lansquenets from Germany, and to receive the musqueteers of Elizabeth, declared that they had only the honour of God before their eyes, the liberation of the king and queen, and the maintenance of the edicts. The chiefs who put their seals to the treaty of Milhau, never bound up in their alliance any principle of political fraternization, such as that which actuated, for example, the Tennis-court oath. Neither Condé nor L'Hopital contemplated lèse-majesté in the association of the Consistorians with the gentilshommes. The Huguenot peasant, who rushed with his reaping-hook and pike against the gay marauders of the Butcher of Vassey, still prayed in the Sabbath assembly of his camp for the king, the queen-mother, the princes of the blood-royal, and the members of the king's council. The sturdy veteran of Dreux, who shouted his devotion to the popular refrain of 'Dieu garde de mal le petit homme,' never had it in his thoughts to anticipate the author of the Ca ira. Coligni would never have dreamed of being the prototype of Mirabeau, or Navarre of acting Philip Egalité. Even on the other side the spirit of fanaticism never seriously propounded doctrines of political reform. The deed of Jacques Clement, it is true, was compared to the achievements of Judith and Eleazer. Guise was David, and Henri III. was Goliath. But the worthless abbés and priests who daily thundered from their pulpits in favour of the new Gideon, and filled their papiers rouges with fresh victims for the Seine, would have recoiled in their work of blood had they foreseen the conscription-lists of the Directorat or the Consulat. The wretches who ground their children's bones to make them bread, rather than admit the fat Bearnise, were far from acknowledging the same motives as the Sansculottes and Poissardes of a later era.

The

In England the religious reformer and the politician were as one. The war was at once a secular war and a holy war. fanatic who put to flight the proud apollyons of Lindsey and Rupert, fanned his fanaticism with the motives of the Parliamentarian. The Roundhead commemorated in his triumph at Naseby the triumph of those principles which he had inherited from Wycliffe, and the triumph of those principles which through many a reverse he had inherited from the testators of Magna Charta. In his conduct he was a zealot and a statesman, and in his principles he endorsed the sentiments of the Pilgrim's Progress and the sentiments of Eikonoclastes. The traditional policy of his party embraced the elements of that spiritual democracy known in Medieval History as the Pastoreaux, with the elements of that social democracy known as the Jacquerie. But unlike the medieval organization, religion, yielding to the

Twofold Character of English Revolutions.

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exigencies of municipal development, severed itself from the poetical alliance with Chivalry, to become the partner of a more practical Sociology. A type for the English Revolution might easily be found among the examples of Southern Europe, in the revolutions, for instance, of Florence. It would have been easy to have lighted on a Savonarola among the Pulpiters of Blackfriars, or to have met with the representatives of the Piagnoni at Westminster. The difference of motive in the two revolutions, in the revolution as it was developed in England and in France, made itself visible in the different results. The legislation that represents the process and the extent of the reaction in England, presents the anomalous appearance of great ecclesiastical reforms intermingling and co-operating with great civil reforms. Thus the legislative assembly is found to combine the duties of a convocation. The same enactment that preserves the liberty of the person maintains the liberty of conscience. The same document that contains a proposal for a new liturgical directory, contains a proposal for a new limitation of the royal prerogative of the sword. The same legislation that destroys the Star Chamber destroys the High Commission Court. The same advocate who votes for the abolition of the House of Peers, votes for the imposition of the Covenant. And the same man that demands triennial Parliaments, declares himself dissatisfied without Presbyterian synods. This Erastian feature, so strongly developed in the reaction alluded to, has always more or less clung to all our subsequent revolutions. Thus our religious revolutions have never been altogether divorced from the consideration of politics, and our political revolutions have never been independent of the consideration of religion. The drama of our enfranchisement has in its various stages always reflected the operation of this principle. Such scenes as the execution of Charles and Laud, the imprisonment of the seven bishops, and the death of Monmouth, as they are characteristic of our final revolutions, so are they congenial to all their rehearsals.

In France it was far otherwise. The anti-Erastian principle, which by the nature of the dominant religion distinctly separated ecclesiastical supremacy from civil supremacy, dissociated civil encroachment from ecclesiastical encroachment, and consequently resistance to the ecclesiastical legislator from resistance to the civil legislator. Hence throughout the history of the popular struggle the two principles of action are never confounded. The liberty of the sect is never identified with the liberty of the subject. In discussion the demarcation is still more insisted on. The Institution Chrétienne claims no kindred purpose with

Boetie's Voluntary Servitude, or Hoffman's Franco Gallia. The Exposition of the Catholic faith, and the history of Protestant Variations, are far less political than the Telemacque. It was not till nearly two centuries later that the identification, as in England, between political and religious interests, became stronger; and the result is manifested in the dismal historical association which couples in the same page the story of the Mitraillades and the feasts of the Supreme Being, the Rights of Man and the Age of Reason, the Social Contract and the System of Nature.

If Huguenotism showed any particular attachment to a political principle, it was rather to aristocracy than democracy, as might indeed have been expected from its alliance with a dynastic question; nor would it require much scrutiny to detect in the various conflicts to which its amalgamation with the aristocratic element exposed it, the germ of that factious confusion which resulted in the Fronde.

In the great movements in which he lived Montaigne played no very important part. His natural character rather disposed him to an easy neutrality. His morality, ethical and political, was of too phlegmatic a temper to subject him to immoderate engagements. He had no interests at stake, and his propensities to mischief were not strong enough to warrant the disguise of zeal. To swim in troubled waters without fishing in them was the motto that regulated his activity. To light up a candle to St. Michael and another to his dragon, to follow the right cause even to the fire, but to do his utmost to avoid the fire, was his philosophy of duty. In spite of his ostentatious repudiation of prejudice he had no sympathy with the genius of Protestantism, and scarcely was at the pains to conceal the fact that he regarded Protestants as fanatical innovators, possessing no higher views of innovation than to sing psalms in French instead of Latin, and to call their children Methuselahs, Ezekiels, and Malachis, instead of Charles, Louises, and Francises. His ideas of toleration were hardly such as became the friend of Boetie. He advocated, as indeed he was compelled to do, a kind of universal indulgence logically deduced from his own private principles of universal doubt, but founded on no large maxims of political science.

He hated innovation, civil and religious, with the cold and apathetic hatred of a man who could not appreciate its benefits. Change implied heresy, heresy implied choice, and choice the infirmity of human judgment renders slippery and uncertain. Ipsa consuetudo assentiendi periculosa esse videtur et lubrica,' said the pagan philosopher, and the Christian philosophy repeated it after him.

In public affairs there is no government so ill, provided it be ancient and has been constant, that is not better than alteration. Our manners are infinitely corrupted and wonderfully inclined to grow worse. In our laws and customs there are many that are barbarous and monstrous; nevertheless by reason of the difficulty of reformation and the danger of stirring things, if I could put something under to stay the wheel, and to keep it where it is, I would do it with all my heart. Happy people who do what they are commanded with greater facility than they who command, without tormenting themselves with the causes; who suffer themselves gently to roll on after the celestial revolution. Obedience is never pure nor calm in him who argues or disputes.'

Hobbes or Filmer might have written the closing paragraph. Continued intercourse, as he surmised, with the humours of the ancients, had, we suspect, put him out of humour with his own times. No one could otherwise believe, save on some such principle of morbid partiality, that he was serious in applying to Charondas and Lycurgus epithets that he denied to L'Hopital, any more than they could believe that he really thought the javelins of antiquity superior to the modern arquebus. It suggests curious reflections to hear the old Gascon of the sixteenth century describing Englishmen in terms that an Englishman of the nineteenth would be most entitled to retort, and expressing his shame and confusion that a nation with whom he had so great familiarity should despise the advice of Socrates and indulge in as many legal whimsies as Persians or Indians.

No forecast of Rousseau, or of the Jacobins of Vendemaire and Praireal could have flitted across the manuscript when he wrote that the best and most excellent government for every nation is that under which it has been maintained; that debates about the best forms of society and the most commodious rules to bind it are debates only proper for the exercise of wits, of fools aiming at the reputation of Pyrrha and Cadmus; and that the quatrain of his friend M. de Piras was the soundest wisdom.

Ayme l'estat, tel que tu le veois estre,

S'il est royal ayme la royauté;

S'il est de pere, ou bien communauté

Ayme l'aussi; car Dieu t'y a fait naistre.

The only authenticated instances in which the opinions of the essayist appear identified in the conduct of the man are connected with his presence in one or two of the various conflicts that were continually occurring in his neighbourhood. Mr. St. John has traced him at the age of twenty-five at the siege of Thionville by Guise and Strozzi. It is possible that he was present with Charles IX. at the taking of Rouen, and more than

probable, from an allusion in his Essays, that he witnessed the battle of Dreux.

Be this as it may, his intimacy at the Courts of Paris under successive monarchs leaves no doubt as to his sympathies or his loyalty. He was no enemy to Court life, he tells us; and his natural prudence, not without a show of simplicity and indifference, kept him safe under the treacherous patronage of Catharine. He loved himself too well to be guilty of ambition, and the timorous discretion with which he declared that he would sooner be the third in Perigord than the first at the Louvre, more than once recommended him to the Lorraines as a suitable agent in their negotiations with Navarre. As a man of letters, too, his experience in the capital of Henri II. could not have been without its attractions. That experience coincided with an epoch in the history of French literature. The appearance of the Pleiades was creating in French poetry a revolution not unlike, in its general characteristics, to that which English critics hold responsible for the so-called metaphysical era in English poetry. The erudite enthusiasm of Ronsard had already disengaged his contemporaries from their devotion to the elegant and arch simplicity of Marot, and half induced them to take part in the reaction with which his name is associated, and which was soon destined to encounter in its turn another reaction in the person of Malherbe. With such irritating topics for discussion, it is not difficult to conjecture how the essayist, who was already well known among the booksellers of the Quartier Latin, and had been admitted into the assemblies of Antoine de Baif, passed the time not occupied with attendance on Charles or Henri.

From the slavery of Courts and public enjoyments,' Montaigne, as an inscription still extant attests, 'took refuge in the bosom of the learned virgins,' in other words, retired to his chateau, at the age of thirty-eight; and from the moment he retires his life becomes uninteresting. He had married at thirtythree, an age, which he does not omit to remark, was two years below the standard of Aristotle, and three above that of Plato; and his wife survived him when he died of a quinsy in 1592.

One event, indeed, must not be passed over. Montaigne had inherited from his father one of the most painful diseases that the flesh of man is heir to. As he had grown old, the malady had increased; till at length, philosopher as he was, his philosophy fairly gave way. Not all the reasoning of the Porch could make an attack of nephritic colic a pleasure. For medicine and medical men, it had been his habit to express the most profound mistrust. Indeed, some of his most violent irony had been spent on the profession of Celsus and Paracelsus. Travelling,