M. de Lamennais's youth was stormy and undisciplined. He loved physical exercises, hunting, fencing, racing and riding; strange tastes these, as preparation for an ecclesiastical career! But it was not from personal inclination or of his own impulse that he entered the priesthood, but by compulsion from the noble families in the district. On his part, the bishop of the diocese discerned in the young man a superior intellect, a lofty character, a tendency towards meditation and thoughtfulness, and drew him to himself by all kinds of seductions. They spared him the trials of an ecclesiastical seminary, at which his intractable disposition might have rebelled; but, priest though he was, M. de Lamennais did not discontinue to ride the most fiery horses of the town, or to practise shooting. It was the Empire, that régime of glory and of despotism, which wounded the sensitive nerves of the young priest of stern spirit and Royalist sympathies. Brittany remembered her exiled princes, and the family of M. de Lamennais was among those which faithfully preserved the worship of the past; not that their family was of ancient nobility: the head of the house was a shipowner who had made his wealth by distant voyages, and who was ennobled at the close of the last century for services rendered to the town of St. Malo. The Empire fell, and M. de Lamennais, casting a bird's-eye view over that stupendous ruin, wrote in 1815-- "Wars of extermination sprang up again; despotism counted her expenditure in men, as people reckon the revenue of an estate; generations were mowed down like grass; and men daily sold, bought, exchanged and given away like flocks of little value, often not even knowing whose property they were, to such an extent did a monstrous policy multiply these infamous transactions! Whole nations were put in circulation like pieces of money!" To profess such principles was, of course, equivalent to looking towards the Restoration, that dawn without a sun. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that, in those days, all young men of letters were carried away with the same intoxication for monarchical memories. Poets are like women--I do not at all know who said that poets were women--they make much of a favourable misfortune. This enthusiasm for _the person of the king_ was shared, in different degrees, even by men whose names, later, were connected with Liberalism. Heaven alone knows whether any king was ever less fitted than Louis XVIII. for calling forth tenderness and idolatry! But that did not hinder Casimir Delavigne from exclaiming--