y gay Paris." This, however, was thirty
years ago, when Bennett was almost as French as Voltaire. He was a
Frenchman also in this: though discarding, in his youth, the doctrines
of his Church, and laughing them to scorn in early manhood, he still
maintained a kind of connection with the Catholic religion. The whole
of his power as a writer consists in his detection of the evil in
things that are good, and of the falsehood in things that are true,
and of the ridiculous in things that are important. He began with the
Roman Catholic Church,--"the holy Roman Catholic Church," as he once
styled it,--adding in a parenthesis, "all of us Catholics are devilish
holy." Another French indication is, that his early tastes were
romantic literature _and_ political economy,--a conjunction very
common in France from the days of the "philosophers" to the present
time. During our times of financial collapse, we have noticed, among
the nonsense which he daily poured forth, some gleams of a superior
understanding of the fundamental laws of finance. He appears to have
understood 1837 and 1857 better than most of his contemporaries.

In a Catholic seminary he acquired the rudiments of knowledge, and
advanced so far as to read Virgil. He also picked up a little French
and Spanish in early life. The real instructors of his mind were
Napoleon, Byron, and Scott. It was their fame, however, as much as
their works, that attracted and dazzled him. It is a strange thing,
but true, that one of the strongest desires of one of the least
reputable of living men was, and is, to be admired and held in lasting
honor by his fellow-men. Nor has he now the least doubt that he
deserves their admiration, and will have it. In 1817, an edition of
Franklin's Autobiography was issued in Scotland. It was his perusal of
that little book that first directed his thoughts toward America, and
which finally decided him to try his fortune in the New World. In May,
1819, being then about twenty years of age, he landed at Halifax, with
less than five pounds in his purse, without a friend on the Western
Continent, and knowing no vocation except that of book-keeper.

Between his landing at Halifax and the appearance of the first number
of the Herald sixteen years elapsed; during most of which he was a
very poor, laborious, under-valued, roving writer for the daily press.
At Halifax, he gave lessons in book-keeping for a few weeks, with
little profit, then made his way along t