brilliant in conversation, although tinged with bitterness and
sarcasm--became a favorite in those high circles where rank was adorned
by piety and culture. The spiritual director became a friend, and his
friendship was especially valued by Paula and her illustrious circle.
Among those brilliant and religious women he was at home, for by birth
and education he was their equal. At the house of Paula he was like
Whitefield at the Countess of Huntingdon's, or Michael Angelo in the
palace of Vittoria Colonna,--a friend, a teacher, and an oracle.

So, in the midst of a chosen and favored circle did Jerome live, with
the bishops and the doctors who equally sought the exalted privilege of
its courtesies and its kindness. And the friendship, based on sympathy
with Christian labors, became strengthened every day by mutual
appreciation, and by that frank and genial intercourse which can exist
only with cultivated and honest people. Those high-born ladies listened
to his teachings with enthusiasm, entered into all his schemes, and gave
him most generous co-operation; not because his literary successes had
been blazed throughout the world, but because, like them, he concealed
under his coarse garments and his austere habits an ardent, earnest,
eloquent soul, with intense longings after truth, and with noble
aspirations to extend that religion which was the only hope of the
decaying empire. Like them, he had a boundless contempt for empty and
passing pleasures, for all the plaudits of the devotees to fashion; and
he appreciated their trials and temptations, and pointed out, with more
than fraternal tenderness, those insidious enemies that came in the
disguise of angels of light. Only a man of his intuitions could have
understood the disinterested generosity of those noble women, and the
passionless serenity with which they contemplated the demons they had by
grace exorcised; and it was only they, with their more delicate
organization and their innate insight, who could have entered upon his