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Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Gay. AN ODE. WE are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams; Wandering by lone sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams; On whom the pale moon gleams: Shall go forth and conquer a crown; We in the ages lying In the buried past of the earth, And Babel itself in our mirth; To the old of the new world's worth; A breath of our inspiration A wondrous thing of our dreaming, Till our dream shall become their Present, And their work in the world be done. They had no vision amazing And, therefore, to-day is thrilling And the multitudes are enlisted In the faith that their fathers resisted; And, scorning the dream of to-morrow, Are bringing to pass as they may In the world, for its joy or its sorrow, The dream that was scorned yesterday. But we, with our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we ! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see, Our souls with high music ringing – O men, it must ever be That we dwell in our dreaming and singing A little apart from ye. For we are afar with the dawning, And the suns that are not yet high; And out of the infinite morning, Intrepid, you hear us cry, — From Fraser's Magazine. THE PROTESTANT these southern provinces, resisted with success the efforts of the best officers and most carefully trained soldiers of Louis XIV. to overpower them; albeit outnumbered as by thirty to one, and manœuvred, not by skilled generalship, but by the supposed inspirations of their unlettered "prophets." THE revocation of the Edict of Nantes did not, as Louis XIV. intended that it should, destroy French Protestantism; but it made an important difference in its type and character. The great Huguenot exodus that supervened upon the meas- The phenomenon of the Inspirés is the ure of 1685 is commonly reputed to have most notable fact connected with this carried off about 300,000 of the popula- survival of Protestantism in the South of tion of the kingdom; and it so happened France. We have seen how, in quite rethat these consisted mainly of the middle, cent times, a belief in visible communicaindustrial classes: effectively, at that tions with the other world is still a chartime, the best blood of the kingdom. It acteristic of the people inhabiting that is difficult to estimate what gain might portion of the realm. The Catholic pilhave accrued to the character of the grimages to La Salette and Lourdes, the French nation as a whole, had the paper- wild stories of the Virgin Mary's appearmills of Angoumois, the tan-yards of ance on mountain slopes and river banks Touraine, the ribbon-looms of Lyons, to shepherd boys and girls, which first incontinued to be worked in increasing pro- cited those pilgrimages what are these portions by a steady, sober, God-fearing save reproductions, under other formulas, race, alive to the rights of conscience, of the tendencies which helped to mould but sufficiently enlightened by common the Calvinist "prophets " and "prophetsense to discard the vagaries of supersti-esses" of the Desert in the days of Louis tious fanaticism. The middle-class Prot- XIV. and the Regency? The "prophestants mostly emigrated and enriched ets" first appeared immediately after other lands by their industries and their the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, solid qualities. The upper class Prot- when, the fancies of youth being heated estants turned back to the State religion, by the tales of suffering for religion's through the portals of which alone Court favour and worldly reputation could be gained. There remained the lower classes, the peasantry and mechanics, amongst whom Calvinism might still count some hundreds of thousands of adherents; people too poor or too ignorant to think of quitting the country where they had been brought up, and too obscure to have attracted much attention to themselves had they been disposed to remain quiet. In the West and North of France they were content in general so to remain; keeping up as much as they dared the traditions of their faith, but not inviting by wilful acts the ill-will of the authorities. In Dauphiné and Languedoc, on the other hand, a hardy population, inclined to fanaticism, and worked upon by the mystic utterances of teachers drawn from their own ranks, broke out into the famous Camisard revolt. For three years, amid the rugged fastnesses of the Cevennes, some two thousand peasantry of sake which circulated among the homesteads of the Reformed, children, full of crude notions about the persecution of saints and the iniquities of the Apocalyptic Beast, wandered from village to village, uttering cries and exhibiting convulsions which the bystanders were ready to interpret as signs of inspiration. The phenomenon itself is not an unusual one. In very troublous times, when reason and order are inadequate to keep a cause alive, superstition and fanaticism, it may be, are required. The world of spirit must be grasped, as it were tangibly, or the world of sense and sight would weigh down all hope, all courage. And the more grotesque and irrational the media then available, often the more effective; for, in the syllogism of mysticism, if these shows are independent of all earthly links of cause and effect, ergo the more likely is it that they come direct from Heaven. Government measures suppressed these ebullitions for a time; the childish In and his children's baptisms had taken place in the Roman Catholic Church, his wife was held to be no wife, his children to be both illegitimate and outlawed. This edict was promulgated in March 1715. A significant commentary on it was offered five months afterwards, when some eight or nine preachers and laymen, meeting in a stone quarry near Nismes, proclaimed themselves to be the Synod of the Reformed Church of France. Many years had passed since any such token of organized life had been given by spirés were personally forgotten after the their consequences in law were accepted. excitement of their day was over. But Henceforward, unless a man's marriage about the year 1700 a revival of fanaticism began to be talked about; and then it was that, under the influence of a race of "prophets," not children merely, but grown-up men and women, the Camisard revolt was hatched. After its suppression (in 1704) the Protestant pastors were banished, and the prophets fled the land. The "prophetesses " remained, however; and to them, for some ten years, it was mainly owing that an attachment to the traditions of the Reformation survived in the drear solitudes of Upper Languedoc. Some of these Deborahs of the "Desert "the oppressed sect. After the Revocahave lived on in local fame. Such were tion of 1685, a process of disintegration the widow Caton, Claire, and above all, had set in, which, as we have seen, eventIsabeau Dubois, a woman of rare charms uated in the prevalence of the Inspirés and courage indomitable, who first roused and their wild delusions, as the only outthe soul of the principal agent in the work ward and visible sign of the survival of of organic restoration, Antoine Court. Protestantism. Of those who remained From the Vivarais to the Cevennes, from attached to its tenets in a more reasonthe Cevennes to the Vaunage, these wo-able sense, by far the greater number men wandered, preaching and prophesy- either embraced the State religion as the ing. In their nocturnal assemblies they safest thing to do, or conformed to its would foretell confidently a great day requirements outwardly, while maintainof reparation; as when a gathering to- ing their cherished doctrines in secret. gether should take place in the meadow There were many parts of France in of La Cour, and a mighty tree spread which, to this extent, the germs of Protforth in one night, under whose shadow estantism still existed -chiefly, besides the Faithful should partake of the Holy Languedoc and Dauphiné, in Poitou, Communion, and "English people should Normandy, and Brittany-but such exassist at it." istence was sporadic only; and but for the energies and talents of one individual at this critical time, it may well be doubtful whether the Protestant Church would have held together so as to have had any claim to State recognition when the advancing principles of the Revolution extorted first the emancipating Edict of Louis XVI, in 1787, and then the admission to equal rights under the National Convention. 66 Of these fitful gleams of still existing life in the "so-called Reformed religion," however, Government deigned not to take cognizance; and in 1715, a few days before his own departure from the world, Louis XIV. issued an edict proclaiming that the said false religion being dead, and its whilom adherents standing in the category of converts to the true faith, such persons must receive the sacraments at the hands of the priest, send M. Hugues, in his volumes lately pubtheir children to the parish schools, and lished on the Life and Labours of Anin case of "perversity" would be liable toine Court,* has brought much additional to punishment as "relapsed" Catholics. information to bear on the career of a The power of the Protestant rites of bap-man who has hitherto been somewhat tism and marriage to confer any civil vaguely connected with the Protestant status was altogether ignored. Now, this was an important step onward in repression. Hitherto, whatever penalties might be attached to the heretical observances, Protestantisme en France au XVIII Siècle, d'après des documents inédits. Par Edmond Hugues. Paris, 1872. Antoine Court: Histoire de la Restauration du |