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coffers. The produce of the sale of his furniture, together with the arrears of rent due to him, were appropriated, by his direction, to pious and charitable purposes.

The calumnies with which he was assailed during the affair of Quietism were remembered only to the disadvantage of their authors. The public seem eventually to have regarded him as a man who was persecuted because he refused to be a persecutor; who had maintained, at all hazards, what he believed to be the cause of truth and justice; and had resigned his opinion only at that moment when conscience required the sacrifice.

Universal homage was paid by his contemporaries to his talents and genius. In the grasp and power of his intellect, and in the extent and completeness of his knowledge, none probably would have ventured to compare him with Bossuet; but in fertility and brilliancy of imagination, in a ready and dexterous use of his materials, and in that quality which his countrymen call esprit, he was supposed to have no superior. Bossuet himself said of him "Il brille d'esprit, il est tout esprit, il en a bien plus que moi."

It is obvious that his great work, the Adventures of Telemachus, was, in the first instance, indebted for some portion of its popularity to circumstances which had no connexion with its merits; but we cannot attribute to the same cause the continued hold which it has maintained on the public favour. Those who are ignorant of the interest which attended its first appearance still feel the charm of that beautiful language which is made the vehicle of the purest morality and the most ennobling sentiments. In the many editions through which it passed, between its first publication and the death of the author, Fenelon took no concern. Publicly he neither avowed nor disavowed the work, though he prepared corrections and additions for future editors. All obstacles to its open circulation were removed by the death of Louis; and in the year 1717, the Marquis de Fenelon, his great-nephew, presented to Louis XV. a new and correct edition, superintended by himself, from which the text of all subsequent editions has been taken.

The best authority for the life of Fenelon accessible to the public is the laborious work of his biographer, the Cardinal de Bausset, which is rendered particularly valuable by the great number of original documents which appear at the end of each volume. Its value would be increased if much of the theological discussion were omitted, and the four volumes compressed into three.

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CHRISTOPHER WREN, the most celebrated of British architects, was born at East Knoyle in Wiltshire, October 20, 1632. His father was Rector of that parish, Dean of Windsor, and Registrar of the Order of the Garter: his uncle, Dr. Matthew Wren, was successively Bishop of Hereford, of Norwich, and of Ely; and was one of the greatest sufferers for the royal cause during the Commonwealth, having been imprisoned nearly twenty years in the Tower without ever having been brought to trial. The political predilections of Wren's family may be sufficiently understood from these notices; but he himself, although his leaning probably was to the side which had been espoused by his father and his uncle, seems to have taken no active part in state affairs. The period of his long life comprehended a series of the mightiest national convulsions and changes that ever took place in England-the civil warthe overthrow of the monarchy-the domination of Cromwell-the Restoration-the Revolution-the union with Scotland-and, finally, the accession of a new family to the throne; but we do not find that in the high region of philosophy and art in which he moved, he ever allowed himself to be either withdrawn from or interrupted in his course by any of these great events of the outer world.

His health in his early years was extremely delicate. On this account he received the commencement of his education at home under the superintendence of his father and a domestic tutor. He was then sent to Westminster School, over which the celebrated Busby had just come to preside. The only memorial which we possess of Wren's schoolboy days, is a dedication in Latin verse, addressed by him to his father in his thirteenth year, of an astronomical machine which he had invented, and which seems from his description to have been a sort of apparatus for representing the celestial motions, such as we

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now call an orrery. His genius is also stated to have displayed itself at this early age in other mechanical contrivances.

In 1646 he was sent to Oxford, and entered as a gentleman commoner at Wadham College. Of his academical life we can say little more than that it confirmed the promise of his early proficiency. He was especially distinguished by his mathematical acquirements, and gained the notice and acquaintance of many of the most learned and influential persons belonging to the university. Several short treatises and mechanical inventions are assigned to this period of his life: but as these have long ceased to interest any but curious inquirers into the history of literature or science, we can only indicate their existence, and refer to other and more comprehensive works. In 1650 Wren graduated as Bachelor of Arts. He was elected Fellow of All Souls on the 2d of November, 1653, and took the degree of Master of Arts on the 12th of December in the same year. Of the subjects which engaged his active and versatile mind at this time, one of the chief was the science of Anatomy; and he is, on apparently good grounds, thought to have first suggested and tried the interesting experiment of injecting liquids of various kinds into the veins of living animals, a process of surgery, which, applied to the transfusion of healthy blood into a morbid or deficient circulation, has been revived, not without some promise of important results, in our own day. Another subject which attracted much of his attention was the Barometer; but he has no claim whatever, either to the invention of that instrument, or to the detection of the great principle of physics, of which it is an exemplification. The notion which has been taken up of his right to supplant the illustrious Torricelli here, has arisen merely from mistaking the question with regard to the causes of the fluctuations in the height of the barometrical column, while the instrument continues in the same place, for the entirely different question as to the cause why the fluid remains suspended at all; about which, since the celebrated experiments of Pascal, published in 1647, there never has been any controversy. It was the former phenomenon only which was attributed by some to the influence of the moon, and which Wren and many of his contemporaries exercised their ingenuity, as many of their successors have done, in endeavouring to explain.

In carrying on these investigations and experiments, Wren's diligence was stimulated and assisted by his having been admitted a member, about this period, of that celebrated association of philosophical inquirers, out of whose meetings, begun some years before, eventually arose the Royal Society. But, like several others of the more eminent

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