100 



ST STKl'HEX'.S 



SAINT-VICTOR 



taking part in a hunt. He describes with pity the 

 horrors of hunger among tin- |>easantry during the 

 winter of 1709 ; and his heart was hoi within him 

 at the inhuman persecutions of the JansenLsts and 

 the Huguenots, which he ascribes directly to 

 Madame de Maintenon, herself 'the dupe oi her 

 own hypocrisy ' a mere tool in the hands of the 

 Jesuits. He loved the old Gallicanism of the 

 French Church, and abhorred the infamy of the 

 Revocation, and he describes the military disasters 

 and humiliation of the king's later years with a re- 

 morseless truth that does not impair his patriotism. 

 although it has cost him the favour of Chauvinist 

 editors, and even of M. Cheruel. ' A reign of blood 

 and brigandage and perpetual wars against all 

 Europe continually allied against him and armed 

 by the necessity of defending itself so he de- 

 scribed the epoch of the Grand Monarque. He 

 does ample justice to the dignity ami kingly deport- 

 ment of Louis, who ' never considered that any one 

 but himself had been king of France.' He was an 

 admirable observer, and he has left us an inimit- 

 able gallery of the portraits of a whole court, all 

 distinct and individual, vivid and real, snatched 

 securely from forgetfulness and the night of time. 

 He usually sketches the physical aspect first, with 

 a few firm graphic strokes, and he gives colour, 

 tire, life, to everything he touches, for he possesses 

 that magical power of vision which enaules the 

 reader to divine and resuscitate a vanished past. 

 His aim was to make his reader think ' not that 

 he is reading a history or memoirs, but rather 

 that he is himself in the secret of all that is 

 represented to him, and spectator of all that 

 is related,' and in his aim he succeeded as no 

 other has done before or since. Yet his style 

 is unstudied, slap-dash, full of confusions of 

 construction 'il ecrit a la diable pour 1'immor- 

 talite.'said Chateaubriand. Villemain and Mai 

 montel placed him above all contemporary writers ; 

 Taine ranks him with Pascal and La Fontaine, 

 Sainte-Beuve with Moliere and Bossuet. The 

 last and greatest critic with these words sums 

 up his judgment : ' Thanks to him un Tacite au 

 natural et a bride abattue we have nothing to 

 envy in the earlier writer. And what/ is more, the 

 vein of comedy, which he has so boldly scattered 

 through his Memoirs, has given us in him truly a 

 Tacitus a la Shakespeare. ' 



See Sainte-Beuve, Ca merit* itu Lundi (vols. iii. and 

 XT.), and Nuuvmujc Lundi* ( voL x.) ; Taine, in Eaais de 

 Critique et d'Hittoirc ; Cheruel, Saint-Simon coiuidfri 

 eomme Hittorirn de Loui* XIV. (1865); Clifton W. 

 Collins, in 'Foreign Classics' (1880); Henry Reeve, 

 Royal and Republican France (vol. i. 1872); and the 

 admirable study by Edwin Camuui -the Lothian prize 

 enay for 1885. 



>i Stephen's. Bee WESTMINSTER. 



SI Sulpicc. the famous diocesan seminary for 

 priests in Paris, close by the large and wealthy 

 church of St Sulpice, on the south side of the Seine, 

 near the Luxembourg. 



SI TllOIIins, a volcanic island of Africa be- 

 longing to Portugal, lies in the Gulf of Guinea 

 170 niiii-s W. of the mouth of the river Gaboon. 

 IN southern extremity almost touches the equator. 

 Measuring 32 miles by 21, it has an area of 300 

 so. m. ; pop. nearly 20,000, including 1000 whites. 

 Although it rises to the altitude of fXKX) feet, it has 

 the reputation of being very unhealthy. < 'oll'ci- and 

 cocoa, with MIMIC pepper, cinnamon, maize, imli^o, 

 &c., are the principal products. Chief town, St 

 Thomas (pop. 3000), on the north-east coast, the 

 seat of a bishop. The island was discovered in 1470, 

 and colonised in 1493 by the Portuguese, to whom 

 it reverted after a Dutch occupation from 1641 to 

 1844. See Crouch, Glimpses of Fevcrlanti (1889). 



St Thomas, one of the Virgin Islands in 

 the West Indies, belongs to Denmark, and lies 

 30 miles E. of Puerto Rico. Area, 33 sq. m. : 

 pop. 14,389, 8632 of them women, and nearly 

 600 Jews. English is the language of the eilu 

 cated classes. The surface is hilly (l.'i.v. i 

 and the soil poor. The cultivation of vegetable-, 

 guinea grass, and a small quantity of cotton 

 employs the scanty rural population. The port. 

 Charlotte Anialie or St Thomas ( pop. 12,000), was 

 formerly a busy emporium for the European trade 

 with the West Indies, the harlHiur in which the 

 merchant fleets assembled to wait for their con- 

 MU-. and later the principal port of call in the 

 West Indies. All these advantages have now 

 passed from it. Before the abolition of slavery it 

 was covered with prosperous sugar- plantation-. 

 The island i- often \isited by earthquakes, but 

 they are not, as a rule, so destructive as the 

 cyclones. It was first colonised by the Dutch in 

 1657. The British held it in 1667-71, 1801, 1807-15. 



St Thomas, a town of Ontario, 15 miles S. ot 

 London by rail, 112 ENE. of Detroit, and 9 miles 

 N. of Port Stanley on Lake Erie, with sawmills, 

 foundries, and railway works. The town, which 

 has a ladies' college, i- an important railway 

 centre, and has grown rapidly. Top. (1891) 10,370. 



St Thomas's, one of the great London hospitals, 

 dates from 1;V>:{, .ami is now housed in seven four- 

 storied red I ii irk pavilions, a spacious but ugly 

 building standing opposite the Houses of Parlia- 

 ment, on the south side of the Thames. The 

 present edifice cost 500,000. The revenue of the 

 hospital is aliont 40,000. It treats annually 6000 

 in-patients and over 60,000 out-patients. . 



St Victor, HUGO OF, a medin-val theologian, a 

 Fleming, born near Ypres in 1097, died in 1 141 as 

 prior of the Angustinian monastery of St Victor at 

 Paris, was a man of the school of Bernard of Clair- 

 vaux, and a mystic, his favourite teaching l>eing 

 that the intellect or its exercise, reasoning, will 

 never enable man to discover the ' uncorrupted 

 truth of things.' His writings were very popular 

 in the monastic schools and in pietistic circles 

 during the middle ages. His pupil, RICHARD OF 

 ST VICTOR, prior of his monastery from 1162 to 

 1173, and a Scot by birth, went even further than 

 Hugo in that he proclaimed mystic contemplation 

 to be above reason. 



Saint-Victor, PAUL DE, a superfine French 

 writer, was born at Paris in 1S27, the son of a poet 

 who translated Anacreon and l>ecame a fine con- 

 nni-seur iii painting. He had his education at 

 Freiburg in Switzerland and at the Collegio Romano 

 at Rome, and made his debut in 1851 as a dramatic 

 critic in the Pays, under the protection of Laniar- 

 tine, whom he had already served as secretan. 

 In 1855 he carried his |ien to the Presse, later to 

 La Liberte, and last to the Moniteur Universel. 

 He quickly made himself famous by his knowledge 

 and insight, ami by a brilliant style, marred only 

 by it anectedness and over-elaboration. Sense of 

 colour, imagination, a quick eye for the pictiu 

 esque in everything, and the sovereign gift of the 

 artist the intuition of individuality made him a 

 word painter of the first rank, while his severity of 

 taste and his sense of form saved him from extrava- 

 gance. Yet his style is splendid, Oriental or at 

 least Italian rather than French even in his ap- 

 pearance he was a Venetian who had Mcppeil out 

 of his canvas. ' When I rend Saint-Victor, I put 

 on blue .-prelacies,' said Lamartine, and Victor 

 Hugo wrote to him, after reading his review of the 

 Trni-iiillriir* de la Mer, 'One would write a ImoU 

 merely to make von write a page.' Hi- first liok 

 was tfODHMt ' 1>" <"' i lX(i7). a -erics of liistorico- 

 a--t Ill-tie studies on the Venn- of Milo. 1 liana, < Vie-, 



