I took down ‘The Faithful Shepherdess,’ wishing to refresh my memory of passages which the scenes we had visited that day vaguely recalled to my mind. Looking over my shoulder, Percival guided me to the lines I was hunting after. This led to comparisons between ‘The Faithful Shepherdess’ and the ‘Comus,’ and thence to that startling contrast in the way of viewing, and in the mode of describing, rural nature, between the earlier English poets and those whom Dryden formed upon Gallic models, and so on into the pleasant clueless labyrinth of metaphysical criticism on the art of poetic genius. When we had parted for the night, and I regained my own room, I opened my window and looked forth on the moonlit gardens. A few minutes later, a shadow, moving slow, passed over the silvered ground, and, descending the terrace stairs, vanished among the breathless shrubs and slumbering flowers. I recognised the man who loved to make night his companion. (_To be continued._) HENRI LACORDAIRE.[3] There are few of the leaders or servants of the public who interest the general mind so profoundly as the great preachers, whose fame reaches the humblest as well as the most exalted, and within the reach of whose influence, more or less, an entire generation passes. Not to reckon the secondary class of preachers, whose biography is as inevitable as their decease, and whose lives are studied as a matter of religious duty by vast sections of the population who lie in a kind of underground out of the reach of ordinary literature, it is enough to instance such a life as that of Chalmers, to prove how wide a hold upon the public interest is taken by a man with whom, for once in their lives, most people of his generation have come in momentary contact in the slight but often momentous relation of hearers to a speaker. Only a very limited number can or do hear a great speaker in any other kind, compared with those who think it indispensable to hear the notable preacher of their day; and multitudes who have the most visionary conception of their rulers and statesmen, and all other public notabilities, have a certain personal knowledge of the orator whose sphere is the pulpit, which makes them as eager to hear his life as if their own history were somehow involved in it. The life which we have now to unfold to our readers is, however, one with which in this country we are unfamiliar. It is a religious existence of a fashion unknown to us. A strange atmosphere breathes out of its acts and sentiments; its strength and its feebleness are alike novel to our experience; but under all these puzzling distinctions, the life itself is very remarkable—interwoven with the entire history of its country and period—and opens to us so strange yet so instructive a glimpse of a Christianity not less fervent, pure, and true, than anything in our Protestant records, but couched in terms so