different from ours, and wearing an aspect so unlike, that the mingled resemblance and dissimilarity add a charm to its own merits. The life of Henri Lacordaire, priest, preacher, and monk, told by his eloquent countryman and loving friend, M. de Montalembert, is for us not only a religious biography, but a novel study of character and life. The picture is fascinating but strange. Stranger than the eremites in the ancient wilderness, or those early followers of Benedict and Francis, with whom the same hand has lately made us familiar, is the apparition of the monk of the nineteenth century as he appears in these pages. For it is no picturesque lay figure which rises in the white Dominican tunic before our unaccustomed eyes, but a modern Frenchman, acute, brilliant, unimpassioned—full of sound sense and inexorable logic—a politician, a liberal, a man of his day, no less than a great preacher and a pious Catholic. The story of his life is without private events, for he was a priest, and debarred from any private life save that which makes a passion of friendship and finds an outlet there; but his career is that of a man strong in personal identity, who acts and thinks for himself, and throws his entire being into his occupation, whatever that may be. M. de Montalembert, always eloquent, is perhaps too rhetorical and declamatory for biography, at least in narrating a life which to a great extent he shared, and the vicissitudes of which, as he records them, naturally rouse his enthusiasm, his indignation, and grief, and tempt him into many digressions. The volume which he has dedicated to the memory of his friend is more of an _eloge_ than a biography, and the lines of the picture are vague in consequence, and want the distinctness of portrait-painting; nevertheless the figure rounds out of its dim background into unquestionable individuality, and the English reader who has not already heard of the great French preacher will herein meet with another man well worthy the remembrance of the world. Henri Lacordaire was born in the beginning of the present century, almost a contemporary of our own great preacher Edward Irving, in whose life one remarkable point of resemblance shows only the full force of the contrast between the French priest and the Scotch pastor. He was of moderate origin, undistinguished either in his birth or training, without any brilliant prognostics to mark the beginning of his career. It is thus that his biographer sums up the simple story of his early days:—