We have no room here to show Madame Guyon by any of her extant letters addressed to Fenelon; but we may take the present occasion to introduce at least a few stanzas from one of those sweet little Christian poems of hers which a spirit not far alien from Fenelon's own, we mean William Cowper, has put for us into fairly happy English expression. Madame Guyon spent ten years in prison--for teaching that souls should love God unselfishly, for his own sake only!--and it is in prison that this meekly triumphing song of hers must be imagined as sung by the author. It bears the title, "The Soul that Loves God Finds Him Everywhere." * * * * * To me remains nor place nor time; My country is in every clime; I can be calm and free from care On any shore, since God is there. While place we seek, or place we shun, The soul finds happiness in none; But, with a God to guide our way, 'Tis equal joy to go or stay. Could I be cast where thou art not, That were indeed a dreadful lot; But regions none remote I call, Secure of finding God in all. * * * * * Ah, then! to his embrace repair; My soul, thou art no stranger there; There love divine shall be thy guard, And peace and safety thy reward. French literature, unfortunately, is on the whole such in character as to need all that it can show to be cast into the scale of moral elevation and purity. Fenelon alone--he was not alone, as the instance of Madame Guyon has just freshly been reminding us--but Fenelon alone were enough, in quality supported by quantity, not indeed to overcome, but to go far toward overcoming, the perverse inclination of the balance. XIV. LE SAGE. 1668-1747. Le Sage was a fruitful father of literary product, but it is as the author of "Gil Blas" that he is entitled to his place in these pages. "The Adventures of Gil Blas" justly enjoys the distinction of being among the few works of fiction that are read everywhere, and everywhere acknowledged to be masterpieces in literature. Lapse of time and change of fashion seem not to tend at all toward making "Gil Blas" obsolete. With every generation of men it takes as it were a fresh lease of inexhaustible immortality. Of course, there must be something elemental in the quality and merit of a book, especially a book of fiction, concerning which this can truly be said. A novel "Gil Blas" is generally called. The name is hardly descriptive. Le Sage's masterpiece is rather a book of human nature and of human life. It constitutes already, embraced within the compass of a single work, that which it was the ambition of the novelist Balzac to achieve in an Alexandrian library of fiction; "Gil Blas" is the whole "comedy" of man. The breadth of it is enormous. There is hardly any thing lacking to it that is human--unless it be some truly noble human character, some truly noble human action.