abbé

Carron. His memory is still blessed amongst us, and the works which he began here in his exile still abide. The chapel and schools of Somers' Town, and the convent of the "Faithful Companions of Jesus," bear witness to his labours of love. But of how many holy priests, cast by the reign of terror upon our shores, no record now remains. They came and went, they lived and laboured here in patience, poverty, and prayer. They received the alms and the hospitality of England; they lifted up holy hands for her before God, and more, far more, in their poor attics and lowly dwellings they offered up the Immaculate Lamb for the land once reeking with the blood of His saints. This, and the testimony of their pure and innocent lives, is all we know of them; but who shall say how large a debt we owe them for the revival of Catholicity in England, or how many, even individual conversions, may have indirectly followed from the melting away of the mists of prejudice before the gentle light of their example, and before the might of His Eucharistic presence, whom they brought once more amongst us-" who stood in the midst of us, and we knew Him not!

Even apart from visible indications of extraordinary sanctity, the feeling inspired by the exiles in general was one of respectful sympathy. We have often heard that feeling expressed by the late Sir George Lee, the owner of Hartwell House, where Louis XVIII. and his little court passed the greater portion of their exile in England.

The old Elizabethan manor-house was crowded with inmates bearing the noblest names in France. Not an alcove or a summer-house sheltered beneath the stately cedars and chestnuts of the park but was turned into a dwelling-place, and yet, at the end of five years spent in a lonely village, in enforced idleness, by over a hundred persons, many of whom had been reared in luxury and self-indulgence, their benevolent and noble-hearted host could say, with tears in his eyes, that they had left neither a scandal nor a debt behind them. What they did leave behind them and what still lingers among the cottagers to this day, is the memory of the charity of Louis XVI.'s daughter to the poor.

ART. V.-DR. LEE ON ANGLICAN ORDERS.

The Validity of the Holy Orders of the Church of England. By the Rev. F. G. LEE, D.C.L.

ANY a fortress has been preserved to its defenders by a show of merely apparent strength; and the besiegers have often struck their tents from before walls which needed hardly more than a trumpet-blast to rend them

From turret to foundation-stone,

and lay their pride in ruins. We all know the old stories of numberless camp-followers standing in arms before the messengers of the foe-the veriest shadow of strength; of ambassadors led through granaries where the wheat was thinly strewn over heaps of useless sand; of banquets where plenty seemed to reign while the givers fought against the pangs of hunger; every device by which weakness is made to appear as strength, and the hour of triumph or defeat delayed is familiar to us all. But in them all we find that the besieged had one point in their favour, which was often the element of their success, and that was the ignorance of their enemies as to their real condition. Their dire distress was not known; the weak points in their defences were not seen; the walls of their granaries spoke not of the hollow mockery of plenty which they showed. And we could not but feel, while reading Dr. Lee's book, that the fortress of Anglican Orders is not only not impregnable, but is not even safe. He has thrown down the gauntlet without, to all seeming, a thought of fear or mistrust; he has heaped page upon page of testimonies gathered from the four winds of heaven; and yet, despite it all, we cannot help the conviction coming over us that it is only show; the last effort of one who feels that his position is no longer tenable, if its real state should be known. He lacks the element which could bring success, want of knowledge on the part of those arrayed against him. We know all the weak points in his defences, we are prepared to see grains of reasoning strewn over barren sand; and knowing all this we admire his boldness, but we cannot congratulate him on his success.

The author has striven hard to make his catena of evidence in the case perfect ;-link after link is laboured at with a perseverance worthy of a cause less desperate; and certainly from the preface to the Ordinal of Edward VI. down to Mr. De Lisle's evidence