Catholic French feminine ideal. Comparing Eugénie de Guerin, the beloved sister of the French poet Maurice de Guerin, with an English woman who wrote poetry, Miss Emma Tatham,-Matthew Arnold says: "The French woman is a Catholic in Languedoc; the English woman is a Protestant at Margate, Margate the brick and mortar image of English Protestantism, representing it in all its prose, all its uncomeliness,—and let me add, all its salubrity. Between the external form and fashion of these two lives, between the Catholic Madlle de Guerin's nadalet at the Languedoc Christmas, her chapel of moss at Easter time, her daily reading of the life of a saint,—between all this and the bare, blank, narrowly English setting of Miss Tatham's Protestantism, her "union in Church fellowship with the worshtppers at Hawley Square, Margate," her singing with the soft, sweet voice, the animating lines.
My Jesus to know, and feel His Blood flow
'Tis life everlasting, 'tis heaven below!"
her young female teachers belonging to the Sunday school and her "Mr. Thomas Rowe, a venerable class-leader"—what a dissimilarity. In the ground of the two lives, a likeness; in all their circumstances, what unlikeness! An unlikeness, it will be said, in that which is non-eesential and indifferent. Non-essential,—yes; indifferent,—no. The signal want of grace and charm—in the English Protestantism's setting of its religious life is not an
