We had already collected many notes with the intention of examining critically the celebrated history of these two lovers of the 12th century, when we read an article by Mr. F. W. Rowsell in the _St. James’s Magazine_ for October 1864, in which he gives a sketch of the lives of both of them. The writer has succeeded in condensing into half a dozen very amusing pages a complete _résumé_ of the leading events in their history; only he has followed the commonly received opinion held by many English and French historians who have taken up the subject, and he does not enter into a critical examination of several points at issue. Everybody knows how great an attraction the monument erected to the memory of Eloisa and Abelard is to the crowds who visit the cemetery of Père la Chaise, recalling to their minds the letters full of love and passion written by Eloisa, which have elicited so many imitations both in prose and verse in England and in France. The history of the two lovers being true as a whole, we are far from wishing to take away from the sympathy that their constancy and hapless love so well deserve. Our only object is to separate the true from the false, and to show that the celebrated letters imputed to Eloisa were not written by her at all, and that the tomb in Père la Chaise is altogether a modern construction. Abelard, born in 1079, died in 1164, and Eloisa survived him upwards of twenty years, dying in 1184. The works and correspondence of Abelard were published for the first time in 1616 by the learned Duchesne, and we therein find three letters from Eloisa to Abelard and four from Abelard to Eloisa. These are the letters on which Pope, in England, and Dorat, Mercier, Saurin, Colardeau, &c., in France, founded their poems. Out of these seven letters, four only can strictly be termed the amatory correspondence of the two lovers. The remainder, and those that have been brought to light and published in later years, are pious effusions which contain no trace whatever of those passionate emotions which pervaded the four other letters. We must remind the reader that the oldest manuscript existing of these epistles is nothing more than an alleged copy of the originals made one hundred years after the death of Eloisa. It is preserved in the library of the town of Troyes, and belongs to the latter half of the 13th century. A modern French historian, M. Henri Martin, having written some pages in a melodramatic style on these letters of Eloisa, a critic, M. de Larroque,[22] pointed out to him the error into which he had fallen, they having evidently been composed some years after the death of the heroine. The learned Orelli published in 4ᵗᵒ at Zurich, in 1841, what may be termed the memoirs of Abelard, entitled, _Historia Calamitatum_: also the seven letters of the two lovers.