attached themselves to it from interested motives, — both the ambitious nobles who sought support in political contentions, and that restless and unruly class whom contemporaries styled atheists and Epicureans,' leaders in insubordination and iconoclastic exploits. Yet if the lower populace was not now strongly Protestant, the Protestant nobles and gentry were still considerable in numbers and in influence. Many a church was composed almost exclusively of the best families of the region. . . . But in the large towns and cities the strength of the 'pretended Reformed religion' lay in the great middle classes. Trade, foreign and domestic, banking, manufactures, came more and more to fall into the hands of the Huguenots. Excluded, as time passed on, from hope of preferment in the va rious departments of the royal service, they pressed into those callings in which men of all creeds meet substantially as equals. Later in the century, a Venetian ambassador, Girolamo Venier, in a report to his government, asserted that at the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes the Huguenot merchants transacted two thirds of the business of the country. This was, doubtless, a gross exaggeration even then. However this may be, there were many places where, as at Dieppe, the Roman Catholic merchants were few in number and of little wealth as compared with their Protestant townsmen." When the proverb "Rich as a Huguenot" became current Professor Baird professes himself unable to say. It is curious to note, in view of this estimate of the Venetian ambassador, that a marked jealousy of Protestant political leaders has shown itself in France under the Third Republic.

The truce could not endure for long. The periodic assemblies of the Church of France offered opportunities for abusing the Protestants, and for the formulation of appeals to the king urging the suppression of heresy. Both the government and the courts regarded the

Huguenots with dislike and suspicion. The presumption was, naturally, always against the Protestant. The Edict of Nantes was not, as a prominent jurist explained, to be construed gracieusement, but strictly according to the letter, since Protestantism was only tolerated out of the goodness of the king's heart. Louis XIV. had scarcely assumed control of the government before matters changed much for the worse. The perpetual nagging and injustice which the Protestants suffered at all times began to take a more serious form. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was not an abrupt or isolated act, but the culmination of a process of repression which, it was asserted, had been so successful as to render the edict no longer necessary.

The Huguenots had always been carefully limited as to their places of worship. Upon one pretense or another, the interdiction or demolition of nearly six hundred of their "temples" was sanctioned between 1660 and 1684. The worshipers were forced to resort to the churches which still remained, even if these were at great distance from their homes, and in spite of the insecurity of the roads. We are told that it was not rare to see ten or twelve thousand at a single service. Besides the constant unfair interpretation of the edict (and there are secret orders preserved, addressed to the judges, requiring them to withhold justice in the case of the Protestants), two decrees preceding the final revocation may be taken as sufficiently characteristic of the tendencies. The first, a subtly conceived bit of legislation, related to Protestants who, in the hope of having a share in the sums distributed to the newly converted or for other reasons, had embraced Catholicism only to relapse soon after into heresy. Such instable sons of the Church seem not to have been negligible factors in the situation. It was therefore decreed in 1679 that after the names of such apostates had been once announced to the

ministers and consistories of the Protestant churches, should any such persons be admitted to divine worship, the consistory of the church in question was to be suppressed, and the minister deprived of the right to officiate. It was obviously open to any ill-disposed individual, by entering a large assembly where he could easily escape notice, to deprive a whole community of its services by simply asserting, under oath, that he had, since his conversion to Catholicism, been present at a Protestant service. This appears to have been exactly the way in which the law worked, and it excellently illustrates what the Huguenots suffered from the application of laws which seem at first thought neither harsh nor unjust.

A better known and much more shocking antecedent of the revocation was the decree of 1681, authorizing children to renounce Protestantism and embrace Roman Catholicism upon reaching the age of seven. This meant that if a child could be induced, by the offer of a toy or a bonbon, to say, for example, the words "Ave Maria," it was sufficient to indicate in the sight of the law a hopeful subject for conversion, if not an actual convert. The child was not permitted to retract its words, and could be abducted from its parents and placed in one of the institutions designed for this class of youthful converts. This miserable business is best understood from a document of pathetic simplicity, a list of the Huguenots of Alençon, drawn up by order of the government, upon which a later, doubtless clerical hand has jotted down the sentence for each family, indicating the children who were to be taken from their parents and placed in Catholic institutions. This Professor Baird reproduces as follows: "Thus Martha Boullay, a widow living in the Grande Rue, has three children: Jean aged six years, Anne Marie aged five, and Joseph aged six months. 'Take Jean and Anne Marie.' A man of more importance, Jean le Conte, and his wife have but one little

...

girl, Anne, 'four years old and weakly.' Take Anne if she is in condition.' Pierre Thifaine and his wife have three children: Ivan, a boy of three; Louise, a girl of eight; and Marie, a girl of five. 'Take Louise and Marie.' . . . With regard to the little family of the widow Anne Ardesoif, consisting of four chil dren, whose ages unfortunately run from four to twelve years, all are to be taken." The dragonnades themselves can hardly be ranked with this measure as a source of domestic misery.

The fact that the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was but part and parcel of the public policy pursued in France during the preceding quarter of a century serves in a measure to explain the favorable attitude of liberal-minded Catholics towards the measure. Madame de Sévigné wrote to her cousin: "You have doubtless seen the edict by which the king revoked the Edict of Nantes. Nothing is so beautiful as all that it contains, and never has any king done, none will ever do, anything more memorable." Mademoiselle de Scudéry declares the king's act to be "a Christian and royal work." The king was applauded by the French Academy, which found a spokesman in the mild-mannered La Fontaine. This attitude towards what seems to us so notoriously gross and ill advised a breach of good faith is nevertheless perfectly explicable. It was due to a fatal misapprehension as to the success of the king's persevering efforts to convert his Protestant subjects. The statement was so often made as finally to be generally believed, that only an insignificant and seditious remnant survived of the once influential body of Protestants. It seemed justifiable now to proclaim that the longed-for unity in belief was once more established in France, after a century and a half of discord. The better heretics had seen the error of their ways, and the opprobrious Edict of Nantes, which in the eyes of the nation at large was a recognition of

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the most hateful of national weaknesses, religious schism, was joyfully done away with, as no longer necessary. This view was carefully inculcated by the Church. The Protestant religion, it was claimed, no longer had the support of an intellectual and powerful element of French society, but was now despised, abased, and henceforth reduced to seeing itself abandoned by all rational persons." These results, the clergy asserted, had been accomplished "without violence, without arms," nor so much by the force of the king's edicts as by his "exemplary piety." The Archbishop of Rouen congratulated Louis upon first gaining the hearts of the heretics, and suggested that perhaps they might never have returned to the bosom of the Church in

any other way than "by the path strewn with flowers," opened to them by the king. This was doubtless very generally believed; and in spite of the anxiety which the emigration of the Huguenots caused the more thoughtful men connected with the administration, the revocation must have appealed to most Frenchmen as it did to Madame de Sévigné, as nothing less than la plus grande et la plus belle chose qui ait été imaginée et exécutée. This view was supported by the absence of any attempt upon the part of the Huguenots to resort to arms before the circumscribed if persistent revolt of the Camisards in 1702. Yet Saint-Simon, in one of his bits of penetrating comment, views the matter in much the light in which the modern historian leads us to see it.

Professor Baird devotes over two hundred pages to the episode of the Camisards. He can scarcely hope to hold the interest of the average reader in so detailed a treatment of this local revolt. The reader cannot be severely reprehended if he finds more to the point the account Mr. Stevenson has given us of this matter in recounting his travels with patient Modestine. In no way unexampled as a medley of fanaticism and VOL. LXXVII. NO. 461.

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self-restraint, of religious vagary and heroic martyrdom, this insurrection furnishes an instance of the difficulty governments have always had in coping with such intensive revolts. It shows clearly, moreover, what a change Protestant influence had undergone in France since the wars of religion when a Protestant gentleman bid fair to gain such an ascendency over the mind of the king himself as to arouse the blind jealousy of the queen mother.

Professor Baird's chapters upon the Desert and the final recognition of the rights of Protestantism by the edict of toleration issued in 1787 form a valuable account of a neglected phase in the history of the eighteenth century. The laws relating to the Protestants were codified in the royal declaration of 1824. It was not new legislation, but a repetition of the old with a view to more complete execution. It thus furnishes a means of reviewing the legal status of the French Protestant. "On only one point," Professor Baird observes, "did a feeling of shame compel a slight alleviation. While reënacting the pains against the person and memory of those who died as relapsed persons, the infliction upon the corpses of Huguenots of that inhuman treatment which had raised the indignation of civilized Europe was purposely omitted. . . . But no more mercy was shown than heretofore to the living. Death remained the penalty for the Huguenot preacher. Indeed, the clause was added that this penalty should not hereafter be regarded as comminatory; that is, a penalty that might be inflicted or not at the discretion of the judges. The minister or preacher that fell into their hands must be sent to the gallows." The baptisms and marriages performed by Protestant ministers "in the desert," as the secret conventicles were picturesquely called, had of course no validity in the eyes of the law, and evidence based upon such ceremonies served only to convict the one urging it of unlawful attendance

at forbidden assemblies. The legal registration of births and marriages was inextricably confused with the most sacred rites of the Catholic Church, and the Protestant who refused to conform knew that his marriage was but concubinage in the eye of the law, and his children bastards with no rights of inheritance. The last execution of a Protestant preacher took place in 1762. In November, 1787, the civil status of non-Catholics was at last recognized.

Professor Baird's work indicates upon every page scholarly erudition and untiring industry. He has utilized much new, or at least comparatively unknown material, although he has very properly availed himself of the guidance of the careful Huguenot historian, Benoist, who completed a voluminous history of the revocation of the edict shortly after that event. While in no way bigoted, Professor Baird writes from a distinctly Protestant standpoint. He takes no pains to explain why the French government pursued so perverted a policy. He exhibits none of the scientific sympathy with the oppressor which is after all essential to the best historical work.

With all their stalwart virtues, the reader will surely agree that the volumes are sadly long. Our author fails conspicuously to stimulate his readers. And yet, with the mass of seductive reading bidding for its attention, the public becomes more impatient every day, and less inclined to supply by an honest effort to be interested what the historian has failed to furnish by a vivacious and philosophical handling of his subject. It is generally supposed that with the Florentine historians, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and the rest, the old form of chronicles was replaced by more intelligent treatments of the past. Doubtless this is, in a way, very true, but as in the matter of superstition and intolerance, in forecasting the weather by the tilt of the moon, if not our fortunes by the stars, we can trace plenty of survivals of medieval in

tellectual frailty, so in historical writing even nowadays we often find little more grasp of the facts and little more histori cal insight than in the Annals of Laure sheim or the Chronicles of Monstrelet.

There are indications that those who write history feel the necessity of a change. Whether the new history be institutional, economic, or genetic, it is at least pretty well assured that the public will no longer patiently pass the winter evenings in its chimney corner, taking up volume after volume of the once classical narrative histories of the past. Bancroft and Thiers are still sold, but it may be doubted if they are often read. Every writer must needs be an impressionist in a measure. He must have an aim and calculate his effects. Much in Prescott's works is as out of date as Hans Memling's Seven Joys of Mary. Too much attention to the petals of the daisies and the embroidered facings of the tunics has frustrated the artist's aim. Perhaps the details of ceremonial connected with the abdication of Charles V. or the individual deeds of the valorous Camisards do but blur rather than clarify our historical conceptions. And then there are the grievous omissions, — essentials crowded out by non-essentials. A legend still passes current that the Renaissance began with the fall of Constantinople; for who can learn anything of Petrarch and his rôle in our histories? Endless illustrations could be given of common misapprehensions of no less magnitude. There are, as every student knows, undreamed-of possibilities in writ ing European history. From this standpoint Professor Baird's book is lamentably deficient. His style is, moreover, unfortunately wanting in those qualities which make the mere story a joy. It is therefore to be regretted that he did not content himself with an account in a single volume, which would have suf ficed amply to give both the student and the general reader all that was of real importance.

WE are not to have an authoritative Life of Matthew Arnold, and it cannot be said that we need one, after we have been let into the history of his mind through his published writings, and of his heart through his letters. The facts of his outward life are quickly summarized. Born Christmas Eve, 1822, the eldest son of Dr. Thomas Arnold, shortly after to become famous as a schoolmaster, and noteworthy as one of the religious prophets of modern England; a boy at Rugby, an Oxford student, and a fellow of Oriel; private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, then lord president of the Council; appointed to an inspectorship of schools in 1851, and married the same year, continuing for thirty-five years to hold this government office, this is Matthew Arnold's short story. He made occasional visits to the Continent, usually in connection with his official work, and twice visited America, where he lectured, though his second visit was more especially on account of a daughter who had married an American. He died April 15, 1888, in his sixty-sixth year, leaving behind as a legacy to English literature eight volumes of essays and three of poems, besides a number of studies in educational problems, representative of his official work.

Arnold was so much in the public eye as a poet and an essayist, and the amount of his collected literary writings was so considerable, that he easily acquired from this source the reputation of an industrious man of letters, although any one who should take the trouble to divide his forty working years by his dozen volumes would not reckon the amount of writing unduly disproportionate. But when one comes to read these Letters, the vague impression that Matthew Ar

1 Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848-1888. Collected and arranged by GEORGE W. E. RUS

nold held some official position in connection with English schools gives place to a recognition of the fact that school work was his vocation, essays and poems his avocation, so far as expenditure of time and the acquisition of livelihood might be taken for a basis of discrimination. Without looking too closely into the exact nature of his daily work, we may with little hesitation add Arnold to the list of those men of letters who do their literary work more effectively because of the substantial drudgery from which it is a partial escape; and it would not be an overnice inference from this double intellectual occupation that the constant dealing with educational problems inspired in Matthew Arnold much of the gospel of culture of which he was an evangelist. The close contact into which he came with the ordinary Englishmen and Englishwomen of his day through his regular tasks afforded him a very broad basis for his knowledge of the mass which he wished to leaven.

Matthew Arnold's writings taken with his daily work offer a pretty full expla nation of his intellectual attitude; but the judgment which men might pass upon him from such evidence would be incomplete without the corrective or corroboration of personal acquaintance, and this the two volumes of Letters partially give to such as had not the advantage of knowing the man in his lifetime. They do not contain many adequate expressions of his opinions regarding politics, literature, education, or the men of his time, though there are offhand references to current events and persons, which have some piquancy, as when, for example, he says in a letter to M. Fontanés: "Have you seen a book by a certain Professor Henry Drummond, called SELL. In two volumes. New York: Macmillan & Co. 1895.