itary enthusiasm, swollen to heroic proportions, drain Europe of its nobles and its wealth, to scatter them over the sands of Palestine. These disasters, combined with the religious wars of Languedoc, and with the exercise of perennial craft and violence, raise the small sovereignty of the Isle of France into a control, more or less complete, of the powerful princes who surround it. The rising monarchy enters upon a desperate struggle for existence with the sturdy English; and when impolicy and defeat have reduced it to such an extremity that a miracle seems the only resource, the miracle appears. But the heroism displayed by the suffering commons, though it expelled the stranger, brings no relief to themselves; the policy of a foreign master would at almost any period of their history have proved more beneficial to them than the virtue or gratitude of their own. The hearts of artisans and tradesmen cherish the true ideas of social and political organization which the commons have saved and perpetuated from the general ruin ; and now the Reformation appears among them, encouraging individual thought, fixing individual responsibility, and supporting the determinations of reason with the stout heart of faith. A doubly bitter civil war ensues, complicated by the animosities of both politics and religion; the kingdom flames with bloody intolerance, pious zeal, and valiant despair. Scarcely has it taken breath and settled into troubled repose, scarcely has the commanding genius of Richelieu succeeded in repairing its exhausted resources, and curbing the haughty vassals of the crown, when a new struggle is commenced. The power of the great lords, which gave a sort of imputed independence to their followers, is now, after a series of expiring throes, almost annihilated, and feudal checks being no longer operative, the overshadowing power of the crown alarms reflecting minds. The Fronde inaugurates the age of conflicts based upon purely political notions, upon the desire of personal and constitutional freedom, in place of the feudal and religious wars which have passed away forever. But the Fronde being neither a war of classes nor sects, lacks the impulse of fanaticism, and is unable to sustain itself, and royal authority culminates in the self-centered system of Louis XIV.! During half a century the nation's energy is expended in gigantic graspings after universal dominion. Exhausted of its patience and re

sources, it sees the royal line simultaneously exhausted of its kingly nature. How ominous, how fatal the conjuncture: God hath numbered the kingdom and finished it. Yet before that day of wrath, when king and nobles, and lovely ladies and gentle children, are haled by the blind instruments of long-suffering ignorance to expiate with their puny lives centuries of ancestral crime, the tottering monarchy, in the providence of God, lays its hands to one glorious work, and Americans at least will recall its turbulent career and awful tragedy with pardonable sadness, as they reflect that to its timely aid they owe relief from the protracted agony of civil war, and perhaps their present freedom and prosperity.

Down to a recent period the eventful progress of the French people has found no truthful and philosophical narrator. Prejudices of class, deference to royalty, and bad methods of historical composition, have united with the defect of study and mental training to make the earlier French histories quite unreliable. In the pages of Velly and Anquetil the student finds the airs and graces of their own times transferred to the rough Franks of the Merovingan age. They construct a so-called French monarchy of that and the Carlingian period, with its court, its intrigues, its offices, its relations with nobles and people, its refined vices, as if they were describing the social and political aspect of the sixteenth century. The rise of popular liberty they gloss over, and ascribe privileges wrested like Magna Charta, and defended against all comers for ages, to the free grace of the monarch. The distinctions of race, so marked even now, and the feudal divisions, only obliterated within three centuries past, are blended into a single French nation by the bold historian, who thus effects with a stroke of his pen what exhausted the craft and strength of a race of kings like Louis XI., and a college of cardinals like Richelieu. Devoid of individuality or correct local coloring, these narratives reproduce the stirring life of past ages about as accurately as the daub of a trowel might copy the almost animated reliefs on the frieze of the Parthenon.

During the present century, however, French literature has amply redeemed itself from such reproaches. The loving toil and truthful delineations of the Thierrys, the vivid style and

grand, even if hasty, generalization of Martin and Michelet, the profound philosophic insight of Guizot, and the comprehensive and accurate judgment of Sismondi, combine to present the French student with the clarified results of exhaustive research, and bring out the obscurest times into a blaze of light. In our own language nothing which can be called a history of France has heretofore appeared. The puerile compilations of Crowe, Sedley, Mrs. Marcet, etc., were too weak even to excite inquiry enough to correct the erroneous ideas they imparted. However worthy the late French histories, translations are not enough. Every cultivated nation needs a literature of its own, moulded upon its own peculiarities, clothed in its own idiom, and permeated with its own convictions. The place is open for the most deserving, and we welcome the volume, the title of which stands at the head of this article, as the commencement of a work which bids fair to supply a long-felt want of English literature.

Mr. Godwin has earned an honorable repute in his connection with various literary enterprises. That amid editorial cares, and the engrossing pursuits of business, he should have been persevering enough to master the various knowledge necessary even in the preparation for so important a work, and bold enough to enter upon so formidable a design, will be surprising to those who are unacquainted with his robust mental organization and untiring industry. His intention as stated in the preface, is to relate the events of French history from the earliest times down to the Revolution of 1789, and in the present volume he carries the story to the final division of the empire of Charlemagne, including, therefore, a period of much interest to the inquirer who is fond of tracing in modern nations the characteristics they inherit from the unmixed races of antiquity.

The external appearance of the book is creditable in type and paper, and the proofs seem to have been read with care. We are glad to find it a contrast to the imprint by the same publishers of Mr. Motley's noble and scholarly history of the Rise of the Dutch Republic; than which a more grotesque, inexplicable, and slovenly specimen of typographical errors was never let loose to haunt an author and to horrify sensitive bibliophiles.

We shall now give our readers a general notion of the style and contents of Mr. Godwin's volume, with a few extracts, which may assist them in determining its merits. The first hundred pages are devoted to a description of the primitive Gauls, and to the conquest over them by Julius Cesar. The latter part of the subject has been unconquerably distasteful to us ever since our escape from Professor Anthon's impressive methods of stimulating the youthful mind in its investigations of Cesar's Gallic campaigns. Our remarks will therefore be confined to the Gauls themselves. Though far from forming a single united people, and though their tribes possessed many different customs, they were yet marked by certain general characteristics which are common to Celts, and which seems so imbedded in their nature that time and revolutions have never changed them. Without any elaborate order we will state some of these. The old Gauls were superstitious but not reverential, and were kept to their religious opinions and rites rather by the terrible power which the priests had acquired than by conviction or will. Their reasoning was acute, but marked by hasty generalization and careless analogies. Their morality was by no means strict, and divorce was easy; their social adhesions were strong but mutable; the ties of blood, however, were so much valued (as in most early ages) that the system of clans was in full vigor among them. They were loquacious and noisy in dispute, fond of company, and quick at quarreling, given to excessive indulgence of the passions, impetuous, brave, and warlike. "Always in extremes, there was no limit either to their audacity or their discouragement." How enduring is this Celtic stock, which, after so many destructive processes and foreign graftings, is still so manifest in the modern Frenchman, that the above sentences fit him precisely. Mr. Godwin gives the amusing testimony of an old Roman soldier:

All the Gauls are tall, fair-skinned, golden-haired, and terrible for the fierceness of their eyes. They are greedy of quarrels, great braggarts, and insolent. A whole troop of strangers could scarcely resist a single one of them in a brawl, and particularly if he were assisted by his stalwart, blue-eyed wife, who, gnashing her teeth, distending her neck, brandishing her large snowy arms, and kicking up her heels betimes, will deliver fisticuffs like bolts from the twisted strings of a catapult.-P. 34.

The effect of their warlike habits and division into clans was, as in Scotland, to keep them involved in petty wars, "which produce Gaul before us, wasted, wan, and disheveled, even in the youth and outset of her historical career." The most striking element of Gallic society was the priesthood, with its subordinate classes of bards and soothsayers, and its inner circle of mysterious high-priests dwelling in the dark forests of oak and gloomy yew. Exempt from public burdens, possessing judicial powers and all the science which existed in the land, the Druids centered in themselves all the sanctity and authority which superstition could acknowledge. They formed a kind of secret organization which extended over the British Isles, and, as Romans and Franks encroached upon them, gradually receded to take a last refuge in the island of Mona. There were associated with them a class of female Druids who were supposed to possess the arts of magic. Their worship consisted of frantic nocturnal dances, or more abandoned rites, recalling the Samothracian orgies:

The Gallic mariner, as he skirted by night the wild reefs of the Armorican seas, often fancied that he heard strange cries and chants, weird melodies, mingling with the wail of the winds and the deep moanings of the waves. On the summit of the misty crags he saw red phantoms gliding, with streaming hair and burning torches, whose flames made the lightnings. These were the Druidesses weaving their magic spells, healing maladies, raising the elements, consulting the dread spirits of fate, or perhaps waiting to receive the souls of the shipwrecked, which the Breton peasant still discerns in the white and fugitive spray, hastening to rejoin their loved and lost companions of the earth.-Pp. 47, 48.

The religion taught by the Druids acknowledged but one Supreme Being, and taught the doctrines of metempsychosis, a future state, the worship of fire, and hatred of images. So firm was the faith of these heathens in an immortality beyond the grave, where they should renew their loved pursuits, that they contracted debts to be paid after their own death, and, like other savages, sacrificed kindred upon the bier of the deceased to bear him company.

Mr. Godwin next treats of Gaul under the Romans. The province experienced the usual effects of Roman sway. Great roads, bridges, temples, and amphitheaters were built, some of which still remain. The Latin language and its rhetoric spread FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XIII.-9