[22] I hardly like to speak of the feeble creation of Robert Buchanan in such a company, but his ‘New Abélard’ is a further illustration. His pitiful Mr. Bradley has no earthly resemblance to Abélard, except in a most superficial sense. It is grotesque to compare him to Abélard for his ‘heresy’; and to say that he recalls Abélard in his weakness (to the extent of bigamously marrying and blasting the life of a noble woman) is deeply unjust. Abélard was not a cad. In direct opposition to the writers who find parallels for the correspondence of abbess and abbot we have a few critics who deny or doubt the authenticity of the letters. It is significant that the recent and critical German biographers of Abélard do not even mention these doubts. They have, in truth, the slenderest of foundations. Lalanne, who has endeavoured to spread this heresy in faithful France, can say little more than that he cannot reconcile the tone of the letters with the age and condition of the writers; he also says that Abélard would be hardly likely to preserve such letters had he received them from his wife. Orelli has tried to sow similar doubts in the apparently more promising soil of German culture, but with no greater success. If it seems incredible that Heloise should have penned the letters which bear her name, how shall we qualify the supposition that there lived, some time within the following century, a genius capable of creating them, yet utterly unknown to his contemporaries? If they are the work of some admirer of Abélard, as Orelli thinks, they reveal a higher literary competency than Rousseau shows in his _Nouvelle Heloïse_. We are asked to reject a wonder in the name of a greater wonder. Moreover, an admirer of Abélard would not have written the letters which bear his name in a style that has won for him anything but the admiration of posterity. And it is quite impossible to admit one series of the letters without the other.