Both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant lines of French pulpit eloquence are continued down to our own day. Lacordaire, Pere Felix, Pere Hyacinthe, of the Catholics, Frederic Monod, Adolph Monod, Coquerel, of the Protestants, are names worthy to be here set down; and it may be added that Eugene Bersier, deceased in 1889, challenges on the whole not unequal comparison with the men treated in this chapter for pulpit power. He may be described as a kind of nineteenth-century Bossuet, tempered to Massillon, among French Protestant preachers. But there is no Louis XIV. now to cast over any great preachers, even of the Roman Catholics, the illusive, factitious, reflected glory of the person and court, the sentence and seal, of the "most illustrious sovereign of the world." The seventeenth-century sacred eloquence of France, the sacred eloquence, that is to say, of the "great" French age, will always remain a unique tradition in the history of the pulpit. XIII. FENELON. 1651-1715. If Bossuet is to Frenchmen a synonym for sublimity, no less to them is Fenelon a synonym for saintliness. From the French point of view, one might say, "the sublime Bossuet," "the saintly Fenelon," somewhat as one says, "the learned Selden," "the judicious Hooker." It is as much a French delight to idealize Fenelon an archangel Raphael, affable and mild, as it is to glorify Bossuet a Michael in majesty and power. But saintliness of character was in Fenelon commended to the world by equal charm of person and of genius. The words of Milton describing Eve might be applied, with no change but that of gender, to Fenelon, both the exterior and the interior man: Grace was in all his steps, heaven in his eye, In every gesture dignity and love. The consent is general among those who saw Fenelon, and have left behind them their testimony, that alike in person, in character, and in genius, he was such as we thus describe him. Twice, in his youth, he was smitten to the heart with a feeling of vocation to be a missionary. Both times he was thwarted by the intervention of friends. The second time, he wrote disclosing his half-romantic aspiration in a glowing letter of confidence and friendship to Bossuet, his senior by many years, but not yet become famous. Young Fenelon's friend Bossuet was destined later to prove a bitter antagonist, almost a personal foe. Until he was forty-two years old, Francois Fenelon lived in comparative retirement, nourishing his genius with study, with contemplation, with choice society. He experimented in writing verse. Not succeeding to his mind, he turned to prose composition, and, leading the way, in a new species of literature, for Rousseau, for Chateaubriand, for Lamartine, and for many others, to follow, went on writing what, in ceasing to be verse, did not cease to be poetry.