living with a poignancy unmastered as yet by anybody's associates in
flesh and blood. We have, in brief, all that Dumas could ever offer,
here utilised not to make drama but background, all being woven into
a bright undulating tapestry behind an erudite and battered figure,--
a figure of odd medleys, in which the erudition is combined with
much of Autolycus, and the unkemptness with something of a Kempis.
For what one remembers of _The Queen Pedauque_ is l'Abbe Jerome
Coignard; and what one remembers, ultimately, about Coignard is not
his crowded career, however opulent in larcenous and lectual
escapades and fisticuffs and broached wineflasks; but his religious
meditations, wherein a merry heart does, quite actually, go all the
way.

Coignard I take to be a peculiarly rare type of man (there is no
female of this species), the type that is genuinely interested in
religion. He stands apart. He halves little with the staid majority
of us, who sociably contract our sacred tenets from our neighbors
like a sort of theological measles. He halves nothing whatever with
our more earnest-minded juniors who--perennially discovering that
all religions thus far put to the test of nominal practice have,
whatever their paradisial _entree_, resulted in a deplorable
earthly hash--perennially run yelping into the shrill agnosticism
which believes only that one's neighbors should not be permitted to
believe in anything.

The creed of Coignard is more urbane. "Always bear in mind that a
sound intelligence rejects everything that is contrary to reason,
except in matters of faith, where it is necessary to believe
blindly." Your opinions are thus all-important, your physical
conduct is largely a matter of taste, in a philosophy which ranks