them, and Cromwell sent, out of his own purse, to Geneva 20007. for their immediate relief. The particulars collected by Pell, in his despatch to Thurlow, give a frightful picture of persecution so late as the middle of the 17th century. The Savoyard army had been marched into the valleys, and there devastated the villages. The inhabitants fled where flight was in their power. On their return they found everything burned which their persecutors had not been able to carry away.

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'Money," says Pell, "hath been sent them, which helpeth to maintain their widows, fatherless, and impotent, that they be not too burdensome to their friends; while the men themselves have no other subsistence but what they fetch from their enemies with extreme danger; and it is to be feared that, before any harvest be ripe, all will be consumed thereabout, so that a dearth will miserably pinch them, if a famine destroy them not. Yet they desire to tarry there, and to run very great hazards, rather than leave their lands and native country, and give the Papists cause to boast that now, at the last, they had driven them out of their nests in the rocks, which so many years they had possessed."

The Doctor. Milton's famous lines commemorated at once the sorrow of the Christian and the indignation of the bard :—

"Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd saints!"

Pell declares that "Rome expressed great signs of joy for clearing Calabria and the Valteline of our brethren, and is now in hope to rid Piedmont of them, to increase the gladness of their extraordinary jubilee this year." Another letter from Geneva, of the same day, gives a characteristic anecdote :-"They say that the Duchess (mother of the Duke of Savoy, and sister to the Queen of England) asked her Confessor, whether she should be accountable to God for the massacre of the Valleys?" The Confessor was probably offended or alarmed at this touch of compunction in the female conscience, for, as Pell observes,— "he wrote of it into Spain; his letters were intercepted, so she came to know what a secret ghostly father she had; whereupon she sent him to the castle of Niolons, out of which scarce any man comes to liberty or public execution, but is fed there till he die of himself, or is privately made away." Such was and is continental freedom! How much ought Englishmen to rejoice in their Constitution! Which of those things could have been done in a land where there was cither a Habeas Corpus Act, or a trial by jury? Thsee volumes on the whole are highly important: they give authentic information of one of the most complicated periods of British history, exibit the workings of some of the most powerful minds which ever guided or disturbed a state, and leave a moral of the most solemn and essential warning against trusting to personal ambition for the healing of the state, or to the fanaticism of the populace for the purity of religion.

The Rector. "A Wreath of Wild Flowers from New England, by Frances S. Osgood."-In this country we are always pleased to receive such contributions from America. Wars, and rumours of wars, are ungenial things between nations which have so many strong natural ties to keep them in amity. But the rivalry of mind is harmless, animating, and graceful. Mrs. Osgood's volume contains many specimens of that

style of poetry, which, at once delicate and forcible, is most natural and most attractive, from the female pen. The lines on a sleeping child are sweet and flowing:

"The child was weary, and had flung herself,

In beautiful abandonment, to rest,

Low on the gorgeous carpeting, whose lines
Contrasted richly with her snow-white robe.
One dimpled arm lay curving o'er the head,
Half-buried in its glossy golden curls-
The other, pressed beneath her cheek, did make
With small round fingers dimples in the rose."

The Colonel. "Heath's Picturesque Annual, Versailles."- Louis Philippe has given a new proof of his knowledge of national character, in decorating, furnishing, and dedicating, as a national monument, the noble palace of Versailles. He has achieved another triumph by showing, that the modern monarchy erected under his sceptre, and restricted as it is by at least the rudiments of constitutional freedom, can equal the public splendours of that older despotism, whose only apology for a thousand errors and miseries was, that it gave France the finest palaces, costliest popular shows, and most brilliant balls in the annals of human extravagance.

The Barrister. The history of Versailles is, like everything in French recollection, tinged with romance. The feudal castle of the original lords of this district stood a little above the Priory of St. Julian. The first who is named was Hugo de Versaliis, a contemporary of the first of the Capet kings. Towards the end of the eleventh century, the mansion was inhabited by a lord named Philip, a man of a reflective and cloudy character. The legend represents him as going forth from his secluded dwelling, and wherever he turns, hearing the announcement of some extraordinary event; yet still without change of temper or increase of sympathy. One day, when he goes out from his château, he hears that the Dukes of Normandy have conquered England, but the conquest has no charms for him; he turns away his horse's head, and rides on, gloomy as ever: farther on, he hears the people shouting," the Normans have conquered the south; it is in Italy that Fortune waits the brave;" but Italy has no charms for him; he abandons southern glory, and turns away his horse's head from the crowd. He is now met by a company of young nobles; they tell him that Henry of Burgundy has beaten the Moors, and that Spain is the place of glory; but Spanish glory cannot awake him, he turns his horse's head another way. He now suddenly plunges into a multitude -those are not alone nobles or warriors, but peasants, priests, every class of society; immense masses are rushing forward with a cross in one hand, and a sword in the other. He hears them shouting "the Pope has ordered a crusade, and Peter the Hermit has preached it:" but the glory of the crusade throws no light round his spirit. And now, having tried all points of the compass, and found vexation in every quarter of the horizon, he returns home; but even there the world follows him. The lords of the Province come to propose a rebellion against King Philip, who has been excommunicated by the Pope; but he has no desire for an increase of his privileges. Soon after, his presence is de

manded to assist the nobles against a rebellion of the Serfs; but he finds as little inclination to fight for the nobles as against the King. Thus beset, the unlucky lover of his fireside discovers that there is but one spot where he can escape the perpetual tumults and tribulations of this bustling world. The convent is that spot. His wife Helvise is beautiful, young, spirituelle. But what is wife or wealth in comparison with the comfort of escaping from perpetual summonses to war, diplomacy, aristocratic intrigue, and popular riot? The convent is the true place for this philosopher of the dark ages. He gives his handsome wife a parting kiss, gives a showy donation of land to the neighbouring priory, and finally in Touraine shaves his head, puts on a hair shirt, and defies the world, the flesh, and Satan, in the garb of a monk. The monk's spirit certainly did not transpire in the future owners of the domain.

The Colonel. Versailles was long a hunting-ground of the French Kings. In the time of Louis the Thirteenth the site of the present palace was surmounted by a mill, where the King used frequently to sleep on his hunting excursions. He built the château in

1627.

The Rector. There is a singular connexion between public tumult and national literature. They seem remote as the poles by nature; yet they are always in the same horizon by sympathy. In Greece, Rome, Modern Italy, and England, the period of public troubles always either preceded or accompanied a sudden revival of literature. But this was eminently the case in monarchical France. The reign of Louis the Fourteenth was almost one long war; the reign of his predecessor was a succession of civil tumults; yet Pascal, Molière, St. Evremond, Rabutin, De Sevigné, Boileau, with a crowd of orators, wits, and philosophers, who were to be equalled only by the crowd who developed themselves in the cloudy and tempestuous preparations for the revolution of 1789, were all, the children of those two reigns.

The Doctor. When Louis Philippe first came to the throne, the palace at Versailles was sinking into ruin. It required the peculiar conceptions, as well as the extraordinary personal opulence of the King to make it anything else than what it was-a sepulchre of the old monarchy. He adopted the idea of making it a national monument—a palace of the people-a magnificent union of the grandeur of the past despotism with the popular spirit of the new reign. Immense alterations were required; numbers of small rooms were thrown into one; and the whole building is now one vast collection of the glories of France-a great architectural history of the intellect, the enterprise, and the renown of the nation—a solid record standing before the people, in which the eye is substituted for the ear, and succeeding generations may trace in all the reality that can be given by the bronze, the marble, or the canvass, the memorable times and things of the generations passed away.

The Colonel. The account of this palace is enlivened by amusing anecdotes. The bed-chamber of Louis the Fifteenth was originally a billiard-room. It was here that Chamillart made his fortune, by beating all the courtiers at the game, and allowing the King to beat him.

After Louis the Fifteenth had put his bed in this room, he was seized with the small-pox; all his courtiers ran away through dread of the disease, and nobody was left with him but his daughters, who, as the French say, were too old for any danger to their beauty. The king was at length given over by his physicians; and, in this instance, we have a memorable example of the national manners. The ante-chamber was full of courtiers, as the king's death was expected every moment, and the palace was crowded with people, anxious for the event. The Dauphin, afterwards Louis the Sixteenth, was waiting in the palace, ready to set out for Paris, at the moment when the king had expired. A lamp set in a window of the bed-room was to be the signal of the fatal moment. All eyes were fixed upon the lamp; but the king still lived, and the lamp still burned. Ennui rose to its height, and the nervous impatience of the Frenchman broke into murmurs; at length the signal was given, the lamp burned no more. At the instant, the whole crowd jumped into their calêches and saddles-all were on the road to Paris-the uproar was deafening it was described as if a thunderbolt had fallen on the palace, and was rolling through the room. This was the rush of the courtiers running through the palace to pay their Court to Louis the Sixteenth. On leaving the bed-chamber, the Duc de Villequier desired the first surgeon to open the body. "I shall willingly perform the duty of my office," said the surgeon, if you will do yours, and hold the head." The Duke left the room without saying a word. Some under-servants put the body into a hunting-carriage, and, all glad to get rid of it, sent it off post-haste to St. Dennis, there to be laid with the dust of kings.

The decorations of the volumes are highly finished. Twenty-one fine engravings give representations of the palace, and the surrounding country, in their prominent points of view; and the binding and general arrangements are worthy of the superb fabric which the volume thus makes the common property of Europe-an example to the taste, munificence, and public spirit of its sovereigns.

INDEX

TO THE

THIRD PART OF 1838.