The Saint-Simonian writings made me familiar with the idea of a hierarchy, and removed from my mind the prejudices against the Papacy generally entertained by my countrymen.  Their proposed organization, I saw, might be good and desirable if their priests, their Supreme Father and Mother, could really be the wisest, the best,—­not merely the nominal but the real chiefs of society.  Yet what security have I that they will be?  Their power was to have no limit save their own wisdom and love, but who would answer for it that these would always be an effectual limit?  How were these priests or chiefs to be designated and installed in their office?  By popular election?  But popular election often passes over the proper man and takes the improper.  Then as to the assignment to each man of a capital proportioned to his capacity to begin life with, what certainty is there that the rules of strict right will be followed? that wrong will not often be done, both voluntarily and involuntarily?  Are your chiefs to be infallible and impeccable?  Still the movement interested me, and many of its principles took firm hold of me and held me for years in a species of mental thraldom; insomuch that I found it difficult, if not impossible, either to refute them or to harmonize them with other principles which I also held, or rather which held me, and in which I detected no unsoundness.  Yet I imbibed no errors from the Saint-Simonians; and I can say of them as of the Unitarians,—­they did me no harm, but were in my fallen state the occasion of much good to me.

FERDINAND BRUNETIERE

(1849-)

BY ADOLPHE COHN

Ferdinand Brunetiere, the celebrated French literary critic, was born in Toulon, the great military Mediterranean sea-port of France, in the year 1849.  His studies were begun in the college of his native city and continued in Paris, in the Lycee Louis le Grand, where in the class of philosophy he came under Professor Emile Charles, by whose original and profound though decidedly sad way of thinking he was powerfully influenced.  His own ambition then was to become a teacher in the University of France, an ambition which seemed unlikely to be ever realized, as he failed to secure admission to the celebrated Ecole Normale Superieure, in the competitive examination which leads up to that school.  Strangely enough, about fifteen years later he was, though not in possession of any very high University degree, appointed to the Professorship of French Literature in the school which he had been unable to enter as a scholar, and his appointment received the hearty indorsement of all the leading educational authorities in France.

[Illustration:  Ferdiand Brunetiere]