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Garcias," interrupted he, "if I am not mistaken, was chaplain in a convent of nuns, and has been brought into the ecclesiastical court as a delinquent. I recollect some very heavy charges which have been sent me against him. His morals are not the most exemplary." "May it please your grace," interrupted I, in my turn, “it is not for me to justify him in all points; but I know that he has enemies. He maintains that the authors of the informations you have received are more bent on doing him an ill office than on vindicating the purity of religion." "That very possibly may be the case," replied the archbishop; "there are a great many firebrands in the world. Besides, though we should take it for granted that his conduct has not always been above suspicion, he may have repented of his sins; in short, the mercies of heaven are infinite, however heinous our transgressions. Bring that licentiate before me; I take off his suspension.'

Thus it is that men of the most austere character descend from their altitudes, when interest or a favorite whim reduces them to the level of the frail. The archbishop granted, without a struggle, to the empty vanity of having his works well copied, what he had refused to the most respectable applications. I carried the news with all possible expedition to the steward, who communicated it to his friend Garcias. That licentiate, on the following day, came to return me thanks commensurate with the favor obtained. I presented him to my master, who contented himself with giving him a slight reprimand, and put the homilies into his hand, to copy them out fair. Garcias performed the task so satisfactorily, that he was reinstated in the cure of souls, and was afterwards preferred to the living of Gabia, a large market town in the neighborhood of Grenada.

THE ARCHBISHOP IS AFFLICTED WITH A STROKE OF APOPLEXY. How GIL BLAS GETS INTO A DILEMMA, AND

HOW HE GETS OUT.

While I was thus rendering myself a blessing first to one and then to the other, Don Ferdinand de Leyva was making his arrangements for leaving Grenada. I called on that nobleman before his departure, to thank him once more for the advantageous post he had procured me. My expressions of satisfaction were so lively, that he said, "My dear Gil Blas, I

am delighted to find you in such good humor with my uncle the archbishop." "I am absolutely in love with him,” answered I. "His goodness to me has been such as I can never sufficiently acknowledge. Less than my present happiness could never have made me amends for being at so great a distance from Don Cæsar and his son." "I am persuaded," replied he, "that they are both of them equally chagrined at having lost you. But possibly you are not separated forever; fortune may some day bring you together again." I could not hear such an idea started without being moved by it. My sighs would find vent; and I felt at that moment so strong an affection for Don Alphonso, that I could willingly have turned my back on the archbishop and all the fine prospects that were opening to me, and have gone back to the castle of Leyva, had but a mortification taken place in the back of the scarecrow which had frightened me away. Don Ferdinand was not insensible to the emotions that agitated me, and felt himself so much obliged by them, that he took his leave with the assurance of the whole family always taking an anxious interest in my fate.

Two months after this worthy gentleman had left us, in the luxuriant harvest of my highest favor, a lowering storm came suddenly over the episcopal palace; the archbishop had a stroke of apoplexy. By dint of immediate applications and good nursing, in a few days there was no bodily appearance of disease remaining. But his reverend intellects did not so easily recover from their lethargy. I could not help observing it to myself in the very first discourse that he composed. Yet there was not such a wide gap between the merits of the present and the former ones, as to warrant the inference that the sun of oratory was many degrees advanced in its post-meridian course. A second homily was worth waiting for; because that would clearly determine the line of my conduct. Alas, and well a day! when that second homily came, it was a knockdown argument. Sometimes the good prelate moved forward, and sometimes he moved backwards; sometimes he mounted up into the garret, and sometimes dipped down into the cellar. It was a composition of more sound than meaning, something like a superannuated schoolmaster's theme, when he attempts to give his boys more sense than he possesses of his own, or like a capuchin's sermon, which only scatters a few artificial flowers of paltry rhetoric over a barren desert of doctrine.

I was not the only person whom the alteration struck. The

audience at large, when he delivered it, as if they too had been pledged to watch the advances of dotage, said to one another in a whisper all round the church, "Here is a sermon, with symptoms of apoplexy in every paragraph." "Come, my good Coryphæus of the public taste in homilies," said I then to myself, "prepare to do your office. You see that my lord archbishop is going very fast-you ought to warn him of it, not only as his bosom friend, on whose sincerity he relies, but lest some blunt fellow should anticipate you, and bolt out the truth in an offensive manner. In that case you know the consequence; you would be struck out of his will, where no doubt you have a more convertible bequest than the licentiate Sedillo's library."

But as reason, like Janus, looks at things with two faces, I began to consider the other side of the question; the hint seemed difficult to wrap up so as to make it palatable. Authors in general are stark mad on the subject of their own works, and such an author might be more testy than the common herd of the irritable race; but that suspicion seemed illiberal on my part, for it was impossible that my freedom should be taken amiss, when it had been forced upon me by so positive an injunction. Add to this that I reckoned upon handling the subject skillfully, and cramming discretion down his throat like a high-seasoned epicurean dish. After all my pro and con, finding that I risked more by keeping silence than by breaking it, I determined to venture on the delicate duty of speaking my mind.

Now there was but one difficulty; a difficulty indeed! how to open the business. Luckily the orator himself extricated me from that embarrassment, by asking what they said of him in the world at large, and whether people were tolerably well pleased with his last discourse. I answered that there could be but one opinion about his homilies; but that it should seem as if the last had not quite struck home to the hearts of the audience, like those which had gone before. "Do you really mean what you say, my friend?" replied he, with a sort of wrig gling surprise. "Then my congregation are more in the temper of Aristarchus than of Longinus!" "No, may it please your grace," rejoined I, "quite the contrary. Performances of that order are above the reach of vulgar criticism: there is not a soul but expects to be saved by their influence. Nevertheless, since you have made it my duty to be sincere and unreserved, I shall take the liberty of just stating that your last discourse is

not written with quite the overpowering eloquence and conclu. sive argument of your former ones. Does not your grace feel just as I do on the subject?"

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This ignorant and stupid frankness of mine completely blanched my master's cheek; but he forced a fretful smile, and said, "Then, good Master Gil Blas, that piece does not exactly hit your fancy?" "I did not mean to say that, your grace,' interrupted I, looking very foolish. "It is far superior to what any one else could produce, though a little below par with respect to your own works in general." "I know what you mean," replied he. "You think I am going downhill, do not you? Out with it at once. It is your opinion that it is time for me to think of retiring?" "I should never have had the presumption," said I, “to deliver myself with so little reserve, if it had not been your grace's express command. I act in entire obedience to your grace's orders; and I most obsequiously implore your grace not to take offense at my boldness." "I were unfit to live in a Christian land!" interrupted he, with stammering impatience, "I were unfit to live in a Christian land if I liked you the less for such a Christian virtue as sincerity. A man who does not love sincerity sets his face against the distinguishing mark between a friend and a flatterer. I should have given you infinite credit for speaking what you thought, if you had thought anything that deserved to be spoken. I have been finely taken in by your outside show of cleverness, without any solid foundation of sober judgment !"

Though completely unhorsed, and at the enemy's mercy, I wanted to make terms of decent capitulation, and to go unmolested into winter quarters; but let those who think to appease an exasperated author, and especially an author whose ear has been long attuned to the music of his own praises, take warning by my fate. "Let us talk no more on the subject, my very young friend," said he. "You are as yet scarcely in the rudiments of good taste, and utterly incompetent to distinguish between gold and tinsel. You are yet to learn that I never in all my life composed a finer homily than that unfortunate one which had not the honor of your approbation. The immortal part of me, by the blessing of heaven on me and my congregation, is less weighed down by human infirmity than when the flesh was stronger. We all grow wiser as we grow older, and I shall in future select the people about me with more caution; nor submit the castigation of my works but to a much abler

critic than yourself. Get about your business!" pursued he, giving me an angry shove by the shoulders out of his closet; "go and tell my treasurer to pay you a hundred ducats, and take my priestly blessing in addition to that sum. God speed you, good Gil Blas! I heartily pray that you may do well in the world! There is nothing to stand in your way, but the want of a little better taste."

NATURE OF THE SOUL.

BY LEIBNITZ.

(From the "Monadology.”)

[GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNITZ, one of the world's great mathematicians and metaphysicians, a universal genius, was born 1646 at Leipsic, where his father was professor of philosophy. A prodigy of precocious learning, he entered Leipsic University at fifteen; read deeply there and always in ancient and modern history and philosophy; took a year's course in jurisprudence at Jena; and Leipsic refusing an LL.D. on the ground of his youth, Altdorf gave it on the same thesis, "Perplexing Cases in Law." At Nuremberg he sought admission out of curiosity to the pretended Rosicrucian Society, by a letter of gibberish which so impressed them that they made him secretary. Going to Frankfort in 1667, he wrote a paper on legal education which attracted the notice of the Archbishop-Elector of Mainz, who employed him as a mediator to attempt the reunion of Catholics and Protestants. In 1672 he went to Paris to induce Louis XIV. to invade Egypt, a project on which he had written a book; and remained there four years, also visiting England, corresponding with noted scholars, inventing a calculating machine, and in 1676 the Differential Calculus. In 1673 the archbishop died, and after seeking diplomatic employment, Leibnitz became and remained till death librarian to the Duke of Brunswick at Hanover. In 1703 he wrote "New Essays on the Human Understanding"; in 1710 the "Theodicy"; in 1714 the "Monadology"; and minor works from time to time. He strove ardently also to found academies all over Europe. He died in 1716. His metaphysical system - of monads, preëstablished harmony, sufficient reason, and that this world is the best of compossible worlds, so that "whatever is, is right" -was widely influential, and led to the philosophic optimism ridiculed by Voltaire in "Candide."]

THE organic body of each living being is a kind of divine machine or natural automaton, which infinitely surpasses all artificial automata. For a machine made by the skill of man is not a machine in each of its parts. For instance, the tooth of a brass wheel has parts or fragments which for us are not artificial products, and which do not have the special characteristics of the machine, for they give no indication of the use for which the wheel was intended. But the machines of nature,

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