Sweet were his words, when o'er the mountain Its bulwarks overgrown with fern and flower:

From The Edinburgh Review.
THE FRENCH IN NORTH AMERICA.*

minds of Francis I. and his advisers. In 1518 De Lery set out on an unsuccessful IN geographical science the fourteenth expedition to plant a French settlement century had progressed but little beyond in the New World. In 1524 Verrazani the knowledge of Ptolemy. It was still explored the American coast for the king disputed whether the shape of the world of France. Ten years later Jacques Carwas round or square, or, as the most or- tier, a mariner of St. Malo, discovered the thodox asserted, a tabernacle. In map river which he named the St. Lawrence. making, mediæval geographers had retro- It was supposed that a country lying in graded. They fell back on the Homeric the latitude of southern France would be disk surrounded by ocean. The centre of blessed with a genial climate. Full of the earth was the turreted city of Jerusa these hopes, Francis I. issued a commislem; in the extreme east lay Paradise sion to plant a colony many years before fenced in with flames; the Mare Mag- Elizabeth waved her hand to Frobisher, num, flowing like a T north and south or granted a patent to Raleigh. In May, and west, divided Europe, Asia, and 1535, three well-manned ships sailed from Africa. Fifty years later, the bounds of St. Malo. Cartier and his followers rethe known world were the coasts of Nor-ceived the blessing of the bishop; the way in the north, Atlas in the south, the king, the nobility, and the clergy were pillars of Hercules to the west, to the interested in their fortunes. Both in east the Holy Sepulchre. Beyond these Hindostan and in North America, France limits to the south and east lay the semi-preceded England with a systematic fabulous regions of Prester John, Cipan- scheme for acquiring new territory. go, and Cathay. Except by the Norsemen the Oceanus Dissociabilis was still unexplored, when Henry the Navigator inaugurated the new era of maritime discovery. From that time forward commerce changed its direction and its character. Traffic was transferred from the land to the ocean, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, from the Italians to the western states of Europe. No sooner had Columbus and Cabot discovered the New World than western Europe competed for its possession. From the early patents granted to English navigators no results followed; and in North America, France took the lead. Breton and Norman sail-nists. ors fished the coasts of Newfoundland; more successful. War at home and abroad schemes of colonization floated in the for the time diverted the attention of France from the New World. Yet, more than half a century before the voyage of the "Mayflower," Coligny established colonies as refuges for persecuted religion. The first Huguenot colony was planted in Brazil, in 1558; a second in 1562, in Carolina; a third in Florida, in 1565. The settlements were short-lived. The first was destroyed by the Portuguese; the second broke up from internal discord; the colonists of the third were massacred by Menendez and the Spaniards.

1. France and England in North America. A

Series of Historical Narratives. By FRANCIS PARK

MAN, Boston. Part I.: "The Pioneers of France in
the New World." Fifteenth Edition, 1879. Part II.:
"The Jesuits in North America." Twelfth Edition,
1878. Part III.: "La Salle and the Discovery of the

Great West." Eleventh Edition, 1879. Part IV.:
"The Old Régime in Canada." Thirteenth Edition,
1884. Part V.: "Count Frontenac and New France
under Louis XIV." Twelfth Edition, 1884.

2. Montcalm and Wolfe. By FRANCIS PARKMAN.
Two vols. London: 1884.

3. History of the City of New York: Its Origin, Rise, and Progress. By Mrs. MARTHA C. LAMB. Two vols. 4to. Illustrated. New York and Chicago:

1877.

While English adventurers swept the seas as freebooters, or sought Arctic Eldorados, or searched for a north-west passage to Cathay, France formed a plan of territorial expansion which should not only supply the mother country with a revenue, but create new marts for her trade, and establish new centres of industry. Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence, gave the name of Montreal to the royal mount which overhung the Indian village of Hochelaga, but founded no permanent settlement. The severity of the winter, for which his previous visit had not prepared him, appalled the intending coloSubsequent attempts were not

It was not till the seventeenth century

that the French acquired a permanent | France and the temporary surrender of footing in North America. The founder | Quebec to the English; the second is the of New France was Samuel de Cham- period of missionary enterprise, the thirtyplain, a native of Saintonge, born at three years of Jesuit ascendency; the Brouage, on the Bay of Biscay. After third extends from 1665 to 1763, when fighting in the wars of the League he Canada was a fur-trading station and a journeyed through the West Indies and military colony. Mexico, and eventually made his way to Panama. 66 Here, more than two centuries and a half ago, his bold and active mind conceived the plan of a ship canal across the isthmus, by which, he says, 'the voyage to the south seas would be shortened by more than fifteen hundred leagues."" Whatever of romance the story of Canadian colonization contains is centred in the person of Champlain. Enthusiastic for the spread of the Catholic faith, inspired by an absorbing passion for discovery, he is the knight-errant of French exploration. The manuscript journal of his voyages, quaintly illustrated by his own hand, is still preserved at Dieppe. In 1602 he was sent to explore the St. Lawrence. Two years later he sailed with a motley crew of adventurers and gaol-birds, Catholic priests and Huguenot pastors, to found at Port Royal in Acadia the first agricultural colony which Europe established in America. In 1608 he started on a new expedition from Honfleur, reached the St. Lawrence, and landed at Quebec.

A few weeks passed [writes Mr. Parkman] and a pile of wooden buildings rose on the brink of the St. Lawrence, on or near the site of the market-place of the Lower Town of Quebec. The pencil of Champlain, always regardless of proportion and perspective, has preserved its semblance. A strong wooden wall, surmounted by a gallery, loopholed for musketry, enclosed three buildings, containing quarters for himself and his men, together with a courtyard, from one side of which rose a tall dove-cot, like a belfry. A moat surrounded the whole, and two or three small cannon were planted on salient platforms towards the river. There was a large magazine near at hand, and a part of the adjacent ground was laid out as a garden. (Pioneers of New France, pp. 302-3.)

From 1608 to 1763 the history of the French in Canada falls roughly into three periods. The first closes in 1629 with the foundation of the Company of New

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the colonial rivalry of France and England ran high. The influence of the New World on European politics has been under-estimated. So early as 1613 and 1628, Acadia and Canada were objects of English attack. Colonial competition involved England in wars with Spain and Holland, and extended the range of the war with France in 1689; it prolonged, if it did not origi. nate, the wars of the Spanish succession; finally, it engaged England in a struggle with the French which lasted for nearly a hundred years. The expansionist policy of Richelieu was continued by his suc cessors. Under Colbert and Seignelay, France became a great naval power; she chartered her companies of the north with a monopoly of the trade with Hudson's Bay, of the East and West Indies, of Senegal, and of Guinea; she planted settlements at Cayenne, St. Christopher, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and San Domingo; she established a footing at Pondicherry; she hopped to find in Madagas car a second Java. Before the close of the seventeenth century she claimed, on the mainland of America, Florida, Texas, Hudson's Bay, and part of the states of New York, Vermont, and Maine. Her dominions stretched from the Alleghany to the Rocky Mountains, and from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi; she held the two outlets of this vast territory with Quebec, the capital of Canada, and New Orleans, the metropolis of Louisiana. Her missionaries penetrated into every part of the country which she claimed. In conciliating native races she was unrivalled; her religion and her language were spreading over the whole of the new continent. The English colonists held only a narrow strip of coast hemmed in between New France and the sea. A majestic future seemed to lie before France; everything

pointed to her supremacy in North America, he writes under severe physical America. But piece by piece during the disadvantages. Continual ill-health, which eighteenth century she was stripped of narrowly limited, and for several years her colonial dominions till they dwindled wholly precluded, mental labor, and a conto nothing. Acadia in 1713, and Canada dition of eyesight which " never permitted in 1763, passed into the hands of En-reading or writing continuously for much gland; her forts on the Ohio were cap- more than five minutes, and often has tured. Finally, after many vicissitudes, never permitted them at all”. are obstaLouisiana was sold to the United States cles which to most men would have proved by Napoleon, who pocketed the purchase absolutely insurmountable. Mr. Parkmoney. The Seven Years' War crippled man's apology, if such it be, is wholly unher commerce, ruined her influence in necessary. His volumes show no trace of America and India, destroyed her position the disadvantageous conditions of their as a colonial power. Nothing remained production. On the contrary they contain of New France in North America but the a mass of new matter, which could only cod-fishing islets of St. Pierre and Mique- be collected by indefatigable research lon. The memory of her Canadian occu among original sources. The bulk of his pation lingers in the nomenclature of the material is gathered from manuscript and country, the language and character of unpublished authorities collected in the the population; her law still forms the public and private libraries of Europe and basis of the law of property; her Church America. Above all he has drawn largely. continues to predominate; in the distribu- from the voluminous collections belonging tion and tenure of land, the influence of to the French government, contained in her feudal system is not yet extinct. But the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Archives these traces of her rule survive only as de la Marine et des Colonies, and the monuments of the decay of her fortunes Archives Nationales. Mr. Parkman treats and the errors of her colonial policy. his subject without reserve or partiality, and tells the story with vigor and picturesqueness. One advantage results from the author's ill-health. He has studied in the open air the scenes of his narrative, has lived in camps with the tribes of the prairies, and followed the tracks of the coureurs de bois and rangers. Hence his pages are bright (sometimes too bright) with local coloring, and he depicts Indian life and struggles with singular force and vivacity. Nor is Mr. Parkman only a landscape painter; his portraits are firmly drawn. Laval, La Salle, Frontenac, and Montcalm stand out from his canvas instinct with life and individuality. On the other hand, the style is often too ornate and pretentious for English taste. Though this fault becomes less marked in his later volumes, it is still conspicuous in "Montcalm and Wolfe." But this blemish does not seriously impair the great merits of his work. The number of editions through which portions of the series have passed in America attest their popularity in the country of its birth. But the "History of New France" deserves among Englishmen a wider recog.

It is remarkable that the recent rising of the French half-breeds in the NorthWest indicates the existence of the last traces of the long contest which raged so fiercely in the last century. Whatever the alleged grievances of the followers of Riel in the late rebellion may be, the real origin of the quarrel lay in the undying hostility of race and religion to British ascendency which still exists amongst a small and feeble portion of the popula tion of north-western Canada. Their language is French, and their religion is Roman Catholic. The priests, we have reason to believe, played an important part in instigating the rebellion, and although it has been easily, and we hope effectually, suppressed, this last explosion of French nationality and religious intolerance in Canada has excited the sympathies of the French Canadians in the lower province, who have no grievance of their own to complain of.

The subject of Mr. Parkman's historical series is the rise and fall of the French power in North America. Like the bistorian of the Spanish conquest in South

nition than it has yet received. The sub-acts was to petition Richelieu to destroy ject is one of special interest. Not only the dangerous enemy whom he had prodoes it deal with the infancy of a colony voked. In his intrepid search for a pasof whose growth England is justly proud, but the last two volumes contain the most complete account of the American side of the Seven Years' War which "made England what she is, and supplied to the United States the indispensable condition of their greatness, if not of their national existence." The events of that war do not fall within the scope of the present article. To complete his series of works on the French in North America, Mr. Parkman has so far departed from chronological sequence as to leave a gap of fifty years, from the Peace of Ryswick to the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. Till this interval is filled, the war between the two rivals for the possession of North Amer. ica which commenced in 1689 and continued with little real intermission till the Peace of Paris- cannot be treated as a whole. Partly for this reason, partly because the causes of the loss of Canada are to be sought in her earlier history, partly also because the events of this later period are comparatively familiar, our object is to trace, with Mr. Parkman's aid, the foundation, not the fall, of the French power in Canada.

sage to China, he discovered Lake Champlain, penetrated to Lake Nipissing, crossed Lake Ontario, explored the mer douce of the Hurons. His activity was indefatigable. He crossed the sea repeatedly to promote the interests of the colony. Keenly alive to the spiritual, as well as material, welfare of Canada, be made Quebec not only a trading station but a mission. His life testified to the reality of his piety; the purity of his morals made a lasting impression on the Hurons. A fervent Catholic, he was jealous for the conversion of the heathen, who lived, as he said, "like brute beasts, without faith, without religion, without God." Near Brouage was a convent of Recollet friars. Fired by his enthusiasm, several of the brotherhood volunteered their aid; but the Franciscan mendicants were too poor to send out missionaries. Champlain repaired to Paris, obtained the royal authority and the papal sanction for the mission, and collected funds for its equip ment. In May, 1615, he returned to Quebec with four Recollet friars. It was a heavy blow when the assignment in 1621 of the trade monopoly to two Huguenot Unlike the nations of the Old World, brothers filled Quebec with Protestant Canada has no mythic heroes; her re- merchants. Four years later the Jesuits, mote past is not pieced out with webs of whose jealousy of the Recollets equalled fiction, woven by the imagination of more their hatred of the Huguenots, obtained a polished ages. Yet, like the legendary footing in Canada. Not only was the colfounder of a European State, the figure of ony divided by religious disputes, but it Champlain stands out alone in the open was subjected to frequent changes of goving scenes of the French occupation of ernment, starved by selfish monopolists, North America. In geographical science fettered by harassing restrictions. he was not beyond his age. The dream ents were granted and suspended; moof a northern sea, which would open a nopolies created or extinguished; the route to China and Japan, was always in governorship changed hands repeatedly; his mind. By aiding the Hurons and within a few years there were five lieutenAlgonquins against the Iroquois, he se- ant-generals of New France. Nearly all cured the aid of the former two tribes in the emigrants lived on supplies from his explorations. The policy which he home; few supported themselves; the inaugurated was steadily pursued by his majority spent their time in idling, drinksuccessors. English schemes of coloni-ing, gambling, or hunting. Disputes be zation ignored the Red Indians; to attach them to France was always the policy of the French. Champlain joined the war parties of the Hurons, and tried to teach them military tactics; but it was his white complexion, his coat of mail, and, above all, his arquebuse, which made him the umpire of Indian quarrels. Rather a soldier than a statesman, he left as a legacy to the French Canadians the undying hostility of the Iroquois, the most formidable of the savage tribes. One of his last

Pat

tween rival traders, or between Catholics and Huguenots, kept the settlement in perpetual ferment. Trade was ruined by restrictions; neither men nor money could be found to repair the ruinous Fort of St. Louis; the Iroquois prowled round Quebec, murdering stragglers, and threatening indiscriminate massacre. It is not surprising that the progress of the colony was slow. In 1628 the whole population of Quebec had risen to only one hundred and five persons men, women, and