Equally hostile to the bull, and equally persecuted by its victorious friends, was Gabriel Charles Buffard, a native of Bayeux, who was born in 1683. He was rector of the university of Caen, and canon of Bayeux; but was expelled from his offices, and banished out of the diocese, in 1722. Buffard settled at Paris, where he was not long allowed to remain in quiet. He was conveyed to the Bastile, and, after having been there for some time, he was exiled to Auxerre. From Auxerre he was speedily dragged to suffer another imprisonment in the Bastile. Fortunately, he found a protector in Cardinal des Gesvres, through whose intercession he was set at liberty. Buffard thenceforth lived in retirement, and gained a subsistence by giving opinions as a chamber counsel, and by assisting young scholars in the study of the canon law. He died in 1763. It was an opinion of Bishop Butler, the celebrated author of The Analogy of Religion, that “whole communities and public bodies might be seized with fits of insanity, as well as individuals;” and, indeed, that “nothing but this principle, that they are liable to insanity, equally at least with private persons, can account for the major part of those transactions which we read of in history.” Singular as, at first sight, this opinion may appear to be, there are many circumstances which ought to induce us to pause, before we reject it as erroneous. The strange scenes, for instance, which took place among the Jansenists,—scenes arising out of the death of the deacon Paris,—may almost authorize a belief, that large bodies of individuals can be simultaneously smitten with monomania, or at least can communicate it to each other with wonderful rapidity.