The whole period from the twelfth to the fifteenth century has generally been considered so unvarying in its details, one century so like another, that it has been thought sufficient to class them all under the general name of the Middle Ages. Old Monteil, indeed, the author of “The French People of Various Conditions,” declines to individualize any age during that lengthened epoch, for “feudalism,” he says, “is as little capable of change as the castles with which it studded the land.” But a closer inspection does by no means justify this declaration. From time to time we have seen what great changes have taken place. The external walls of the baronial residence may continue the same, but vast alterations have occurred within. The rooms have got a more modern air; the moat has begun to be dried up, and turned into a bowling-green; the tilt-yard is occasionally converted into a garden; and, in short, in all the civilized countries of Europe the life of society has accumulated at the heart. Power is diffused from the courts of kings; and instead of the spirit of independence and opposition to the royal authority which characterized former centuries, we find the courtiers’ arts more prevalent now than the pride of local grandeur. The great vassals of the Crown are no longer the rivals of their nominal superior, but submissively receive his awards, or endeavour to obtain the sanction of his name to exactions which they would formerly have practised in their own. Monarchy, in fact, becomes the spirit of the age, and nobility sinks willingly into the subordinate rank. This itself was a great blow to the feudal system, for the essence of that organized society was equality among its members, united to subordination of conventional rank,—a strange and beautiful style of feeling between the highest and the lowest of that manly brotherhood, which made the simple chevalier equal to the king as touching their common knighthood,—of which we have at the present time the modernized form in the feeling which makes the loftiest in the land recognise an equal and a friend in the person of an untitled gentleman. But this latter was to be the result of the equalizing effect of education and character. In the fifteenth century, feudalism, represented by the great proprietors, was about to expire, as it had already perished in the decay of its armed and mailed representatives in the field of battle. By no lower hand than its own could the nobility be overthrown either in France or England. The accident of a feeble king in both countries was the occasion of an internecine struggle,—not, as it would have been in the tenth century, for the possession of the crown, but for the custody of the wearer of it. The insanity of Charles VI. almost exterminated the lords of France; the weakness of Henry VI. and the Wars of the Roses produced the same result in England. It seemed as if in both countries an epidemic madness had burst out among the nobility, which drove them to their destruction. Wildly contending with each other, neglecting and oppressing the common people, the lords and barons were unconscious of the silent advances of a power which was about to overshadow them all. And, as if to drive away from them the sympathy which their fathers had known how to excite among the lower classes by their kindness and protection, they seemed determined to obliterate every vestige of respect which might cling to their ancient possessions and historic names, by the most unheard-of cruelty and falsehood in their treatment of each other.

The leader of one of the parties which divided France was John, son of Philip the Hardy, prince of the blood royal and Duke of Burgundy. The leader of the other party was Louis of Orleans, brother of the demented king, and the gayest cavalier and most accomplished gentleman of his time. The Burgundian had many advantages in his contest for the reins of government. The wealth and population of the Low Countries made him as powerful as any of the princes of Europe, and he could at all times secure the alliance of England to the most nefarious of his schemes by the bribe of a treaty of trade and navigation. He accordingly brought his great possessions in Flanders to the aid of his French ambition, and secured the almost equally important assistance of the University of Paris, by giving in his adhesion to the Pope it had chosen and denying the authority of the Pope of his rival Orleans. Orleans had also offended the irritable population of Paris by making his vows, on some solemn occasion, by the bones of St. Denis which adorned the shrine of the town called after his name,—whereas it was well known to every Parisian that the real bones of the patron of France were those which were so religiously preserved in the treasury of Notre Dame. The clergy of the two altars took up the quarrel, and as much hostility was created by the rival relics of St. Denis and Paris as by the rival pontiffs of Avignon and Rome. Thus the Church, which in earlier times had been a bond of unity, was one of the chief causes of dissension; and the result in a few years was seen in the attempt made by France to shake off, as much as possible, the supremacy of both the divided Popes, as it managed to shake off entirely the yoke of the divided nobility.

Quarrels and reconciliations among the princes, feasts and festivals among the peerage, and the most relentless treatment of the citizens, were the distinguishing marks of the opening of this century. Isabella of Bavaria, the shameless wife of the hapless Charles, added a great feature of infamy to the state of manners at the time, by the openness of her profligacy, and her neglect of all the duties of wife and queen. Rioting with the thoughtless Orleans, while her husband was left to the misery of his situation, unwashed, unshorn, and clothed in rags and filth, the abandoned woman roused every manly heart in all the land against the cause she aided. Relying on this national disgust, the wily Burgundian waited his opportunity, and revenged his private wrongs by what he afterwards called the patriotic dagger of an assassin. "A.D. 1407."On the night of the 23d of December, 1407, the gay and handsome Louis was lured by a false message from the queen’s quarters to a distant part of the town, and was walking in his satin mantle, twirling his glove in his hand, and humming the burden of a song, when he was set on by ten or twelve of the adherents of his enemy, stabbed, and beaten long after he lay dead on the pavement, and was then left motionless and uncared-for under the shade of the high house-walls of the Vieille Rue du Temple.

Public conscience was not very acute at that time; and, although no man for a moment doubted the hand that had guided the blow, the Duke of Burgundy was allowed to attend the funeral of his murdered cousin, and to hold the pall in the procession, and to weep louder than any as the coffin was lowered into the vault. But the common feelings of humanity were roused at last. People remembered the handsome, kindly, merry-hearted Orleans thus suddenly struck low, and the ominous looks of the Parisians warned the powerful Burgundy that it was time to take his hypocrisy and his tears out of the sight of honest men. He slipped out of the city, and betook himself to his Flemish states. But the helm was now without a steersman; and, while all were looking for a guide out of the confusion into which the appalling incident had brought the realm, the guilty duke himself, armed cap-À-pie, and surrounded by a body-guard which silenced all opposition, made his solemn entry into the town, and fixed on the door of his hotel the emblematic ornament of two spears, one sharp at the point as if for immediate battle, and one blunted and guarded as if for a friendly joust. Eloquence is never long absent when power is in want of an oration. A great meeting was held, in which, by many brilliant arguments and incontrovertible examples from holy writ and other histories, John Petit proved, to the entire satisfaction of everybody who did not wish to be slaughtered on the spot, that the doing to death of the Duke of Orleans was a good deed, and that the doer was entitled to the thanks of a grateful country. The thanks were accordingly given, and the murderer was at the height of his ambition. As a warning to the worthy citizens of what they had to expect if they rebelled against his authority, he took the opportunity of hurrying northward to his states, where the men of Liege were in revolt, and, having broken their ill-formed squares, committed such slaughter upon them as only the madness of fear and hatred could have suggested. Dripping with the blood of twenty-four thousand artisans, he returned to Paris, where the citizens were hushed into silence, and perhaps admiration, by the terrors of his appearance. They called him John the Fearless,—a noble title, most inadequately acquired; but, in spite of their flattery and their submission, he did not feel secure without the presence of his faithful subjects. He therefore summoned his Flemings and Burgundians to share his triumphs, and a loose was given to all their desires. They pillaged, burned, and destroyed as if in an enemy’s country, encamping outside the walls, and giving evident indications of an intention to force their way into the streets. But the sight of gore, though terrifying at first, sets the tamest of animals wild. The Parisians smelt the bloody odour and made ready for the fray. The formidable incorporation of the Butchers rose knife in hand, and at the command of their governor prepared to preserve the peace of the city. Burgundians and Orleanists were equally to be feared, and by a curious coincidence both those parties were at the gate; for the Count of Armagnac, father-in-law of the orphan Duke of Orleans, had assumed the leadership of the party, and had come up to Paris at the head of his infuriated Gascons and the men of Languedoc. North and South were again ranged in hostile ranks, and inside the walls there was a reign of terror and an amount of misery never equalled till that second reign of terror which is still the darkest spot in the memory of old men yet alive. No man could put faith in his neighbour. The murder of the Duke of Orleans had dissolved all confidence in the word of princes. One half of France was ready to draw against the other. Each half was anxious for support, from whatever quarter it came, and to gain the destruction of their rivals would sacrifice the interests of the nation.

But the same spirit of disunion and extirpation of ancient landmarks was at work in England. The accession of Henry the Fourth was not effected without the opposition of the adherents of the former king and of the supporters, on general principles, of the legitimate line. There were treasons, and plots, and pitiless executions. The feudal chiefs were no longer the compact body which could give laws both to King and Parliament, but ranged themselves in opposite camps and waited for the spoils of the vanquished side. The clergy unanimously came to the aid of the usurper on his faithful promise to exempt them from taxation; and, by thus throwing their own proportion of the public burdens on the body of the people, they sundered the alliance which had always hitherto subsisted between the Church and the lower class. Another bribe was held out to the clerical order for its support to the unlineal crown by the surrender to their vengeance of any heretics they could discover. "A.D. 1401."In the second year of this reign, accordingly, we find a law enabling the priests to burn, “on some high and conspicuous piece of ground,” any who dissented from their faith. This is the first legal sanction in England to the logic of flame and fagot. How dreadfully this permission was used, we shall see ere many years elapse. In the mean time, it is worth while to remark that in proportion as the Church lost in popularity and affection it gained in legal privilege. While it was strong it did not need to be cruel; and if it had continued its care of the poor and helpless, it would have been able to leave Wickliff to his dissertations on its doctrinal errors undisturbed. A Church which is found to be nationally beneficial, and which endears itself to its adherents by the practical graces of Christianity, will never be overthrown, or even weakened, by any theoretical defects in its creeds or formularies. It was perhaps, therefore, a fortunate circumstance that the Church of Rome had departed as much by this time from the path of honesty and usefulness as from the simplicity of gospel truth. The Bible might have been looked at in vain, even in Wickliff’s translation, if its meanings had not been rendered plain by the lives and principles of the clergy. Henry the Fifth, feeling the same necessity of clerical support which had thrown his father into the hands of the Church, left nothing untried to attach it to his cause. All the opposition which had been offered to its claims had hitherto been confined to men of low rank, and generally to members of its own body. Wickliff himself had been but a country vicar, and had been unnoticed and despised in his small parsonage at Lutterworth. But three-and-twenty years after he was dead, his name was celebrated far and wide as the enemy of constituted authority and a heretic of the most dangerous kind. His guilt consisted in nothing whatever but in having translated the Bible into English; but the fact of his having done so was patent to all. No witnesses were required. The bones of the old man were dug up from their resting-place in the quiet churchyard in Leicestershire, carried ignominiously to Oxford, and burned amid the howls and acclamations of an infuriated mob of priests and doctors. This was in 1409. But, in his character of heretic and unbeliever, Wickliff had high associates in this same year; for the General Council sitting at Pisa declared the two Popes—of Avignon and Rome—who still continued to divide the Christian world, to be “heretics, perjurers, and schismatics.”

Europe, indeed, was ripe for change in almost all the relations both of Church and State. There would seem no close connection between Bohemia and England; yet in a very short time the doctrines of Wickliff penetrated to Prague. There Huss and Jerome preached against the enormities and contradictions of the Romish system, and bitterly paid for their presumption in the fires of Constance before many years had passed. But in England the effects of the new revelation of the hidden gospel had been stronger than even at Prague. Public opinion, however, divided itself into two very different channels; and while the whole nation listened with open ear to the denunciations rising everywhere against the corruption, pride, and sensuality of the priesthood, it rushed at the same time into the wildest excesses of cruelty against the opponents of any of the doctrinal errors or superstitious beliefs in which it had been brought up. In the same year in which several persons were burnt in Smithfield as supporters of Wickliff and the Bible, the Parliament sent up addresses to the Crown, advising the king to seize the temporalities of the Church, and to apply the riches wasted on luxurious monks and nuns to the payment of his soldiers. Henry the Fifth adroitly availed himself of the double direction in which the popular feeling ran. He gained over the priesthood by exterminating the opponents of their ceremonies and faith, and rewarded himself by occasionally confiscating the revenues of a dozen or two of the more notorious monasteries. In 1417 a heavier sacrifice was demanded of him than his mere presence at the burning of a plebeian heretic like John Badby, whose execution he had attended at Smithfield in 1410. He was required to give up into the hands of the Church the great and noble Oldcastle, Lord Cobham. The Church, as if to mark its triumph, did not examine the accused on any point connected with civil or political affairs. It questioned him solely on his religious beliefs; and as it found him unconvinced of the necessity of confession to a priest, of pilgrimages to the shrines of saints, of the worship of images, and of the doctrine of transubstantiation, it delivered him over to the secular arm, and the stout old soldier was taken to St. Giles’s-in-the-Fields, and suspended, by an iron chain round his body, above a fire, to die by the slowest and most painful of deaths. But, in this yielding up of a nobleman to the vengeance of the priesthood, Henry had a double motive: he terrified the proudest of the barons, and attached to himself the other bodies in the State. The people were still profoundly ignorant, and looked on the innovators as the enemies both of God and man. And nothing but this can account for the astonishing spectacle presented by Europe at this date. The Church torn by contending factions—three Popes at one time—and council arrayed against council; every nation disgusted with its own priesthood, and enthusiasm bursting out in the general confusion into the wildest excesses of fanaticism and vice,—and yet a total incapacity in any country of devising means of amendment. Great efforts were made, by wise and holy men within the Church itself, to shake off the impediments to its development and increase. Reclamations were made, more in sorrow than in anger, against the universal depravation of morals and beliefs. The Popes were not unmoved with these complaints, and gave credence to the forebodings of evil which rose from every heart. Yet the network of custom, the authority of tradition, and the unchangeableness of Roman policy marred every effort at self-reformation. An opening was apparently made for the introduction of improvement, by the declaration of the supremacy of general councils, and the cessation of the great schism of the West on the nomination of Martin the Fifth to the undisputed chair. "A.D. 1429."But the force of circumstances was irresistible. Cardinals who approved of the declaration while members of the council repudiated its acts when, by good fortune, they succeeded to the tiara; and one of them even ventured the astounding statement that in his character of Æneas Sylvius, and approver of the decree of Basle, he was guilty of damnable sin, but was possessed of immaculate virtue in the character of Paul the Second. It was obvious that this unnatural state of things could not last. An establishment conscious of its defects, but unable to throw them off, and finally forced to the awful necessity of defending them by the foulest and most unpardonable means, might have read the inevitable result in every page of history. But worse remained behind. There sat upon the chair of St. Peter, in the year 1492, the most depraved and wicked of mankind. No earthly ruler had equalled him in profligacy and the coarser vices of cruelty and oppression since the death of the Roman Nero. This was a man of the name of Borgia, who fixed his infamous mark on the annals of the Papacy as Alexander the Sixth. While this bloodthirsty ruffian was at the summit of sacerdotal power—this poisoner of his friends, this polluter of his family circle with unimaginable crimes—as the visible representative upon earth of the Church of Christ, what hope could there be of amendment in the lower orders of the clergy, or continuance of men’s belief in the popish claims? Long before this, in 1442, the falsehood of the pretended donation of Constantine, on which the Popes founded their territorial rights, was triumphantly proved by the learned Valla; and at the end of the century the reverence of mankind for the successor of the Prince of the Apostles was exposed to a trial which the authenticity of all the documents in the world could not have successfully stood, in the personal conduct of the Pope and his familiars.

While this was the general state of Europe in the fifteenth century as regards the position of the clergy, high and low, the Church, in all countries, threw itself on the protection of the kings. By the middle, or towards the end, of this period, there was no other patronage to which they could have recourse. The nobility in France and England were practically eradicated. All confidence between baron and baron was at an end, and all belief in knightly faith and honour in the other classes of the people. As if the time for a new state of society was arrived, and instruments were required to clear the way for the approaching form, the nobility and gentry of England first were effectual in overthrowing their noble brethren in France, and then, with infuriate bitterness, turned their swords upon each other. The most rememberable general characteristic of this century is the consolidation of royal power. The king becomes despotic because the great nobility is overthrown and the Church stripped of its authority. Tired of hoping for aid from their ancient protector, the lowest classes cast their eyes of helplessness to the throne instead of to the crozier. They see in the reigning sovereign an ideal of personified Power. All other ideals with which the masses of the people have deluded themselves have passed away. The Church is stripped of the charm which its lofty claims and former kindness gave it. It is detected for the thing it is,—a corporation for the grinding of the poor and the support of tyranny and wrong. The nobility is stripped also of the glitter which covered its harsh outlines with the glow of Christian qualifications. It is found to be selfish, faithless, untrustworthy, and divided against itself. To the king, then, as the last refuge of the unfortunate, as the embodied State, a combination, in his own person, of the manly virtues of the knight with the Christian tenderness of the priest, the public transfers all the romantic confidence it had lavished on the other two. And, as if to prove that this idea came to its completeness without reference to the actual holder of sovereign authority, we find that in France the first really despotic king was Louis the Eleventh, and in England the first king by divine right was Henry the Seventh. Two more unchivalrous personages never disgraced the three-legged stool of a scrivener. Yet they sat almost simultaneously on two of earth’s proudest thrones.

No century had ever witnessed so great a change in manners and position as this. In others we have seen a gradual widening-out of thought and tendencies, all, however, subdued by the universal shadow in which every thing was carried on. But in this the progress was by a sudden leap from darkness into light. In ancient times Europe was held together by certain communities of interest and feeling, of which the chief undoubtedly was the centralization of the spiritual power in Rome. At the Papal Court all the nations were represented, and Stockholm and Saragossa were brought into contact by their common dependence on the successor of St. Peter. The courtly festivals which invited a knight of Scotland to cross blunted spears in a glittering tournament with a knight of Sicily in the court of an emperor of Germany was another bond of union between remotest regions; and in the fourteenth century the indefatigable Froissart, as we remarked, conveyed a knowledge of one nation to another in the entertaining chapters with which he delighted the listeners in the different palaces where he set up his rest. But all these lights, it will be observed, illumined only the hill-tops, and left the valleys still obscure. Ambitious Churchmen encountered their brethren of all kindreds and tongues in the court of the Vatican; tiltings were only for the high-born and rich, and Froissart himself poured forth his treasures only for the delight of lords and ladies. The ballads of the common people, on the other hand, had had a strongly disuniting effect. The songs which charmed the peasant were directed against the exacting priest and oppressive noble. In England they were generally pointed against the Norman baron, with whose harshness and pride were contrasted the kindness and liberality of Robin Hood and his peers. The French ballads were hostile to the English invader; the Scottish poems were commemorative of the heroism of Wallace and the cruelties of the Southern hordes. Literatures were thus condemned to be hostile, because they were not lofty enough to overlook the boundaries of the narrow circles in which they moved. By slow and toilsome process books were multiplied,—carefully copied in legible hand, and then chained up, like inestimable jewels, in monastery or palace, as too valuable to be left at large. A king’s library was talked of as a wonder when it contained six or seven hundred volumes. The writings of controversialists were passed from hand to hand, and the publication of a volume was generally achieved by its being read aloud at the refectory-table of the college and then discussed, in angry disputations, in the University Hall. Not one man in five hundred could read, if the book had been written in the plainest text; and at length the running hand was so indistinct as to be not much plainer than hieroglyphics. The discoveries, therefore, of one age had all to be discovered over again in the next. Roger Bacon, the English monk, in the eleventh century, was acquainted with gunpowder, and had clear intimations of many of the other inventions of more recent times. But what was the use of all his genius? He could only write down his triumph in a book; the book was carefully arranged on the shelf of his monastery; clever men of his own society may have carried the report of his doings to the neighbouring establishments; but time passed on, those clever men died out, the book on the monastery shelf was gradually covered with dust, and Roger Bacon became a conjurer in popular estimation, who foretold future events and took counsel from a supernatural brazen head. But in this century the art of printing was discovered and perfected. A thousand copies now darted off in all directions, cheap enough to be bought by the classes below the highest, portable enough to be carried about the person to the most distant lands, and in a type so large and clear that a very little instruction would enable the most illiterate to master its contents. Here was the lever that lifted the century at its first appearance into the light of modern civilization. And it came at the very nick of time. Men’s minds were disturbed on many subjects; for old unreasoning obedience to authority had passed away. Who was to guide them in their future voyage? Isolated works would no longer be of any use. Great scholars and acute dialecticians had been tried and found wanting. They only acted on the highly-educated class; and now it was the people in mass—the worker, the shopkeeper, the farmer, the merchant—who were anxious to be informed; and what could a monk in a cell, or even Chaucer with his harp in hand, do for the edification of such a countless host? People would no longer be fed on the dry crust of Aristotelianism or be satisfied with the intellectual jugglery of the Schoolmen. Rome had lost its guiding hand, and its restraining sword was also found of no avail. Some rest was to be found for the minds which had felt the old foundation slip away from them; and in this century, thus pining for light, thus thrusting forward eager hands to be warmed at the first ray of a new-risen sun, there were terrible displays of the aberrations of zeal without knowledge.

Almost within hearing of the first motion of the press, incalculable numbers of enthusiasts revived the exploded sect of the Flagellants of former centuries, and perambulated Europe, plying the whip upon their naked backs and declaring that the whole of religion consisted in the use of the scourge. Others, more crazy still, pronounced the use of clothes to be evidence of an unconverted nature, and returned to the nakedness of our first parents as proof of their restoration to a state of innocence. Mortality lost all its terrors in this earnest search for something more than the ordinary ministrations of the faith could bestow; and in France and England the hideous spectacles called the Dance of Death were frequent. In these, under the banner of a grinning skeleton, the population danced with frantic violence, shouting, shrieking, in the exultation of the time,—a scene where the joyous appearance of the occupation contrasted shockingly with the awful place in which the orgies were held, for the catacombs of Paris, filled with the bones and carcasses of many generations, were the chosen site for these frightful exhibitions. Like the unnatural gayety that reigned in the same city when the guillotine had filled every family with terror or grief, they were but an abnormal development of the sentiment of despair. People danced the Dance of Death, because life had lost its charm. Life had lost its security in the two most powerful nations of the time. England was shaken with contending factions, and France exhausted and hopeless of restoration. "A.D. 1451."The peasantry in both were trampled on without remorse. Jack Cade led up his famishing thousands to lay their sufferings before the throne. They asked for nothing but a slight relaxation of the burdens that oppressed them, and were condemned without mercy to the sword and gallows. The French “Jacques Bonhomme” was even in a worse condition. There was no controlling power on the throne to guard him from the tyrannies of a hundred petty superiors. The Church of his country was as much conquered by the Church of England as its soil by the English arms. A cardinal, bloated and bloody, dominated both London and Paris, and sent his commands from the Palace at Winchester, which were obeyed by both nations. A.D. 1452. A.D. 1483. A.D. 1492.And all this on the very eve of the introduction of the perfected printing-press, the birth of Luther, and the discovery of America! From the beginning of the century till government became assured by the accession of Henry VII. and Louis XI., the whole of Europe was unsettled and apparently on the verge of dissolution. In the absence of the controlling power of the Sovereign, each little baron asserted his own right and privileges, and aimed perhaps at the restoration of his feudal independence, when the spirit of feudalism had passed away. The nobility, even if it had been united, was not now numerous enough to present a ruling body to the State. It became despised as soon as it was seen to be powerless; and at last, in sheer exhaustion, the people, the churches, and the peerage of the two proudest nations in the world lay down helpless and unresisting at the footstool of the only authority likely to protect them from each other or themselves. When we think of the fifteenth century, let us remember it as the period when mankind grew tired of the establishments of all former ages, when feudalism resigned its sword into the hands of monarchy, and when the last days of the expiring state of society were distinguished by the withdrawal of the death-grasp by France and England from each other’s throats, and the establishment of respectful if not friendly sentiments between them. By the year 1451, there was not one of all the conquests of the Edwards and Henrys left to the English except Calais. If that miserable relic had also been restored, it would have prevented many a heart-burning between the nations, and advanced, perhaps by centuries, the happy time when each can look across the narrow channel which divides them without a wish save for the glory and prosperity of the other.

It is like going back to the time of the Crusades to turn our eyes from the end of this century to the beginning, so great and essential is the change that has taken place. Yet it is necessary, having given the general view of the condition of affairs, to descend to certain particulars by which the progress of the history may be more vividly defined. And of these the principal are the battle of Agincourt, the relief of Orleans, the invention of Guttenberg, and the achievement of Columbus. These are fixed on, not for their own intrinsic merits, but for the great results they produced. Agincourt unfeudalized France; Joan of Arc restored man’s faith in human virtue and divine superintendence; printing preserved forever the conquests of the human intellect; and the discovery of America opened a new world to the energies of mankind.

We must return to the state of France when the Duke of Orleans was so treacherously slain by the ferocious Duke of Burgundy in 1407. For a time the crime was successful in establishing the murderer’s power, and the Burgundians were strengthened by obtaining the custody of the imbecile king, Charles the Sixth, and the support of his infamous consort, Isabeau of Bavaria. But authority so obtained could not be kept without plunging into greater excesses. So the populace were let loose, and no man’s life was safe. In self-defence—burning with hatred of the slayer of his son-in-law and betrayer of his country—the Count of Armagnac denounced the dominant party. "A.D. 1411."Burgundy threw himself into the arms of England, and was only outbidden in his offers of submission by the Armagnacs in the following year. Each party in turn promised to support the English king in all his claims, and before he set foot in France he already found himself in possession of the kingdom. "A.D. 1413."Many strong places in the South were surrendered to him as pledges of the fidelity of his supporters. The whole land was the prey of faction and party hate. The Church had repudiated both Pope and Council; the towns were in insurrection in every street; and Henry the Fifth was only twenty-six years of age, full of courage and ambition, supported by the love and gratitude of the national Church, and anxious to glorify the usurpation of his family by a restoration of the triumphs of Cressy and Poictiers. He therefore sent an embassy to France, demanding his recognition by all the States as king, though he modestly waived the royal title till its present holder should be no more. He declared also that he would not be content without the hand of Catharine, the French king’s daughter, with Normandy and other counties for her dowry; and when these reasonable conditions, as he had anticipated, were rejected, and all his preparations were completed, he threw off the mask of negotiation, and sailed from Southampton with an army of six thousand men-at-arms and twenty-four thousand archers. A beautiful sight it must have been that day in September, 1415, when the enormous convoy sailed or rowed down the placid Southampton water. Sails of various colours, and streamers waving from every mast, must have given it the appearance of an immense regatta; and while all France was on the watch for the point of attack, and Calais was universally regarded as the natural landing-place for an English army, the great flotilla pursued its course past the Isle of Wight, and struck out for the opposite coast, filling up the mouth of the Seine with innumerable vessels, and casting anchor off the town of Harfleur. Prayers for its success ascended from every parish in England; for the clergy looked on the youthful king as their champion against all their enemies,—against the Pope, who claimed their tithes, against the itinerant monks, who denied and resisted their authority, and against the nobles, who envied them their wealth and territories. And no wonder; for at this time the ecclesiastical possessions included more than the half of England. Of fifty-three thousand knightly holdings on the national register, twenty-eight thousand belonged to mother Church! Prayers also for its success were uttered in the workshops and markets. People were tired of the long inaction of Richard the Second’s time, and longed for the stirring incidents they had heard their fathers speak of when the Black Prince was making the “Mounseers” fly. For by this time a stout feeling of mutual hatred had given vigour to the quarrel between the nations. Parliament had voted unexampled supplies, and “all the youth of England was afire.”

Meantime the siege of Harfleur dragged its slow length along. Succours were expected by the gallant garrison, but succour never came. Proclamations had indeed been issued, summoning the ban and arriÈre ban of France, and knights were assembling from all quarters to take part in the unavoidable engagement. But the counsels at head-quarters were divided. The masses of the people were not hearty in the cause, and the men of Harfleur, at the end of the fifth week of their resistance, sent to say they would surrender “if they were not relieved by a great army in two days.” “Take four,” said Henry, wishing nothing more than a decisive action under the very walls. But the time rapidly passed, and Harfleur was once more an English town. Henry might look round and triumph in the possession of streets and houses; but that was all, for his usual barbarity had banished the inhabitants. The richer citizens were put to ransom; all the rest were driven from the place,—not quite naked, nor quite penniless, for one petticoat was left to each woman, and one farthing in ready money. Generosity to the vulgar vanquished was not yet understood, either as a Christian duty or a stroke of policy. But courage, not unmixed with braggadocio, was still the character of the time. The English had lost many men from sickness during the siege. No blow had been boldly struck in open field, and a war without a battle, however successful in its results, would have been thought no better than a tournament. All the remaining chivalry of France was now collected under its chiefs and princes, and Henry determined to try what mettle they were of. He published a proclamation that he and his English would march across the country from Harfleur to Calais in spite of all opposition; and, as the expedition would occupy eight days at least, he felt sure that some attempt would be made to revenge so cutting an insult. He might easily have sent his forces, in detachments, by sea, for there was not a French flag upon all the Channel; but trumpets were sounded one day, swords drawn, cheers no doubt heartily uttered, by an enthusiastic array of fifteen thousand men, and the dangerous march began. It was the month of October, the time of the vintage: there was plenty of wine; and a French author makes the characteristic remark, “with plenty of wine the English soldier could go to the end of the world.” When the English soldier, on this occasion, had got through the eight days’ provisions with which he started, instead of finding himself at Calais, he was only advanced as far as Amiens, with the worst part of the journey before him. The fords of the Somme were said to be guarded; spies came over in the disguise of deserters, and told the king that all the land was up in arms, that the princes were all united, and that two hundred thousand men were hemming them hopelessly round. In the midst of these bad news, however, a ray of light broke in. A villager pointed out a marsh, by crossing which they could reach a ford in the stream. They traversed the marsh without hesitation, waded with difficulty through morass and water, and, behold! they were safe on the other side. The road was now clear, they thought, for Calais; and they pushed cheerily on. But, more dangerous than the marsh, more impassable than the river, the vast army of France blocked up their way. Closing across a narrow valley which lay between the castle of Agincourt and the village of Tramecourt, sixty thousand knights, gentlemen, and man-at-arms stood like a wall of steel. There were all the great names there of all the provinces,—Dukes of Lorraine, and Bar, and Bourbon, Princes of Orleans and Berri, and many more. Henry by this time had but twelve thousand men. He found he had miscalculated his movements, and was unwilling to sacrifice his army to the point of honour. He offered to resign the title of King of France and to surrender his recent conquest at Harfleur. But the princes were resolved not to negotiate, but to revenge. Henry then said to the prisoners he was leading in his train, “Gentlemen, go till this affair is settled. If your captors survive, present yourselves at Calais.” His forces were soon arranged. Archers had ceased to be the mere appendages to a line of battle: they now constituted almost all the English army. All the night before they had been busy in preparation. They had furbished up their arms, and put now cords to their bows, and sharpened the stakes they carried to ward off the attack of cavalry. At early dawn they had confessed to the priest; and all the time no noise had been heard. Henry had ordered silence throughout the camp on pain of the severest penalties,—loss of his horse to a gentleman, and of his right ear to a common soldier. "A.D. 1415."The 23d of October was the great, the important day. Henry put a noble helmet on his head, surmounted by a golden crown, sprang on his little gray hackney, encouraged his men with a few manly words, reminding them of Old England and how constantly they had conquered the French, and led them to a field where the grass was still green, and which the rains had not converted into mud; for the weather had long been unpropitious. And here the heroic little army expected the attack. But the enemy were in no condition to make an advance. Seated all night on their enormous war-horses, the heavy-armed cavaliers had sunk the unfortunate animals up to their knees in the adhesive soil. Old Thomas of Erpingham, seeing the decisive moment, completed the marshalling of the English as soon as possible, and, throwing his baton in the air, cried, “Now, Strike!” A great hurrah was the answer to this order; but still the French line continued unmoved. If it had been turned into stone it could not have been more inactive. Ranged thirty-two deep, and fixed to the spot they stood on, buried up in armour, and crowded in the narrow space, the knights could offer no resistance to the attack of their nimble and lightly-armed foes. A flight of ten thousand arrows poured upon the vast mass, and saddles became empty without a blow. There came, indeed, two great charges of horse from the flank of the French array; but the inevitable shaft found entrance through their coats of mail, and very few survived. Of these the greater part rushed, blind and wounded, back among their own men, crashing upon the still spell-bound line and throwing it into inextricable confusion. Horse and man rolled over in the dirt, struggling and shrieking in an undistinguishable mass. Meanwhile the archers, throwing aside their stakes and seizing the hatchets hanging round their necks, advanced at a run,—poured blows without cessation on casque and shield, completing the destruction among the crowded multitudes which their own disorder had begun; and, as the same cause which hindered their advance prevented their retreat, they sat the hopeless victims of a false position, and were slaughtered without an attempt made to resist or fly. The fate of the second line was nearly the same. Henry, forcing his way with sword and axe through the living barrier of horse and cavalier, led his compact array to the glittering body beyond. There the mÊlÉe became more animated, and prowess was shown upon either side. But the rear-guard, warned by previous experience, took flight before the middle lines were pierced, and Henry saw himself victor with very trifling loss, and only encumbered with the number of the slain, and still more with the multitude of prisoners. Almost all the surviving noblemen had surrendered their swords. They knew too well the fate of wounded or disarmed gentlemen even among their countrymen, and trusted rather to the generosity of the conqueror than the mercy of their own people. Alas that we must again confess that Henry was ignorant of the name of generosity! Alarmed for a moment at the threatening aspect of some of the fugitives who had resumed their ranks, he gave the pitiless word that every prisoner was to be slain. Not a soldier would lift his hand against his captive,—from the double motive of tenderness and cupidity. To tell an “archer good” to murder a great baron, the captive of his bow and spear, was to tell him to resign a ransom which would make him rich for life. But Henry was not to be balked. He appointed two hundred men to be executioners of his command; and thousands of the young and gay were slaughtered in cold blood. Was it hideous policy which thus led Henry to weaken his enemy’s cause by diminishing the number of its knightly defenders, or was it really the result of the fear of being overcome? Whichever it was, the effect was the same. Ten thousand of the gentlemen of France were the sufferers on that day,—a whole generation of the rich and high-born swept away at one blow! It would have taken a long time in the course of nature to supply their place; but nature was not allowed to have her way. Wars and dissensions interfered with her restorative efforts. Six-and-thirty years were yet to be spent in mutual destruction, or in struggles against the English name; and when France was again left free from foreign occupation, when French chivalry again wished to assume the chief rule in human affairs, it was found that chivalry was out of place; a new state of things had arisen in Europe; the greatest exploit which had been known in their national annals had been performed by a woman; and knighthood had so lost its manliness that, when prosperity and population had again made France a powerful kingdom, the silk-clad courtiers of an unwarlike monarch thought it good taste to sneer at the relief of Orleans and the mission of Joan of Arc!

Six years after Agincourt, the English conqueror and the wretched phantom of kingship called Charles the Sixth descended to their graves. "A.D. 1421."Military honour and patriotism seemed utterly at an end among the French population, and our Henry the Sixth, the son of the man of Agincourt, succeeded in the great object of English ambition and was recognised from the Channel to the Loire as King of France. In the Southern provinces a spark of the old French gallantry was still unextinguished, but it showed itself in the gay unconcern with which the Dauphin, now Charles the Seventh, bore all the reverses of fortune, and consoled himself for the loss of the noblest crown in Europe by the enjoyments of love and festivity. Perhaps he saw that the whirligig of time would bring about its revenges, and that the curse of envious faction would vex the councils of the conquerors as it had ruined the fortunes of the subdued. The warriors of Henry still remained, but, without the controlling hand, they could direct their efforts to no common object. The uncles of the youthful king speedily quarrelled. The gallant Bedford was opposed by the treacherous Glo’ster, and both were dominated and supplanted by the haughty prelate, the Cardinal Bishop of Winchester. Offence was soon taken at the presumption of the English soldiery. Religious animosities supervened. The Churches of England and France had both made successful endeavours to establish a considerable amount of national independence, and the French bishops, who had withdrawn themselves from the absolutism of Rome, were little inclined to become subordinate to Winchester and Canterbury. A court gradually gathered round the Dauphin, which inspired him with more manly thoughts. His feasts and tournaments were suspended, and, with his hand on the hilt of his sword, he watched the proceedings of the English. These proceedings were uniformly successful when restricted to the operations of war. They defeated the men of Gascony and the reinforcements sent over by the Scotch. They held a firm grasp of Paris and all the strong places of the North, and cast down the gauntlet to the rest of France by laying siege to the beautiful city of Orleans in the winter of 1428. "A.D. 1428."Once in possession of the Loire, they would be able at their leisure to extend their conquests southward; and all the loyal throughout the country took up the challenge and resolved on the defence of the beleaguered town. The English must have begun by this time to despise their enemy; for, in spite of the greatness of the stake, they undertook the siege with a force of less than three thousand men. To make up for the deficiency in numbers, they raised twelve large bastions all round the walls, exhausting the troops by the labour and finding it impossible to garrison them adequately when they were finished. It seems that Sebastopol was not the first occasion on which our soldiers were overworked. To surround a city of several thousand inhabitants, strongly garrisoned, and with an open country at its back for the supply of provisions, would have required a large and well-directed force. But the moral effects of Agincourt, and even of Cressy and Poictiers, were not yet obliterated. Public spirit was dead, and very few entertained a hope of saving the doomed place. Statesmen, politicians, and warriors, all calculated the chances of success and decided against the cause of France. But in the true heart of the common people far better feelings survived. They were neither statesmen, nor politicians, nor warriors; but they were loyal and devoted Frenchmen, and put their trust in God.

A peasant-girl, eighteen years of age, born and bred in a little village called Domremy, in Lorraine, was famous for her religious faith and simplicity of character. Her name was Joan d’Arc,—a dreamy enthusiast, believing with full heart all the legends of saints and miracles with which the neighbourhood was full. She rested, also, with a sort of romantic interest on the personal fortunes of the young discrowned king, who had been unjustly excluded by foreigners from his rights and was now about to lose the best of his remaining possessions. She walked in the woods and heard voices telling her to be up and doing. She went to pray in the dim old church, and had glorious visions of angels who smiled upon her. One time she saw a presence with a countenance like the sun, and wings upon his shoulders, who said, “Go, Joan, to the help of the King of France.” But she answered, “My lord, I cannot ride, nor command men-at-arms.” The voice replied, “Go to M. de Baudricourt at Vaucouleurs: he will take thee to the king. Saint Catharine and Saint Marguerite will come to thy assistance.” There was no voluntary deception here. The girl lived in a world of her own, and peopled it out of the fulness of her heart. She went to Vaucouleurs: she saw M. de Baudricourt. He took her to Poictiers, where the Dauphin resided, and when she was led into the glittering ring an attempt was made to deceive her by representing another as the prince; but she went straight up to the Dauphin and said to him, “Gentle Dauphin, my name is Joan the Maid. The King of Heaven sends to you, through me, that you shall be anointed and crowned at Rheims, and you shall be lieutenant of the King of Heaven, who is King of France.” All the court was moved,—the more pure-minded, with sympathy for the girl, the more experienced, with the use that might be made of her enthusiasm to rouse the nation. Both parties conspired to aid Joan in her design; and, clothed in white armour, mounted on a war-horse, holding the banner of France in her hand, and waited on by knights and pages, she set forth on her way to Orleans. It was like a religious procession all the way. She prayed at all the shrines, and was blest by the clergy, and held on her path undismayed with all the dangers that occurred at every step. At length, on the 30th of April, she made her entry into Orleans. Her coming had long been expected; and, now that it had really happened, people looked back at the difficulties of the route and thought the whole march a miracle. Meantime Joan knelt and gave thanks in the great church, and the true defence of Orleans began. Into the hard-pressed city had gathered all the surviving chivalry of France,—Dunois, the bastard of Orleans, La Hire, Saintrailles, rough and dissolute soldiers, yet all held in awe by the purity and innocence of the Maid. With Joan at the head of the column of assault, the English intrenchments fell one after another. In spite of wounds and hardships, the peasant-girl pushed fearlessly on; the knights and gentlemen could not decline to follow where she led the way; and ten days after her arrival old Talbot and Falstaff gathered up the fragments of their troops and made a precipitate retreat from the scene of their discomfiture. But there was not yet rest for the dreamer of Domremy. She hurried off to the Dauphin. “Gentle Dauphin,” she said, “till you are crowned with the old crown and bedewed with the holy oil, you can never be King of France. Come with me to Rheims. There shall no enemy hurt you on the way.” The country through which they had to pass was bristling with English castles and swarming with wandering troops. Yet the counsel which appeared so hardy was in fact the wisest that could be given. The faith in the sanctity of coronations was still strong. Whoever was first crowned would in the eye of faith be true king. Winchester was bringing over the English claimant. All France would be startled at the news that the descendant of St. Louis was beforehand with his rival; and the march was successfully made. "July 17, 1429."“Gentle king,” said Joan, kneeling after the ceremony, and calling him for the first time King,—“Gentle King, Orleans is saved, the true king is crowned. My task is done. Farewell.” But they would not let her leave them so soon. The people crowded round her and blest her wherever she appeared. “Oh, the good people of Rheims!” she cried: “when I die I should like to be buried here.” “When do you think you shall die?” inquired the archbishop,—perhaps with a sneer upon his lips. “That I know not,” she replied: “whenever it pleases God. But, for my own part, I wish to go back and keep the sheep with my sister and brothers. They will be so glad to see me again!” But this was not to be.

If Talbot and Suffolk had been foiled and vanquished by Dunois and La Hire, they would have accepted their defeat as one of the mischances of war. A knightly hand ennobles the blow it gives. But to be humbled by a woman, a peasant, a prophetess, an impostor,—this was too much for the proud stomachs of our steel-clad countrymen. But far worse was it in the eyes of our stole-clad ecclesiastics. Apparitions of saints and angels vouchsafed to the recalcitrant Church of France!—voices heard from heaven denouncing the claims of the English king!—visible glories hanging round the head of a simple shepherdess! It was evident to every clergyman and monk and bishop in England that the woman was a witch or a deceiver. And almost all the clergymen in France thought the same; and after a while, when the exploit was looked back upon with calmness, almost all the soldiers on both sides were of the same opinion. Nobody could believe in the exaltation of a pure and enthusiastic mind, making its own visions, and performing its own miracles, without a tincture of deceit. It was easier and more orthodox to believe in the liquefaction of the holy oil and the wonders wrought by the bones of St. Denis: so, with a nearly universal assent of both the parties, the humbled English and delivered French, the most heroic and most feminine of women was handed over to the Church tribunals, and Joan’s fate was sealed. Unmanly priests, whose law prevented them from having wives, unloving bishops, whose law prevented them from having daughters,—how were they to judge of the loving heart and trusting tenderness of a girl not twenty years of age, standing before them, with modesty not shown in blushes but in unabated simplicity of behaviour, telling the tale of all her actions as if she were pouring it into the ears of father and mother in her own old cottage at home, unconscious, or at least regardless, of scowling looks, and misleading questions, directed to her by those predetermined murderers? No one tried to save her. Charles the Seventh, with the oil of Rheims scarcely dried upon his head, made no attempt to get her from the hands of her enemies. The process took place at Rouen. Magic and heresy were the crimes laid to her charge; and as generosity was magic in the eyes of those narrow-souled inquisitors, and trust in God was heresy, there was no defence possible. Her whole life was a confession. First, she was condemned to perpetual imprisonment, and to resume the dress of her sex. Then she was exposed to every obloquy and insult which hatred and superstition could pour upon her. A gallant “Lord” accompanied the Count de Ligny in a visit to her cell. She was chained to a plank by both feet, and kept in this attitude night and day. The noble Englishman did honour to his rank and country. When Joan said, “I know the English will procure my death, in hopes of getting the realm of France; but they could not do it, no, if they had a hundred thousand Goddams more than they have to-day;” the gallant visitor was so enraged by those depreciating remarks, and perhaps at the nickname thus early indicative of the national oath, that he drew his dagger, and would have struck her, if he had not been hindered by Lord Warwick. Another gentleman, on being admitted to her prison, insulted her by the grossness of his behaviour, and then overwhelmed her with blows. It was time for Joan to escape her tormentors. She put on once more the male apparel which she had thrown off, and sentence of death was passed. On the 30th of May, 1431, in the old fishmarket of Rouen, the great crime was consummated. "A.D. 1431."The flames mounted very slowly; and when at last they enveloped her from the crowd, she was still heard calling on Jesus, and declaring, “The voices I heard were of God!—the voices I heard were of God!” The age of chivalry was indeed past, and the age of Church-domination was also about to expire. The peasant-girl of Domremy wrote the dishonoured epitaph of the first in the flame of Rouen, and a citizen of Mentz was about to give the other its death-blow with the printing-press.

This is one of the inventions apparently unimportant, by which incalculable results have been produced. At first it was intended merely to simplify the process of copying the books which were already well known. And, if we may trust some of the stories told of the earliest specimens of the art, we shall see that there was some slight portion of dishonesty mingled with the talent of the Fathers of printing. These were Guttenberg of Mentz, and his apprentice or partner Faust. "A.D. 1455."The first of their productions was a Latin Bible; and the letters of this impression were such an exact imitation of the works of the amanuensis that they passed it off as an exquisite specimen of the copyist’s art. Faust sold a copy to the King of France for seven hundred crowns, and another to the Archbishop of Paris for four hundred. The prelate, enchanted with his bargain, (for the usual price was several hundred crowns above what he had given,) showed it in triumph to the king. The king compared the two, and was filled with astonishment. They were identical in every stroke and dot. How was it possible for any two scribes, or even for the same scribe, to produce so undeniable a fac-simile of his work? The capital letters of the edition were of red ink. They inquired still further, and found that many other copies had been sold, all precisely alike in form and pressure. They came to the conclusion that Faust was a wizard and had sold himself to the devil, and that the initials were of blood. The Church and State, in this case united in the persons of king and archbishop, had the magician apprehended. To save himself from the flames, the unhappy Faust had to confess the deceit, and also to discover the secret of the art. The whole mystery consisted in cutting letters upon movable metal types, and, after rubbing them with ink when they were correctly set, imprinting them upon paper by means of a screw. A simple expedient, as it appeared to everybody when the secret was spread abroad; for there had been seals stamping impressions on wax for many generations. Medals and coins had been poured forth from the dies of every nation from the dawn of history. In England, playing-cards had been produced for several years, with the figures impressed on them from wooden blocks; and in 1423 a stamped book, with wood engravings, had made its appearance, which now, with many treasures of typography, is in the library of Lord Spencer. Even in Nineveh, we learn from recent discovery, the dried bricks, while in a soft state, had been stamped with those curious-looking inscriptions, by a board in which the unsightly letters were set in high relief. Wooden letters had also long been known; and yet it was not till 1440 that Guttenberg bethought him of the process of printing, and only after ten or twelve years’ labour that he brought his experiments to perfection and with one crush of the completed press opened new hopes and prospects to the whole family of mankind. But things apparently unconnected are brought together for good when the great turning-points of human history are attained. There are always pebbles of the brook within reach when the warrior-shepherd has taken the sling in his hand. Shortly before the invention of printing, a discovery was made without which Guttenberg’s skill would have been of no avail. This was the applicability of linen rags to the manufacture of paper. Parchment, and preparations of straw and papyrus, had sufficed for the transcriber and author of those unliterary times, but would have been inadequate to supply the demand of the new process; and therefore we may say that, as gunpowder was essential to the use of artillery, and steam-power for the railway-train, linen paper was indispensable to the development of the press. And the development was rapid beyond all imagination. In the remaining portion of the century, eight thousand five hundred and nine books were published, of which the English Caxton and his followers supplied one hundred and forty-two,—a small contribution in actual numbers, but valuable for the insight it gives us into the favourite literature of the time. Among those volumes there are

“The Tale of Troy divine,” for scholars; “Tullie, of old age,” and “of Friendship,” and “Virgil’s Æneid,” for the classical; “Lives of Our Ladie and divers Saints,” for the religious; and “The Consolation of Boethius,” for the afflicted. But several editions prove the popularity of the Father of English poetry; and we find the “Tales of Cauntyrburrie,” and the “Book of Fame,” and “Troylus and Cresyde, made by Geoffrey Chaucer,” the great and fitting representatives of the native English muse.

We ought to remember, in judging of the paucity of books produced in England, that the Wars of the Roses broke out at the very time when Guttenberg’s labours began. In such a season of struggle and unrest as the thirty years of civil strife—for though Mr. Knight, in his very interesting sketch of this date,[D] has shown that the period of actual and open war was very short, the state of uneasiness and expectation must have endured the whole time—there was small encouragement to the peaceful triumphs of art or literature. And, moreover, the pride of station was revolted by the prospect of the spread of information among the classes to whom it had not yet reached. The noble could afford to acknowledge his inferiority in learning and research to the priest or monk, for it was their trade to be wise and learned, and their scholarship was even considered a badge of the lowness of their birth, which had given them the primer and psalter instead of the horse and sword. But those high-hearted cavaliers could ill brook the notion of educated clowns and peasants. And, strange to say, the sentiment was shared and exaggerated by the peasants and clowns themselves. Jack Cade is represented, by an anachronism of date but with perfect truth of character, as profoundly irritated at the invention of printing, and the building of a paper-mill, and the introduction of such heathenish words as nominatives and adverbs: so that the press began its career opposed by the two greatest parties of the State. Yet truth is mighty and will prevail. No nobility in Europe gives such contributions to the general stock of high and healthy thought as the descendants of the men of Towton and Bosworth, and no peasantry values more deeply, or would defend more gallantly, the gifts poured upon it by a free and sympathizing press. Warwick the King-maker, if he had lived just now, would have made speeches in Parliament and had them reported in the Times, and Jack Cade would have been sent to the reformatory and taught to read and write.

But, with the peerages of Europe greatly thinned, with mounted feudalism overthrown, with the press rejoicing as a giant to run its course, something also was needed in order to make a wider theatre for the introduction of the new life of men. Another world lay beyond the great waters of the Atlantic. Whispers had been going round the circle of earnest inquirers, which gradually grew louder and louder till they reached the ears of kings, that great things lay hidden in the awful and mysterious solitudes of the ocean; that westward, to balance the preponderance of our used-up continent, must be solid land, equal in weight and size, so that the uninterrupted waters would conduct the adventurous mariner to the farther India by a nearer route than Bartholomew Diaz, the Portuguese, had just discovered. "A.D. 1487."This man sailed to the southern extremity of Africa, passed round to the east without being aware of his achievement, and penetrated as far as Lagoa Bay. But the crew became discontented, and the navigator retraced his steps. Alarmed at the commotion of the vast waves of the Southern Ocean pouring its floods against the Table Mountain, he had retired from further research, and called the southern point of his pilgrimage the Cape of Storms. It is now known to us by a happier augury as the Cape of Good Hope. But, whether perpetually haunted by tempests or not, the truth was discovered that the land ceased at that promontory and left an unexplored sea beyond. This was cherished in many a heart; for in this century maritime discovery kept pace with the other triumphs of mental power. Wherever ship could swim man could venture. The Azores had been discovered in 1439 and colonized by the Portuguese in 1440. Already in possession of Cape Verd, Madeira, and the Canaries, Portugal looked forward to greater discoveries, for these were the nurseries of gallant and skilful mariners. But the glory was left for another nation,—though, by a strange caprice of fortune, the chance of it had been offered to nearly all.

The life of Columbus is more wonderful than a romance. He hawked about his notion of the way to India at all the courts of Europe. By birth a Genoese, he considered the great ocean the patrimony of any person able to seize it. When his services, therefore, were rejected by his own country, he offered them successively to Portugal, to Spain, and to England. Henry the Seventh was inclined to venture a small sum in the lottery of chances; but, while still in negotiation with the brother of Columbus, the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, closed with the navigator’s terms, and on the 3d of August, 1492, the squadron of discovery, consisting of a vessel of some size, and two small pinnaces, with a crew at most of a hundred persons in all the three, sailed from the port of Palos, in Andalusia. Three weeks’ constant progress to the westward took them far beyond all previous navigation. The men became disheartened, discontented, and finally rebellious. Against all, Columbus bore up with the self-relying energy of a great mind, but was driven to the compromise of promising, if they confided in him for three days longer, he would return, if the object of his voyage was yet unattained. But by this time his sagacious observation had assured him of success. Strange appearances began to be perceived from the ship’s decks. A carved piece of wood floated past, then a reed newly cut, and, best sign of all, a branch with red berries still fresh. “From all these symptoms, Columbus was so confident of being near land, that on the evening of the 11th of October, after public prayers for success, he ordered the sails to be furled, and the ships to lie to, keeping strict watch, lest they should be driven ashore in the night. During this interval of suspense and expectation no man shut his eyes: all kept upon deck, gazing intently towards that quarter where they expected to discover the land, which had been so long the object of their wishes. About two hours before midnight, Columbus, standing on the forecastle, observed a light at a distance, and privately pointed it out to Pedro Guttierez, a page of the queen’s wardrobe. Guttierez perceiving it, and calling to Salcedo, comptroller of the fleet, all three saw it in motion, as if it were carried from place to place. A little after midnight the joyful sound of ‘Land! land!’ was heard from the Pinta, which kept always ahead of the other ships. But, having been so often deceived by fallacious appearances, every man was now become slow of belief, and waited in all the anguish of uncertainty and impatience for the return of day. As soon as morning dawned, all doubts and fears were dispelled. From every ship an island was seen about two leagues to the north, whose flat and verdant fields, well stored with wood, and watered with many rivulets, presented the aspect of a delightful country. The crew of the Pinta instantly began the Te Deum as a hymn of thanksgiving to God, and were joined by those of the other ships, with tears of joy and transports of congratulation. This office of gratitude to Heaven was followed by an act of justice to their commander. They threw themselves at the feet of Columbus, with feelings of self-condemnation mingled with reverence. They implored him to pardon their ignorance, incredulity, and insolence, which had created him so much unceasing disquiet and had so often obstructed the prosecution of his well-concerted plan; and, passing in the warmth of their admiration from one extreme to another, they now pronounced the man whom they had so lately reviled and threatened to be a person inspired by Heaven with sagacity and fortitude more than human, in order to accomplish a design so far beyond the ideas and conception of all former ages.”

Many excellent writers have described this wondrous incident, but none so well as the historian of America, Dr. Robertson, whose eloquent account is borrowed in the preceding lines. The great event occurred on Friday, the 12th of October, 1492, and the connection between the two worlds began. The place he first landed at was San Salvador, one of the Bahamas; and after attaching Cuba and Hispaniola to the Spanish crown, and going through imminent perils by land and sea, he achieved his glorious return to Palos on the 15th of March, 1493. He brought with him some of the natives of the different islands he had discovered, and their strange appearance and manners were vouchers for the facts he stated. The whole town, when he came into the harbour, was in an uproar of delight. “The bells were rung, the cannon fired, Columbus was received at landing with royal honours, and all the people, in solemn procession, accompanied him and his crew to the church, where they returned thanks to Heaven, which had so wonderfully conducted, and crowned with success, a voyage of greater length, and of more importance, than had been attempted in any former age.”[E]