is so much competition between the male lecturers. Even a morose man of science, when he casts his eye over his audience, must be gladdened and freshened by their presence. He may prefer communion with the masculine intellect; but he must find his countrywoman’s alert and agreeable face, under its ever-becoming bonnet, a welcome vision. Distinguished foreign writers, if they know enough French, are generally invited to lecture by some society. Fogazzarro was asked to lecture here on his recent visit, and a very pleasant little lecture it was, delivered in the best and easiest manner possible; and after him came Madame Pardo Bazán, the Spanish writer, with a few commonplaces about Spain. The fashionable resort for the lecture fanatic has been, for some years past, the Bodinière, in the Rue St. Lazare. This is an old theatre, a concert hall, a kind of fast musical chamber, where ballets, songs, and lectures all mingle strangely, and the lecturer, when the curtain rises, is revealed seated before a table, with ballet-girls heel-and-toe-tipped on the walls around him. The first time I attended a fashionable lecture at the Bodinière, it was to hear the Abbé Charbonnel talk to us on Lamennais. I am not easily shocked, but I found both incongruous and indecorous the picture made by an abbé in his uniform of religion, between two ballet-girls, with images everywhere of public dance and light morals. The lecture was an impressive one, far above the average Parisian lecture, eloquent, original, solemnly grave, polished as only a Frenchman’s prose is polished, with a note of burning revolt running through it. This, too, surprised me. When all London gathered to hear why an eminent clergyman of the Church of England left the faith of his fathers, they congregated in a church, and listened with a sense of solemnity to a solemn avowal. Here was a French abbé talking to us with a just indignation of the tyranny of Rome; talking with passion and admiration of Lamennais’s revolt and the injustice of Rome, talking as only a man who felt and shared the moral sufferings of his hero could talk. It was undoubtedly beautiful and thrilling. It was like hearing a heart beat, like watching a brain throb, feeling one’s self face to face with a naked soul in one of its great crises. But was a fashionable lecture-hall the place for such a public confession? Were frivolous, fluttering women of society a fitting audience in such an hour? Were these ladies of the ballet painted on the walls, this theatrical curtain, seemly environment? And was it in his abbé’s robe that Victor Charbonnel should have denounced the tyranny of Rome in public? Shortly afterwards the Abbé Charbonnel was excommunicated, which was no more than everybody expected; and though there was not a word he uttered in that remarkable lecture on a remarkable subject with which I did not sympathise, I should have preferred to hear it delivered elsewhere,—in other and more solemn surroundings.