conveyed in letters from Louis penned by Bossuet. At length the sentence of condemnation was obtained; but in too mild a form to satisfy altogether the courtly party. No bull was issued. A simple brief pronounced certain propositions to be erroneous and dangerous, and condemned the book which contained them, without sentencing it in the usual manner to the flames. It is needless to say that Fenelon submitted. He published without delay the sentence of condemnation, noting the selected propositions, and expressing his entire acquiescence in the judgment pronounced; and prohibited the faithful in his diocese from reading or having in their possession his own work, which up to that moment he had defended so manfully. Protestants, who are too apt in judging the conduct of Roman Catholics, to forget every thing but their zeal, have raised an outcry against his meanness and dissimulation. Fenelon was a sincere member of a Church which claimed infallibility. We may regret the thraldom in which such a mind was held by an authority from which the Protestant happily is free; but the censure which falls on him personally for this act is certainly misplaced. The faint hopes which his friends might have cherished, that when the storm had passed he would be restored to favour, were soon extinguished by an event, which, whilst it closed against him for ever the doors of the palace, secured him a place in history, and without which it is probable that he would never have become the subject even of a short memoir. A manuscript which he had intrusted to a servant to copy, was treacherously sold by this man to a printer in Paris, who immediately put it to the press, under the title of Continuation of the Fourth Book of the Odyssey, or Adventures of Telemachus, Son of Ulysses, with the royal privilege, dated April 6, 1699. It was told at court that the forthcoming work was from the pen of the obnoxious archbishop; and before the impression of the first volume was completed, orders were given to suppress it, to punish the printers, and seize the copies already printed. A few however escaped the hands of the police, and were rapidly circulated. One of them, together with a copy of the remaining part of the manuscript, soon after came into the possession of a printer at the Hague, who could publish it without danger. So eager was the curiosity which the violent proceedings of the French court had excited, that the press could hardly be made, with the utmost exertion, to keep pace with the demand. Such is the history of the first appearance of Telemachus.