Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew vol 2.djvu/237

 Addison, Esq., by Mr Des Maizeaux,” and is dated London, November 24th, 1711. Volumes I. and II. of Boileau’s Works were published in 1712. Afterwards a posthumous volume appeared, “London, Printed for E. Curll at the Dial and Bible against St. Dunstan’s Church in Elect-street. 1713. Price 3s. 6d.; where may be had the two former Volumes of M. Boileau’s Works, Price 12s.” The most interesting item in verse is “The Satire upon Equivocation, against the Jesuits,” — and in prose, “A critical dispute between Monsieur Boileau, M. Huet, Bishop of Avranches, and M. Le Clerc, concerning the sublimity of this passage in Genesis, And God said, Let there be light — and there was light.” This collection of Boileau’s Works was complete and serviceable; but, being printed fragmentary and economically, it has no external elegance, except the engraved portrait of Monsieur Boileau Despreaux.

&#42;&#8270;* Mr Wagner sends me the following note from the register of St Paul’s, Covent Garden:— “Marriage, 1740, Feb. 2. Peter Des Maizeaux to Ann Brown.”





was born at Nay, in Bearn, in the kingdom of Navarre, in the year 1654. To the pasteur of that country town, Jean de la Placette, a celebrated moralist, he owed his early education. He completed his studies at Puylaurens, Saumur, and Sedan; — at the last-named university he took the degree of Doctor of Divinity at the age of seventeen. He never had a congregation in France; although but for the gloomy prospects of Protestantism in that country, “his own, his native land,” he would have refused the offer which enabled him to leave it quietly, and with royal permission. Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, had resolved to found a church in Berlin, where public worship should be conducted in the French language. He sent the Count d’Espense to Paris to select a minister, and the Envoy’s choice fell on Abbadie, who accepted the appointment. The date of his arrival in the Prussian capital is not preserved. Before leaving France he had earned the reputation of a master in controversial writing. He wrote four letters on Transubstantiation, which have been translated and published by John W. Hamersley, A.M., with the title, “The Chemical Change in the Eucharist — in four letters, showing the relations of faith to sense, from the French of Jacques Abbadie.” The learned translator gives the history of them:—

“The design of Louis XIV. to commit Turenne to the Roman Creed gave the first impulse to the controversy that closed with these caustic letters. Louis, by instinct a bigot and despot, tempted the ambition of the chief captain of the age. The politic Port-Royalists sent the Marshal a thesis, charging the actual presence on the Protestant faith and change of faith to be impossible. Anne De Nompar, his wife, an ardent Calvinist, doubting the stability of her husband if he should survive her, induced Claude, the great polemic of France, to expose the fallacies of Port-Royal. The cordial reception of the Roman laity throughout Europe of Claude’s Critique (written on a journey from Languedoc to Montauban and circulated only in manuscript) evoked the able work of Arnauld and Nicole, La Perpetuité de la foi dans l’église catholique sur l’ Eucharistie. Claude replied. Arnauld rejoined; Nouet the Jesuit came to the relief of Arnauld in the Journal des Scavans. Claude answered Nouet in the Provincial