that the uncertainty which has been thrown on so many events will only be of temporary duration, and arises from the habit of attributing too much value to specific sources of information, rather than from the rapid accumulation of materials. It is too much the custom of historical students in the nineteenth century, to look on each new contribution to history as an authority which may at once supersede previous ones wherever it differs from them. There is no discrimination in the value assigned to the new materials; all are treated as if they stood upon equal ground, and there seems to be an almost morbid desire to receive their authority where they contradict previouslyestablished conclusions. There is not enough suspension of judgment until the publication of several of these exparte statements has given us the means of comparison, and a broader basis for our deductions. We are continually being told that such and such a thing has been disproved, and such another thing has been established, and when we inquire into the authority on which the correction rests, we frequently find that beyond the fact that a novel assertion has been made, there is little reason for supposing that we have arrived at positive truth. Concurrently with this hasty judgment on fresh materials, and in no slight degree connected with it as its originating cause, we have in the recent treatment of history, pretensions advanced in behalf of that study, which go far to destroy its actual value. A new word has been coined which expresses something to which history is rapidly becoming a handmaida very miserable one, too-a servant of all-work. This is SOCIOLOGY. History is now looked upon by many minds as valuable, not as a record of the past, and a curious diary of human nature, but as the Bible of a system of political and moral philosophy for the guidance of the present, and for the assurance of the future. Here the Republican, the Ultra-Royalist, the Anti-State-Churchman, the AngloCatholic, and the Roman-Catholic, find the proofs of the efficacy of their doctrine in times past-the axioms for its propagation in times to come. With the zeal of heated partizans they ransack the archives of History, invoke new allies from the obscurity of dusty shelves and unexplored chests; defend what has been held to be established fact where it accords with their own views; overwhelm it with

their new discoveries where it ventures to contradict them. Events and the actors in them are alike subjected to an unrelenting inquisition. Under the pressure of these literary tortures, they make strange confessions. Innocent facts confess to extraordinary significance; unpremeditated actions avow a long train of impulses; the men of one age own to the prejudices and convictions of centuries later. Thus even when we have the same facts, the method of arrangement in different authors, and the ingenious and half-unconscious colouring of party prejudice, render them so unlike that we can scarcely believe our eyes when we see the same authorities appearing in defence of both authors' positions at the bottom of their respective pages. We believe there are symptoms of a reaction against this excess of philosophising on history. When the public are told from every side that history proves this and that to be the proper course for the politician, the statesman, and the moralist, and find in the midst of the most dogmatic assertions the greatest possible contrariety of opinion, they naturally begin to distrust these lofty pretensions, and the consequence we fear will be, that the real philosophy which we may gather from history will be cast aside as worthless along with the dross, and that we may once more degenerate into mere chronicle-writing, and see in the historic drama no more than a tedious tale written in a dead language. But History, however exaggerated may be the claims which have been advanced in her name, is still an undoubted schoolmistress of the times. She cannot, indeed, profess to teach the statesman how in so different an age from any of those which her pages pourtray, he can rule with a success emulative of the earlier fame of great men, but she can present to him scenes of apparently hopeless despair, which the strong heart and the unwavering hand have converted into the forerunners of complete recovery and joyous triumph. When the power of evil seems greatest around him, and the assurances of hope seem faint and far, she cannot, it is true, point out to him in the past a complete facsimile of the present, nor can she teach him from her crowded pages the true science of politics, but she can carry him over large spaces of time, and show him how, while patriots grow false or cold, and injustice springs again from the earth to which it had been struck, a nation,

by the virtue and perseverance of but few or one mind, may recover itself from its prostrate condition, and under the auspices of a guiding Providence once more assume its former high position. Thus fortified by examples of ill leading ultimately to the secure possession of good, he will no longer see in every failure the precursor of ruin, and the signal for despair, but will hail the coming success from amidst the shadows of defeat. Lessons such as these-experience, namely, of the varying phases which ultimately successful causes have assumed during their struggles-and similar examples of the natural workings of human nature, may, without any strained interpretation of men or their motives, be deduced from the patent facts of History; and there are times when their necessity is felt more than at others, and when their application to some one nation is felt to be of more marked consequence than it otherwise would be. We believe France to be in a position in which the lessons of the past may be deduced with much advantage, if not to the actors in her present history, at least to the spectators, who stand around to applaud or reprobate. We therefore hail with gladness the appearance in this country of two works, which, from the high literary position of their authors, are likely to attract considerable attention to the subject of their labours. M. Ranke's work deals with facts, several of which he presents to us in a novel form, shaped according to the authority of the secret despatches of foreign ambassadors. The former part of our remarks, therefore, apply more especially to him, and while welcoming his contribution to French History, we must not too hastily suppose that the authority of the Venetian Ambassador is to override all previous authorities, and to henceforward determine our estimate of Catherine de Medicis, the Guises, or Henry of Navarre. Sir James Stephen's Lectures are rather expositions of certain points of Sociology, and especially of the working of Providence in human affairs. In reading them, therefore, we are more likely to fall into the other error to which we have observed that History is exposed, that of making her too much a mere handmaid to particular theories, and seeing in every event a meaning with reference to those theories, which it is wholly inadequate to sustain. Taken in conjunction, however, and as supple

ments to the standard History of France, these new publications will be found to possess as much value, as, taken separately, they are likely in somewhat different quarters to excite a large amount of interest. One period which is common to both possesses in our opinion especial importance at the present moment, and we, therefore, avail ourselves of the appearance of these volumes to bring it in a connected form before the notice of our readers. We mean that period which records the rise and struggles for existence and ascendancy of what we may not inaptly call FRENCH PURITANISM.

We are fond, as Englishmen, of comparing the fate of our own country with that of her neighbour. We are, not unjustly, proud of our constitution, and look with compassionate contempt on the evanescent charters of French liberty, and the alternate succession of license and tyranny in that rival state. We like to philosophise on the causes of this difference in destiny of two powerful nations. We lay much stress on our national character as a chief element in our superior success. We compare together the Frenchman and the Englishman of the nineteenth century, and see in their respective characteristics an evident explanation of the fate which attends each. We point with pride to the struggles and sufferings of the patriot band which two centuries ago withstood and overthrew the growing tyranny of our Stuart Kings; and we point with pride to their forerunners in the regeneration of our land, the martyrs in the reign of Mary, and the men who supported, directed, and controlled the strong arm of Elizabeth. But we are accustomed to look upon these great manifestations of religious and patriotic zeal as confined to, and the home growth of, the English soil. The ill-fortune of liberty on the other side of the channel has made us turn away from the tale of her struggles there, as if it could disclose no aspirations for better things with which the countrymen of Pym or Hampden could sympathise; no upheavings of popular feeling which could remind us of our own great struggles for civil and religious liberty. But impartial History tells us another story, and teaches us that there were movements and men to guide them in France, that may rank side by side with some of our own proudest recollections. It is a curious problem then to assign the

reasons why in one country all these noble efforts proved fruitless, while in the other they were the sources of an enduring national prosperity. "To have emancipated the human mind from the errors of Papal Rome," observes Sir James Stephen, "is but one of the many triumphs of the Reformation. In almost every part of the Christian world, that great religious enfranchisement was followed by civil liberty, as at once its offspring and its guardian." He might have added that the guardianship is reciprocal, and that civil liberty owes its preservation almost as completely as its origin to religious freedom. "But in France," he continues, "it was otherwise; and I proceed to inquire, how it happened that the protest made by so large a part of the French people against the tyranny of the Roman Church, was not followed by any effectual resistance to the despotism of the reigning dynasty." Both Sir James Stephen expressly, and M. Ranke incidentally, attempt to assign reasons which they think adequate to explain this apparent anomaly. Many of these appear to us just in themselves, and not to be overlooked in any full consideration of the subject. We doubt, however, whether, at least in the disconnected form in which these writers bring them before us, they will leave on the mind of the reader the impression of a satisfactory solution of the problem. At any rate it has occurred to ourselves, that they might be arranged and systematised, so as to afford something more closely approaching a train of consecutive reasoning.

In obtaining clear ideas of the phenomena of French society and of the French constitution in Church and State in the sixteenth century, we shall probably find it the most suggestive method of inquiry to glance at the leading features presented by our English constitution, during the corresponding period of its growth. It would be no unworthy subject for a volume in itself to point out those among the successes and misfortunes of a nation which appear to have a cause altogether independent of the conduct of her inhabitants, and in which the interposing hand of Providence seems to be more immediately perceived. England has been peculiarly favoured by happy accidents or Providences (whichever we choose to call them) of this sort. When, after the Norman Conquest, the first William scattered his distributions of land