RECOLLECTIONS OF CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. Renan's 'Recollections of Childhood and Youth) ('Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse)) were written between 52 and 60, as the matured Orientalist and philosophic interpreter of religious evolution looked back with Celtic sensitiveness of poetic fancy on his own impressionable and strangely-ordered youth and the struggles of his adolescent man hood for intellectual emancipation. It is one of the world's rarest books of psychic interpre tation and, except perhaps his 'Life of Jesus,) the work for which Renan is most widely known. It tells of his childhood at Treguier in Brittany, subtly bringing out the divided in heritance from a father of old republican sea faring folk, and a mother, half Gascon, half Breton, of the royalist trading middle class, in tense in the sincerity of her simple, exceedingly narrow devotion. The resultant psychic com plexity can be traced, with his words as guide, through his whole after career. There are pleasant pictures of the seminary at Treguier, with warm appreciation of the virtues of the Breton clergy and fascinating digressions on Breton piety. Then the 'Recollections' tell how, not yet 16, he was suddenly summoned to Dupanloup's just reorganized seminary, Saint Nicholas du Chardonnet at Paris, °morally fixed, but as ignorant as one could be, with everything to discover.' How his mind un
folded here and later at the Sulpician houses at Issy and in Paris is told with kindly dis criminating account of his teachers and their ways. Gradually his philosophical and then his Hebrew studies brought about a struggle be tween vocation and conviction, the more inti mate details of which were first revealed after his death in the correspondence with his sister Henriette, a very remarkable woman and the strongest personal influence in his life. With his breaking away from Saint Sulpice in 1845, a brief experiment at teaching in an Oratorian college, and his final self-emancipation, the 'Recollection& end. This simple story of a young man's struggle to be true to his higher self is told with a frank directness, a subtlety of psychic perception, a sympathy for all noble feeling and honest conviction that give the book singular charm. An abridgment of the 'Recollections) has been edited for schools (Boston 1902).