;

political intrigues, and the able and cruel usurpations, of Louis 11th. Brantome among the great men, the parties and the manners which the struggles of the Reformation brought into view; the cardinal de Retz in the saloon, the parliament, the court, the market, in short in every scene of fraud Dangeau in the Œil de Bœuf; Velly, Daniel, Anquetil and all the general historians of the era of monarchy, in the court of the prince; and in our own days M. de Sismondi has placed it in the nation of which he is tracing the existence, local or public, in his work on the French annals. An author, like his epoch, sees and is but one thing.

The new edition of Froissart published by M. Buchon, is more complete and convenient than any preceding edition; a handsome octavo has been substituted for the ponderous folio, and a regular orthography has taken place of the difficult and disorderly spelling of the ancient manuscripts. The greatest attention has been paid to the text, which is restored by a comparison with all the originals. Illustrations of the text, and explanations within parentheses of the old words now no longer understood, or employed, have been added, and render M. Buchon's edition superior to all the rest. The improvements made and to be made upon this new edition of Froissart are of three kinds :

1. In the text. 2. In the notes. 3 In addition, we are to have the life and the poetry of the author.

1. THE TEXT. The preceding editions were taken from incorrect and imperfect manuscripts. Johnes only has taken the trouble of collating the various manuscripts; and to this is owing the former superiority of the English edition over all the French copies. But Johnes had not access to the best manuscripts, which were in the possession of various princes belonging to the royal family of France, and which are chiefly deposited in the royal library. By means of the labours of M. Dacier, joined to his own, M. Buchon has succeeded in new modelling the text. There is scarcely a page in which he does not appear to have found several phrases omitted or disfigured; good readings are now substituted for the former incorrect ones.

We know from the testimony of Froissart himself, that he did not begin to write his Chronicle until the battle of Poitiers in 1356, and that up to that period he has followed the memoirs of Jehan Lebel, as he states in the beginning of his book. Now these memoirs of Jehan Lebel ended with the reign of Philip of Valois in 1350. In order to fill up the blank which occurs here of six years from the beginning of the reign of king John, former editors had been accustomed to copy the large chronicles of

France, styled the Chronicles of St. Denis. The heavy and fatiguing style of the latter contrasted absurdly with the brilliant and animated style of Froissart; but as nothing had hitherto led to the belief that Froissart might have written at a later period the annals of these six years, the supplementary pages from the chronicles of St. Denis continued to be inserted in all the editions. Johnes in one of his manuscripts found about fifteen pages of new text, and published them as a supplement. More scrupulous researches convinced M. Buchon that he had discovered the genuine supplement written by Froissart himself, and he has published the newly discovered manuscript. It forms the first 138 pages of his 3rd volume. He has transferred to the end of the volume, as an appendix, the ancient fragment of the Chronicles of St. Denis.

This manuscript, which bears abundant evidence of the characteristic talent of Froissart, includes several of the most curious facts of the time, among which are the following:

The combat of the Thirty.

The foundation of the order of the Etoile.

The assassination of Charles of Spain by the king of Navarre. The taking of Berwick by the Scots, and its recovery by the English.

The chevauchée of the prince of Wales through Languedoc. The revolt of the inhabitants of Rouen, and the arrest of the king of Navarre by king John.

The States of 1352.

M. Buchon has made another addition to the end of the 6th volume and 1st book of Froissart; a new reading of 200 pages 8vo, which has hitherto been completely unknown.

But what will principally interest English readers is, that the 11th volume, which concludes the 3rd book of Froissart, contains a narrative almost entirely new, and much more extensive than former ones, of the famous battle of Otterbourne. The manuscript which furnished M. Buchon with that various reading is much more correct with regard to proper names, than the other versions. If sir Walter Scott had been acquainted with this version, he would have been spared the exercise of the ingenuity which he has displayed in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish border, in searching out the proper names of the English and Scots who figured in that battle.

2. THE NOTES. M. Dacier had written some excellent historical notes upon the 1st book of Froissart. M. Buchon has published these for the first time, has added notes of his own, and undertaken the annotation of the remaining books, He has likewise made a careful comparison between

the narratives of Froissart, and the English, Spanish, and Portuguese chroniclers from whom he has obtained some corrections in facts and in names.

3. The 15th volume of this edition is to contain a life of. Froissart written by M. Buchon, and is intended to present in some measure a view of the literature of the fourteenth century in France. The last half of the volume will contain the poems of Froissart, which have never been published, and which at the saine time that they offer illustrations of the history of the French language, will afford some curious details of the adventurous life of the historian and traveller whose Chronicle we have examined, and of the principal personages to whom he was known.

It is gratifying to witness the uniform success in France of the large editions of the original French historians now presented to the public. The Latin chronicles translated by M. Guizot, and the national French chronicles edited by M. Buchon, form, with the collection of Mémoires published by M. Foucault, a complete series of annals of the French monarchy. By this means the study of the various epochs is no longer monopolized by a few privileged men of learning, but is commonly shared by all the nation. This symptom is of excellent augury, and promises well for our age and for history.

ART. II. The British Code of Duel: a reference to the Laws of Honour and the Character of Gentleman. London. Knight and Lacey. 1824.

Τ

IT may be as well to premise in the outset, that of the contents of this book we have no concern with any other part than that which is comprised in the title-page, the reason of which exclusive preference can only be thoroughly understood by means of a reference to the volume itself.

If a law-giver were to decree that whenever a theft was committed, and a complaint made to the proper authority, the robber and the party robbed should draw lots, and that he who drew the shortest should be hanged, the means would not appear very happily adapted to the end of repressing theft. Yet the principle of this method of decision, is the very one on which the ancient trial by battle, long considered a very admirable institution, must in reality have depended. The above method, however, of repressing theft has this advantage over the battle and the duel, that it is governed purely by chance, which in one particular at

least resembles justice, viz. in being blind, that is in having no pre-conceived bias towards either of the litigant parties, whereas the two latter institutions depend, in a great measure, upon skill, which goes a great way towards securing success to him who happens to possess it. But although this principle of chance was that which in reality determined the result in the battle and the duel, excepting in so far as the equity of its decisions was disturbed by the unequal skill of the parties, yet we must do our ancestors the justice to remark, that they erected the institution upon a foundation, the solidity of which was never suspected in their days, and which, if solid, would not only justify the institution, but would show that no other method of deciding disputes between man and man ought ever to have been adopted.

Our ancestors thought, and the opinion seems to be very universal and natural, an idolon tribus, according to lord Bacon's classification, that those apparently irregular phenomena, which an ample and scientific experience has now shown to be only particular cases of invariable laws, were the effects of particular interpositions of the Deity, and that as the Deity must love virtue, and hate vice, he would on every occasion take care to adapt the succession of physical events according to the moral exigencies of the case. This was unquestionably the original ground on which men believed that knotty questions of fact might be conveniently cut by the sword, instead of being slowly and painfully solved by the ordinary operations of judicature. This ground, however, has slipped away from under our feet, and if the practice of duelling is to stand at all, some other must be found on which it may be rested.

Accordingly we no longer hear, among those who profess to reason on the subject, of washing out the imputation of dishonour in the blood of the slanderer, but we are told that the reciprocal right to challenge and liability to be challenged, are the sufficient reason of all the polish and decorum which are to be found in our manners. We remember to have read at school that

-Ingenuas didicisse fideliter artcs

Emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros:

but at the time we no more suspected than the benighted heathen who wrote the lines, that to snuff a candle at twelve paces was one of those ingenuous arts to which such good effects are to be attributed--and even now, after all our experience of the world, we feel ourselves compelled to dissent from that opinion, and we propose to lay before our readers the reasons of our dissent. We consider the question as now ripe for discussion; as long as

we are told that the honour of a gentleman is in his own keeping and can only be vindicated by his own right hand, &c., &c., our inability to apprehend the sense of the propositions prevents us from grappling with them. But when we hear of means and an end, we begin to scent our quarry, means and an end are the very things we delight in, for if we have any skill at all, it consists in the adaptation of the one to the other.

Refinement of manners, then, being the end, the question is, whether the custom of duelling be the best means of attaining it.

The circumstance that most forcibly strikes us at first sight, in considering this custom, is, that it is not an artificial device, by which the natural disposition of men is to be moulded to beneficial purposes, but, pro tanto, a recourse to a savage state, it looks like a rude and desert spot in the very midst of the garden of civilization, where

Inter nitentia cultu

Infelix lolium, et steriles dominantur avenæ.

It involves a confession that there are certain injuries for which the wisdom of civilized men is incapable of finding an adequate remedy, and which must, therefore, be left to the operation of those vindictive feelings which nature has implanted in the hearts of the human race. All that has been done by design and reflection has been, to impose a check, to hang a weight upon the springs, whose elasticity puts the system in action. For there is no doubt that the savage man would maim or slay whomsoever should affront him, without thinking it necessary to expose himself to the hazard of the same calamities; whereas, under the system of duelling, no man is entitled to what is called satisfaction, without tendering the same satisfaction (which we believe, however, is not then called by the same name) to his adversary. It cannot fairly be denied that this is a check and a very powerful one, but of what nature? The framers of the mutiny act have determined, that if a plaintiff bring an action for any thing done under the authority of that act, and fail to recover, he shall pay treble costs to the defendant. The object of this is, of course, to separate those cases where the plaintiff has a just cause of complaint, from those in which he has not; to leave him at liberty to pursue his course with regard to the first set of cases, and to deter him from pursuing it, with regard to the second set. But, suppose the provision had been, that the plaintiff should be exposed to an even chance of paying treble the costs to the defendant, whether he made out his case or not, it is manifest that such an indiscriminate restric