_Monday, July 17._--I had a quiet walk round St. Ouen and to the Lady Chapel there. I can fancy being able to retire to that church once a day being a consolation to many a life of toil. Yesterday, after the services, we seemed fit for nothing but to mount its roof and look on the great works of God around one there. At two we took a carriage to the seminaire of M. l'Abbé Lambert, Bois Guillaume. He is a person of fortune, who to satisfy his father entered the Ecole Polytechnique, and studied there for some time; but as soon as his father would consent, became a priest, to which he had always felt a vocation, and has given up his fortune to build a college for boys of the higher class. He has a beautiful spot on the top of the hill to the north of Rouen, covered with a garden, an orchard, and rows of beech trees of some sixty years' growth. He has now fifty-two boys, and eight priests, with himself, to instruct them. The object is to give a really Christian education, without directing the boys to enter into orders, which parents generally of that rank are much set against. Thus they only hear Mass twice on week days. We had a long conversation with him. He seemed much to regret the want of independence produced by, or at least existing in, French education. He receives a government inspector every year, though his house is his own. This inspector objected to the beds of his pupils having curtains, as making surveillance more difficult. I told him of my surprise to find at M. Poileau's academy, near Paris, a rule that two sick boys should never be in the infirmary alone. He said he should have expected such a rule. He inquired with interest about the independence of the English character. It struck me forcibly here what an immense advantage the rule of celibacy offers to the Church for education. Here were eight masters for fifty-two boys, and yet the pension so moderate as 1000 francs. At Eton, where the cost is nigh four times as great, the number of boys at the same proportion would require ninety-six masters, instead of about sixteen. But here all personal advancement is given up. There is no increasing family to be supported: personal gain or honour is neither _the_ motive, nor _a_ motive, but simply the higher one of fulfilling a great duty, and winning a bright crown. This complete self-devotion seems necessarily killed by the marriage tie, so that the highest works both of the priesthood and of education are thus cut off; and it may be doubted how far, in the present relation of the state to the Church all over the world, any body of ministers who are involved in the closest ties with the world can meet the exigencies of the times, or maintain the most necessary and fundamental liberties of the Church, either as to dogma or as to discipline. The great masses seem every where to be in such a state of irritation, or ignorance, or prejudice, that nothing but the spectacle of great and daily self-denial, of zeal and