It cannot be denied that he has added to our stock of historical information. But it must also be admitted that many of the pieces he has inserted are of inconsiderable value when compared with their length and tediousness. The endless repetition of insignificant orders from the Hôtel de Ville and the circumstantial, but often incorrect reports of proceedings transmitted from one town to another, might have been spared us, or at least banished to an appendix. The truth seems to be, that, like many recent authors of his own country, he has been seduced by the success of Sir Walter Scott into a vain attempt to revive the passions and feelings of the middle ages, by minute and circumstantial details from contemporary writers who witnessed and participated in the scenes they describe. But, wanting the judgment and discretion of that great master in his art, M. Capefigue, instead of enlivening his narrative by the fruits of his studies, fatigues and wearies us with diffuse and tiresome descriptions of shows, mummeries, exhibitions, banquets, collations, and balls-with bells ringing, banners floating, and colours flying in all directions-with honourable mention of the crimson velvet caps and embroidered vestments worn on these occasions; and tedious descriptions of the dresses and decorations of the ladies and gentlemen, and of the accoutrements even of the horses and mules. Mingled with these details we have long and minute accounts of splendid feasts served in gold, with delectable wines and viands prepared for the guests, and money and sugar-plums scattered among the populace. In addition to these amusing and instructive particulars, we have long processions of municipal officers, from the provost to the beadle, and enumerations of all the trades in Paris, from the draper and grocer to the scavenger. In the abundance of his zeal for original information, M. Capefigue favours us with whole pages of orders issued, from day to day, to the train-bands and militia of Paris, which are not more edifying or entertaining than a series of regimental orders regulating the movements of the guard-room.

But it is not of these useless and wearisome details that we chiefly complain. History has been called philosophy teaching by example. It has been described as an impartial tribunal before which men are summoned after death, and acquitted or condemned according to their merits. Its object is said to be the improvement of mankind in wisdom and virtue, and to teach them how to conduct themselves well in all the relations of life. If the historian palliates vice or cruelty-if, not content with tracing and explaining the causes, he vindicates the excesses of error and ignorance, he fails in the duty he has contracted to society by assuming that character. Such is not the view which M. Cape

figue seems to have taken of the duties of an historian. He must forgive us for saying that his work appears to us to bear the same relation to genuine history which the modern French drama does to the ancient. He has not the vivid imagination of Victor Hugo, but he is a labourer in the same vineyard. He relates acts of perfidy and atrocity without an expression of moral disapprobation; and selects for the object of our sympathy the criminal in place of the victim. Instead of entitling his book a History of the Reformation, of the League, and of the Reign of Henry IV.,' he ought to have called it an apology for the crimes of fanaticism, mingled with sarcasms against the wise and good— dreamers and visionaries-who, in times of popular effervescence, seek to moderate the violence of passion and bring back the multitude to a sense of justice and humanity. He is or assumes the character of a furious Leaguer. Without seeming to participate in any of the opinions of the League, he applauds its violence, and blames those who attempted prematurely to check its course. According to the philosophy he inculcates, the masses, when once inflamed, are not to be resisted. They must be suffered to commit massacres without opposition till they desist from lassitude. Attempts to resist them in their fury are the miserable efforts of vain, presumptuous men, ignorant of the strong convictions and violent passions that surround them.

He

Such appear to us to be the spirit and purport of M. Capefigue's book, and he judges of characters in accordance with his system. Violence, though accompanied with fraud, never fails to obtain his praise, nor moderation to incur his censure. despises Sixtus V. for his timidity and hesitation in refusing his adhesion to the League, but applauds his legate Cajetano, who exceeded, or rather acted in violation of his instructions;-that is to say, who betrayed in support of the League the authority that employed him. He treats the Chancellor de l'Hôpital with contempt, as a man without sense or courage, who was continually attempting some wretched compromise between two adverse parties that sought each other's destruction. He derides Coligny as a weak, credulous old man-the most paltry character of his time-besotted and deceived by the blandishments and professions of the court, and by his obstinacy and blindness exposing his party to extermination. On the other hand, he regards Catherine of Medicis with admiration, and lauds Philip II. as the greatest of men.

There is no indication in M. Capefigue's work of any warm and sincere, through misdirected feelings of devotion. He avows, indeed, in one passage of his book, that the warmth he manifests on other occasions is not real, but assumed in order to give greater

effect to the scenes he describes.* He speaks at times with complacency of the progress of the Reformation; and even expresses no strong repugnance to what he calls the philosophical doctrines of Servetus. He considers them, on the contrary, as rational and profound opinions, divested of every thing mystical and unintelligible,-unfitted for the age of religious fervour to which they were first addressed, but pregnant with great results, and destined to be the inevitable term at which the Reformation must arrive. But though apparently indifferent to the dogmas of the Catholic church, he is not the less indignant against those who called them in question. He is a 'conservative' in the worst sense of the word. Whether changes be for good or evil, he is averse to them, because they are changes. He is a blind admirer of every thing ancient. His heart is not touched by religious feeling, but his imagination fires at the recollection of the venerable cathedral, with its holy bishops, its lofty spires, its glass of celestial blue, its altars, images, and relics. Even its sacred vestments and consecrated banners, bespangled with gold and fragrant with incense, fill him with enthusiasm. His delight is to recall the times when pious trades and fraternities walked on stated days, in solemn procesion; invoking with equal ardour their patron saint and the charter of their privileges-when legates roamed over Christendom with a suppliant generation on its knees before them-and, above all, when the Pope, the centre of unity and order, governed and directed all things by scraps of paper from the Vatican. He laments even the anathemas of the clergy, and sighs at the recollection of a barefooted friar mounted on a pillar in the market-place, or kneeling before a crucifix in the Place de Grève, exhorting and exciting the multitude to the persecution and extermination of heretics. For these venerable legacies of antiquity, whatever crimes or atrocities might be perpetrated, they seem to him justifiable acts, deserving of praise rather than of censure.

He is cured, and so, he boasts, is the age in which he lives, of the frigid philosophy of the eighteenth century, with its sceptical doubts, its cold dissertations, its virulent disdain, its malignant contempt of the past. Surrounded by magnificent ruins, we (for he and his age are one) no longer despise the hands that reared them, or imagine that before us there was nothing but barbarism and abuse. We have left the Encyclopedists far behind -put aside the Voltaires, the Dupuys, and the Volneys-and reached at length the goal of profound and impartial investigation.

* VI. 356.

That the philosophical school of the eighteenth century, as the unphilosophical school of the present day has been pleased to term it, in its zeal against superstition, bigotry, and intolerance, underrated the benefits which the Catholic church at one time conferred on the world, is not to be denied. It was the Catholic church which communicated to the northern barbarians the first germs of letters and civilisation; and for many ages it was the great bond of union among the different nations established on the ruins of the empire. The superstition it inculcated, among many evils it introduced, had the merit of imposing a moral restraint on the licentious ferocity and unbridled rapacity of the powerful. But such advantages as an ignorant superstition could afford had ceased to be wanted before the era of the Reformation. The house was built, and the scaffolding that had helped to raise it remained only to offend the eye as an inconvenient and unsightly incumbrance. Freedom of enquiry, which the church repudiated, was necessary for the further progress of human society. We may displease M. Capefigue, but we must confess that, with M. Charles Villiers, we regard the Reformation with its fruits as the greatest blessing bestowed for ages on mankind.

M. Capefigue agrees with us in thinking that a revolution in religion was inevitable; and he seems even to admit that in its consequences it has been salutary. But in apportioning his praise and censure among the actors in the great historical drama he attempts to delineate, he uniformly sides with the party most opposed to innovation; and strange as it may appear, epithets are the weapons he employs to infuse his sentiments into the incautious minds of his readers. They serve him, as they do many popular preachers, in the place of arguments and facts. The great and good Catholic party is the eternal theme of his song. No sooner has a town been stained by the massacre of its Protestant inhabitants than it receives in his pages the appellation of the holy and pious city; and if one of its magistrates treacherously stabs with his own hand a brother magistrate, whose only crime was an unwillingness to join the League, the assassin instantly becomes the brave consul, the intrepid champion of the holy union. If the halls, trades, and fraternities of Paris break forth into acts of cruelty and rebellion, they are described as highminded bodies acting under a lofty Catholic impulse. When the Catholics violated the first edict of toleration by the massacre of Vassy, and, to secure impunity for the act arrested the royal family and carried them by force from Fontainebleau to Paris, M. Capefigue coolly observes that they could no longer endure the taunts of a talking, turbulent minority; and when he publishes the secret bond of the triumvirate (Guise, Montmorency, and St

André), by which they engaged to extirpate the Protestant religion, to spare no one in France who had ever embraced its tenets, and to leave no Bourbon alive, that there might be none of the family to avenge the rest, he exalts it into a vast European treaty. On the other hand, whenever the Huguenots are mentioned, the most contumelious and disparaging epithets are applied to them. When they ask for justice and insist on a faithful execution of treaties, they are insolent and imperious. When they accept favours from the court, they are rapacious. When they express distrust, it is not from their experience of former perfidy but from the consciousness of their own weakness. Their ministers are stigmatized as coarse and rustic preachers-their chivalry degraded into a rude provincial gentry, with no merit but hardihood-and their chief ridiculed as a poor, beggarly gentleman, as unlucky in his mistresses as in his wife-scorned and cheated by both-not fit to be placed in comparison with the high and mighty family of Lorraine. Very differently does he speak of the Duke of Guise-the Machabeus of the church, the martyr of Catholicism, the personification of the religious and municipal principle, so near placing the crown of France on his own head, with a Catholic glory around it.

Catholicism, according to M. Capefigue, was the life and soul of the middle ages, the bond and animating spirit of society. The unity of religious faith was the basis and principle of government, and every opposition to it was an act of rebellion. To this idea he continually reverts-more especially when he is about to extenuate any atrocities perpetrated by the adherents of the ancient faith. He prepares his readers for the St Bartholomew by reminding them that Catholicism was at that time the foundation of society. In these circumstances, he observes, men of ardent minds naturally regarded every departure from religious unity as rebellion against the social order in which they lived; and in that conviction considered all means of resistance to the innovators as justifiable in the sight of God and man. Those who appeared to take the lead were pushed forward by the multitude behind them. They seemed to direct, but were governed by an influence over which they had no control. In every social crisis, political as well as religious, there is an overruling, invincible necessity, which it is in vain to resist. The man who places himself in the centre of an opinion must submit to its power, and adopt not only its interests, but even its caprices, however atrocious.

Philip II. is the high and almost mystical object of M. Capefigue's adoration. He calls that gloomy, unrelenting tyrant the type or personification of the Catholic principle, and seems to regard him as the spirit of Catholicism incarnate. He knows no