ays never
permitted him to learn any thing except by doing two things at
once. Every form of pleasure he loved with a violent avidity, and
all this with a pride and a haughtiness impossible to describe;
dangerously wise, moreover, to judge of men and things, and to
detect the weak point in a train of reasoning, and to reason
himself more cogently and more profoundly than his teachers. But at
the same time, as soon as his passion was spent, reason resumed
her sway; he felt his faults, he acknowledged them, and sometimes
with such chagrin that his rage was rekindled. A mind lively,
alert, penetrating, stiffening itself against obstacles, excelling
literally in every thing. The prodigy is, that in a very short time
piety and grace made of him a different being, and transformed
faults so numerous and so formidable into virtues exactly opposite.

St. Simon attributes to Fenelon "every virtue under heaven;" but his way
was to give to God rather than to man the praise of the remarkable
change which, during Fenelon's charge of the Duke of Burgundy, came over
the character of the prince.

The grandfather survived the grandson; and it was never put to the stern
proof of historical experiment, whether Fenelon had indeed turned out
one Bourbon entirely different from all the other members, earlier or
later, of that royal line.

Before, however, the Duke of Burgundy was thus snatched away from the
perilous prospect of a throne, his beloved teacher was parted from him,
not indeed by death, but by what, to the archbishop's susceptible and
suffering spirit, was worse than death,--by "disgrace." The disgrace was
such as has ever since engaged for its subject the interest, the
sympathy, and the admiration, of mankind. Fenelon lost the royal favor.
That was all,--for the present,--but that was much. He was banished from
court, and he ceased to be preceptor to the Duke of Burgundy. The king,
in signal severity, used his own hand to strike Fenelon's name from the
list of the household of his grandson and heir. The archbishop--for
Fenelon had previously been made archbishop of Cambray--returned into
his diocese as into an exile. But his cup of humiliation was by no means
full. Bossuet will stain his own glory by following his exiled former
pupil and friend, with hostile pontifical rage, to crush him in his
retreat.

The occasion was a woman, a woman with the charm of genius