A very charming book is Sabatier’s “Life of St. Francis of Assisi.” To me one of its chief attractions lies in the strong parallel between the life of the mediæval saint and the Eastern reformer. The points of divergence are no more than would be accounted for by the differences of time, place and surroundings. St. Francis was not a prince of the blood royal like the Buddha, but he was the son of a rich man, one of those merchants and men of mark who travelled through the world, visiting all the important fairs of those days, and received as welcome guests by the great nobles. Indeed, they, too, had a sort of patent of nobility of their own, belonging to a guild of popularity—for in those days when newspapers were not, the rare visits of a man who could bring the latest court gossip from Paris or London, and whose waggons were often laden with golden tribute sent from beyond the sea to the Pope, were looked forward to with no little pleasure. So Francis, in his gilded youth, became one of the leading youngsters of the town, foremost in all mischief and riotous living, a fighter and a daredevil, ruffling it in all the fantastic coxcombry of weapons and dress which the ingenuity of mediæval tailors and armourers could devise. Fighting there was in plenty in the Italian cities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and who so ready to fight as the extravagant young scapegrace, who was as keen to throw away his life as his money? After one of the local raids came imprisonment for a year—then more fighting, followed by illness, fever and repentance; after that solitude, meditation, and the final renunciation of the world, the flesh and the devil, when the manifest likeness to the Buddha first asserted itself.