now the play begins. All understand its blows, and can appreciate their force. The assembly is now filled with admiring applause and now convulsed with merriment. Socrates himself sees his own features depicted in "the clouds."

Thus, as the fabled touch of Midas could transmute all into gold, so the genius of the comedian draws fun and frolic from the most unpromising materials. He has an audience such as never was gathered before and never will be again. His drollery and sarcasm can find subjects everywhere; a prolific fancy runs riot in the wildest humor. A beard, a puff of smoke, the blunder of a clown, the lisp of Alcibiades, feed his mirthfulness. He is a punster, a Punch, a Thomas Hood, a Thackeray, all in one.

And now you may ask, Where was humanity, where were virtue and religion all this while? Athens might almost blush in her grave of centuries to give an answer. She could boast one Aristeides, but him she banished. She could boast one Socrates, but to him she gave the fatal hemlock. What more can be said? Is not the cup of her shame and disgrace full

The picture of Athens, then, in the days of Socrates her golden age-is one of intellectual brilliancy, of national enthusiasm, of many noble impulses, but of licentiousness, pride, idolatry and inhumanity. She was her own idol. Her Phidias and Pericles, her tragic and comic poets, her heroic generals and soldiers, her free institutions and literary eminence, are like brilliants hung upon a harlot's bosom. She fell from her glory because she had no public morality, no pure religion to sustain her institutions. Like many another nation, she fell by her own hand, and the word Suicide must be written upon her tomb.

That vex the gasping mariner, and bid
The wrecking argosy to leave no trace

Or bubble where it perished. Man's weak voice,
Though wildly lifted in its proudest strength
With all its compass, all its volumed sound,
Is mockery to thee. Earth speaks of him--
Her levelled mountains and her cultured vales,
Town, tower, and temple, and triumphal arch-
All speak of him, and moulder while they speak.
But of whose architecture and design
Tell thine eternal fountains, when they rise
To combat with the cloud, and when they fall?
Of whose strong culture tell thy sunless plains
And groves and gardens, which no mortal eye
Hath seen and lived?

359

What chisel's art hath wrought Those coral monuments and tombs of pearl, Where sleeps the sea-boy 'mid a pomp that earth Ne'er showed her buried kings?

Whose science stretched The simplest line to curb thy monstrous tide, And graving "Hitherto" upon the sand, Bade thy mad surge respect it?

From whose loom

Came forth thy drapery, that ne'er waxeth old,
Nor blancheth 'neath stern Winter's direst frost?
Who hath thy keys, thou deep? Who taketh note
Of all thy wealth? Who numbereth the host
That find their rest with thee? What eye doth scan
Thy secret annal, from creation locked
Close in those dark, unfathomable cells,
Which he who visiteth, hath ne'er returned
Among the living?

Still but one reply!
Do all thine echoing depths and crested waves
Make the same answer ?--of that one dread Name,
Which he who deepest plants within his heart
Is wisest, though the world may call him fool.
Therefore, I come a listener to thy lore,
And bow me at thy side, and lave my brow
In thy cool billow, if perchance my soul,
That fleeting wanderer on the shores of time,
May, by thy voice instructed, learn of God.

360

Deep groans of man in his last agonies!
And now and then there swell'd upon the breeze
Strange, savage bursts of laughter, wilder far
Than all the rest.

The Vespers of Palermo. Act V. Scene II.

A MELANCHOLY history is that of France, from very early times, as of some athletic, stalwart hero, bleeding to death through wounds inflicted by his own suicidal hands. Never seriously crippled by foreign aggressors, that country has repeatedly been brought to the brink of ruin by the reckless folly or wickedness of its own rulers. One of these well-nigh mortal stabs into its own vitals, bears the ominous date of August 24th, 1572--a day marked upon the page of the past as a terrible illustration of the capabilities of human passion under the impulses of ecclesiastical hatred.

We shall be quite mistaken if, in charity to human nature, we regard this event as a sudden outburst of vindictive feeling, chafed to explosion by unexpected provocations. Truth denies this apology. The student of history must blush for the dishonor of his race, as he finds that the "Eve of St. Bartholomew" forged but the last link of a chain of atrocities, long in its construction and deliberate in its completion.

To trace this consummation of cruelty to its immediate causes, we must go back to the condition of France in the reign of the first Francis, near the commencement of the sixteenth century. This monarch ascended the throne of an entirely Papal kingdom. At the period of his accession, with but here and there a faint murmur of discontent, all Europe slept supinely in the embrace of the Roman Church. To doubt her divine right to dictate in all matters, spiritual and temporal, was looked upon as the sure proof of idiotic weakness or satanic impiety, for either of which, compulsive restraint, from a thumb screw to a pile of faggots, was the established prescription. And with this quietus, Rome had till now succeeded in laying the rising spirit of innovation which, at intervals here and there, had menaced her repose.

But the day of her unchallenged despotism was closed, and Europe and the world were to witness another spectacle. The light kindled at Wurtemburg, by the Saxon monk, spread rapidly beyond the widest thought of its author. From a personal, it grew to a national quarrel, then to a continental. Twenty years gave those Germau reformers the satisfaction of seeing some of the chief thrones of Europe warmly espousing a

cause on which, to their faith, hung the best hopes of humanity.

France, from its proximity to Germany, was among the first to feel these new disturbances. But not until Calvin, about the year 1536, began to make Protestantism a respected and formidable assailant of the dominant Church, did the French court begin to take decided measures against the growing heresy. Then the true character of the subtle Francis, no longer masked by political considerations, showed itself; and the butcheries of D'Oppedo, which consigned twenty-two villages and four thousand of their inhabitants to the sword, gave the first presage of the fate which was decreed to fall thenceforth on the devoted Huguenot.

From this period, through two successive reigns, the religious affairs of France present but a sad picture of oppression and resistance, each party organizing itself for a more vigorous contest, and prosecuting the controversy with a more destructive energy. Never was a struggle made illustrious by a more gallant band of leaders, or a succession of combats fought with a more chivalrous valor. On the side of Rome, the Dukes of Guise, Princes of Lorraine, nearly allied to the crown, suspected even of aspiring to transfer it to their own line, and numbering in their heraldry some of the most noted warriors and reverend prelates of the age, throwing themselves at the head of the royal troops, turned almost the whole military force of the kingdom to crush the opposers of their ambitious views. The followers of the Reformed faith, few and unknown to fame, but firm in conscious rectitude, and guided by the genius and experience of the veterans Condé and Coligny, proved an even match for their titled adversaries; and the well-contested fields of St. Denis and Jarnac

taught the world how invincible is a cause defended by an unflinching hand and an honest heart.

Such bravery and sagacity did the Huguenots display, that the court faction began to despair of reducing them to submission by open force. It was no prompting of pity for the thousands slaughtered and the miseries entailed by this unrighteous war, which moved the unhuman Charles IX., then the occupant of the French throne, to propose terms of amnesty. A deep-laid plot, to secure by perfidy what violence could not compass, was the policy which led to a suspension of hostilities. On the 15th of August, peace was concluded at St. Germain, by which, through studied complaisance, the apprehensions of the Protestants were put to rest, to enclose them the

more widely in the snare which, ten days after, was to sweep them by thousands to death.

The brief interval was well employed for this nefarious purpose. As if to wipe out all traces of the late collisions, the King proposed a marriage between his sister and Prince Henry of Navarre, the recognized head of the Huguenot league. To grace the nuptials with becoming state, the Queen-mother of the Prince, with all his chief partisans, is invited up to Paris. They are welcomed with smiles and congratulations. Pomp and festivities usher in the bridal-day. marriage is solemnized amid the acclamations of multitudes. Religion lends her most imposing rites to heighten the sacredness and seal the inviolableness of the friendship thus plighted. Who dreams that beneath this surface of joyous forgetfulness are already gathered for explosion the materials of indiscriminate destruction?

"Let them fall

When dreaming least of peril; when the heart, Basking in sunny pleasure, doth forget

The

That hate may smile, but sleeps not. Hide the sword
With a thick veil of myrtle; and in halls

Of banqueting, where the wine-cup shines
Red in the festa! torch-light, meet we there,
And bid them welcome to the feast of death."

Yet some mistrusted danger. Asthe Admiral Coligny was mounting his horse to go to Paris, a woman seized his stirrup and begged him not to trust the royal assurances of his safety. After his arrival there, letters reached him recalling to his memory the falseness of his foes; that the Queenmother was of the worst school of Italian duplicity, and that her son, the King, had been systematically trained to dissimulation and perjury. Like efforts were as unsuccessfully made to save Navarre from this infernal trap. Two Protestant noblemen had caution enough to avoid the lure--Francis Montmorency and the Sieur de Langoiran, the latter of whom told Coligny that he did not like so much caressing, and that he had rather save his life with fools than lose it with the wise.* But a noble host of victims was decoyed within the hunter's lines.

And so the week of doom wears on, during which Charles, on pretence of security to his guests, manages to fill the city with large detachments of the royal troops. A wound inflicted accidentally, to appearance, on the Admiral, is made the occasion, for which it was contrived, of posting forces in every part of the capital. They understood perfectly their intended work.

* Smedley.

361

Stung to implacable hatred by a long and obstinate war, they embraced with stern exultation the offer of so congenial a recompense. And when "the bell of midnight proclaimed" to the unsuspecting occupants of the imperial city "the commencement of the festival of St. Bartholomew," like unchained tigers these hired assassins bounded to their death-tasks. Nor in Paris alone was this tragedy enacted. By preconcerted siguals, each principal town in the kingdom was deluged with the same mad slaughter, and in another week France had drunk the blood of seventy thousand of her best citizens, immolated on the altars of Antichrist.

How highly this service was appreciated at Rome, and how unaltered still is that approval, is a matter of authentic, unrefutable record. Not only by the firing of cannon, the solemn procession of Pope and Cardinals to the, Church of St. Louis, and the chanting of Te Deum was thanksgiving offered "for an exploit so long meditated and so happily executed"-I quote the words of the Papal Legate-but triumphant medals were struck to immortalize the event. Within a few years past a new issue of this 'Hugonotorum strages"* medal has been struck from the Papal Mint at Rome, and sold for the benefit of the Holy See. That which Charles produced on this occasion bore the motto, "Pietas excitavit justitiam"-PIETY EXCITED JUSTICE.

The sacrifice was accomplished. But only to demand a second, as it only added another illustration of the impotency of persecution to crush out convictions of truth from human soule. Terrible as was that blow, the Protestant cause rose from it, as the staunch ship recovers from the blast of the hurricane, to ride the billows. with a steadier, truer helm. Men were in that struggle, and women too, whose religion was a covenant, for life and death, with duty and with God.

"They linked their hands, they pledged their stainless faith

In the dread presence of attesting Heaven.
They bound their hearts to suffering and to death,
With the severe and solemn transport given
To bless such vows. How man had striven,
How man might strive, and vainly strive, they knew;
And called upon their God, whose arm had riven
The crest of many a tyrant, since he blew

The foaming sea wave on, and Egypt's might o'erthrew."

Pass we on a few years. Charles is in a grave of ignominy. Henry III., his brother-as imbe

* Slaughter of the Huguenots,

cile, bigoted, and profligate as his predecessorafter cursing the realm with fifteen years of folly, has fallen by the dagger of Jaques Clement, a fanatical monk; and now Prince Henry, of Navarre, stands next to the throne of France, its rightful heir. Descended of the blood-royal, through Robert of Bourbon, a son of St. Louis, he had early imbibed the spirit of the Reformation from his heroic mother, Jeanne d'Albret; and at sixteen years of age had drawn his sword in its defence. Narrowly escaping the Bartholomew carnage, and for several years thereafter kept a close prisoner by the Papal faction, he had at length again taken the field, and victoriously asserted the cause of his oppressed countrymen in the memorable battles of Coutras, Arques, and Ivry. But the dissensions of the nation were beyond the healing of war. The Papal party, incessantly goaded by priestly intrigue, utterly refused to acknowledge a Protestant king. To harmonize the realm, Henry was persuaded by his minister, the Duke of Sully, to give in his adherence to the Catholic Church. In 1593, he made this profession, and was crowned monarch of France the following year.

We must regard this as merely a political conversion, the propriety of which should be judged in the light of its own age and circumstances. Nurtured in the doctrines of religious and civil freedom, their firm defender through years of bitterest persecution, and during life the efficient friend of the Reformers, it is not at all supposable that any conviction of past error led to this change. It was the wish of this magnanimous prince to give rest to a land riven for generations by a most unpitying, fratricidal strife; to rule a people reconciled, if not by a thorough, at least by an ostensible union. Within five years of his accession, Henry succeeded in placing the Protestant interests on a just basis by the Edict of Nantes. By this great charter of liberty, the Huguenots were guaranteed the enjoyment of their religious belief and worship, and were made equally eligible with the Catholics to offices of honor and trust. The beneficial effects of these healing measures were speedily apparent. Commerce, agriculture, manufactures, the elegant and useful arts revived from the prostration and ruin of civil war and destroyed confidence; and France once more entered on a career of prosperity with refreshed and vigorous strength.

It was a scene, like many a sunlit morning, doomed speedily to be overcast with clouds and returning tempests. Henry fell also by the hand of an assassin, lamented by every manly heart

in Europe as the most kingly monarch of his age, and justly honored in history as the "Great." His son, Louis XIII., inherited neither his greatness nor his goodness. Jesuitical councils again triumphed, and the scarce-closed wounds of the country were rudely rent asunder and freshly made to bleed.

But it was reserved for the grandson of the great protector of French liberty, the Fourteenth Louis, to stamp his name with endless infamy, by overthrowing the embankment against tyranny set up by his illustrious ancestor of Navarre. A profligate youth, a parade day soldier, a vain, self-idolizing monarch, at middle life he took the next degree in kingeraft, by surrendering his conscience to a confessor's control, and consecrating what remained of him to the sanctities of spiritual devoteeism, and the stale caresses of a faded mistress. For all this, the sycophaney of Papal historians has named him "Le Grand Monarque." He has, however, sat for his fulllength to another artist, and that so successfully that a feature or two must enliven our pages.

Says Mr. Babington Macaulay, "Concerning Louis XIV. the world seems at last to have

formed a correct judgment. . . Though his internal administration was bad; though the military triumphs which gave splendor to the early part of his reign were not achieved by himself; . . . though he was so ignorant that he scarcely understood the Latin of his Massbook; though he fell under the control of a cunning Jesuit, and of a more cunning old woman, he succeeded in passing himself off on his people as a being above humanity. Five hundred people assembled to see him shave and put on his breeches in the morning. He then kneeled down at the side of his bed and said his prayer, while the whole assembly awaited the end in solemn silence, the ecclesiastics on their knees, and the laymen with their hats before their faces. All Versailles came to see him dine and sup. He was put to bed at night in the midst of a crowd as great as that which met to see him rise in the morning.

Yet though he constantly exposed himself to the public gaze in situations in which it is scarcely possible for any man to preserve much personal dignity, he, to the last, impressed those around him with the deepest awe and reverence. He had, it seems, a way of holding himself, a way of walking, a way of swelling his chest and rearing his head, which deceived the eyes of the multitude," and all this with an ab. solutely diminutive stature.

Such was the worthy instrument of Papal malice and fraud for destroying the chartered rights of a populous and loyal section of the nation. Under the lead of a cabinet composed of the ferocious Louvois, the crafty Tellier, and the Jesuit La Chaise, his confessor, Louis made ready the secret blow. Among the green hills of Southern France, and among the sea side provinces, a period of comparative quiet had reared a numerous generation of the Reformed Church. Some of the noblest families in the kingdom were, as ever, its staunch supporters. The valor, intelligence, loyalty of these could not save them. The nefarious plot was kept within the court until numerous troops had been sent to overawe the disaffected sections. Then, when all was ripe, a decree was published forbidding, on pain of death, all emigration; and at the same time, the REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES-the Magna Charta of French liberty -was announced. No Protestant could leave the country, or, remaining, be more than a slave. Religious and secular freedom perished at a stroke. Yet, in spite of every vigilance, more than five hundred thousand Huguenots fled the land-fled it as Israel escaped Egypt, choosing the sea, the desert, exile from every thing dear and treasured, rather than bow the knee to the Baal of the Vatican.

The reaction upon France of this measure was like a stroke of palsy. It was another Bartholomew sacrifice, stretched from a night, a week of agony, over years of horrid gloom and anguish. Arts, wealth, culture, enterprise, virtue, were driven out of the empire, or crushed within her vice-like grasp. They fled with the fugitives to many lands, leaving the unnatural mother bereft and barren of her best children, her noblest props. France pierced her own heart, and drained off its richest blood, when she suffered a Louis to cast forth such men as have made the name and the nobleness of the Huguenot immortal in both hemispheres dooming

herself to a miserable, decrepit, groveling, premature old age of vice and superstition, merging by and bye into universal infidelity and political savageism. Nor is the end yet arrived of that catastrophe.

I close this paper with a paragraph from the French Roman Catholic historian, Saint Simon, (Vol. 13, p. 113, ed. 1829,) fully confirming the view I have given of the enormity of this Huguenot persecution: "The revocation of the Edict of Nantes, without the least pretext or necessity, and the diverse proscriptions that followed,

.

363

were the fruit of a dreadful plot, which depopulated one fourth of the realm; which ruined its commerce; which weakened it universally; which gave it over for a long time to public pillage and military control; which consigned to punishment and torture multitudes of the innocent of either sex; which ruined numberless people; which stripped the land of families; which transferred our manufactures to foreigners, causing them to flourish and thrive at our expense, and rearing for them new cities; which enacted the spectacle of a numerous population proscribed, naked, fugitive, wandering without crime, seeking rest far from home; which doomed the noble, the rich, the aged, renowned for piety, learning, virtue, to ruin, for the sole cause of religion. Such was the general abomination engendered by flattery and cruelty." This, let it be remembered, is the comment of a somewhat free-spoken Romanist on the policy of the extirpating Louis-for which policy, be it remembered further, this same Louis was expressly and warmly thanked in a special letter by Innocent IX., the then reigning Pontiff; for which the persecuting king was told, by the same high authority, that "the Catholic Church shall most assuredly record, in her sacred annals, a work of such devotion towards her, and celebrate your name with never-dying praises." But humanity and Christianity also have their record to make of such transactions; and the world is fast learning at their tribunal who are the great and who the mean; who are the blessings and who the curses of our race; who have doomed themselves to an eternal memory of shame, and who have embalmed their names in imperishable honor.

Here is the divergent point between Papal and Protestant history. The latter also stained her early robes with some dregs of this temper which Rome had taught her. Calvin consented to the death of Servetus; Socinus threw into prison, for some differences of theological opinion, his friend David Francis, of Transylvania; the Puritans laid a hard hand on Baptists and Quakers. Granted. But Protestantism universally repudiates these violences as contrary to Christianity. For a hundred years and more, she has not spoken of them through any of her recognized organs, save with sorrow. This is the contrast. Honest men will confess it. Rome defends all her old atrocities. She must. It is her breath of life. She never says “Peccavi”— I have sinned. She cannot. Protestantism does and will to the end of time; and she will show,