_Son pays le crut fou_, says La Fontaine, of a Greek sage; _mais quoi! aucun n’est prophète chez soi_. Of Joan of Arc, and her early mental struggles, a French historian writes: “It behoves her to find in the bosom of her family someone who would believe in her: this was the most difficult part of all.” Non-recognition, disparagement, cold obstruction. Societies and families, as Goethe says, behave in the same way to their dearest members, towns to their worthiest citizens. Consuelo advising Anzoleto to quit Venice, reminds him that “no person is a prophet in his own country. This is a bad place for one who has been seen running about in rags, and where any one may come to say of you, ‘I was his protector, I saw his hidden talent, it was I who recommended him and procured his advance.’” Descartes had to support with philosophic patience the scorn of his family, impatient of a philosopher in it. Jean Bodin, neglected and slighted in his own land, exulted in the welcome accorded to his books in the English Universities, which printed as well as prized them: “il n’est pas rare que nous ayons besoin d’apprendre des étrangers ce que valent nos compatriotes,” observes M. Léon Feugère. Every rule has its exceptions, and most proverbs too. The case of St. Catharine, of Sienna, is cited by a Protestant biographer as “an exception to the rule that excludes a prophet from honour in his own country.” The biographer of Edward Irving, recounting with enthusiasm the details of his reception in Annandale in 1828, adds that “for once the proverb seems to have failed. He had honour in his own country, where gentle and simple flocked to hear him,”—neighbouring ministers shutting up their kirks on the Sunday when he preached, and going the “long Sabbath-day’s journey” across the Annandale moors to hear him, along with their people. La Bruyère points out on the one side a man recognised by the world at large as a master-mind, honoured and sought after by eager admirers, but at home, of no account at all; _petit dans son domestique et aux yeux de ses proches_: on the other hand, a man who is a prophet in his own house and country, who enjoys a _vogue_ that is confined to his immediate surroundings, and who _s’applaudit d’un mérite rare et singulier qui lui est accordé par la famille dont il est l’idole_. But exceptions to a rule are commonly taken in confirmation of it; and the rule as to a prophet’s home acceptance is held to be only confirmed, not disproved, by here and there a stray example in history to the contrary; such as Arnold, of Brescia, being rescued from captivity by some of those partisan nobles of Campania by whom he was honoured as a prophet: “Tanquam _prophetam in terrâ suâ_ cum omni honore habebant.” Or, as the experience, highly exceptional, of young Bernard of Clairvaux, the “strange and irresistible force” of whose character, as the historian of Latin Christianity describes it, enthralled his brothers one after