in his preservation, notwithstanding the reports which prevailed against them, he took a Jesuit for confessor. It is pretended that he acted thus, in order to have, in his very court and about his person, an hostage who should be answerable to him for that suspected and dangerous society: it is added, that the Jesuits had been recalled on the very condition of giving this hostage: if the thing be true, it must be confessed that they were able, like dexterous men, to make subservient to their grandeur a law humiliating in itself, and to avail themselves skilfully, for the augmentation of their credit, of the distrust and dread which they had inspired. Louis XIII., who reigned after Henry IV. or rather cardinal Richelieu, who reigned under his name, continued to favour the Jesuits: he thought their zeal and their regular conduct would serve at once as an example and curb to the clergy; and that the permission of teaching, which had been granted them, and of which they acquitted themselves with success, would be to the universities an object of emulation. This great minister was not deceived. It cannot be denied that the Jesuits, and especially those of France, have produced a great number of useful works for facilitating to young people the study of letters; works, by which the universities themselves have profited, so as to produce, in their turn, similar works, and perhaps better still: the one and the other are known; and the impartial public has given them the favourable reception they merited. Let us add (for we must be just) that no religious society, without exception, can boast so great a number of men famous in the sciences and in letters. The Mendicants, even at the time of their greatest lustre, were but schoolmen, the Benedictines only compilers, the other monks mere blockheads[3]. The Jesuits exercised themselves with success in every kind, eloquence, history, antiquities, geometry, literature both profound and agreeable: there is hardly any class of writers in which they count not men of the first merit: they have even had good French writers; an advantage of which no other order can boast; for this reason, that in order to write well in one’s own language, it is necessary to keep company with people of fashion, and that the Jesuits, by the nature of their functions, have been more dispersed throughout the world than others.