We have dwelt so long on Pascal as a writer, that we have left ourselves scanty room for considering him as a man. It is, however, of the less consequence, since in the highest possible degree his writings are himself. Yet we are unwilling to conclude without an attempt to portray him a little more clearly, and we cannot introduce what remains to be said better than by extracting from Chateaubriand the entire paragraph from which we have already quoted a couple of lines: "There was a man who at twelve years old, with bars and rounds, created mathematics; who at sixteen composed the most learned treatise on conic sections since the ancients; who at nineteen reduced to mechanism a science which is entirely mental; who at twenty-three demonstrated the weight of the air, and exploded one of the greatest errors of the old physics; who at an age when other men are scarcely beginning to be born, having achieved his course round the circle of human sciences, perceived their nothingness and turned to religion; who, although from that mo ment until his death, which took place in his thirty-ninth year, he was always feeble and in pain, fixed the language which Bossuet and Racine spoke, and furnished a model of the most perfect wit as well as of the closest reasoning; lastly, who in the brief intervals of his pain solved by abstraction the highest problems of geometry, and threw on paper thoughts which breathe as much of God as of man: this astonishing (effrayant) genius was named Blaise Pascal." Now, such writing as this must be confessed to be too theatrical and forced to be of much critical value; still the passage may be accepted as a dashing and not inaccurate sketch of Pascal's life and achievements. The story of his working his own way, at twelve years old, as far as the 32nd Proposition of the 1st book of "Euclid," with a piece of charcoal on the floor of an unused garret, without even knowing the common terms of geometry, is so astonishing that had it not been told by his sister with all the simplicity of truth, we should have been tempted to class it with the legends in which the surprising quickly grows into the miraculous. But as the feat was at no long interval followed by the treatise on conic sections, which excited the mingled incredulity and astonishment of the veteran Descartes, and that by the construction of an arithmetical machine to assist his father's financial calculations, and that again by the invention of the barometer, we cannot doubt that Pascal was not merely one of those precocious children who are a nine days' wonder, but was endowed by Nature with one of the most extraordinary capacities for mathematical reasoning and physical research that ever fell to the lot of man. From this line of labour, however, he was early turned aside by the failure of his health, which suffered so greatly from excessive application to scientific study, as to expose him to an attack of dynamical paralysis;" and the result was to leave his constitution so disordered, and his nervous system so shattered, that to the end of his life he scarcely ever passed a day without pain. In his twenty-fourth year occurred what his biographers call his "first conversion;" when, owing to the influence of teachers of the Jansenist school, with whom he became acquainted, and who introduced him to the books of St. Cyran and Jansen, he received a strong bias towards 66 a religious life. Of the change at that time wrought in him too much, perhaps, has been made by those who have regarded the years afterwards spent by him in the gay world of Paris as a period of apostasy, which entailed a bitter expiation in the seclusion and austerities of his later period. We rather side with Dreydorff in putting a lower estimate on the contrast between the first fervour of his youthful religion and the mixed occupations of his life in the capital. It is no doubt true that, as we find from Pascal's own letters preserved among the Guerrier manuscripts, he took up religion with the warmth of his enthusiastic temperament, and sprang almost with a bound into a mystic devotion, which would have required solitude for its nutriment, and failed to hold its own amidst the distractions of social and busy life; but there is not the slightest ground for believing that he ever in any real sense apostatized, or became infected by the dissoluteness and profanity which were too characteristic of the age of the Fronde. To use Faugère's somewhat high-flown phrase, "His feet rested for a moment on the mire of that corrupt society, but his divine wings were never soiled by it." It was his "second conversion," when he was in his thirty-first year, which changed the whole current of his life by giving him over to asceticism and Port-Royal. To that momentous and final movement several causes seem to have contributed. The influence of his sister Jacqueline, then in the first glow of her profession; the increasing gloom of his own temperament, aggravated perhaps by disappointed love; a shuddering recoil from the levity and vice of the society around him, intensified by a conviction that in his struggle with the doubts and perplexities which surged up tumultuously within his restless soul, he needed a support that could only be found in retirement and mortification and converse with the austere solitaries of Port-Royal: these were causes sufficient to prompt his decision and drive him from the world, without our having recourse to the more questionable incidents of narrow escape from being dashed to pieces in a runaway carriage at the bridge of Neuilly, and the vision of an abyss opening beside his chair, the supposed record of which, and of the act of self-dedication ́to which it led, was ever afterwards secretly worn by him stitched inside his clothes, where it was found after his death. This curious and not too intelligible paper was the "amulet" which excited the sneers of Condorset and Voltaire, and furnished the theme of M. Lélut's volume. It appears to record the very day and hour of his final resolve to give himself wholly to God, and breathes an ecstatic fervour characteristic of the critical moment when the struggle of his soul issued in triumph and joy. Let us remember that this document in a double form, the paper original being folded within a parchment copy, was worn on Pascal's breast day by day till the breath left his worn-out frame, and that, even while penning the very fragments on which the charge of scepticism has been founded, it was this that he was pressing to his heart, and we shall feel that without taking ac count of it no estimate of Pascal's religion would be complete. It is headed by a small cross, and is as follows: "The year o grace 1654. Monday, 23rd November, day of St. Clement, pope and martyr, and others in the martyrology. Eve of St. Chrysogone, martyr, and others. From about half-past ten in the evening to half-past twelve. Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and savants. Assurance, Assurance. Feeling. Joy. Peace. God of Jesus Christ, my God and your God. Thy God shall be my God. Forgetfulness of the world and of all but God. He is found only by the ways taught in the Gospel. Greatness of the human soul. Righteous Father, the world has not known Thee, but I have known Thee. Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy. I have separated my-elf from Him. They have forsaken Me the fountain of living water. My God, wilt Thon forsake me? Let me not be separated from Him eternally. This is life eternal that they know Thee the only true God and J. C. whom Thou hast sent. Jesus Christ-Jesus Christ. I have separated myself from Him, I have fled from, renounced, crucified Him. Let me never he separated from Him. He is retained only by the ways taught in the Gospel. Renunciation total and sweet." In the spirit which evidently animates this extraordinary and incoherent document Pascal henceforth lived. Body and soul, he gave himself up to religion, and, whether consorting with his Jansenist friends at Port-Royal, or living as a recluse in his own house in Paris, whether contending against the Jesuits in the "Provincial Letters or corresponding in mystic strains with Madlle. de Roannez, or meditating his apologetic work, the entire remainder of his life was spent in the renunciation of the world, the practices of an ascetic devotion, and the consecration of all he was and all he had to the service of God. Of Pascal's mental organization the most characteristic features, as revealed in his writings, may be described as an intense, audacious individuality, and a passionate love of reality and truth. No man's thoughts and sentiments were ever more emphatically his own. His voice was no echo of current opinions, but issued clear and sharp from the depths of his own being. What he had received from others he never gave back without having incorporated it with himself, shaped it in his own mould and stamped it with his own mark. Conventionalities and masks of all kinds were hateful to him; to tear them away with a vehement contempt and penetrate to the very core and naked reality of things, was like a fierce joy to his soul. Nothing was too daring for him to utter, if only it appeared to him to be true; of truth, what ever it was, he felt an imperious need, and to speak it forth without compromise and without reserve was his overmastering impulse. It was this frank conscientiousness, this ardour for the exact truth, which made his mode of expression, his literary style, so singularly real and pure, so accurately true to the thought; it could tolerate no superfluity, no circumlocution, no ambiguous vagueness; it was, as Faugère says, "the thought itself clothed like an antique statue with its own chaste nudity." These characteristics point to a genius intense rather than broad, penetrating more than constructive; and, as we have already said, the illumination thrown by Pascal on the mystery of our being resembled the vivid but fitful flash of the lightning rather than the calm, steady light of day. We have ventured to differ from M. Cousin's estimate of his scepticism; but that eminent writer has our hearty concurrence when he says, "The man in Pascal was profoundly original, but the creating mind had not been given him. He had more depth in sentiment than in thought, more force than breadth." To the same effect is Mr. Beard's thoughtful estimate: "This is the character of Pascal's originality. He does not construct systems of the universe, or mark an era in philosophical thought, or compass the whole sphere of human knowledge, like Descartes. He is not conversant with all the literature which it becomes a learned man to know, like Arnauld. He probably knew little Greek and no Hebrew; much of his classical learning came to him at secondhand from Montaigne; all the books with which his writings betray any acquaintance might be enumerated in half-a-dozen lines. What he knew and thought came almost wholly out of himself, and was the result of his independent thought, and bears in the completeness of its symmetry the impress of his nature." 66 Pascal," says the Protestant Vinet, was born in the Roman sect, and in a sect of that sect, Jansenism; but without separating himself from the sect to which we may say he belonged, he rose superior to it; the substance to him was more than the form; the spirit ruled over the body. He was one of those who are united by the heart to the living principle of truth, but to their sect by the inferior parts alone of their intellect." Notwithstanding his Jansenism, which placed him on the confines of Geneva, and his mortal defiance of the Jesuits, who were the real wire-pullers of the Vatican, his allegiance to his Church never wavered. "I will never separate myself from her communion," he wrote to Madlle. de Roannez after Arnauld had been condemned by the Sorbonne, and no provocation ever shook his resolve. However it may be now, the Roman Church then, especially to a French Catholic, was more than the Pope; and though, as Ďreydorff remarks, "Pascal saw and lamented that he was in a strait between God and the Pope, he never appears to have felt himself in a strait between God and the Church." Hence when the Jesuits accused him of making common cause with the heretics, he indignantly retorted, "When have I been absent from mass or scant of my duty to my parish church? What act of fellowship with heretics or of schism towards the Church can you lay to my charge? What Council have I contradicted, what Papal constitution have I transgressed?" The Church might be ruled by a corrupt faction, yet to him it was still the house of God and the appointed guide to salvation, and without a thought of separating himself from it, he was content to commit his cause to the Judge of all. The Pope might pronounce against him and place his book in the Index, but Pascal could sustain himself with the thought, “God does not perform miracles in the ordinary management of His Church; it would be a strange miracle if infallibility resided in a single person. If my letters are condemned in Rome, what I condemn in them is condemned in heaven. To Thy tribunal, Lord Jesus, I make my appeal." It is impossible to clear the religion of Pascal's declining years from the taint of superstition. As his health grew feebler he became increasingly subject to fits of depression, and had recourse to austerities which aggravated the physical mischief and shortened his days. It is inexpressibly touching to watch this fiery yet loving spirit burdened with its frail and morbid organism, striving to get nearer to God by a daily martyrdom of self. The spiked girdle on his bare flesh, the stern refusal of the commonest comforts, the recoil from a sister's affection and from a child's caress as dangerous to spirituality, the protest against an advantageous marriage for his niece, as if honest wedlock were "the most perilous and basest of conditions in which Christian people could live ;" these in the author of the "Pensées furnished a melancholy illustration of his favourite theme-" Nothing is stranger in the nature of man than the contrarieties of all kinds which are found in it.' We rise from our study of him with the sad sense of a life uncompleted, a promise unfulfilled, a glorious possibility but half realized. Yet viewed in the light of Christian hope, there is more to cheer than to depress in this spectacle of mingled weakness and strength. For if even amidst the shadows of mortality and under the burden of premature decay, man can be so great, of what height may he not be capable when the burden is unbound from his shoulders and mortality is swallowed up of life? Quarterly Review. HANS SACHS AND THE MASTERSONG. "Not thy councils, not thy Kaisers, win for thee the world's regard, SUCH are Longfellow's words to the old merchant town of Nuremberg as he paces its streets and courtyards and dreams over its busy past. The memories of old Nurembergers crowd upon him; their fame is the fame of their city; yet many of us know Hans Sachs only through this very poem. Such knowledge must be nebulous, but need not be incorrect. To associate his name with Albrecht Dürer, to recognise in him a Nuremberg burgher of the sixteenth century, the poet of its toil and traffic, is to find the right stand-point from which to judge him. For Hans is essentially the poet of handworkers and traders, he has the honesty and humour and good sense of the thriving bourgeois. He does not detect the passing shadows and delicate tints of life; its crimes and sorrows have for him no mystery; they have a |