We then began to talk of the state of religion in France.  He said that among a large set, religion was now a la mode.  But he did not suppose that many of the fine folks who patronised it had much belief in it.  The clergy of France were, he said, almost invariably very illiterate.  Guizot, I remembered, calls them in his History of Civilisation doctes et crudits, but I abstained from quoting him.  Mohl went on to tell me a story of a newspaper that had been about to be established, called Le Democrat.  The shareholders met, when it appeared that one party wished to make it a Roman Catholic, and the other an atheist organ.  Whereupon the existence of God was put to the vote and carried by a majority of one, at which the atheist party were so disgusted that they seceded in a body.

I got to like Mohl much, and had more conversation, I think, with him than with any other of the numerous men of note with whom I became more or less acquainted.  On another occasion, when I found him in his cabinet, walled up as usual among his books, our talk fell on his great work, the edition of the oriental MSS. in the Bibliotheque Royale, which was to be completed in ten folio volumes, the first of which, just out, he was showing me.  He complained of the extreme slowness of the Government presses in getting on with the work.  This he attributed to the absurd costliness, as he considered it, of the style in which the work was brought out.  The cost of producing that first volume he told me had been over 1,600_l_. sterling.  It was to be sold at a little less than a hundred francs.  Something was said (by me, I think) of the possibility of obtaining assistance from the King, who was generally supposed to be immensely wealthy.  Mohl said that he did not believe Louis Philippe to be nearly so rich a man as he was supposed to be.  He had spent, he said, enormous sums on the chateaux he had restored, and was affirmed by those who had the means of knowing the fact, to be at that time twelve millions of francs in debt.

My liking for Mohl seems to have been fully justified by the estimation he was generally held in.  I find in a recently published volume by Kathleen O’Meara on the life of my old friend, Miss Clarke, who afterwards became his wife, the following passage quoted from Sainte-Beuve, who describes him as “a man who was the very embodiment of learning and of inquiry, an oriental savant—­more than a savant—­a sage, with a mind clear, loyal, and vast; a German mind passed through an English filter, a cloudless, unruffled mirror, open and limpid; of pure and frank morality; early disenchanted with all things; with a grain of irony devoid of all bitterness, the laugh of a child under a bald head; a Goethe-like intelligence, but free from all prejudice.”  “A charming and spirituelle Frenchwoman,” Miss O’Meara goes on to say, “said of Julius Mohl that Nature in forming his character had skimmed the cream of the three nationalities to which he belonged by birth, by adoption and by marriage, making him deep as a German, spirituel as a Frenchman, and loyal as an Englishman.”