St. Nicolas was literary. Issy and St. Sulpice were severely philosophic and scientific, places of "_fortes études_"; and the writer thinks that they were more to his own taste than the more brilliant literary education given under Dupanloup. In one sense it may be so. They introduced him to exactness of thought and precision of expression, and they widened his horizon of possible and attainable knowledge. He passed, he says, from words to things. But he is a writer who owes so much to the form into which he throws his thoughts, to the grace and brightness and richness of his style, that he probably is a greater debtor to the master whom he admires and dislikes, Dupanloup, than to the modest, reserved, and rather dull Sulpician teachers, whom he loves and reveres and smiles at, whose knowledge of theology was serious, profound, and accurate, and whose characteristic temper was one of moderation and temperate reason, joined to a hatred of display, and a suspicion of all that seemed too clever and too brilliant. But his witness to their excellence, to their absolute self-devotion to their work, to their dislike of extravagance and exaggeration, to their good sense and cultivation, is ungrudging and warm. Of course he thinks them utterly out of date; but on their own ground he recognises that they were men of strength and solidity, the best and most thorough of teachers; the most sincere, the most humble, the most self-forgetting of priests:-- Beaucoup de mes jugements étonnent les gens du monde parcequ'ils n'out pas vu ce que j'ai vu. J'ai vu à Saint-Sulpice, associés à des idées étroites, je l'avoue, les miracles que nos races peuvent produire en fait de bonté, de modestie, d'abnégation personelle. Ce qu'il y a de vertu à Saint-Sulpice suffirait pour gouverner un monde, et cela m'a rendu difficile pour ce que j'ai trouvé ailleurs.