of artificially enhanced evil, by divine de- | Dreaded abroad, paralyzed at home, with cree, the Christian teaching is that in all conditions of punishment we are shut up in our own evil by God only to teach us what that evil really is, and what the divine power which would always draw us away from narrowness and evil, if we would only follow its attraction, to the larger and brighter world of good. On the highest pagan the ory of Hell, Hell is the natural and inevitable pain created for us by our own evil actions; on the medieval theory of the visionaries, it is the pain inflicted on us by the decree of God; according to the Christian doctrine, it is the pain to which we are condemned only that we may better know the divine force constantly drawing us away from it, drawing us out of our own sins, passions, and prejudices, and narrow theories, into the wider and brighter world from which we shrink. It is curious enough that all the 'visions of Hell ignore that overruling force against which the gates of Hell cannot prevail.

From The Spectator. PIONEERS OF FRANCE IN THE NEW

WORLD.*

THIS book commends itself to the attention of all interested in tracing how far the civilization of the New World has been influenced by the genius which contributed so largely to the moulding of our own, and the question raised, but not answered, for Mr. Parkman's graphic writing is not without a trace of the cynicism which describes failure more brilliantly than success, why did the Huguenot and the Jesuit succumb before powers which appear to have tasked only to strengthen the muscle of the Puritan? Is the problem left possibly for succeeding volumes, whose advent we shall hail, to solve. And yet the work before us is something more than carefully accurate; true to the promise of his preface, Mr. Parkman has thoroughly succeeded in imbuing himself with the spirit of the time, and writes with the vivacity of an eye-wit

ness.

The condition of Spain in the middle of the sixteenth century has been so fruitful a theme for all historians since, that the veriest schoolboy feels for the subject a familiarity bordering on contempt.

* Pioneers of France in the New World. By Francis Parkman. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. 1865.

no power remaining to create, but strong still to retain her grasp, her condition is well described by our author as that of "an athletic man penetrated with disease, which had not yet unstrung the thews and sinews formed in his days of vigour. Philip II. could command the service of warriors and statesmen developed in the years that were past." But while "the gathered energies of ruined feudalism were wielded by a single hand,” a new era was dawning upon France. Protestantism in England meant reformation, in France revolution; both came in due time, and both bore fruit after their kind. But in 1550 the Huguenot was struggling for existence; and a new world was open for colonization. Full of delusive hopes and eager dreams of untold wealth, the emigrant band embarked, to be miserably disappointed. It was, as Mr. Parkman justly remarks, no Mayflower which sailed from the ports of France. The colonists sent out by Gaspar de Coligny were a motley crew, and upon too many of them their faith sat lightly enough. Urged by the love of adventure, the hopes of wealth, and all the other possibilities of an unknown land, the emigrants set sail under Ribaut on the 18th of February, 1562, and on the 27th of May landed at Port Royal. Here thirty chosen men remained, under Albert de Pierria, while Ribaut set sail again for France. Delight in scenery strangely beautiful, dreams of gold, or yet more brilliant hopes of being the pioneers of civilization, freedom, and order in a new world, quickly disappeared before the stern realities of famine. How they were to subsist seems to have been the last inquiry present to the minds of the unprosaic Frenchmen. But hunger was not more tolerable to them than to their less imaginative neighbours. Wondrous forests grew strangely dreadful in their stillness, and the sea a hateful barrier between themselves and home. Ribaut had left them a forge, with tools and iron, and despair lent the energy which stood them in the place of skill. A rough craft was finished, and in it the half-famished colonists embarked, Mr. Parkman observing, "Had they put forth to maintain themselves at Port Royal the energy and resource they exerted to escape from it, they might have laid the corner-stone of a solid colony." The wretched sequel is but too well known, but our author with his graphic pen has lent a freshness to the tragic scene. New bands of colonists braved new dangers, and it seemed as if indomitable courage would almost

sway,

and

compensate for the absence of more prosaic | the wilderness had resumed its virtues. But famine proved a harder foe silence and solitude brooded over this anthan the Indies, and but for the generosity cient resting-place of civilization. It was of Sir John Hawkins (whom nevertheless, but a sample of the rest. The Jesuits, aided Mr. Parkman does not spare), the little by Madame de Guercheville, lacked neither colony at Fort Caroline, under Laudon- zeal nor money, and soon became the movnière, must have perished like their com- ing spirit and controlling power in the inrades. "At the eleventh hour" Ribaut fant colonies. To extend the dominions or again appears upon the scene, bringing the Church in the boundless lands of Amer with him seven ships, three hundred men, ica, to save the benighted souls of the Indiand "all things thought necessary for a ans, and win for themselves the martyr's prosperous colony," but just when the crown, seemed well worth all their energies. heavy clouds which hung over the strug- And meanwhile Champlain was everygling little company seemed about to be where, aiding the priests, controlling the lifted up, "the crew of Ribaut's flag-ship, soldiers, building towns, planting garanchored on the still sea outside the bar, dens, finding time, amidst endless toil, to saw a huge hulk, grim with the throats of plant roses round the new settlement of cannons, drifting towards them through the Quebec and discover the waters of Lake gloom; and from its stern rolled on the Huron, and in the wild forests on its borsluggish air the portentous banner of ders join priest and woodsman in a hymn Spain." Thenceforward their fate was of praise, while the first mass was said in sealed. The history of Menendez, the the country of the Hurons. All the strange Spanish commander, is one of the dark adventures which gave colour to his life pages in the world's history. Cruel and and to the lives of the brave men who acremorseless, keeping no faith with heretics, companied him are recorded with a vivida prey to the gnawing avarice which sup- ness which, to those who can appreciate plied constant fuel to his zeal, the grim courage uncrowned by success, faith unenannals of religious war have few chapters lightened by knowledge, patience which so dark as this record of the man who, while left him unsoured by life-long vexations, butchering in cold blood the victims decoyed and an energy which again and again subby fair promises into his power, weeps dued mountains of difficulty to his will, with emotion" as he recounts "the favours Heaven had showered upon their enterprise." The iron heel of the Spaniard stamped into the earth the blood of the Huguenot. The Jesuit thought he had burnt out the fire of religious freedom, but the spirit of revolution rose again from its ashes. The Court of France looked coldly on the tragedies enacted so far from Paris, but Dominque de Gourgues avenged the martyred Frenchmen. Menendez, however, escaped him, and died "crowned with honours" in 1574. He had "crushed French Protestanism in America." "To plant religious freedom on this Western soil," says Mr. Parkman, "was not the mission of France. It was for her to rear in Northern forests the banner of absolutism and of Rome." And accordingly the other half of this volume is directed to tracing the history of Samuel de Champlain, "the father of New France," and of the brave men who, "sword in one hand, crucifix in the other, vainly strove on the shores of the New World to clothe with flesh and endow with life the skeletons of absolutism and an infallible system. Acadia was occupied. The little island of St. Croix was.covered with buildings, and had its chapel and its cemetery; yet in 1798

FOURTH SERIES. LIVING AGE. VOL. I.

will amply repay their careful reading. It is a strange story. A few years later the Puritan was rooted on the soil which had proved uncongenial alike to Huguenot and Jesuit. Yet they were apparently bound on a nobler errand, with a higher purpose (so it might have seemed), a higher idea. The first principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity burned in the breasts of the Huguenot band, where noble and simple ate the common bread and shared the common toil. And the Jesuit, with no selfish purpose, but with the earnestness of intense conviction, bound to the wheels of the one system through which alone souls could be saved, braved perils by sea and perils by land, carrying in his hand the charm which was to open heaven and make death doubly welcome. Beside all this the Puritan looked terribly prosaic; he had no crusade to preach, he had wife and children, and he wanted room to breathe and bread to eat. But he had grasped one fact. The breath he drew was the breath of a divine life, and the labour which sustained it was no longer prosaic or despicable. If heaven was God's throne, earth was still His footstool; and the big forest trees and the prairies, "ancient when the pyramids were young, and to which Nineveh was a mush

55.

!

882

THE FRENCH EMPEROR AND 1815.

room of yesterday," were cleared by arms and all violent reactions are bad; and, by nerved by the conviction that "the earth the light of subsequent events, we now see was the Lord's and the fulness thereof." how ludicrous it was to expect the French, Yet France did not put forth her strength after twenty years of enthusiasm and delirialtogether in vain. heroes who succeeded Champlain, their dren, to the BOURBONS. Nor could 1815 The history of the um, to go quietly back, like whipped chilwork, and its results, remains to be told, fail to be considered in aftertimes as the and we can only hope the succeeding vol- year in which France had been compelled umes of this series may prove as full of to drink a bitter cup of mortification. interest as the first. Frenchmen have, therefore, a just claim to dislike the Treaties of 1815; and NAPOLEON III., as he reminds the Corporation of Auxerre and the Department of the Yonne, entered public life eighteen years ago, tradFrom The Saturday Review, 19th May. ing on this inveterate popular antipathy. Down to the end of the reign of LOUIS THE FRENCH EMPEROR AND 1815. PHILIPPE his countrymen had not, in his THE French EMPEROR has not lost many reigns of Europe, and the policy of their opinion, shaken off their humiliating chains. They were still at the mercy of the Soveoccasions, during his career, of denouncing Government was an old-world policy. The the Treaties of 1815. of METTERNICH and HARDENBERG may wards recovery, and the subsequent reTo undo the labours Revolution of 1848 was the first step tobe said to have been the dominant idea of establishment of the Imperial dynasty upon his life. As a philanthropist, he doubtless the throne ranks as the second. A mere feels a moral indignation against the policy violation of the letter of the Vienna comwhich parcelled out the populations of pact would have seemed insufficient without Europe like sheep among the rival Sov- a moral triumph over the principle. It was ereigns; while, as a statesman and diplo- necessary, not only to tear the treaties, but matist, he conceives that such a principle to stamp on them; and step by step, under of settlement is vicious and untrustworthy. the guidance of NAPOLEON III., the French But, above this and beyond this, the EMPEROR sees in the work of the Congress of Vienna the complete ratification of the ruin of the First NAPOLEON, and of the discomfiture of all his plans. The Treaty of Paris had already driven France within her old limits of 1792, but the Congress of Vienna, which marks the final conclusion of the European conflict, in the eyes of every Imperialist comes in for a portion of the reproach. And the French EMPEROR mixes up so systematically his dislike of what the Congress did for Europe, and what it did for France, as to produce a natural confusion of thought, in the minds of his admirers, between the fortunes of humanity and the fortunes of the NAPOLEONS. From a confusion of a not very dissimilar kind the members of the Congress were not perhaps free. They conceived that the reign of a NAPOLEON must be incompatible with order and tranquillity; and both the worshippers and detractors of the first EMPEROR thus agree in regarding him as the representative of something. Upon no assumption could the settlement of Vienna be taken to be a satisfactory one, even as far as the French nation was concerned. All attempts to impose a political creed from without upon a great country are bad,

have regained in Europe a valid portion of the prominent influence which they lost in 1815. In spite of CASTLEREAGH and METTERNICH, Corsican adventure and audacity is once more reinstated on the throne of France, restrained by the fate of the First EMPEROR, and the thought of the long exile of the family, from schemes of universal conquest, but still in a certain sense ruling and moderating the Continent. For France, then, the Treaties of 1815 only exist upon the map. Of the effects of the long war and the downfall of the First Empire nothing survives except the territorial boundaries into which, towards the close of the First Empire, France again shrunk. The annexation of Nice and Savoy has broken even this last spell; and if, as a Frenchman and a citizen, ÑAPOLEON III. still laments 1815, it is, and must be, because he is dissatisfied with the narrow frontiers of 1792.

for the Treaties of 1815, as a liberal EuroThe detestation which he feels or has felt pean politician, has also become partially superfluous. Time has long since dissolved the union of Belgium and of Holland, and detached Greece from Turkey; and the course of events threatens us with still further changes in the East. The whole constitution of the Italian Peninsula, through

the initiative taken by NAPOLEON III., has in the EMPEROR's eyes, of the faulty prinbeen reformed. It is no longer a question, ciple on which the Treaties of 1815 were as in 1815, of adding Genoa to the little based. NAPOLEON III. accuses in his Kingdom of Sardinia. The Austrians have heart the Vienna Congress of sacrificing been driven from Milan, the Archdukes the happiness of whole populations to mofrom Tuscany, Parma, and Placenza; and, tives of mere State policy, and in order to under the guise of assisting its weak and preserve the balance of power among bigoted allies, the House of HAPSBURG no particular reigning families. Such an oblonger domineers over half of Italy. In jection would not lie well in the mouth of spite of the Congress of Vienna, the Lega- the First EMPEROR, whose regard for nations have again been parted from the tionalities and independent national growth POPE, and the Two Sicilies have settled the never became violent till he was at St. controversy of the diplomatists of Vienna Helena. But the present EMPEROR cannot by belonging neither to the BOURBONS nor be estopped from taking an advantage of to a MURAT. Meanwhile, in some respects such a blot in the arrangements that unthe condition of the world has not improved. seated his dynasty. His indignation at the The extinction of the independence of speech of M. THIERS was not probably unCracow, after its violation by Russia, Prus- mixed with the feelings that all the selfish sia, and Austria in turn, is a type of the anxiety of M. THEIRS to prevent Germany contempt with which the Treaties of 1815 and Italy from being strong was only the could be treated by those of the great spirit of 1815 in a French dress. NAPOLEON signataries who had in view the final extir- III. believes that this is the wrong end of pation of the nationality of Poland. The the political string; and that men who berights of the Kingdom of Poland proper, gin with such egotistical axioms will never placed in 1815 under the guardianship and make Europe happy or contented, nor obcare of Europe, have faded into thin air; tain any rectification at all of the French and Lord RUSSELL, in a moment of can- frontier. He would like, for the sake of dour of which he subsequently repented, liberal principles abroad, and of his own informed the world that, as regards Russia, ambition at home, to be able to group Euthe treaties in question existed no longer. rope on a healthier and more natural sysIt is not easy to say whether the tyranny of tem. Rivers and mountain ranges may not Russia or the cold neutrality of Europe be divinely constituted boundary lines, but gave them their coup de grace. Denmark, so far from regaining Norway or Heligoland, has lost more money, men, and territory. Of the work of 1815 there is not, therefore, so very much that is left intact. There still remains the misshapen and illbalanced German Confederation; in the arrangements of which both the unity of Germany and the independence of the middle States have been sacrificed to the rival jealousies of Austria and Prussia. It was, however, scarcely worth while going down to Auxerre to harangue a country Mayor upon German Reform; nor did the tirade against 1815 necessarily mean a desire on the part of the EMPEROR to wash the dirty linen of Germany. Another torn and tattered fragment of the treaties in question survives in Austria's retention of Venetia. And the last and most important evil that has never yet been eradicated is the unhealthy growth of Prussia, who regained in 1815 more than she either expected or deserved. Her aggrandizement is the more inexcusable because it was effect ed at the expense of France.

At the bottom of all these fragmentary relics of 1815 it is possible to detect a common element which serves as an illustration,

they are as good as boundary lines which are the result of a compromise between the traditional cupidity of rival Governments. M. THIERS, upon the other hand, is full of the Divide et impera reasoning that would have struck METTERNICH and TALLEYRAND as irrefragable. Lest Germany be a too powerful neighbour, his principle, above everything, is to keep Germany divided. For fear of Italy ever aspiring to hold the Mediterranean, keep Italy divided too. It is plain that this political method leads immediately to Venetian thraldom, and to every other selfish piece of tyranny that can be carried out either by force or by intrigue in any part of Europe, whether it be in the Danubian Principalities, or in Poland, or in Germany, or in SchleswigHolstein.

Nos numeri sumus. Human multitudes are at best only cattle to be driven at the will of diplomatists into this or that fold. Against such selfishness the soul of NAPOLEON III. revolts, and his denunciation of it is probably as heartfelt as any of his sentiments. It is not a complete answer to say that he has something to gain by the political change he hopes to see. It is possible that he may not be a disinterested advocate, and yet that the policy against