its growlings grow fiercer day by day, from the balcony toward which his people flung upward the lamentable cry of "Bread! Give us bread at two sous a loaf!"

Oh that balcony of Versailles, the Golgotha of the doomed monarchy! It commands the Marble Court, on a level with the French windows of Louis XIV's bedroom. That bedroom was to the chateau, as we know, like the tabernacle in a church-the very Holy of Holies of Royalty. To clear the balustrade which defended that bed, the greatest folk in France would have stooped to the basest actions! When ladies passed before that empty bed, etiquette obliged them to bow the knee, as to the chapel altar. The tradition of its august memories was so tyrannous that King Louis XV and his grandson after him, had to quit every morning the warmer and more commodious rooms where they had slept, and creep for an instant under the curtains of Louis XIV's bed that they might hold the grand lever there. From that balcony our Kings could see approaching along the broad avenues which radiate from the Court of Honor like beams of a star, the nobility of a whole kingdom, courtiers with tidings of victory, the princes and the ambassadors of all nations.

the

And this was the balcony upon which Louis XVI had to step out when a ragged mob were howling to him for bread! In the very dawn of his reign-on Feb. 2, 1775-the paid rioters of the Wheat-war had there given him a foretaste of the Days of October. It was only sedition at first, but on the 5th and 6th of October, 1789, it had become Revolution. One can follow, step by step, the path of the Queen, when she escaped from the chamber, whose doors were about to be forced, to join the King upon this balcony. They were made prisoners

by the Parisians, and taken away. Cut off from his only amusement, the royal sportsman wrote sadly in his journal-the everlasting journal of his huntings,-Oct. 5th. "Shot, near the gate of Chatillon. Hit 81. Interrupted by events."

Henceforth it is on the balcony of the Tuileries that the ecce homo will be presented, each time in a more sinister and humiliating manner; then in the Tribunal: finally on the Place de la Revolution. Louis XVI will accept the unintelligible torture piously: he will face it with a calmness worthy of his name and race. Let us pity him. Let us respect his virtues and his passive courage. I am quite willing to have him canonized, but do not ask me to admire a King who suffers himself to be assassinated when he might have died sooner, like a King, on foot, and sword in hand! The "poor man" did not even comprehend the advice allegorically offered him by the Jacobin painter, Carteaux, when he inscribed the royal sword with the motto "La Loi."

After the departure of the sovereigns on October 6th, all was over with that life at Versailles, which had been "interrupted by events." It fades away among the pictures by whose help we have endeavored to re-animate it. Once abandoned by its proper masters, the chateau could only be turned into a national museum, a sort of necropolis, whither are still conveyed the effigies of important statesmen and historic personages of every grade. They are huddled together there with a promiscuousness which is, in itself, suggestive. At the very end of the Prince's wing in the garden, in a small secluded summer-house, we may see Napoleon I in the triumphal robes of his coronation: a statue by Bosio which was to have been set up on the Arc de l'Etoile. Under Napoleon's feet, in a sort of trench, dividing the

garden from the frowning house of Lounois, we may also see, if we lean over far enough, the figure of a Prince who appears to be doing penance in this hole,--it is the equestrian statue of the Duc d'Orléans, ejected from the Place du Carrousel in 1848. Children, as they grow up, are apt to put away in some storeroom or other, the broken pieces of the playthings which amuse them no more. nation has made Versailles the repository of its cast-off puppets-Kings, Emperors and Presidents. And it is at Versailles, also, that she constructs

new ones.

Our inconstant

The relics of the past live there, in peace, together. After the gates are closed at night there is not a sound, not a glimmer in one of those hundreds of windows. On the evening of my first systematic visit, I lingered in the gardens until night-fall. The day died quietly and in great beauty, with

Revue des Deux Mondes.

many a suggestion of bygone splendor, and illusion of survival, in the lingering reflections from windows and fountain-basins. On the other side of the palace, in the courts and avenues through which one must pass in going out, in the direction of that Paris from which misfortune comes, night descends upon the chateau both suddenly and heavily. The colossal structure vanishes all at once, as in a shroud of darkness. A single wan light is kindled and wavers for an instant in some keeper's room, at the basement of the Gabriel wing. Is it the same that was actually seen to glimmer for one moment in that very place, after all the fires in the palace had been put out in sign of mourning, on the night after the death of Louis XV? That signal announced to France that she had lost her King. It announces that same thing still, and no one of us yet knows what beside. Eugene-Melchior de Vogüé.

It is a much debated question how far the work of American writers deserves the name of a national literature. It is asserted, and with some plausibility, that American literature is but the shadow of a name, that the products of American thought are not in any way to be distinguished from the literary work of contemporary England, and that where any diversity is discoverable it is but a local manifestation which has had no permanent effect in stamping the hall-mark of nationality on the literature of which it forms a part.

At first sight there may appear to be good grounds for the assertion.

In

England and America are found two peoples sprung originally from a common stock, with a common history and speaking a common tongue; and in such a case a similarity, superficial at least, and probably actual, will inevitably appear in the written examples of their common thought. A close study of American literature, however, will, partially at any rate, clear the student's mind of the prejudices which this argument has implanted. In the end, though he may protest that her literature is not yet fully developed, he will be forced to admit that it exists, and that reared as it has been in a climate and amid circumstances

wholly diverse, this literature has attained to many characteristics which cannot be associated to any considerable extent with her English sister.

There is one influence in particular which, while it may have lightly touched those literatures of an older growth, has affected that of America in an altogether different degree. In America the history of her literature is the history of her religious development, and consequently to a very considerable extent the history of Calvinism, the religion of her youth.

The foundation of the American colonies was effected at a period when English literature was richer and more varied than it had ever been before or has ever been since. The brilliance and versatility of the Elizabethans, culminating in the genius of Shakespeare, had attained for England the foremost place in literary Europe. No other period of the modern world has in one nation produced so many masters whether in poetry, drama, history, phllosophy, or travel, whose fame has survived the inexorable judgment of time. But the settlers of America, though imbued with the spirit of the Elizabethans, carried little but the spirit of this literature to their new home. The gentlemen adventurers who established themselves in Virginia and the South, though their leader was the gifted Raleigh, were themselves men rather of the sword than of the pen; and if some of them, like gallant James Smith, have left records of their experiences, their writings approach more nearly the uncouth baldness of the skipper's log than the polished prose of the courtiers of Elizabeth. And if the first colonists were rough and ready, their successors were only too often luckless redemptioners or the sweepings of the English gaols. The Northern colonists, on the other hand, were of a different type. The first of them were Puritans of the Puritans,

and as such could scarcely be expected to carry to the Promised Land the taint of that literature which they regarded with abhorrence as the subtlest instrument of Belial himself.

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In these circumstances, save in so far

they could claim a share in the glories of the past, the American people started their national life and continued throughout nearly two centuries without producing anything which could in any way deserve the name of literature. So far as the South is concerned there appears to have been literally no productive thought. The more considerable families, it is true, living an almost feudal existence each in what became an ancestral domain, preserved out of a certain pride of birth some standard of literary education. But it was wholly with the literature of the past that they were familiar; the thoughts of contemporary Europe touched them not at all; the events which shook the foundations of the elder world were to them but the echoes of a distant storm, and it was not until the Revolution that they aroused themselves to a sleepy interest in aught that lay beyond their immediate borders.

In the North things were somewhat better. Here, under the nominal rule of royal governors, there existed in fact a theocracy. The Calvinist divines were the real rulers; and each in his own church, a church generally synonymous with the township, held almost undisputed sway over the minds and bodies of his flock. With them Calvinism was carried to further extremes than had been possible in Elizabethan England. All outside its communion were not merely heretics but rebels," upon whom the Church was not unwont to vent its righteous indignation; and the severity of its punishments appears again and again, not only in spasmodic outbursts like the trials for witchcraft at Salem, but in the legal

codes of the provinces whose extremest example is the famous Blue Laws of Massachusetts.

At the same time Calvinism and its ministers were the only force which to any appreciable degree kept alive in the land the flickering flame of learning. Harvard, the first and greatest of the American universities, was founded in 1636 by the Calvinist divines, in the avowed hope that there the most promising of the new generation should be educated in the tenets of the Calvinistic faith, and be ready upon the death of their fathers to take their places as the spiritual leaders of the people. But Harvard at its inception, although its course included the elements of education, was in effect a school of theology alone. It served the purpose of its founders indeed excellently well, for its alumni, even such of them as were unlearned in all else, were yet deeply instructed in the dogmas of Calvinism, and capable in the highest degree of carrying on the fight against heresy and schism in which the orthodox Church was soon to be strenuously engaged. Until the foundation of Yale University some sixty years later, Harvard was the one centre of light in a land of literary darkness. With few exceptions the graduates who passed from its shelter into the Church were the only men of literature in the Northern colonies, and for at least a hundred years almost the only writings which could boast of any literary form were the voluminous works of these Calvinist preachers.

Of these same preachers one at least, Cotton Mather, had something approaching a European reputation. His cast of mind may be estimated from the fact that he was one of the judges at the Salem trials, while his literary activity will appear from the number of his works of which between the years 1678 and 1728 he published some four hundred volumes. The bulk of

these were entirely theological, and the burden of all appears to have been the glorification of the sect of which he was the most zealous leader.

Before his death the theocracy had fallen, the priesthood had lost its power, and in the eighteenth century his greatest successor, Jonathan Edwards, was driven from church to church by the advance of those liberal opinions which the best part of his life was spent in combating. For the inevitable reaction had already arrived. The country was no longer inhabited only by the immediate descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers who were accustomed to suffer gladly the yoke of their spiritual masters. Other colonists had followed, men of a lighter faith. The Scotch-Irish from the north of Ireland had spread themselves along the verge of the western wilderness from north to south, and in the heart of New England a large influx of German immigrants threatened in places to submerge the original colonists and assume their powers. In these circumstances the Calvinist ascendency could not be maintained. An opposition sprang up formed by a combination of all those of more liberal views whom the priestly domination pressed most hardly. The University of Yale was founded in 1701 as a counterbalance to the Calvinist college at Harvard, and by degrees the liberal principles there inculcated took root and flourished, until they found a restingplace not only in Yale but in the very seat of Calvinism itself.

on

In purer letters the position of the North was not much better than that of the South. In the domain of poetry Mrs. Ann Bradstreet, known as the Tenth Muse, gained some local fame, while Michael Wigglesworth compiled the Bay Psalm-Book, a metrical paraphrase of the psalms, and published several volumes of very villainous Eng. lish verse. In history and biography,

too, some few works appeared, but such examples of general literature as these are hardly now of any interest even as literary curiosities. So far as the poetry is concerned it was well nigh entirely of a sacred character, while the history and biography were, in effect, if not in form, the history of Puritanism and the biographies of her leading divines.

Up to the revolutionary times, therefore, there appeared not only no evidence of national literary thought, but no work of importance which was even a fairly worthy imitation of the literature of the mother country. The standard of individual education was, it is true, far higher than in England, for actual illiteracy was practically unknown; but this education, though good in itself, produced little creative thought except in the dusty region of theological polemics, and by reducing all men to a dead level of unimaginative knowledge was rather an adverse than a favoring influence.

With the approach of the Revolution, however, came a new phase. The place in American thought once occupied by theology was now held by politics; the preacher yielded place in the national estimation to the orator, and though oratory is not literature, the orators were the nearest approach to literary men that the period produced.

The best example of the new era is Benjamin Franklin. Born in obscurity, self-educated, and self-made, he yet attained a world-wide celebrity not only as a champion of American independence, but as a dignified representative of his country at the polished courts of Europe, while in the domain of science his attainments have never perhaps been adequately recognized. As a man of letters, too, he was by no means contemptible. His autobiography, if not a monument of literary art, is a considerable advance on anything that preceded it, but some of his best work was

done in his letters and political pamphlets in which his prose is of almost Addisonian dignity; and one letter in particular to the English papers, in which he declares that "the grand leap of the whale up the Falls of Niagara is esteemed by all who have seen it as one of the finest spectacles in nature," is remarkable as being the first example in literary history of what is now generally recognized as American humor, a humor whose main characteristic is the exaggeration of nonsense in the midst of the soberest sense. In other respects Franklin is perhaps best known as the author of "Poor Richard's Almanac," whose now hackneyed aphorisms, such as "Honesty is the best Policy," and "God helps them that help themselves," have passed into the proverbial language of both England and America.

Nor was Franklin alone among the Revolutionary leaders in producing stately and dignified prose. Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, and many other leaders of the nationalist movement, adorned even the political pamphlets which they published in such profusion with a dignified grace of style savoring more of the English essayists of the previous century than of the crude utterances which one is accustomed to associate with the ephemeral literature of politics. Even while they prated of the rights of man, of liberty, equality, and fraternity, their writings are permeated for the most part with the unexpected but ever saving grace of com

mon-sense.

The political essay, then, was brought at this time to a high state of perfection; but neither politics nor oratory can supply the place which literature leaves unfilled, and of pure literature in all the length and breadth of the colonies there was still hardly a vestige. Although theology had been for the time superseded in men's minds by the more practical calls of politics, the