become a free-thinker of the serious kind, high-principled and earnest: she is described as a woman of elevated mind and character, the force of whose will and intelligence has kept her from being betrayed by a naturally loving disposition, which has expended itself in friendship and filial and maternal affection, the latter being her only passion. The respectful distance which the author places between her and the rest of the world is indicated by her first name never being mentioned: she is only Madame Gervaisais. But she is not only a woman of reading: she is an artist and a musician, and these tastes increase her susceptibility to the soft masterdom of the place. Rome is considered by those who make such matters their business a peculiarly favorable spot for proselytizing: there is supposed to be an afflatus from various sources which disposes the unbelieving soul to the reception of the Church's teaching. The MM. de Goncourt understand this: "What a vast embrace, what an immense holy contagion, is religion at Rome!" We become aware of a general lassitude and ennervation in the firm texture of Madame Gervaisais's nature before the first approach is made to her convictions. And how are those approaches made? Can any one point to the first step? Has it ever been positively ascertained whether a certain meeting, a borrowed book, a striking coincidence, a conversation which has insensibly glided into a particular channel, was the result of chance or long premeditation? In the present case it is impossible to detect the earliest shadow of design falling across circumstance. Was Madame Gervaisais's landlady sent to offer prayers for the recovery of the sick child at the Sant' Agostino? Did the man-servant read her journal and report its contents? Had the Russian countess come on purpose to make her acquaintance when she found her sitting under the oak tree at Castel Gandolfo reading Lammenais's essay on religious indifference? The mystery which surrounds these questions corresponds entirely to similar unexplained occurrences in Madame Craven's seductive pages, where the finger of the sacred-supernatural is tacitly supposed to play a decisive part. But, chance or calculation, it leads in the same direction; and after a year and a half in Rome, Madame Gervaisais, who has given up Lammenais for a book of her Russian friend's, and has fallen into a state of languid dejection, takes to attending the regular sermon at the Jesuits' church, where the music, the paintings, the architecture, corrupt in style as they are, gradually induce a sort of somnolent ecstasy. Before many Sundays pass a celebrated preacher ascends the pulpit. "He was known as a man of talent in the order--an actor, a pantomimist, a comedian, a tragedian, whose gesticulatory and perambulatery eloquence swept the platform, and whose dramatic fire was enough to kindle the wood of the desk. He declaimed, wept, sobbed, raised his voice, let it break, whimpered, thundered, and