express deep contrition for his deficiencies on the religious side and his frequent opposition to the policy of the church; but in this they were disappointed. "God gave him full time," says an anonymous critic of the period, who has annotated very harshly the funeral sermon preached over his remains, "to recognize his errors, and yet to the last he showed a great indifference in all these matters. In a word, he behaved during the few days before his death like one who had led an irreproachable life and had nothing to fear." The last rites of religion were administered by the Recollet father, Olivier Goyer, and on the 28th November 1698, retaining his faculties to the last, the veteran passed peacefully away. What manner of man he was, this narrative, it may be trusted, has in some measure shown. Compounded of faults and virtues, his was a character that appealed strongly to average human nature. Common people understood, admired and trusted him. His faults were those common, everyday ones,[55] which it is not impossible to forgive; and he had the more than compensating virtues of courage, decision, simplicity, underlying kindliness, and humour. His nature, vehement, turbulent, and self-asserting throughout his early and middle manhood, was gaining towards the end that ripeness in which, according to Shakespeare, lies the whole significance of life. The Abbe Gosselin has defined with great exactness his attitude towards religion. "Frontenac," he says, "was a Christian and a religious man after the fashion of his time, and as people generally are in the great world; attached to the church, but with all the Gallican ideas of the period, according to which the church was only a dependency of the state; making it a point of honour to discharge the duties incumbent on a gentleman and a Christian, but drawing a clear distinction between the demands of duty and those of perfection."[56] The late Abbe Verreau, quoted by Gosselin in his _Life of Laval_, has a few words of mingled praise and blame, which, perhaps, in their general effect are not far from the truth. "The harsh doctrines of Jansenism," he says, "and domestic troubles had infused into his nature something unrefined which the outward manners of the aristocrat did not entirely conceal. . . . When, however, he yielded to the natural bent of his mind, he attracted every one by the intellectual grace and charm of his conversation. . . . His ambition was to be in New France the reflection of the great monarch who ruled in Old France." The Abbe probably exaggerates the effect of Jansenist doctrines upon the mind of Frontenac, and also that of his conjugal difficulties; but he rightly discerns an element in his character which clashed with his finer and more distinguished qualities. * * * * *