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'Very well; we will not discuss the point farther; go to the board.'

I had scarcely taken up the chalk, when M. Legendre, returning to the first subject of his preoccupations, said to me, 'You were born in one of the departments recently united to France?'

'No, sir; I was born in the department of the Eastern Pyrenees at the foot of the Pyrenees.'

'Oh! why did you not tell me that at once all is now explained. You are of Spanish origin, are you not?'

'Possibly; but in my humble family there are no authentic documents preserved which could enable me to trace back the civil position of my ancestors: each one there is the child of his own deeds. I declare to you again that I am French, and that ought to be sufficient for you.'

The vivacity of this last answer had not disposed M. Legendre in my favour. I saw this very soon; for, having put a question to me which required the use of double integrals, he stopped me, saying, 'The method which you are following was not given you by the professor. Whence did you get it?'

'From one of your papers.' 'Why did you choose it? Was it to bribe me?'

'No; nothing was further from my thoughts. I only adopted it because it appeared to me preferable.'

'If you are unable to explain to me the reasons for your preference, I declare to you that you shall receive a bad mark, at least as to character.'

I then entered upon the details which established, as I thought, that the method of double integrals was in all points more clear and more rational than that which Lacroix had expounded to us in the amphitheatre. From this moment Legendre appeared to me to be satisfied, and to relent.

Afterwards, he asked me to determine the centre of gravity of a spherical

sector.

'The question is easy,' I said to him. 'Very well; since you find it easy I will complicate it. Instead of supposing the density constant, I will suppose that it varies from the centre to the surface according to a determined function.'

I got through this calculation very happily: and from this moment I had entirely gained the favour of the examiner. Indeed, on my retiring, he addressed to

me these words, which, coming from him, appeared to my comrades as a very favourable augury for my chance of promotion: 'I see that you have employed your time well: go on in the same way the second year, and we shall part very good friends.'

In the mode of examination adopted at the Polytechnic School in 1804, which is always cited as being better than the present organisation, room was allowed for the exercise of some unjustifiable caprices. Would it be believed, for example, that the old M. Baruel examined two pupils at a time in physics, and gave them, it is said, the same mark, which was the mean between the actual merits of the two? For my part, I was associated with a comrade full of intelligence, but who had not studied this branch of the course. We agreed that he should leave the answering to me, and we found the arrangement advantageous to both.

HOAXING A PROFESSOR.

As I have been led to speak of the school as it was in 1804, I will say that its faults were less those of organisation than those of personal management; for many of the professors were much below their office, a fact which gave rise to somewhat ridiculous scenes. The pupils, for instance, having observed the insufficiency of M. Hassenfratz, made a demonstration of the dimensions of the rainbow, full of errors of calculation, but in which the one compensated the other, so that the final result was true. The professor, who had only this result whereby to judge of the goodness of the answer, when he saw it appear on the board, did not hesitate to call out, 'Good, good, perfectly good!' which excited shouts of laughter on all the benches of the amphitheatre.

When a professor has lost consideration, without which it is impossible for him to do well, they allow themselves to insult him to an incredible extent. Of this I will cite a single specimen.

A pupil, M. Leboullenger, met one evening in company this same M. Hassenfratz, and had a discussion with him. When he re-entered the school in the morning, he mentioned this circumstance to us. 'Be on your guard,' said one of our comrades to him; 'you will be interrogated this evening. Play with caution, for the professor has certainly prepared some great difficulties, so as to cause laughter at your expense.'

Our anticipations were not mistaken.

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Beside himself, and seeing his prey escape him, by means of this unexpected answer, M. Hassenfratz addressed himself to the inspector charged with the observance of order that day, and said to him, 'Sir, there is M. Leboullenger who pretends never to have seen the moon.'

What would you wish me to do?' stoically replied M. Le Brun.

Repulsed on this side, the professor turned once more towards M. Leboullenger, who remained calm and earnest in the midst of the unspeakable amusement of the whole amphitheatre, and cried out, with undisguised anger, 'You persist in maintaining that you have never seen the moon?'

'Sir,' returned the pupil, 'I should deceive you if I told you that I had not heard it spoken of, but I have never seen it.'

'Sir, return to your place.'

After this scene, M. Hassenfratz was but a professor in name; his teaching could no longer be of any use.

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THE CHARACTER OF JOSEPHUS.

The other historic person on whom I shall probably be charged with assault and battery is Josephus. And the impartial reader, who knows but slightly or not at all what it is that this felon has been doing, is likely enough to think that I have shown a levity and hastiness of resentment not warranted by the notorieties of his life. It is remarkable that few of us know the possible strength of our patriotic sympathies, and how much it is that we could do and could hazard for our own dear, noble country, if danger or calamity should besiege her. Seen always under calm and gentle sunshine, this natal land of ours forms an object

that would be thoroughly transfigure to our hearts, and would wear a new life, if once she were thrown into impassioned circumstances of calamity, not by visitation of Providence, but by human wrongs and conspiracies. Vendidit hic auro patriam, is the dreadful category which Virgil has prepared in the infernal regions for traitors such as this Jew; for I suppose it can make but slight difference in any man's estimate that the Jew did not receive the bribe first, and then perpetrate the treason, but trusted to Roman good faith at three months after date. But this Jew did worse. Many have been the willing betrayers of their country, who would have spurned with fury an invitation to join in a gorgeous festival of exultation, celebrating the final overthrow of their mother-land, and the bloody ruin of their kindred, through all their tribes and households. There is many an intelligent little girl, not more than seven years old, who, in such circumstances, and knowing that the purpose of the festival was to drag the last memorials of her people-its honours, trophies, sanctities-through the pollution of triumph, would indignantly refuse to give the sanction of so much as a momentary gaze upon a spectacle abominable in all Hebrew eyes. And if, in such a case, she could descend to an emotion so humiliating as curiosity, she would feel a silent reproach fretting her heart, so often as she beheld upon a Roman medal that symbolic memorial of her desolated home-so beautiful and so patheticJudea figured as a woman veiled, weeping under her palm-tree; Rachel weeping for her children. But this Josephus, this hound-hound of hounds, and very dog of very dog-did worse; he sat, as a congratulating guest, offering homage and adoring cringes, simpering and kotooing, whilst the triumphal pageant for Judea ravaged, and for Jerusalem burned, filled the hours of a long summer's day, as it unfolded its pomps before him. Nay, this Jew achieved a deeper degradation even than this. when it was asked of the conquerors, Where is the conquered race? what has become of them? it must have been answered, All slain or captives. And that result is a mode of military triumph, even for the conquered. But through the presence of Josephus, a solitary man of rank, all this was transformed: a Jewish grandee, sitting on terms of amity amongst

But for him,

the victors, and countersigning their pretensions, had the inevitable effect of disavowing all his humbler countrymen; from heroes they become mutineers; and in an instant of time the fiery struggle of the ancient El Koda against the abomination of desolation, standing where it should not'-i. e., the Roman banners, expressing the triumph of an idolatrous nation, insolently hoisted aloft in the temple of Jehovah was transfigured, through this one man's presence, into a capricious, possibly an ungrateful, rebellion. Did this carrion find a peaceful grave?

THE ESSENES.

One aspect of Josephus and his character occurs to me as interesting-namely, when placed in collision with the character so different, and the position so similar, of St Paul. In both these men, when suddenly detained for inspection at an early stage of their career, we have a bigot of the most intractable quality; and in both the bigotry expressed its ferocity exclusively upon the Christians, as the new-born heretics that troubled the unity of the national church. Thus far the parties agree; and they agree also in being as learned as the limitations of their native literature would allow. But from that point, up to which the resemblance in position, in education, in temper, is so close, how entirely opposed! Both erring profoundly; yet the one not only in his errors, but by his errors, showing himself most single-minded, conscientious, fervent, devout; a holy bigot; as incapable of anything mercenary then, of anything insidious, or of compromise with modes of self-interest, as after the rectification of his views he was incapable of compromise with profounder shapes of error. The other, a timeserving knave, sold to adulation and servile ministra tions; a pimp; a liar; or ready for any worse office, if worse is named on earth. Never on any human stage was so dramatically realised, as by Josephus in Rome, the delineation of our English poet:

'A fingering, meddling slave; One that would peep and botanise Upon his mother's grave.' Yes, this master in Israel, this leader of Sanhedrims, went as to something that he thought a puppet-show, sat the long day through to see a sight. What sight? Jugglers, was it? buffoons? tumblers dancing-dogs? or a reed

shaken by the wind? Oh no! Simply to see his ruined country carried captive in effigy through the city of her conqueror-to see the sword of the Maccabees hung up as a Roman trophy-to see the mysteries of the glorious temple-to see the Holy of Holies (which even the High Priest could enter only once in the year), by its representative memorials, dragged from secresy before the grooms and gladiators of Rome. Then, when this was finished, a wo that would once have caused Hebrew corpses to stir in their graves, he goes home to find his luxury, his palace, and his harem, charged as a perpetual tax upon the groans of his brave unsurrendering countrymen, that had been sold as slaves into marble quarries: they worked extra hours, that the one sole traitor to Jerusalem might revel in honour.

When first I read the account of the Essenes in Josephus, I leaned back in my chair, and apostrophised the writer thus:- Wicked Joseph, listen to me; you've been telling us a fairy tale; and, for my part, I've no objection to a fairy tale in any situation; because, if one can make no use of it one's-self, always one knows a child that will be thankful for it. But this tale, Mr Joseph, happens also to be a lie; secondly, a fraudulent lie; thirdly, a malicious lie.' It was a fiction-not at all of ignorance or error, but of hatred against Christianity. For I shall startle the reader a little when I inform him that, if there were a syllable of truth in the main statement of Josephus, then at one blow goes to wreck the whole edifice of Christianity. Nothing but blindness and insensibility of heart to the true internal evidence of Christianity could ever have hidden this from men. Religious sycophants, who affect the profoundest admiration, but in their hearts feel none at all, for what they profess to regard as the beauty of the moral revelations made in the New Testament, are easily cheated, and often have been cheated, by the grossest plagiarisms from Christianity offered to them as the pure natural growths of paganism. I would engage to write a Greek version Somewhat varied and garbled of the Sermon on the Mount, were it hidden in Pompeii, unearthed, and published as a fragment from a posthumous work of a Stoic, with the certain result that very few people indeed should detect in it any signs of forgery. There are several cases of that nature actually unsuspected at this hour,

which my deep cynicism and detestation of human hypocrisy yet anticipates a banquet of gratification in one day exposing. Oh, the millions of deaf hearts, deaf to everything really impassioned in music, that pretend to admire Mozart! Oh, the worlds of hypocrites who cant about the divinity of scriptural morality, and yet would never see any lustre at all in the most resplendent of Christian jewels, provided the pagan thief had a little disguised their setting. The thing has been tried long before the case of the Essenes; and it takes more than a scholar to detect the imposture. A philosopher who must also be a scholar is wanted. The eye that suspects and watches is needed. Dark seas were those over which the ark of Christianity tilted for the first four centuries; evil men and enemies were cruising, and an Alexandrian Pharos is required to throw back a light broad enough to search and sweep the guilty secrets of those times. The Church of Rome has always thrown a backward telescopic glance of question, of doubt, and uneasy suspicion, upon those ridiculous Essenes, and has repeatedly come to the right practical conclusion-that they were, and must have been, Christians under some mask or other; but the failure of Rome has been in carrying the Ariadne's thread through the whole labyrinth from centre to circumference. Rome has given the ultimate solution rightly, but has not (in geometrical language) raised the construction of the problem with its conditions and steps of evolution. Shall I tell you, reader, in a brief, rememberable form, what was the crime of the hound Josephus, through this fable of the Essenes in relation to Christ? It was the very same crime as that of the hound Lauder in relation to Milton. Lauder, about the middle of the last century, bearing deadly malice to the memory of Milton, conceived the idea of charging the great poet with plagiarisni. He would greatly have preferred denying the value in toto of the 'Paradise Lost.' But, as this was hopeless, the next best course was to sayWell, let it be as grand as you please, it is none of Milton's. And, to prepare the way for this, he proceeded to translate into Latin (but with plausible variations in the expression or arrangement) some of the most memorable passages in the poem. By this means he had, as it were, melted down or broken up the golden

sacramental plate, and might now apply it to his own felonious purposes. The false swindling traveste of the Miltonic passage he produced as the undoubted original, professing to have found it in some rare or obscure author, not easily within reach, and then saying-Judge (I beseech you) for yourself whether Milton were indebted to this passage or not. Now, reader, a falsehood is a falsehood, though uttered under circumstances of hurry and sudden trepidation; but certainly it becomes, though not more a falsehood, yet more criminally and hatefully a falsehood, when prepared from afar, and elaborately supported by fraud, and dovetailing into fraud, and having no palliation from pressure and haste, man is a knave who falsely, but in the panic of turning all suspicion from himself, charges you or me with having appropriated another man's jewel. But how much more odiously is he a knave, if with no such motive of screening himself, if out of pure devilish malice to us, he has contrived, in preparation for his own lie, to conceal the jewel about our persons! This was what the wretch Lauder tried hard to do for Milton. This was what the wretch Josephus tried hard to do for Christ.

THE ROMAN JUDICIAL SYSTEM.

A

This would require a separate volume, and chiefly upon this ground-that in no country upon earth, except Rome, has the ordinary administration of justice been applied as a great political engine. Men, who could not otherwise be removed, were constantly assailed by impeachments, and oftentimes for acts done forty or fifty years before the time of trial. But this dreadful aggravation of the injustice was not generally needed. The system of trial was the most corrupt that has ever prevailed under European civilisation. The composition of their courts, as to the rank of the numerous jury, was continually changed: but no change availed to raise them above bribery. The rules of evidence were simply none at all. Every hearsay, erroneous rumour, or atrocious libel, was allowed to be offered as evidence. Much of this never could be repelled, as it had not been anticipated. And, even in those cases where no bribery was attempted, the issue was dependent, almost in a desperate extent, upon the impression made by the advocate. And finally, it must be borne in mind, that there was no presiding judge, in our sense

124 The Expediency Employed by Roman Statesmen.-Secret Societies.

of the word, to sum up, to mitigate the
effect of arts or falsehood in the advocate,
to point the true bearing of the evidence,
still less to state and to restrict the law.
Law there very seldom was any, in a pre-
cise circumstantial shape. The verdict
might be looked for accordingly. And I
do not scruple to say, that so triumphant
a machinery of oppression has never ex-
isted-no, not in the dungeons of the
Inquisition.

THE MORALITY OF EXPEDIENCY EM-
PLOYED BY ROMAN STATESMEN.

poisoned chalice came round to his own lips, and at a moment when its venom reached his heart of hearts.

SECRET SOCIETIES.

interest in the mystery that surrounds At a very early age commenced my own Secret Societies; the mystery being often double-1. what they do; and 2. what they do it for. Except for the premiaturity of this interest, in itself it was not surprising. Generally speaking, a child may not but every adult will, and must, with a feeling higher than vulgar curiif at all by nature meditative-regard, osity, small fraternities of men forming themselves as separate and inner vortices within the great vortex of society; comsignals not even seen; or, if seen, not unmunicating silently in broad daylight by derstood except among themselves; and connected by the link either of purposes not safe to be avowed, or by the grander link of awful truths which, merely to shelter themselves from the hostility of an age unprepared for their reception, are forced to retire, possibly for generations, behind thick curtains of secresy. To be hidden amidst crowds is sublime; to come down hidden amongst crowds from distant generations is doubly sublime.

The regular relief, furnished to Rome under the system of anarchy which Cæsar proposed to set aside, lay in seasonable murders. When a man grew potent in political annoyance, somebody was employed to murder him. Never was there a viler or better established murder than that of Claudius by Milo, or that of Carbo and others by Pompey, when a young man, acting as the tool of Sylla. Yet these, and the murders of the two Gracchi, nearly a century before, Cicero justifies as necessary. So little progress had law and sound political wisdom then made, that Cicero was not aware of any thing monstrous in pleading for a most villanous act that circumstances had made it expedient. Such a man is massacred, and Cicero appeals to all your experience that threw my attention upon The first incident in my own childish natural feelings of honour against the the possibility of such dark associations, murderers. Such another is massacred, on the opposite side, and Cicero thinks it lowed by a similar book of Professor Rowas the Abbé Baruel's book, soon folquite sufficient to reply, 'Oh, but I as- bison's, in demonstration of a regular consure you he was a bad man-I knew him spiracy throughout Europe for extermito be a bad man. And it was his duty nating Christianity. This I did not read, to be murdered, as the sole service he but I heard it read and frequently discould render the commonwealth.' again, in common with all his professional know that cancer meant a crab; and that So cussed. I had already Latin enough to brethren, Cicero never scruples to ascribe the disease so appalling to a child's imathe foulest lust and abominable propen- gination, which in English we call a cancer, sities to any public antagonist; never asking himself any question but this, of an indolent schirrous tumour, drew its as soon as it has passed beyond the state Will it look plausible? He personally name from the horrid claws, or spurs, or escaped such slanders, because, as a young roots, by which it connected itself with man, he was known to be rather poor, and very studious. But in later life a distant points, running underground, as horrible calumny of that very class settled dical extirpation. What I heard read it were, baffling detection, and defying raupon himself; and one peculiarly shock- aloud from the abbé gave that dreadful ing to his parental grief; for he was then sorrowing in extremity for the departed Christianity. This plot, by the abbe's cancerous character to the plot against lady who had been associated in the slan- account, stretched its horrid fangs, and der. Do I lend a moment's credit to the threw out its forerunning feelers and foul insinuation? No. But I see the tentacles, into many nations, and more equity of this retribution revolving upon than one century. That perplexed me, one who had so often slandered others in though also fascinating me by its granthe same malicious way. At last the deur. How men, living in distant pe

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