He has got tolerably free from tailors; | selves blended with the characteristics of but he still lives in the intellectual atmo- the average Englishman. The result is sphere of Cambridge debating rooms. a strange and yet, in a way, harmonious To find a life really in harmony with a and original type, which made "The Bible rustic environment, we must not go to in Spain a puzzle to the average reader. raw settlements where man is still fight- The name suggested a work of the edifying with the outside world, but to some ing class. Here was a good respectable region where a reconciliation has been emissary of the Bible Society going to worked out by an experience of centuries. convert four Papists by a distribution of And amidst all the restlessness of mod- the Scriptures. He has returned to write ern improvers we may still find a few a long tract setting forth the difficulties of regions where the old genius has not been his enterprise, and the stiff-neckedness of quite exorcised. Here and there, in coun- the Spanish people. The luckless readtry lanes, and on the edge of unenclosed er who took up the book on that undercommons, we may still meet the gipsy standing was destined to a strange the type of a race adapted to live in the disappointment. True, Mr. Borrow apinterstices of civilization, having some- peared to take his enterprise quite seri thing of the indefinable grace of all wild ously, indulges in the proper reflections, animals, and yet free from the absolute and gets into the regulation difficulty savagery of the genuine wilderness. To involving an appeal to the British minismention gipsies is to think of Mr. Bor- ter. But it soon appears that his Protrow; and I always wonder that the author estant zeal is somehow mixed up with a of "The Bible in Spain" and "Laven- passion for strange wanderings in the gro" is not more popular. Certainly, I queerest of company. To him Spain is have found no more delightful guide to not the land of staunch Catholicism, or the charming nooks and corners of rural of Cervantes, or of Velasquez, and still England. I would give a good deal to less a country of historic or political interidentify that remarkable dingle in which est. Its attraction is in the picturesque he met so singular a collection of char- outcasts who find ample roaming-ground acters. Does it really exist, I wonder, in its wilder regions. He regards them, anywhere on this island? or did it ever it is true, as occasional subjects for a exist? and, if so, has it become a rail- little proselytism. He tells us how he way-station, and what has become of Iso- once delivered a moving address to the pel Berners and "Blazing Bosville, the gipsies in their own language to his most flaming Tinman”? His very name is as promising congregation. When he had good as a poem, and the battle in which finished, he looked up and found himself Mr. Borrow floored the Tinman by that the centre of all eyes, each pair contorted happy left-handed blow, is, to my mind, by a hideous squint, rivalling each other more delightful than the fight in "Tom in frightfulness; and the performance, Brown," or that in which Dobbin acted which he seems to have thoroughly appreas the champion of Osborne. Mr. Bor-ciated, pretty well expressed the gipsy row is a "humorist" of the first water. He lives in a world of his own-a queer world with laws peculiar to itself, and yet one which has all manner of odd and unexpected points of contact with the prosaic world of daily experience. Mr. Borrow's Bohemianism is no revolt against the established order. He does not invoke nature or fly to the hedges because society is corrupt or the world unsatisfying, or because he has some kind of new patent theory of life to work out. He cares nothing for such fancies. On the contrary, he is a staunch conservative, full of good old-fashioned prejudices. He seems to be a case of the strange reappearance of an ancestral instinct under altered circumstances. Some of his forefathers must have been gipsies by temperament if not by race; and the impulses due to that strain have got them view of his missionary enterprise. But they delighted to welcome him in his other character as one of themselves, and yet as dropping amongst them from the hostile world outside. And, certainly, no one not thoroughly at home with gipsy ways, gipsy modes of thought, to whom it comes quite naturally to put up in a den of cutthroats, or to enter the field of his missionary enterprise in company with a professional brigand travelling on business, could have given us so singular a glimpse of the most picturesque elements of a strange country. Your respectable compiler of handbooks might travel for years in the same districts all unconscious that passing vagabonds were so fertile in romance. The freemasonry which exists amongst the class lying outside the pale of respectability enables Mr. Borrow to fall in with adventures full of mysterious not asking questions, or following out delicate inquiries; and these singular figures are the more attractive because they come and go, half revealing themselves for a moment, and then vanishing into outside mystery; as the narrator himself sometimes merges into the regions of absolute commonplace, and then dives down below the surface into the remotest recesses of the social labyrinth. fascination. He passes through forests | course of his search for the hidden treas at night and his horse suddenly stops and ure at Compostella. Men who live in trembles, whilst he hears heavy footsteps strange company learn the advantage of and rustling branches, and some heavy body is apparently dragged across the road by panting but invisible bearers. He enters a shadowy pass, and is met by a man with a face streaming with blood, who implores him not to go forwards into the hands of a band of robbers; and Mr. Borrow is too sleepy and indifferent to stop, and jogs on in safety without meeting the knife which he half expected. "It was not so written," he says, with the In Spain there may be room for such genuine fatalism of your hand-to-mouth wild adventures. In the trim, orderly Bohemian. He crosses a wild moor with English country we might fancy they had a half-witted guide, who suddenly deserts gone out with the fairies. And yet Mr. him at a little tavern. After a wild gallop Borrow meets a decayed pedlar in Spain on a pony, apparently half-witted also, he who seems to echo his own sentiments; at last rejoins the guide resting by a foun- and tells him that even the most prostain. This gentleman condescends to perous of his tribe who have made their explain that he is in the habit of bolting fortunes in America, return in their after a couple of glasses, and never stops dreams to the green English lanes and till he comes to running water. The con- farmyards. "There they are with their genial pair lose themselves at nightfall, boxes on the ground displaying their goods and the guide observes that if they should to the honest rustics and their dames meet the estadea, which are spirits of the and their daughters, and selling away and dead riding with candles in their hands chaffering and laughing just as of old. a phenomenon happily rare in this region And there they are again at nightfall The shall run and run till he drowns in the hedge alehouses, eating their himself in the sea, somewhere near Mu- toasted cheese and their bread, and ros." The estadia do not appear, but drinking the Suffolk ale, and listening to Mr. Borrow and his guide come near the roaring song and merry jests of the being hanged as Don Carlos and a nephew, laborers." It is the old picturesque escaping only by the help of a sailor who country life which fascinates Mr. Borknows the English words knife and fork, row, and he was fortunate enough to and can therefore testify to Mr. Borrow's plunge into the heart of it before it had nationality; and is finally liberated by an been frightened away by the railways. official who is a devoted student of Jeremy Lavengro" is a strange medley, which Bentham. The queer stumbling upon a is nevertheless charming by reason of name redolent of every-day British life, the odd idiosyncrasy which fits the throws the surrounding oddity into quaint author to interpret this fast-vanishing relief. But Mr. Borrow encounters more phase of life. It contains queer contromysterious characters. There is the won-versial irrelevance - conversations or drous Abarbenelt, whom he meets riding stories which may or may not be more by night, and with whom he soon becomes hand and glove. Abarbenelt is a huge figure in a broad-brimmed hat, who stares at him in the moonlight with deep, calm eyes, and still revisits him in dreams. He has two wives and a hidden treasure of old coins, and when the gates of his house are locked, and the big dogs loose in the court, he dines off ancient plate made before the discovery of America. There are many of his race amongst the priesthood, and even an archbishop, who died in great renown for sanctity, had come by night to kiss his father's hand. Nor can any reader forget the singular history of Benedict Mol, the wandering Swiss, who turns up now and then in the 66 But or less founded on fact, tending to illus- 66 drifts into contact with the most eccentric beings, and parts company with them at a moment's notice, or catching hold of some stray bit of out-of-the-way knowledge follows it up as long as it amuses him. He is equally at home compounding narratives of the lives of eminent criminals for London booksellers, or making acquaintance with thim bleriggers, or pugilists, or Armenian merchants, or becoming a hermit in his remote dingle, making his own shoes and discussing theology with a postboy, a feminine tramp, and a Jesuit in disguise. The compound is too quaint for fiction, but is made interesting by the quaint vein of simplicity and the touch of genius which brings out the picturesque side of his roving existence, and yet leaves one in doubt how far the author appreciates his own singularity. One old gipsy lady in particular, who turns up at intervals, is as fascinating as Meg Merrilies, and at once made lifelike and more mysterious. My came is Herne, and I comes of the hairy ones! are the remark-sents a little oasis of genuine romanceable words by which she introduces herself. She bitterly regrets the intrusion of a Gentile into the secrets of the Romanies, and relieves her feelings by administering poison to the intruder, and then trying to poke out his eye as he is lying apparently in his last agonies. But she seems to be highly respected by her victim as well as by her own people, and to be acting in accordance with the moral teaching of her tribe. Her design is frustrated by the appearance of a Welsh Methodist preacher, who, like every other strange being, is at once compelled to unbosom himself to this odd confessor. He fancies himself to have committed the unpardonable sin at the age of six, and is at once comforted by Mr. Borrow's sensible observation that he should not care if he had done the same thing twenty times over at the same period. The grateful preacher induces his consoler to accompany him to the borders of Wales; but there Mr. Borrow suddenly stops on the ground that he should prefer to enter Wales in a suit of superfine black, mounted on a powerful steed like that which bore Greduv to the fight of Catrath, and to be welcomed at a dinner of the bards, as the translator of the odes of the great Ab Gwilym. And Mr. Petulengro opportunely turns up at the instant, and Mr. Borrow rides back with him, and hears that Mrs. Herne has hanged herself, and celebrates the meeting by a fight without gloves, but in pure friendliness, and then settles down to the life of a blacksmith in his secluded dingle. Certainly it is a queer, topsy-turvy world to which we are introduced in "Lavengro." It gives the reader the sensation of a strange dream in which all the miscellaneous population of caravans and wayside tents make their exits and entrances at random, mixed with such eccentrics as the distinguished author, who has a mysterious propensity for touching odd objects as a charm against evil. All one's ideas are dislocated when the centre of interest is no longer in the thick of the crowd, but in that curious limbo whither drift all the odd personages who live in the interstices without being caught by the meshes of the great network of ordinary convention. Perhaps the oddity repels many readers; but to me it always seems that Mr. Borrow's dingle repre a kind of half-visionary fragment of fairyland, which reveals itself like the enchanted castle in the Vale of St. John, and then vanishes after tantalizing and arousing one's curiosity. It will never be again discovered by any flesh-and-blood traveller; but in my imaginary travels, I like to rusticate there for a time, and to feel as if the gipsy was the true possessor of the secret of life, and we who travel by rail and read newspapers and consider ourselves to be sensible men of business, were but vexatious intruders upon this sweet dream. There must, one supposes, be a history of England from the Petulengro point of view, in which the change of dynasties recognized by Hume and Mr. Freeman, or the oscillations of power between Lord Beaconsfield and Mr. Gladstone, appear in relative insignificance as more or less affecting certain police regulations and the enclosure of commons. It is pleasant for a time to feel as though the little rivulet were the main stream, and the social outcast the true centre of society. The pure flavor of the country life is only perceptible when one has annihilated all disturbing influences; and in that little dingle with its solitary forge beneath the woods haunted by the hairy Hernes, that desirable result may be achieved for a time, even in a London library. From Fraser's Magazine. A FORGOTTEN HERO. THE name of Jacques Cartier, first explorer of the St. Lawrence, remains to this day in Canada an honored name and very little more in France it is almost entirely forgotten -in England almost entirely unknown. Yet, born in a time of great possibilities and of great deeds, the man who bore that name was well worthy of remembrance, not only because he was in his own person a true hero, brave, honest, and God-fearing, but also because he gave to France a territory larger than all Europe, and laid for England the first foundation of a colony which is almost an empire. Of a family long settled and well known in the busy town of St. Malo, Jacques Cartier was born at that place on December 31, 1494. Scarcely anything is known of his boyhood, but since the port was full of seafaring men his first recollections were, no doubt, associated with marvel lous stories of the newly discovered western India, and of the mysterious northern seas, ice-laden and fog-veiled, through which there must surely be somewhere the passage to Cathay. While he was still a child, fishermen from St. Malo had begun to go with those of Dieppe and other ports to fish for cod, sailing boldly out into the still almost unknown ocean in frail little barks built only for coasting voyages. As he grew up he joined some of these expeditions, and evidently prospered, for at twenty-five we find him a person of some consequence, master of a little Manoir of Lemoïlou, and husband of the Demoiselle Catherine des Granches. It was not, however, until 1534, when Cartier was forty years of age, that his first great enterprise was undertaken. At that time he boldly presented himself to Philippe de Chabot - Brion, admiral of France, proposing to go and explore, in the king's name, and for his Majesty's benefit, the shores of Terre-Neuve. This name seems to have been given, rather vaguely, to the coast of North America from Labrador to the south of Cape Breton, and Cartier thought that a coast so broken, and hitherto so little known, might perhaps conceal that passage to India, to discover which would be fame indeed. De Chabot was one of the king's oldest and most intimate friends; to obtain his patronage was almost to secure the permission needed. The time of the proposal, too, was fortunate. The Treaty of Cambrai had left Francis at leisure to think of the affairs of his kingdom, and by his defeat and imprisonment he was sufficiently exasperated against Spain to feel a lively jealousy of her achievements in the new world. He had already sent out one expedition under Verazano, but with no satisfactory results. He seems at once to have received the idea favor ably, and agreed to furnish the Malouin captain with two ships and all that was necessary for his voyage. On April 20, 1534, Cartier sailed from St. Malo. We cannot follow the course of his voyage here, though his own narrative, simple, direct, full of every kind of useful detail, and empty of all self-glorifi cation, is exceedingly tempting. He fol lowed in the track of John Cabot, until on May 11 he reached Newfoundland (or Terre Neuffue, as he writes it), and from thence explored the coasts north and south of that island. So discouraging, however, was the result of this exploration that he writes in his journal: "It ought not to be called a new land, but a mass of rocks and stones, terrible and roughly piled together. . . . In fact, I am much inclined to think that this is the land God gave to Cain." Still he could not consider his labor lost, since those inhospitable rocks might yet hide the wished-for western passage. It was near the end of June when the two small ships discovered pleasanter regions and safe harbors. From that moment Cartier changed his opinion of the new country, and his pages are full of accounts of its beauty and fertility. He made the acquaintance of some friendly Indians, and persuaded them to entrust to him two boys (apparently of their chief's family) to be taken to France. He erected a great wooden cross with much solemnity on Cape Gaspé, and then, winter approaching, and the navigation again becoming difficult, he turned homewards, and reached St. Malo safe and well on September 5. So well satisfied was King Francis with what had been done on this first voyage that he at once resolved to send out another expedition in the following year, and to place the command in the same capable hands. Cartier received the title of" Capitaine Général et Pilote du Roy," and was provided with three ships, each with its captain and crew, and permitted to take with him a number of volunteers, many of them young men of good family. The two Indian boys were also on board the ships, which sailed from St. Malo on May 19, 1535. The expedition made its way directly | title," came in state to visit the stranand without special adventures (except gers. Standing up in his canoe, he adthe encountering some bad weather) to dressed the captain in “ une prédication the coast of Labrador. Here, apparently et preschement," with gestures "d'une at Mingan (Cartier called it St. Nicolas), merveilleuse sorte," expressive of confithey set up a great wooden cross, the dence and friendship, and was easily perposition of which is carefully described suaded to taste the bread and wine prefor the benefit of future voyagers. Leav-sented to him. ing this place, they met with a terrible The difference between the convenstorm, from which they thankfully took tional Indian of romance, and the real refuge in a beautiful bay full of islands. and perfectly unsophisticated Indians of To this place, and not to "the great river this true narrative, is very wonderful. of Canada," Cartier gave the name of St. Not only Donacona and his people, but Laurent. It seems to have been at the all the other tribes whom Cartier met with, mouth of the River St. John, Labrador; seem to have been simple, almost childish but it is impossible to say when or why sauvages, wild men, friendly, hospitable, the name, originally attached to this har- confiding; and cunning only in the clumbor of refuge, was applied to the whole siest and most transparent fashion. Like magnificent stream and gulf which now children, they show themselves somebear it. times wilful and unreasonable; but the worst complaint Cartier makes of them is that they were "marvellous thieves," while they certainly seem to have been quite as ready to give as to take. - Carefully exploring the coasts as he went on, the captain, always anxiously mindful of that "perfection' - the passage to Cathay which more than all else would reward his toils, led his little fleet along the northern shores of the gulf, past the dangerous island of Anticosti, and the innumerable smaller ones lying higher up, until he reached "the country of Saguenay" and the great river which still bears that name. Here he was not only pleased with the beauty of richly wooded and watered lands, and with the report of the Indians that copper was found in the neighborhood, but also saw some creatures not more wonderful to his eyes than his description of them is to our ears. "Here we saw," he says, some fishes such as no man had seen or heard of. They were the size of porpoises, with heads like greyhounds, well made and white as snow, without spot. The Indians called them adnothings,' and said they were good to eat." 66 Sailing on past Ile aux Cendres (which still retains the name he gave it), and other small islands, he anchored at last, one fair September evening, near the north shore at the lower end of the Ile d'Orléans. "Here," he says, "began the land and province of Canada," and here he allowed his men to go ashore, and to accept freely the presents of fruit, maize and fish brought to them by the Indians. The boys, Taignoagny and Domagaya, who had been in France, were received with the greatest joy by their countrymen, and there seems to have been a tremendous uproar of welcome about the ships all that evening and night. Next day "the lord of Canada, who was called Donacona by name, and Agouhanna as his After a little delay the ships left their anchorage and, passing below the beautiful Fall of Montmorenci with its veil of silver mist, coasted the green north shore, drawing near with wonder to the grand cliffs that rose majestically, towering above the broad waters, as if nature had made her citadel there and bade the strangers stand back from her impregnable ramparts. At the foot of the rock fortress they again dropped their anchors; sheltering themselves at the mouth of a stream which flowed quietly into the great river from the north. To this smaller stream they gave the name of Ste. Croix, which it retained for less than a hundred years, till in 1617 the Recollet Fathers of Quebec rechristened it the St. Charles. In the whole of Cartier's story there is no trace of any origin for the name by which the place he had now reached is known to us. He calls it simply Stadacona, and it is evident that he never attempted to give it any other appellation. The story of his sailors crying out "Quel bec!" and their exclamation being repeated until it came be used as the name of the cliffs which caused it, is never hinted at. Indeed, after many attempts to find a Canadian origin for the name of Quebec, one is obliged to confess that the question remains as much unanswered as ever. Charlevoix says that the word is Algonquin. "Les Abenaquis, dont la langue est une dialecte Algonquine, le nomment Quelibec, qui veut dire ce qui est fermé, parceque de l'entré de la petite |