good fortune to sit at the feet of Cornelius à Lapide, when that great man taught at Louvain, a circumstance fully appreciated by Marchant, and referred to by him with thankfulness in his preface.
He was appointed Professor of Theology in the Benedictine monastery of Floreffe, which had been founded in 1121 by Godfrey Count of Namur, and he seems to have looked back in his later life with firm attachment to his cloister life in that picturesque and venerable abbey above the gliding Sambre. He was afterwards removed to the more famous monastery of Lobes, which had sent forth so many great men in the Middle Ages, and there he contracted a lasting intimacy with Raphael Baccart, afterwards its abbot.
Marchant was next transferred to the town of Couvin, to the church of which he became pastor and dean.
Jacques Marchant wrote his work, “The Garden of Pastors,” at the instigation of his brother Peter, a Franciscan, at one time Commissary and Visitor-General of the Province of Britain, and afterwards Provincial of that of Flanders.
The Dean of Couvin was a man of very remarkable refinement of taste. His mind was eminently poetic, and there is not a subject which he touched, over which he has not cast a gleam of beauty. He handles his matter with the utmost tenderness, yet he holds it with the firm grasp of a theologian.
The glow of his fervent piety irradiates every page of his writings, and invests them with that peculiar charm which attaches to the works of the great mystic
