NE day," says a writer on Bibliomania, referring to the present most extraordi

nary volume, to which some readers may

for the first time be introduced,-" One

It

day M. Latour picked up at a stall in Paris a copy of Thomas à Kempis, de Imitatione Christi, with the autograph of Jean Jacques Rousseau on the title-page. contained only two marginal notes, neither of them of much interest. But it had evidently been read with extraordinary care, and more than half the book was underlined with pencil. It bore marks, too, of having been the constant pocket companion of the unhappy misanthrope. It had been read in the evenings, for there were drops of grease from the candle on its pages; and it had accompanied him in his country walks, for there were dried flowers stuck here and there between the leaves. It

became of interest to ascertain at what period of Rousseau's life he had thus given himself up to the study of the Imitatio; and M. de Latour, after much unsuccessful inquiry, was at last able to get some light on the point. In a letter to a Paris bookseller, written from Motiers de Travers, in January, 1763, the following sentence was found: Voici des articles que je vous prie de joindre à votre premier envoi : Pensées de Pascal, Euvres de La Bruyère, Imitation de Jésus-Christ, Latin.' The fact then was plain that he had begun to make his acquaintance with A Kempis shortly after he had finished his principal works, about the time he had received, through the kindness of Marshal Keith, a sort of temporary asylum in the Val de Travers, in Neufchâtel, and when those outcries and persecutions against him had commenced which by-and-bye seem to have driven him into a state of mind little removed from insanity." The writer would have us consider that it is surely most curious and interesting to contemplate Rousseau, the very high priest of a contrary faith, the prime doubter, sceptic, and leader of the sensuous religion of the passions, as one who pored over the pages of him who wrote in boldest way against the expression of the flesh, and who was for ever urging the utmost subjection of the body to the spirit. Is it not a great proof of the universality of this book that Rousseau should have so thoroughly admired it as to make it the

companion of his night watchings and of his morning walks? Again, if any man regarded Jean Jacques Rousseau with a hearty dislike, the dislike of the Christian for the chief sceptic, of the pure and manly mind for that which was considered sensual and unclean, it was Samuel Taylor Coleridge; he and the author of the "Confessions" are the two opposite poles of thought, and yet the two minds, so varied in their powers, so opposed in their ideas of morality, in their works and faith, met upon the common ground of admiration for the work now before the reader.

Let us again take two different men-men different in country, age, fashion of thought, faith, profession, practice, and work. Molière, the great comic dramatist of France, the exposer of religious hypocrisy, and the most creative genius for the stage that his country has produced, in many a moment of his unhappy life consoled himself with the touching passages of À Kempis; while his great rival in tragedy, Corneille, absolutely was so enamoured of the book that he published a great portion of it clothed in good rhyme, "Extraits mises en Vers par P. Corneille." The contrast which is about to be drawn would, however, not lie so much between the latter and the representative man about to be cited, as between the former and John Wesley. Yes, the great leader of Methodism, the staunch opponent of the Roman Church, may be quoted as one of the disciples of the Imitatio. Before Wesley

left England on his enthusiastic mission to America he put forth, says Robert Southey, "a corrected version of Thomas à Kempis, and translated a preface which had not appeared before in any English edition." When Wesley, with his twenty-six Moravians, stood on the deck of the little vessel, surrounded with rough sailors, poor emigrants, and a praying brotherhood, of whose noble calmness in all privations, in the darkness and in the storm, he has told us; he doubtless called to mind many of the consolatory and pathetic sentences of the author who had endeavoured to make all his readers become "Like unto Christ."

A book which can interest and awaken minds so varied and opposed, and which has been throughout ages the consolation of men of the greatest genius as well as of those of the smallest capacity and the lowest ambition, must be a work of priceless value. But its lessons are of greater value still. "This book," said Leibnitz, " is one of the most excellent treatises which have been composed. Happy is he who puts its contents into practice, and is not satisfied with merely admiring them." The simplicity of the book is such that, at first, it is absolutely uninviting. The author never beats about the bush: he goes at once to the point, and tells us what to do. He has no compromises to offer; he does not flatter the human pride of his reader; he tells man how base he is. Hence his mysticism, if indeed he has any, is to