This style of sermon suits some people, perhaps, but it did not take with the masses, who liked richness of imagery, abundance of simile, and neatness of illustration. So when Father d’Harrone, a man of sound learning, but little brilliancy of genius, preached a course in Rouen, after the great Bourdaloue, to use his own words:—“When Bourdaloue preached last year at Rouen, artisans quitted their business, merchants their wares, lawyers the court, doctors their sick; but as for me, when I followed, I set all in order again; no one neglected his occupation.” In the following pages I have given a sketch of some of the most remarkable preachers of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. The divine and the bibliographer may miss the names of some great and eminent men, as Paolo Segneri, Antonio Vieyra, Latimer, Andrewes, &c. But these men are either well known, or their lives and sermons are within the reach of English readers. Segneri’s Lenten sermons have been translated and somewhat diluted by Prebendary Ford, Vieyra is noticed in “Mediæval Sermons,” and English preachers I have omitted entirely to notice, because they are for the most part hopelessly dull. GABRIEL BIEL. This excellent and learned man is generally supposed, from his name Biel, the modern Bienne, to have been a Swiss, though some assert that he was a native of Spire, and the latter is probably the real place of his nativity, though his family may have been of Swiss extraction, for he is called “Gabriel Biel ex Spira” in the beginning of his “Sermones de tempore,” as published by Johan Otmar, in Tubingen, 1510. He went by the name of “the Collector,” from the fact of his being a laborious compiler rather than an original composer. He was undoubtedly one of the best scholastic divines of his age, and was a careful reader of the Fathers. Gabriel Biel was a member of the Regular Canons, and was Doctor of Theology, which he taught as professor in the University of Tubingen, founded by Count Eberhardt of Wirtemberg, in 1477. He soon became a favourite with this nobleman, who listened to his sermons with delight. At one time he was vicar and ordinary preacher at the metropolitan church of St. Martin at Mainz, but the date of his appointment is uncertain. Gabriel Biel was a man of gravity and learning; his sermons were popular, not on account of the eloquence with which they were delivered, for of that there was little, but of their beautiful simplicity and intrinsic excellence. His hearers were not amused by his discourses, but I venture to say that they were edified. His style is pithy, his sentences pregnant with meaning, for what he said, he said in few words, and he said it too very gracefully. Instead of wearying his hearers with unprofitable scholastic quibbles, he gave them practical good advice in plain and homely words.