are probably few who have profoundly investigated the evidences of truth, who have not felt themselves, for a moment at least, and sometimes for a yet longer space, as if on the verge of universal scepticism, and about to be driven forth without star or compass, on a boundless ocean of doubt and perplexity, so these states of feeling are peculiarly apt to infest the higher order of minds. For if, on the one hand, these can best discern and estimate the evidence which proves any truth, they, on the other, can see most clearly and feel most strongly the nature and extent of the objections which oppose it; while they are, at the same time, just as liable as the vulgar to the disturbing influences already adverted to. This liability is of course doubled when its subject, as in the case of Pascal, labors under the disadvantage of a gloomy temperament."* used mettre à nu sur sa chair, redoubling at times with his elbow la violence des piqûres-a practice which seemed to him so useful, that he continued it until his death, through all those douleurs continuelles which agonized his latter days; indeed the last four years of his life were but one continuelle langueur.* There was the regimen he planned out for himself and practised with such punctilious rigort-avoiding whatever pleased his palate, and mortifying the sense of taste with a sort of malicious ingenuity. Some of his critics trace all this to the accident which happened to him in 1654, when he narrowly escaped death near the Pont de Neuilly, while driving out in a coach-and-four-the horses taking fright, and the carriage being upset by the river-side. His imagination appears to have then received a shock from which it never recovered. From that day forth, Pascal believed he saw a gulf opened at his very feet. But the true gulf, says Aimé-Martin, in which his reason was swallowed up, was doubt respecting all those metaphysical questions which employ superior minds-an awful doubt, which only Christianity in its posi tive and practical form can dispel. And referring to the habit ascribed to Pascal, carrying under his clothes a symbol made up of mystical terms, the same writer, following a remark of Villemain's, observes that this powerful mind had fallen back genius of the Arabian Nights, who rises from the upon these superstitious practices, in order little bottle in which he had been imprisoned, in the to take yet farther flight from une effrayante shape of a thin smoke, which finally assumes gigan- incertitude. The imaginary precipice which, tic outlines, and towers to the skies, these flimsy objections dilate into monstrous dimensions, and fill ever since that unhappy accident, Pascal's the whole sphere of mental vision. The arguments enfeebled senses believed they saw, was by which we have been accustomed to combat them but the faint image of that abyss of doubt seem to have vanished, or if they appear at all, look which terrified his inmost soul. In this diminished in force and vividness. If we may pursue state "nothing but piety and prayer savthe allusion we have just made, we even wondered him from shoreless and bottomless how such mighty forms should ever have been compressed into so narrow a space."-Essays by Henry Rogers. What Bishop Hurd calls the "sombrous fanatic air" peculiar to Pascal, was indeed the result in large measure-how large it is not for us to say-of his physical idiosyncrasy, which was morbid and infirm in a highly exceptional degree. Over-study and undue austerities made inroads on his originally fragile constitution. There was the ceinture de fer pleine de pointes, which, his sister tells us, he * Essays by Henry Rogers. The bishop thus contrasts the Pensées with Addison's uncompleted treatise on the Christian Religion: "Thus, our Addison, like the amirable Pascal, closed his valuable life in meditating a defence of the Christian Religion. One is not surprised to find this agreement in the views of two such men; the one the sublimest genius, and the other the most cultivated, of modern times. But there is this lamented difference in their story. The spirit of Jansenism, falling on a temper naturally scrupulous, and a constitution always infirm, threw a sombrous fanatic air on Pascal's religious speculations, as it did on his life while our happier countryman, by the benefit of better health and juster principles, maintained a constant sobriety in the conduct of each."HURD'S Notes on Addison, vol. v. scepticism." There is ground for the opinion that his unfinished work on the * "Vie de Pascal," par Madame Périer, sa sœur. "Had that incomparable person," says the Spectator, of Monsieur Paschal, "been a little more indulgent to himself in this point [of health], the world might have enjoyed him much longer; whereas, through too great an application to his studies in his youth, he contracted that ill habit of body, which, after a tedious sickness, carried him off in the for tieth year of his age: and the whole history we have of his life until that time, is but one continued account of the behaviour of a noble soul struggling under innumerable pains and distempers."-Spectator, No. CXVI. See Aimé-Martin's Notes on Pascal's life and works. evidences of Christianity, seems to have been intended to convince himself, quite as much as to convince others. The sixteenth century had engendered, as Sainte-Beuve remarks,* a considerable number of incrédules; for the most part of a pagan type-of whom the most agreeable representative is Montaigne-a race which we see continued in Charron, La Mothe, Le Vayer, and Gabriel Naudé.. But these learned sceptics, as well as such libertine gens d'esprit et du monde as Théophile or Des Barreaux, took things little to heart: there is no appearance about them of that profound inquietude which attests a lofty moral nature, and an order of intellect marked with the seal of the archangel; these are not, in short, to speak in the style of Plato, royal natures. But Pascal-he is of the higher, elder, nobler race; on his heart and on his brow, there is more than one sign: "c'est un des plus nobles mortels, mais 'malade, et il veut guérir." And he it is that first introduces into the defence of religion, the ardor, anguish, and grand melancholy which others, of a later day, have carried to the side of scepticism. He is of those who, to use his own pregnant phrase, cherchent en gémissant. Pascal is described by a recent critic,t as one who, adding to immense genius a child-like tenderness of heart and purity of conduct, was peculiarly liable to the tremendous doubts and fears forced on us all by the phenomena of man and the universe: doubts and fears which he felt, at once, with all the freshness of infancy, and with all the force of a melancholy manto solve them-asking this science and hood. He is described as trying in vain that philosophy to explain, and getting no reply. "Height and depth had said, 'Not in us.' The universe of stars was cold, dead, and tongueless. He felt tertified at, not instructed by it. He said, "The eternal silence of those infinite spaces affrights me." " And then he is described as turning for a solution from the mysterious materialism of the heavenly bodies to Man, and finding in him his doubts driven to contradiction and despair-so perplexed a puzzle seemed Man Essay on Pascal, in the Cauteries du Lundi, t. iv. See also, on the subject of Pascal, the same writer's essays in the third volume of the Portraits contemporains et divers, and in the Derniers Portraits littéraires. In the Eclectic Review. to this "anxious inquirer," so disorderly a chaos. But religion comes in: and the investigator is guided to a twofold, and no longer a one-sided, study of Man: he studies him, by turns, in his relation to the finite and the infinite, "par rapport à l'atome et par rapport à l'immensité du ciel," and exhibits him alternately great and little, as being suspended between two infinites, between two abysses. He expresses the triumph of Mind over Matter." He cries out to this proud process of developing matter, this wondrous something sweltering out suns in its progress: Thou mayest do thy pleasure on me, thou mayest crush me, but I shall know thou art crushing me, whilst thou art crushing blindly. I should be conscious of the defeat; thou wouldst not be conscious of the victory.' Bold, certainly, was the challenge of this little piece of inspired humanity, this frail, slender, invalid, but divinely gifted man, to the enormous mass of uninspired and uninstructive matter amid which he lived. He did not believe in law, life, or blind mechanism, as the all-in-all of the system of things. He believed rather in Tennyson's Second Voice "A little whisper breathing low, I may not speak of what I know." "Voilà Pascal," exclaims M. Cuvillier Fleury, in one of his citations of the classics of France: "voilà Pascal, penseur sublime, comme l'abime est sublime d'inconnu; ce livre ferait des fous ou des moines."* Pascal himself must to some appear third part fou (since the carriage of Vauvenargues with the very distinct mishap in 1654) and third part moine. M. Villemain, comparing the scepticism grade of it from which Pascal suffered, observes, that although we sometimes fancy we hear in the Pensées the cry of torment wrung from a quite similar kind of doubt, Pascal could counterbalance his form of it by the tradition of his age, by the habits of his life, by the workings of his mind, and by his own unimpaired will to believe. Had Pascal lived in another cumstances, who can tell into what shape age, and surrounded by a new set of cirhis doubts might have developed themselves? for his epoch was one of those in which, as St. Marc Girardin says, men *Cuv. Fleury: "Portraits politiques et révolutionnaires," t. i. Villemain: "Cours de littérature française,” t. ii. "Of one accustomed to desires that feed love science for her own sake, and when | And, despite the force and pressure, inmeditation has no other aim than the tellectually, of Pascal's "obstinate quesdevelopment of thought, and when every tionings," who shall say, of a soul so abkind of intellectual exercise is rife, except sorbed in things unseen, of one who walkthat which makes application of ideas to ed by faith and not by sight, things: "ce qui prête à la pensée une portée menaçante, c'est l'application qu'elle a: donnez une intention aux spéculations du XVIIe siècle, Pascal sera presque un impie, et Corneille un républicain."* But equally against philosophy, and the evidence of facts, and the spirit of religion, is the inference whether coming from the professed unbeliever, or from what the National Review calls the Hard Church party-that because Pascal doubted as he did, he cannot be said to have believed, in any true and valid sense. Let a living bishop of the English Church be heard and answered first: "Did never thorns thy path beset? that in his heart of hearts, he was not, deeply and very really, amid all the clouds and shadows of speculative unrest, not only a believer, but 66 one in whom persuasion and belief Had ripened into faith, and faith become A passionate intuition ?”* To Pascal, indeed, may be-and already by one of his most appreciating countrymen has been-applied what the late Alexandre Vinet strikingly said of a contemporary thinker: "Le scepticisme, par mille endroits, cherchait à pénétrer son esprit; mais sa foi se fortifait, grandissait imperturbablement parmi les orages de sa pensée. On peut le dire, le doute et *Saint Marc Girardin: "Essais de Littérature et la foi vivante, l'un passager, l'autre imde Morale," t. i. + Bishop Hinds, (of Norwich.) Equivalent with the bishop's "charge" on this momentous topic, is the argument pursued in Mr. Henry Rogers's Essay on Pascal: "So little inconsistent with a habit of intelligent faith are such transient evasions of doubt, or such diminished perceptions of the evidence of truth, that it may even be said that it is only those who have in some measure experienced them, who can be said, in the highest sense, to believe at all. He who has never had a doubt [we italicize this all but verbal identity with the bishop's own expression], who believes what he believes for reasons which he thinks as irrefragable (if that be possible) as those of a mathematical demonstration, ought not to be said so much to believe as to know; his belief is to him knowledge, and his mind stands in the same relation to it, however erroneous and absurd that belief may be. It is rather he whose faith is exercised-not indeed without his reason, but without the full satisfaction of his reason-with a knowledge and appreciation of formidable objections-it is this man who may most truly be said intelligently to believe." The value of Professor Rogers's essay on the "Genius and Writings of Pascal," has been significantly recognized in France, by its repeated translation in one instance by M Faugère, the distinguished editor of the Pensées. It is cited as un remarquable article dans la Revue d'Edimbourg" by M. Sainte-Beuve, in one of that critic's many 66 muable, naquirent pour lui le même jour; comme si Dieu, en laissant l'ennemi pratiquer des brèches dans les ouvrages extérieurs, avait voulu munir le cœur de la place d'un inexpugnable rempart." The spirit of this, if not the letter, comes very near the truth as to Pascal's "scepticism;" nearer, surely, much nearer, than Victor Cousin's view of the case, according to which Pascal's religion is, at the best, a bitter fruit, reared in a region desolated by doubt, under the withering breath of despair. études devoted to the character and works of Blaise * Wordsworth: "The Excursion." Book IV. From the Dublin University Magazine. BORDER LANDS OF SPAIN AND FRANCE.* Pyrenees, has for a thousand years contrived to maintain its independence and integrity, alike against France and Spain. We allude to the republic of Andorre. THERE are few things that mark more | republic which in the fastnesses of the emphatically the progress of the age than the mass of works of travel which issues from the press. The facilities of locomotion afford to men the means, in the intervals of study or professional occupation, The author of the volume under our or of the engrossments of trade specula- consideration, whoever he be-for he does tions, during a summer vacation, or a not affix his name-is a man of the right winter pause in business, to leave home stuff to make travellers of-sagacious, and run half over the world in the space reflective, and quick-sighted; he has an of a few weeks; and that mightiest of all eye for natural beauties, a heart for the engines of civilization and knowledge-contemplation of humanity, and a mind the printing-press-is ever ready to trans- ready to philosophize upon the various fer the notes of the tourist to the page of phases of society through which he passes. the publisher, and thence to the world at Such a man can never travel from Dan to large. It is somewhat amusing to take Beersheba, and cry, "All is barren." up a publisher's list of the present day, and compare it with the issue of books of all kinds, and especially books of travel, some twenty years ago. One would be led to believe from the comparison that for one who travelled in those days, a hundred travel now; and that of those who travel, ten now give the world the benefit of their experience, for one that did so then. In fact, steam now does for the body what the electric current does for thought, and mankind is becoming a peregrinating animal. The number of such works that lie before us is not a little perplexing. It seems to us as if we were diurnally called upon to perform the voyage of the world, and in our desperation we sometimes feel an insane desire to ignore the subject altogether, and disbelieve the locomotive faculties of humanity. In our perplexity, the other day, we selected from a mass of such books lying before us a work which had two especial commendations externally; it was in one volume, and that volume was of reasonable dimensions; and so we addressed ourselves to the "Border Lands of Spain and France," more especially as the book promised us some account of that singular *Border Lands of Spain and France. London: Chapman and Hall, 1856. Through a great portion of our author's autumn tour we do not mean to conduct our readers. The paths about the baths of the Pyrenees are as beaten and as well known as the highways that lead to Homburg or Spa or Weisbaden-nay, we had almost said, as the thoroughfares of Holborn or Ludgate Hill. There you meet daily the same men of broken-down fortunes and broken-down frames-adventurers and invalids-fanfarons and far-nientis, hawks and pigeons, pluckers and plucked, saints and sinners, wise men and fools, that you meet at every congregation of the human species, which by some mysterious law of our nature, are always drawn together around springs of medicinal water and strands for sea bathing. In the Basque provinces there is much to engage the attention of a thoughtful man; they are interesting as having been the haunt of a political liberty sanctioned by immemorial tradition, and now almost unknown to the races of Europe. We have in this volume some very intelligent observations upon the religious and political characteristics of the people of these provinces-their habits of life, and social peculiarities-which will alternately amuse and surprise an inhabitant of the British islands. The author gives us these concluding observations: "The nearest existing example, perhaps, to the | scattered in the villages and valleys of the privileges of the Basques, is to be found in the Pyrenees, but still a distinct race. In modern Constitution of Servia. The suzerainete past times proscribed by the church and of the Porte, and that of the Escurial, pro- the state, debarred by the social prejudice ceed alike from the imperfect rule and consequently imperfect centralization, of a com- of their neighbors from the enjoyments paratively modern or dominant race or dy- and privileges which other Christian and nasty. The central power forms, in either, free subjects were entitled to, their origin the protector of the local government from and history, even at this day involved in external aggression; and the local government, deep obscurity and uncertainty, this sinin turn, becomes, in either, its own protector gular people present a problem which has against the central power. If national rights engrossed the attention and perplexed the are more clearly defined in Servia, they are more ancient and venerable in the Basque provinces. speculations of philosophers. The princiIt is only by a jealous maintenance of tradition- pal settlements of the Cagots, in the neighary privileges, in respect of their central govern- borhood of Bagneres, are Montgaillard ment, that insignificant nationalities can ensure and Campain, and both these villages the the durability of their political rights; as it is author visited. Several theories still obonly by a recognition of the suzerainete of tain with regard to the origin of the that central government, that they can ensure Cagots. Some hold that they are the their political rights; in respect of external descendants of the Goths who invaded aggression. And so uniform is man's political nature in all periods of the world, that pro- Aquitaine in the fifth century, and of the tectorial rights are essential to the security of survivors of those who were defeated by small communities in this civilized age, as when Clovis in the battle of Vanillé. Others they were devised in counterpoise to the violence again allege that they are sprung from of feudal times." the remnant of the Arabs defeated by Charles Martel at Poictiers, in the eighth century. A third, that they owe their origin to the Albigenses who were dispersed in the twelfth century. But besides these conjectures there are not wanting those who insist on their descent from the leprous Christians who returned from the Crusades, or even from the Jews. All these historical positions the author of the book before us investigates and combats with much learning and considerable plausibility, substituting finally his own theory in their place. The condition of the Čagots is, however, very different from what it was some generations since. This in a great degree arises, we should imagine; from a breaking up, by frequent intermarriages with their neighbors, of that isolation which hemmed them in, as well as by the relaxation of that religious intolerance by which they were proscribed. Some idea of the harsh ecclesiastical discipline to which, as a heretical, and spiritually, if not physically, leprous race, they were subjected, will be found from the following statement of their condition at Montgaillard: Having visited the Bearnais, including the lowlanders and the mountaineers of the Eastern district of the Basses Pyrenees, the author gives us a very lively sketch of the language, manners, and superstitions of this primitive people. The dialect is a compound of Latin and Teutonic, without the slightest admixture of French, Spanish, or any other modern tongue to aid the stranger in his attempt to become intelligi ble. Nevertheless our traveller essayed to learn somewhat-with what success let him relate: "I passed an old ruined tower, built on a knoll, guarding the ravine on which it stood, and apparently the work of the Plantagenets. Beside it was an old Béarnais woman, (nearly coeval with the ruin,) gathering up sticks or stones, and generally seeking what she might devour. I asked her in French the legend of the place, intending to believe it, if not violently opposed to all internal probability. She answered me in Béarnais, with, very likely, a begging imposition. Neither understood the other; and there was as complete a confusion of tongues before the tower as before the tower of Babel!" Amongst the people who inhabit the border lands of Spain and France, there are few who, in their national and social characteristics, are objects of greater interest and research for the antiquary or the historian than those who are known by the name of Cagots, and who are "The Cagots had been invariably denied the rights of worship and of sepulture with other Christians. A distinct portion of the churchyard had been assigned to them; and here, wherever certain families could be still recognized as distinctively Cagots, they were still interred. This race, although not forbidden from attending the services of the Church, were |