loured vest, her movements are gracefully wavering, and her glances-keen, quick, and bright-strike at once such a multitude of objects that they can fix steadily on none. Sometimes, too, she indulges in harlequinading caprices; but her usual port has a native tastefulness and spirit beyond the reach of academic art. But a few extracts will show the peculiar merits and defects of M. Michelet's volumes better than any further remarks we could offer. The first we shall give by way of a personal introduction of the author to our readers. He is about to narrate (which he does with brilliant rapidity) the conquest of Gaul by Cæsar; and the mention of that hero's name provokes the following little outbreak of personal feeling, which exhibits strikingly the character of his mind and the poetic elevation of his sentiments : "I have spoken elsewhere," he says, "of this prodigious Cæsar, and of the motives which decided him for so long a period to quit Rome for Gaul, to exile himself from his country, that on his return he might be its master. Italy was exhausted, Spain unmanageable; to subject the world, Gaul was to be subdued. Would that I had seen that pallid, bloodless face, blanched, not by age, but by the debaucheries of Rome; that delicate and epileptic man, marching under the rains of Gaul at the head of his legions; swimming across our rivers, or dictating on horseback, whilst his secretaries were carried in litters by his side, four or six letters at a time; agitating Rome from the depths of Belgium; exterminating two millions of men on his route; and conquering, in the lapse of ten years, Gaul, the Rhine, and the Northern Ocean!" The above extract is characteristic of our author; the next will be found equally characteristic of his work. He is passing in review the different races and influences from which the French nation results. To any one else this subject would be dry, heavy, and laborious. By him it is treated as lightly and gracefully as eruditely,. though we cannot say that he probes and analyses the deep subject he has in hand. "Different systems," he thus writes, "have been resorted to, to explain the origin of the French people. Some deny altogether any foreign influence. They insist that France owes nothing to the language, to the literature, and to the laws of the nations who have conquered her. Le Nay more, if it depended on them, they would make us believe that our origin is the origin of the whole human race. Brigant and his disciple, Latour d'Auvergne, the first grenadier of the republic, derive all languages from the Bas-Breton : intrepid and patriotic critics, it was not enough for them to emancipate their country from slavery, they would also give her the dominion of the world. Historians and legists are less presumptuous. Nevertheless the Abbé Dubos denies that the conquest of Clovis was a conquest, and Grosley affirms that our common law is anterior to Cæsar. 66 Other enquirers, less extravagant perhaps, but holding the same sort of exclusive and systematic view, refer everything to tradition, or to the several importations of commerce and of conquest. According to them, our French language is a corruption of the Latin, our law a degradation of the Roman or Germanic law, our traditions a simple echo of foreign traditions. They give the half of France to Germany, the other half to the Romans, and leave her nothing of her own. They would make it appear that those great Celtic populations, of which ancient writers speak so much, were a race so abandoned, so disinherited by nature, that they have been swept away without leaving a trace behind. That Gaul-which armed five hundred thousand men against Cæsar, and which continued so populous under the Empire-they tell us, has disappeared altogether; that it was dissolved by the intermingling of the Roman legions and the bands of Clovis. All the French of the North, they say, are of German descent, though there is so little German in their language. Gaul, they maintain, has perished, body and spirit, like Atlantides. All the Celts likewise have perished; or if any few of this family of men remain, they escape not the severity of modern criticism. Pinkerton will not allow them to This man is a repose even in the grave. true Saxon, brutal against the Celts as England is against Ireland. He will not allow them any distinctive qualities, any original genius. All gentlemen, he upholds, descend from the Goths (or Saxons or Scythians, with him the same thing.) He proposes in his amusing fury that a professorship of the Celtic tongue should be instituted, in order the better to mock at Celtic pretensions. "It is not possible to make a choice between these two systems. History and good sense alike repel them both. It is evident that Frenchmen are not Gauls. Vain would it be to search among us for those large, fair, supple bodies,-those infant giants who amused themselves by burning Rome. On the other hand, the French genius is profoundly distinct from that of Rome or Germany. "Incontestible facts cannot be rejected: no doubt our country owes much to foreign influence. All the races of the earth have contributed something to this Pandora box. "The original soil which has received all, is that young, soft, pliant race of Gaëls, fiery, sensual, fickle, prompt to apprehend, prompt to disdain, ever in pursuit of novelty. Here then is the primitive element, the perfectible element. "To such children severe preceptors were necessary; and from the south and from the north the rigorous instruction came. Thereby their mobility was fixed, their softness hardened and fortified, reason was added to instinct, and to promp titude reflection. "In the South first appeared the Iberians of Liguria and of the Pyrenees, with all the roughness and cunning of mountaineers; then came the Phoenician colonies; and long afterwards the Saracens. The South of France assumed early the mercantile genius of the Semitic nations. The Jews, in the middle ages, found themselves in that region quite at home. From the north descended, at a very early period, the obstinate Kymries, the ancestors of our Bretons. This race, not to pass in vain over the earth, erected monuments-the Needles of Loc-mariaker and the Lines of Carnac, rude, mute stones, which posterity understands not. The druidism of the Kymries spoke of immortality; but contained no principle of social order for the present life: it indicated barely the moral germ that is in the barbarous man, as the plant sprouting up from under snow tells of the dormant life of nature. The genius of war was still ascendant. The Bolgs rushed down from the north, and a hurricane swept over Gaul, Germany, Greece, and Asia Minor. Exuberant and prolific seed-tides of life ran, and spread, and inundated Europe. In Gaul, the warrior society of the clan prevailed over the sacerdotal society of druidism. The clan, however, is represented by its chief, by a man. "But society really begins when man devotes himself not to man but to an idea, and, first, to the idea of civil order. The Roman surveyors (agrimensores,) came behind the Roman legions, to measure, to portion out into acres, to set within artificial limits, according to their ancient oriental rites, the colonies of Aix, of Narbonne, and of Lyons. The city entered into Gaul, and Gaul entered into the city. The great Cæsar-after having disarmed the nation by fifty battles, and by the slaughter of several millions of men opened his legions to Gallic soldiers, and brought them in triumph as victors into Rome and into the senate. They there learned what civil equality was, under a military chief; they there acquired their levelling genius, which they will retain for ever. "Great has been the accumulation of races in our Gaul. Races on races, people on people, Kymries, Phoenicians, Iberians, Greeks, Romans, and last of all Germans. But having said this, have we described France? Not at all. France has made herself out of these elements, from which any other result might have arisen. The same chemical principles compose oil and sugar. Principles being given, all is not given; the mystery of a separate special existence remains. The action which this primary existence puts forth on, and the action it receives from, surrounding elements-this constitutes national character, and this is the subject which history has principally to develop." The above passages may be considered as a fair specimen of M. Michelet's gravest manner. To one already well read in history, the bird's-eye views of this author have a certain charm; but to a student, his aeronautic flights over wide subjacent historic landscapes are unsatisfactory and giddying in the extreme. We will en deavour, however, to abstain from critical observations, and in lieu of them will give descriptive extracts and curious bits from the work before us; which, if we mistake not, it will be found singularly pleasant to peruse. Nothing can be more graphic, poetic, and grotesque, than the following pictures of various districts of France. "It has been often said that Paris, Rouen, and Havre form but one city, of which the Seine is the principal street. Take your station a little to the south of this magnificent street, where chateaux neighbour chateaux, villages villages; cross the Lower Seine at Calvados; and from Calvados direct your course towards the Channel; and, whatever be the richness and fertility of the soil, towns become rarer, general cultivation more neglected, and pasture grounds more frequent. The coun. try is already serious; it will presently become wild and melancholy. To the proud chateaux of Normandy succeed Breton manor-houses. The costume of the natives seems to follow and comply with the change of architecture. The triumphal bonnets of the women of Caux-which announce so loftily the daughters of the conquerors of England widen towards Caen, flaiten at Villedieu, and at Saint Malo take a divided form, sometimes like the wings of a windmill, and sometimes like the sails of a ship. At Laval, coats of sheep skin commence. The forests here thicken, the solitude of La Trappe, where the monks lead a life of black monotony; the names of the cities, Fougères and Rennes, (both signifying fern ;) the dark grey waters of the Meyenne and of the Villaine, all express the dismal rudeness of the region. "Yet it is here we will begin our survey of France. The eldest daughter of the monarchy, the Celtic province, merits our first attention. From her we shall advance to the old rivals of the Celts, the Basques, or the Iberians, not less obstinate in their mountains than the Celts are in their plains and marshes. Thence we shall pass to the mixed countries of the Roman and German conquests, and thus shall have studied geography in its chro nological order, and have travelled at once through space and through time. "Let us now throw a rapid glance over Brittany. At its two entrances it has two forests, the Norman forest and the Vendean forest-two cities, Saint Malo and Nantes, the city of corsairs and the city of slave-dealers. The aspect of Saint Malo is singularly ugly and sinister. Its costumes, its points of view, its buildings, have a dingy stagnant look about them. The town, rich, dull, and murky, appears like a nest of vultures and screech-owlssometimes peninsular, sometimes an island, according to the flux or reflux of the tides: filthy and fetid rocks, but a few hands high, where sea-weed and rubbish are entangled and putrefy, surround it. In the distance is a coast of lofty white angular rocks, cut sharp as if by a razor. Wartime is the good time for Saint Malo: its inhabitants rejoice in war. Their chief amusement is to look from their black battlements, through their telescopes, upon the sea, and to watch the vessels riding or sailing upon its heaving bosom. "At the other extremity of Brittany is Brest, a capacious port, and strong. On it is impressed the conception of Richelieu, and the hand of Louis XIV. At once an arsenal and a dungeon-a bulk for galley slaves, is Brest. Cannons and vessels, armaments and munitions of war, the force of France, is accumulated in an ocean corner of France; in a close haven, where the sojourner can hardly breathe, between two mountains burdened with immense constructions. When you traverse this port, it is as if you passed in a little barque between two shadowing ships; it seems as if the enormous masses were advancing on you, and about to enclose you. The general impression is grand, but painful. The harbour is a prodigious effort of strength-a defiance hurled at England and at nature. The galleys and the chain of the galley slave infect the air. It is just at this point where the sea, escaping from the constraint of the British Channel, dashes with so much fury against our coast, that we have established the great depot of our navy. Certainly it is well guarded. I have counted a thousand guns there. But if it is difficult to enter, it is often dangerous to quit this port. Many a vessel has been lost at the bar of Brest. The whole coast is a buryingground. About sixty vessels are wrecked there every winter. The sea is English; it loves not France; it breaks our ships to pieces, and chokes our harbours with sand. 66 Nothing can be more gloomy and formidable than this coast of Brest; it is the extreme limit, the point, the prow of the ancient world. Here the two enemies are face to face, the earth and the ocean, man and nature. One should see her, the bedlamite, when she is furious. What an insurrection! How she hurls and heaps her monstrous waves against the point of St Matthew-fifty, sixty, eighty feet over the land; their foam sprinkles the church where matrons and virgins are at prayer. But even when there is a truce, when the sea sleeps, who can pace this funereal strand, without exclaiming inwardly,Tristis usque ad mortem.' "But then there is what is worse than wrecks, what is worse than tempests. Nature is atrocious, man is atrocious, and they seem to understand each other. When the sea casts any broken vessel on the coast, the inhabitants, men, women, and children, rush towards their prize. Never imagine that you can stop these wolves. They would pillage tranquilly under the fire of the gendarmerie. It is said, even, that they are so impatient for shipwrecks, as to have often caused them, by attaching a lighted torch to a cow's horns, and thus, by this moving beacon, drawing vessels upon the rocks! "Let us now sit down on the formidable point of Raz, a mined rock, three hundred feet high, and whence we may command a prospect of seven leagues all around us. This may be called the sanctuary of the Celtic world. The land which you perceive beyond the bay of Trépassés, is the Isle of Sein, a dismal sandbank, without trees and almost without shelter; a few families live there, poor and compassionate, who aid the shipwrecked all the winter months. This island was formerly the fabled abode of the sacred virgins, who distributed foul and fair wea ther to Celtic mariners. There they celebrated their murderous orgies; and sailors, far out at sea, heard, with a shudder, the noise of their barbarous cymbals. This islet was, according to tradition, the cradle of Myrddyn, the Merlin of the middle ages. His tomb is on the other side of Brittany, in the forest of Broceliande, under the fatal stone where his Vyvyan lies enchanted. All those rocks which you see, are engulfed cities; there is Douarnenez, there is Iss, the Breton Sodom; those two crows which are constantly seen winging heavily their way along the coast, are no other than the souls of King Grallon and his daughter; and those wailings, which might be mistaken for the mournful sounds of winds justling among rocks, are, in truth, the moanings of the shipwrecked, demanding burial." We must give one more extract from M. Michelet's chapter on the geography of France, from which the above picturesque descriptions are taken : "It was at St Florent," he says, "there where a column has been raised to the memory of the Vendean chief Bonchamps, that in the ninth century the Breton Noménoé, the conqueror of the Northmans, erected his own statue; it looked towards Anjou, towards France, which he regarded as his prey. But Anjou prevailed. A grand feudality reigned over this docile population; whilst Brittany, with its innumerable minor nobility, could not wage war or make conquests. The Black City, Angers, bears not only in its enormous castle, and in its Devil's Tower, but even in its cathedral, the feudal character. This church of St Maurice has its walls decorated not solely with images of saints, but with those also of knights armed capà-pie; but their arrows are, some broken, others ornamented, and others naked, thus expressing the incomplete destiny of Anjou. Despite her fine site on the triple stream of the Maine, and so near the Loire, that its waters are coloured by the soil of four provinces, Angers has fallen to sleep. It is enough to have, in her day, united under her Plantagenets, England, Normandy, Brittany, and Aquitaine; to have afterwards, under her good René and his sons, possessed and disputed the thrones of Naples, of Arragon, of Jerusalem, and of Provence; whilst her daughter Margueret supported the red rose against the white, and Lancaster against York. They sleep also to the murmurs of the Loire, the cities of Saumur, and of Tours, the capital of Protestantism, and the capital of Catholicism in France; Saumur, the little kingdom of the preachers of old Duplessis-Mornay, to oppose whom their good friend, Henry IV., built La Flèche for the Jesuits. The chateau of Mornay, and its prodigious Dolmen,' make Saumur still an historic city. But grander historic recollections belong to the good city of Tours: it has its tomb of St Martin-the asylum, the Delphic oracle of the olden times of France, where the Merovingians came to consult the fates-where that great and lucrative pilgrimage was established, in defence of which the Counts of Blois and Anjou broke so many lances. Mons, Angers, all Brittany depended on the Archbishopric of Tours. Its canons were the Capets; the Dukes of Burgundy, of Brittany; the Counts of Flanders; the patriarchs of Jerusalem; and the Archbishops of Mayence, of Cologne, and of Compostello. There money might be minted as at Paris; there silk and precious tissues were early fabricated; and there also sweetmeats and spices-which have made Tours and Reims the cities of priests and of sensuality, equally celebrated-were confectioned. But Paris, Lyons, and Nantes have injured the industry of Tours. The sun and the languid Loire are also to blame. Labour seems to be against nature in the indolent climate of Tours, of Blois, and of Chinon, in this country of Rabelais, so near the tomb of Agnes Sorel. nonceaux, Chambord, Montbazon, Langeai, Loches-all favourites, male and female, of our kings-built their chateaux on the banks of the river. This region is the region of laugh and do nothing.' The verdure is as bright in Autumn as in May-the fruits and foliage how abundant! If you look from one side of the river to the other, the opposite bank seems to be it, as from the sky. The clear sand-the hung in the air; the crystal waters reflect poplar, the aspen, the walnut tree-the willow. drinking from the stream-the scattered islets intermixed in the moving current and in the distance flocks of trees, whose heads only appear, pasturing peacefully, as it were, on the lazy land! Soft and sensual province! It is here, indeed, that the idea of making woman the queen of monasteries, and of living under her, in voluptuous obedience-a blending of love and sanctity, might well occur. Thus, never had an abbey the splendour of that of Fontevrault. More than one king has desired to be interred there. Even the fierce Richard Coeur de Lion bequeathed to this sanctuary his heart. It would find rest, he might think, in the soft hand of woman, and under the prayers of virgins." Che Being in the vein of extracting, we shall go on and take various odd and We pleasant passages from the volumes on our table, reserving such remarks as have occurred, and may occur to us in the course of our transcriptions, for the conclusion of this paper. have already said that M. Michelet sometimes indulges in harlequinading caprices; and the following quotation, forming a striking contrast to the preceding one, will justify this assertion. He is describing England, and his description is so grandiosely absurd, that it has made us exceedingly merry, and will doubtless have the same effect on our readers. Here it is "I will not, nevertheless, deny that this odious England is a very great nation. Her face is towards Europe-towards Dunkirk and Antwerp. All other countries, Russia, Austria, Italy, Spain, and France, have their capitals in the west, towards the setting sun. England, alone, the great European ship, her sails bellying to the winds, has her prow towards the east, as if to brave the whole world; unum omnia contra. This extreme land of the old world, is the heroic land, the eternal asylum of bandits, of men of energy. All those who have ever fled servitude; Druids persecuted by Rome; Gallo-Romans expelled by barbarians; Saxons proscribed by Charlemagne; lounging Danes; greedy Normans, Flemish industry oppressed, vanquished Calvinism, have all crossed the sea, and found refuge and a country in the great island: Arva, beata petamus arva, divites et insulas. Thus England has fattened on calamities, has grown great out of ruins. In proportion, however, as all these outcasts, amassed together in a narrow corner, have come fixedly to regard each other-in proportion as they have observed the differences of races and of creeds which separate them as they have remarked, that they are made up collectively of Kymries, Gaëls, Saxons, Danes, and Normans, hatred and strife have sprung up among them. A spectacle has ensued resembling the combats of wild beasts which the Romans loved to witnessof wild beasts astonished to find themselves together hippopotami, lions, tigers, and crocodiles. And when these fierce animals, shut up in their ocean-circled arena, had bitten and torn each other till they were tired, they threw themselves into the sea to bite and devour France. But their intestine conflicts are not, we may rely upon it, finished. The triumphant beast will not long bully the world from her ocean throne, and of this she is aware. Her smile is bitter, and furiously she grinds her teeth. Whence her disquietude? Is it that she fears the creaking wheel of Man. But enough of this. The battle of Agincourt, described by M. Michelet, will put our readers strongly in mind of Sir Walter Scott's historic pictures. It is full of movement, and of little touches of the pencil, which bring the scene and the manners of the epoch vividly before the imagination. It is as follows: "From Abbeville, the army of the princes had ascended the Somme as far as Peronne, to dispute the passage of the river. Learning that Henry had crossed the stream, they sent, according to the usage of chivalry, to ask him to fix on a day and place for battle, and to be informed of the route he intended to follow. The English king answered with a dignified simplicity, 'that he was marching straight upon Calais, that he should enter no city, and that he should always, by the grace of God, be found ready in an open field to meet his enemies.' To which he added: your princes will do right not to bar our road, and thus to avoid the effusion of Christian blood.' "On the other side of the Somme the English found themselves truly in an ene my's country. Bread failed them; they had for eight days lived upon meat, eggs, and butter; and at last, when these also were not to be had, upon whatever they could find. The French army had devastated the country and broken up the roads. The English were scattered among many villages in order to find lodgings. Here was another favourable occasion to attack them, of which the French leaders did not take advantage. They were bent solely on bringing about a great action. A little further on, they assembled their troops near the chateau of Agincourt, in a spot where the Calais road, shut in between Agincourt and Tramecourt, would oblige the king to force his passage by giving battle. "On Thursday the 24th October, the English having passed Blangy, learned that the French were in their close neighbourhood, and concluded that they would be immediately attacked. Their mounted warriors descended from their horses, and all together kneeling upon the ground, lifted their hands to heaven, and prayed God to take them under his protection. No attack, however, took place, as the Constable had not yet arrived. The English, therefore, took up their quarters at Maisoncelle, near Agincourt. Henry V. |