and then prosecuted, with their secretaries, their loved work till ten or eleven o'clock at night. When leaving Rome they were enabled therefore to send to Bollandus, by sea, a second consignment of three chests of manuscripts, in addition to a large store which they carried home themselves. On their return journey they visited Florence and Milan, spending more than half a year in these libraries, and then proceeded through France to Paris, where they met scholars like Du Cange, Combefis, and Labbe. They finally arrived at home December 21, 1661, to find Bollandus in a very precarious state of health, which terminated in his death in 1665. The life of Bolland is a type of the lives led by all his disciples and successors. Devout, retired, studious, they gave themselves up, generation after generation, to their appointed task, the elders continually assuming to themselves one or two younger assistants, so as to preserve their traditions unimpaired. And what a work was theirs! How it dwarfed all modern publications! Bollandus worked at eight of those folios, Henschenius at twenty-four, Papebrock at nineteen, Janningus his successor at thirteen; and so the work went on, aided by a subsidy from the Imperial House of Austria, till the suppression of the Jesuits, which was followed soon after by the dissolution of the Bollandists in 1788. Their library became then an object of desire to many foreigners, who would undoubtedly have purchased it, had it not been for the opposition of the local government, and of several Belgian abbeys. It was finally bought by Godfrey Hermans, a Præmonstratensian abbat, under whose auspices the publication of the work continued for seven years longer, till, on the outburst of the wars of the French Revolution, the library was dispersed, part burnt, part hidden, part hurried into Westphalia. At length, after various chances, a great part of the manuscripts was obtained for the ancient library of the House of Burgundy, now forming part of the Royal Library at Brussels, while others of them were reclaimed for the library of the New Bollandists at Louvain, where the work is now carried on. After the dissolution of the old Company, two attempts at least, one in 1801 and the other in 1810--this last under the all-powerful patronage of Napoleon--were made, though without success, to revive the work. Better fortune attended a proposal made in 1838 by four members of the Jesuit Society--viz., J. B. Boone, J. Vandermocre, P. Coppens, and J. van Hecke. Since that time the publication of the volumes has steadily proceeded; we may even hope that the progress of the work in the future will be still more rapid, as the Company has lately added to its ranks P. C. de Smedt, one of the most learned and laborious ecclesiastical historians in the Roman Communion.[9]