Note 339 — Chapter II

Upham, vol. ii. pp. 3, &c. We find among these persons of rank a religion of some vitality—no court-fashion merely. It was to the Introduction à la Vie Dévote (1608) of St. Francis de Sales that Romanism was indebted for such hold as it really had on the upper classes. None of the great ecclesiastical writers of France—not even that darling of the fifteenth century, the Imitatio Christi, could win the ears of people of the world. In the Introduction, however, religion appeared neither ruthlessly stern, nor hopelessly fantastical. It was not, on the one side, scowling, unkempt, sordid, morose; it was not, on the other, impalpable, supersensuous, utterly unintelligible, as well as undesirable, to worldly common sense. Fashion and devotion met; piety and politeness embraced each other. The Introduction leaves to others the pains and raptures of the mystic. It is written for the Marthas, not the Marys. Its readers, personified in Philothea, are not supposed to be covetous of any extraordinary gifts. De Sales possessed a lively fancy, and the tender religious sentiment of his book, graced and lightened by its rainbow illustrations, was a bright-winged Psyche, welcome everywhere. These illustrations are drawn, sometimes from the farms, the flower-valleys, and the snow-peaks of his native Savoy; sometimes from fabulous natural history, from classic story, from the legends of the Church, or the forms and usages of the world,—oftenest of all, from the ways of infants and children, and from the love of mothers. St. Beuve happily characterises the work, as ‘un livre qui, sur la table d’une femme comme il faut ou d’un gentilhomme poli de ce temps-là, ne chassait pas absolument le volume de Montaigne, et, attendait, sans le fuir, le volume d’Urfé.’—Causeries du Lundi, tom. vii. p. 216.