fortune to retain the favor of the monarch.  A life thus eventful ended with the conviction that all was vanity!—­Arnulf, disgusted with sublunary honors, abdicated his see and retired to a monastery at Paris, where he died.—­One of the immediate successors of this prelate, William of Rupierre, was the ambassador of Richard Coeur-de-Lion to the Pope; and he pleaded the cause of his sovereign against Walter, Archbishop of Rouen, on the occasion of the differences that originated from the building of Chateau Gaillard.  He also resisted the power usurped by King John within the city and liberties of Lisieux, and finally obtained a sentence from the Norman court of exchequer, whereby the privileges of the dukes of the province were restricted to what was called the Placitum Spathae, consisting of the right of billetting soldiers, of coining money, and of hearing and determining in cases of appeal.  The decision is honorable both to the independence of the court, and the vigor of the prelate.—­In times nearer to our own, a bishop of Lisieux, Jean Hennuyer, obtained a very different distinction.  Authors are strangely at variance whether this prelate is to be regarded as the protector or the persecutor of the protestants.  All agree that his church suffered materially from the excesses of the Huguenots, in 1562, and that, on the following year, he received public thanks from the Cardinal of Bourbon, for the firmness with which he had opposed them; but the point at issue is, whether, after the massacre of St. Bartholomew, ten years subsequently, he withstood the sanguinary orders from the court to put the Huguenots to the sword, or whether he endeavored, as far as lay in his power, to forward the pious labor of extirpating the heretics, but was himself effectually resisted by the king’s own lieutenant.—­Sammarthanus tells us that the first of these traditions rests solely upon the authority of Anthony Mallet[65] but it obtained general credence till within the last three years, when a very well-informed writer, in the Mercure de France, and subsequently in the article Hennuyer in the Bibliographie Universelle, espoused, and has apparently established, the opposite opinion.

We visited only one other of the churches in Lisieux, that of St. Jacques, a large edifice, in a bad style of pointed architecture, and full of gaudy altars and ordinary pictures.  On the outside of the stalls of the choir towards the north is some curious carving; but I should scarcely have been induced to have spoken of the building, were it not for one of the paintings, which, however uninteresting as a piece of art, appears to possess some historical value.  It represents how the bones of St. Ursinus were miraculously translated to Lisieux, under the auspices of Hugh the Bishop, in 1055; and it professes, and apparently with truth, to be a copy, made in the seventeenth century, from an original of great antiquity.  The legend relating to the relics of this saint, is noticed by no author