to systematise and arrange this chaotic mass of traditions, decisions, and deductions; and from this necessity sprang the four great systems of jurisprudence known from their founders as the Hanafite, Malikite, Shafi'ite, and Hanbalite, to one of which every orthodox Muslim belongs. The decisions of these four Imams, Abu-Hanifa, Ibn-Malik, Esh-Shafi'i and Ibn-Hanbal, are binding upon all true churchmen, in the Mohammedan sense. It is the orthodox belief that since the four Imams no doctor has arisen who can compare with them in learning and judgment, and whether or not this is true, it is certain that no theologian or jurist has ever superseded their digests of the law. No account is taken of the altered circumstances in which Mohammedans are now placed; the conclusions at which these Imams arrived in the eighth and ninth centuries are held to be equally applicable in the nineteenth, and a popular theological handbook among our Indian fellow-subjects states that 'it is not lawful to follow any other than the four Imāms; in 'these days, the Kadi must make no order, the Mufti give no fatwa, contrary to the opinions of the four Imams.' (E. Sell, "Faith of Islam,' p. 19.)

This is therefore the explanation of the difference between modern Mohammedanism and the teaching we have been able to draw from the Koran itself. Islam rests on many pillars and the Koran is not the only support. A large part of what Muslims now believe and practise is not to be found in the Koran at all. We do not mean to say that the Traditions of Mohammed are not as good authority as the Koran-indeed, except that in the latter case the Prophet professed to speak the words of God and in the former he did not so profess, there is little to choose between them-nor do we assert that the early doctors of the law displayed any imaginative faculty in drawing their inferences and analogies, though we have our suspicions; all we would insist on is that it is a mistake to call the Koran either the theological compendium or the corpus legis of Islam. It is neither the one nor the other. Those who turn over the pages of the Hedaya, or Khalil's Code Muselman,' of which M. Seignette has recently published a French translation in Algiers, will easily see how little help the Koran is to the Mohammedan legist, and how few of the Khalil's two thousand clauses can be traced to the supposed Book of the Law. In the same way, one may turn the pages of the Koran backwards and forwards for a lifetime before one finds the smallest indication of the formidable system of ritual which is now considered an essential part of the Mohammedan religion.

For ourselves we prefer the Koran to the religion as it is now

practised, and are glad to think that we do not owe all the faults of modern Islām to the sacred book on which it is supposed to rest. No one can read unmoved the book which is now presented to us in a fresh English dress. There is a peculiar simplicity about the Koran which attracts one in spite of its vain repetitions and dreariness. No book bears more distinctly the impress of its author's mind; of none can it be so positively asserted that it was spoken from the heart without thought or care. Inconsistent, contradictory, tedious, wearisome as it often is, the book has a personality in it which chains the attention. It is not a code of law, nor yet a theological system; but it is something better than these. It is the broken utterance of a human heart wholly incapable of disguise; and the heart was that of a man who has influenced the world as only One other has ever moved it.

ART. IV.-1. Chroniques Dauphinoises. Documents inédits relatifs au Dauphiné pendant la Révolution. Par CHAMPOLLION-FIGEAC. Grenoble: 1880.

2. Nouvelles Excursions Dauphinoises. RAVERAT. Lyon: 1880.

3. La Terreur Blanche dans le Midi. Paris: 1880.

Par le Baron DE

4. Pie VI. dans les prisons du Dauphiné. FRANCLIEU. Grenoble: 1880.

Par E. DAUdet.

Par Mlle. DE

5. Histoire de la réunion du Dauphiné à la France. (Ouvrage couronné par l'Académie.) Par J.-J. GUIFFREY. Paris, Académie des Bibliophiles: 1878.

6. Vizille et ses environs. Précis historique. Par AUGUSTE BOURNE. Grenoble: 1878.

A

UGUSTIN THIERRY was often heard to remark that the history of France had not yet been written; the work having proved too great for any author. This is because France is a collection of countries which her sovereigns acquired and governed on different terms. For nearly fifteen centuries the history of France was that of the provinces. She was divided when Cæsar first described her; she remained divided under the proconsuls, and only a temporary consolidation took place under Charlemagne. After the death of the great emperor his vast heritage broke up, like the empire of Alexander, into many separate and quasi-independent kingdoms; it needed

the lapse of centuries ere those dissimilar and discordant fragments, which are now called by the name of France, were again subject to one ruler. Between 'païs conquis' and 'païs unis,' as between païs de droit' and païs d'état,' rivalries as well as palpable distinctions existed; nor could it be otherwise. The provinces were remote from the heart of France, but none the less proud of their history, whether they looked at its mysterious Celtic origin, full of whispering forests and primeval dolmens, or reverted to the Roman civilisation of the cities by the Rhone, where the blood of the martyrs has truly been the seed of the Church. They were proud, too, of their Bozons,' Fulques, Guigues,' and Humberts,' of dynasties as old as feudality itself, and of princes who made alliances of love. and war with nearly all the crowned heads of Europe. Even when sold by the last of her Dauphins, it was felt to be dangerous to sink the individuality of the imperial fief of the Viennois in the kingdom of France, and a stipulation was made that the fief should be held separate from the kingdom till the Emperor should incorporate them both.

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Who, then, were those Dauphins of the Viennois who held so directly from the Empire that they could dictate their own conditions to the King of France, and demand from him the preservation of a title that has been borne, as we know, by the eldest son of every French sovereign, till the princes of the House of Orleans allowed this remnant of feudality to drop? What was this Dauphinate of the Viennois which the childless Humbert II. felt to be intrinsically his own, to be sold or bequeathed by him at will, and to be by him handed over to a French prince, along, it is true, with feudal sword and knightly banner, but also with the royal sceptre and mint, and with a royal signet ring? Dauphiny, the country of the Chevalier Bayard, of Lesdiguieres, of Diane de Poictiers, of Farel, of Dolomieu, of Mounier, of Barnave, and of Casimir Périer, was formerly divided into two regions, the upper and the lower. Of the former, Grenoble, placed at the confluence of the Drac and of the Isère, became the seat of government, while of the latter, Vienne was the capital, as she was ever the metropolitan see. This triangle of territory, intersected by a hundred streams, is forty-two leagues in length by thirty-four in breadth, lying between Provence on the south, and Bresse and Bugey on the north. It had for its western boundary the course of the Rhone, while on the eastern side it was divided from Savoy, the Maurienne, and Piedmont by those Alps which seem to be unascendable in the imagination of men-a region of solitude, 'silence, and snows; carrying a chill of terror to the soul,

'from the very vacuity of human life within them.' Since the Revolution the map of France has been altered, and the old divisions, which lost their historical titles, have obtained in exchange names coined out of the physical features of the so-termed departments. It is true that popular usage still retains the local terms for many districts. The Auvergnats will not give up speaking of their Limagne,' and the poultry of the best-appointed dinner tables has a warrant that it comes from 'Bresse. Newspaper editors still write of the Cantal,' the Velay,' and the Vexin;' but no minister of the interior now recognises Dauphiny, Burgundy, Brittany, and Provence by those proud territorial names which their prouder dukes and dauphins bore. The escutcheons of the princes are obliterated, like the rights of the droit écrit' or of the pays 'd'états,' while the croziers of their long obsolete bishoprics have rusted like the great sword of the Dauphins.

Dauphiny is now divided into the departments of the Isère, the Hautes-Alpes, and the Drôme. Yet it was once that midland part of Gaul' of which Polybius averred that the Carthaginians sought it, Hannibal having crossed the Rhone near its junction with the Isère before he marched upon Vienne and Lyons. Marius visited the district exactly one hundred years before the Christian era, Pompey resided in Vienne, and Lepidus, before his ambitious colleagues drafted him off to Africa, ruled in Eastern Gaul. Cæsar not only held all these tribes in awe, but also encircled with walls the city of Vienne, which was already the delight of the Roman colonists and the seat of a senatorial body. Tradition has it that Pontius Pilate came to this favoured Vienne to die; the city to which he resorted was fated to become not only the capital of the province of Narbonne, but also the earliest Christian see in France. Thus the Roman governors gave place to Christian bishops. Thus the bishops of Vienne early began to play the important part which they were afterwards to fill, and no one complained that their semi-royal state contrasted sharply enough, not only with the simplicity of the apostolic age, but with the traditions of the first centuries, in whose martyrologies still shine the names of Irenæus, Pothinus, Félix, Zachary, and Ferréol. Noted evangelists had been Trophimus and Césaire, and noted leaders of thought became Hilary of Arles, the brothers Mamert, and Avite, the poet-bishop of Vienne. The lives of such churchmen consisted of the most varied tasks. They built churches and cloisters, but they had also to collect the fragments of literary and artistic life, to maintain the existence of the mechanical arts, and to preserve and copy manuscripts. They

formed a nucleus for parochial life in the chaos come again' of these emphatically dark ages; and they cut down forests, built bridges, drained morasses, and planted vineyards round the walls of the towns in which they preserved what Thierry calls the first spontaneous sketches of municipal organisation, by which they became the depositaries of those records which, according to Roman law, were inscribed in the registers of the 'city.' Privileges were assigned to them by the emperors which gave them lordship over the civic defensores. To their more sacred titles was added that of Dominus,' while Justinian promoted them not only to rule over the regular clergy, but also to exercise surveillance over all municipal affairs. In this way the bishops of Vienne, lords already over seven dioceses of the south, became imperial officers for certain temporal affairs, and insensibly a new order of civil magistracy was 'formed and acknowledged under the empire.' In these complex arrangements originated the claims of the metropolitan of Vienne over the seven districts of the Viennois, and also the gradual adoption by the bishops of a position diametrically opposed to that of the lay suzerains.

With the reign of Clovis (476) the Middle Ages began, but it was not till four centuries later that the fusion between the Gallo-Roman and the Germanic tribes became complete, and only at the close of the tenth century does French history cease to be obscure. But during that darkness the old and the new elements had fused themselves into union, with a marked difference, however, persisting between the civilisation of town and country. In the cities the Roman usages lingered and authority was divided, but in the country the essentially German institution of feudality, by giving a new constitution to society, prepared a change of manners and a romantic chapter for history. Of this system, with all its rigidity and its curious interdependencies, the emperor was the keystone; but when, after the death of Charlemagne, France relapsed into comparative anarchy, many of the great leudes of the empire thought the occasion a happy one for letting their feudal duties fall into abeyance. The absent emperors were put in the wrong, and in Western France, from the Jura to the Mediterranean, the Counts of Provence and Burgundy (titular kings of Arles) took royal state upon themselves. From them, too, depended vassals hardly inferior to themselves in power or pretensions. Thus it happened that when Rudolf II., the last Burgundian king, handed back his fief to the Emperor Conrad the Salic, the local nobles resented the appearance among them of an imperial suzerain. Conrad exerted his authority so far as to