transformation.[3] It will be asked how it was that this fairly clear conception of a positive philosophy did not eradicate my belief in scholasticism and Christianity.  It was because I was young and inconsistent, and because I had not acquired the critical faculty.  I was held back by the example of so many mighty minds which had read so deeply in the book of nature, and yet had remained Christians.  I was more specially influenced by Malebranche, who continued to recite his prayers throughout the whole of his life, while holding, with regard to the general dispensation of the universe, ideas differing but very little from those which I had arrived at.  The Entretiens sur la Metaphysique and the Meditations chretiennes were ever in my thoughts.

The fondness for erudition is innate in me, and M. Gosselin did much to develop it.  He had the kindness to choose me as his reader.  At seven o’clock every morning I went to read to him in his bedroom, and he was in the habit of pacing up and down, sometimes stopping, sometimes quickening his pace and interrupting me with some sensible or caustic remark.  In this way I read to him the long stories of Father Maimbourg, a writer who is now forgotten, but who in his time was appreciated by Voltaire, various publications by M. Benjamin Guerard, whose learning was much appreciated by him, and a few works by M. de Maistre, notably his Lettre sur l’Inquisition espagnole.  He did not much like this last-named treatise, and he would constantly rub his hands and say, “How plain it is that M. de Maistre is no theologian.”  All he cared for was theology, and he had a profound contempt for literature.  He rarely failed to stigmatise as futile nonsense the highly-esteemed studies of the Nicolaites.  For M. Dupanloup, whose principal dogma was that there is no salvation without a good literary education, he had little sympathy, and he generally avoided mention of his name.

For myself, believing as I do that the best way to mould young men of talent is never to speak to them about talent or style, but to educate them and to stimulate their mental curiosity upon questions of philosophy, religion, politics, science, and history—­or, in other words, to go to the substance of things instead of adopting a hollow rhetorical teaching, I was quite satisfied at this new direction given to my studies.  I forgot the very existence of such a thing as modern literature.  The rumour that contemporary writers existed occasionally reached us, but we were so accustomed to suppose that there had not been any of talent since the death of Louis XIV., that we had an a priori contempt for all contemporary productions. Le Teleinaque was the only specimen of light literature which ever came into my hands, and that was in an edition which did not contain the Eucharis episode, so that it was not until later that I became acquainted with the few delightful pages which record it.  My only glimpse of antiquity was through Teleinaque and Aristonoues, and I am very glad that such is the case.  It was thus that I learnt the art of depicting nature by moral touches.  Up to the year 1865 I had never formed any other idea of the island of Chios except that embodied in the phrase of Fenelon:  “The island of Chios, happy as the country of Homer.”