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Neither Tillemont nor Fleury speak of that St Eustache to whom a church is consecrated, very wrongly, at Paris, when so many saints recognised by writers well deserving to be believed, are still waiting for a similar honour.
Milman is the best English writer on the church, and he is the most readable of modern historians. Tillemont and Dupin are very full and very learned. But a truly immortal history of the church, exhaustive yet artistic, brilliant as well as learned, is yet to be written. The ancient historians, like Eusebius and Socrates and Zosimus, are very meagre.
The ecclesiastical histories of Socrates, Theodoret, Zosimus, and Sozomen are dry, but the best we have of that age. The lives of Athanasius and Arius should be read in connection. Gibbon is very full and exhaustive on this period. So is Tillemont, who was an authority to Gibbon. Milman has written, in his interesting history of the Church, a fine notice of Constantine, and so has Stanley.
Dearest brother, see that your affection, and that of yours, to us, or rather to the Apostolic See, fail not, for they who are fixed into the Rock with the Rock shall be exalted." Tillemont, xvi. 68. Simplicii, Ep. viii.; Photius, i. 115. Pope Gelasius, 13th letter. Mansi, vii. 1032-6; Jaffé, 359. Mansi, vii. 1028; Jaffé, 360. Photius, i. 123, translated.
Among those who often come to look at new books and converse familiarly among themselves there are historians as learned as Tillemont, sacred orators the equals of Bossuet and Bourdaloue in eloquence, comic and tragic poets, theologians who unite purity of morals with solidity of doctrine, the esteemed authors of "Spanish" novels, geometers and philosophers capable, like M. Descartes, of measuring and weighing the universe.
Votum pro pace, p. 724. Anim. in anim. p. 642. Votum pro pace, p. 681. Tillem. t. 2. p. 158. Ep. 318. p. 113. Ep. 357. p. 124. Tillemont, t. 2. n. 13. p. 567. Ep. 391. p. 866. Fabric. Bib. Græc. l. 4. p. 174. tom. 3. Commen. ad loca de Antichrist. Anim. in anim. p. 649. Commen. ad loca de Antichrist. Via ad pacem, p. 617. Votum pro pace, p. 750. Matt. xix. 12. 1 Cor. vii. Votum pro pace, p. 682.
Until the seventeenth century, what more respectable historians had arisen than Dupin, Tillemont, Mabillon, and Fleury; or critics and scholars than Bayle, Arnauld, De Sacy, and Calmet! La Rochefoucauld uttered maxims which were learned by heart by giddy courtiers.
It is recopied. Other hands have gone over it. So, the thing is no longer mine. It does not exist any longer, good night. I have taken up again my old hobby of Saint Antoine. I have reread my notes, I am making another new plan and I am devouring the ecclesiastical memoirs of the Nain de Tillemont. This extravagant setting pleases me and I am absorbed in it, there you are!
The "Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius; Epictetus should be read in connection. Renan's Life of Marcus Aurelius. Farrar's Seekers after God. Arnold has also written some interesting things about this emperor. In Smith's Dictionary there is an able article. Gibbon says something, but not so much as we could wish. Tillemont, in his History of the Emperors, says more.
But best of all I like M. de Tillemont; I could have wished for myself even such a life as his; wrapped in silence and calm, a life of gentle devotion and zealous study. From the age of fourteen, he said, his intellect had occupied itself with but one subject, that of ecclesiastical history.
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