passing from each to each with a rapidity which, to men engaged in graver thought, seems like a mental sleight-of-hand. The ready admiration which follows this pleasing talent for society too often allures its possessor from steadfast devotion to objects for which labour is needed, and to which all returns in praise must be far more slow in coming, and far less cordially given when they do come. Hence persons singularly agreeable in all those mixed societies which combine for the purpose of holiday amusement or relaxation, do not often achieve that solid distinction which is obtained by men on whom nature has less generously bestowed the endow ments of which the charmers of society are the amiable spendthrifts.

The touching and exquisitely beautiful line in which Cowley alludes to the unprofitable favour of the Muses, applies (at all events nowadays) with far more truth to the Graces

"Where once such fairies dance no grass

doth ever grow."

The darlings of the drawing-room are those whom the dispensers of official power are delighted to meet -are those of whom the most respectable members of the class that form public opinion are proud to gossip; but do they aim at anything solid-any position which official power can give, and public opinion ratify the dullest drone who, at all events, comes out of a hive, has a better chance of obtaining credit for industry than the dazzling butterflies whom we only know as the flutterers over flowers. Precisely because we so contentedly allow a drawing-room value to the man whose sympathies with the drawing-room are more vivid than ours, we believe that out of the drawing-room he counts as Hence, his amour propre courted by the highest in directions which cost him no trouble, rebuffed, by the highest and lowest alike, in directions which would cost him a great deal of trouble, this favourite of the

zero.

Graces accommodates his ambition to those successes with which graver men do not vie, and which graver men do not envy, simply because they look on such triumphs as certain indications of failure in the objects which they covet for themselves. They continue their own course with a steadfast eye to the goal, and, looking back, cast a gracious smile on the male Atalantas who could indeed outstrip them by a bound, but who halt in the race to pick up the golden apples.

Therefore, I say to every young man at that critical age in which we are all most impressionable to immediate influences, most sympathising with fugitive emotions, "Consider within yourself what it is that you really covet! What is it that constitutes such a want, whether in your intellectual or your moral being, as you must more or less satisfy, or your whole life will be one regret? Is it for a something to be won through competition with those who, in Academe, Forum, or Mart, do the business of this world; or through a superior grace in the attitude you assume among its idlers? The one object necessitates labour-the other is best gained by ease. Alcibiades himself could not unite both. Look at Alcibiades-consider all that birth, fortune, beauty, genius gave to him; and does history record a career more incomplete, a renown more equivocal? Take your choice -do not seek to unite life's business with life's holiday. Each may have place in turn; but remember that the business leads to distinction, and the holiday away from it."

Still, I do not profess, in this or in any matter, to demand from all varieties of mind and position monotonous conformity to an arbitrary standard. The vast majority of men can afford few holidays after they leave school; but there are others to whom, on leaving school, all life becomes one holiday. A really fine gentleman, though he be nothing more than a fine gentleman, is a creature to be admired-he is

one of the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin; yet, if the corn-sheaves have their value, the lilies have their glory. A man who has no object and no ambition except to charm, is certainly a much more attractive object in creation than a man who has no object and no ambition at all, unless it be to offend. Despise a lily as you will, you would rather have in your garden a lily than a nettle.

The Italians, among whom natural grace and charm of manner are more generally diffused than among any other people with whom it has been my lot to have intercourse, possess a familiar word by which they denote a person peculiarly lovable and agreeable simpatico;" viz., a person with whom you can reciprocate sympathy. And to him whose range extends no wider than a well-bred society-in which it is no blamable ambition to

66

wish for affection or applause— recommend an attentive study of all that is signified in that soft Italian word.

Finally, then, the impressionable sympathetic temperament has its good or its evil in proportion to the strength or infirmity of the character in which it is found, and the healthful or morbific nature of the influences to which it is the more habitually subjected; resembling in this respect those figures in astrology which take their signification from the signs with which they are conjoined-doubling evil if conjoined to evil, doubling good if conjoined to good.

It may, indeed, be said that sympathy exists in all minds, as Faraday has discovered that magnetism exists in all metals; but a certain temperature is required to develop the hidden property, whether in the metal or the mind.

SOME readers may possibly remember that six years ago there were published in this Magazine, under the leading title of "The Scot Abroad," a few biographical sketches of Scotsmen who had distinguished themselves beyond the limits of their own country. It was natural that the career of our countrymen in France should occupy a considerable share of the small space thus devoted to an object of inquiry great in extent and fertile in matter. It could not, therefore, but awake a lively interest to know that an eminent French historical inquirer had devoted himself to the separate elucidation of the connection between France and Scotland, and especially to personal biographical notices of the Scotsmen who had effected a career in France, and of the Frenchmen who

us.

had in like manner figured among The result is before us in two good substantial octavo volumes. The author states that they had been, more or less, for a quarter of a century, the object of his industry and his ambition. The common bond of interest between us-of interest in matters which he has elucidated on so large, and we on so small a scale, is expressively noted almost at the starting point of his story. He takes credit for having followed his object without faltering or fainting: "sans nous en laisser détourner par la publication d'essais composés dans le meme but;" and then he explains in a note, voyez deux articles publiés sous le titre de The Scot Abroad dans le Blackwood's Magazine," &c. For our own part we cordially reciprocate the author's

VOL. XCII.-NO. DLXV.

Par FRANCISQUE MICHEL, London: Trübner & Co.

20

feeling, acknowledge him as a fellow-labourer, and feel not jealousy, but admiring gratitude in the consciousness that he has ploughed up the field where we had turned a sod or two. Of the manner in which he has performed his taskthe method and extent of his researches, and the artistic merits of the literature in which he has given the results to the world-we may possibly say a word hereafter. Our object, meanwhile, is to run over the volumes, and note, in passing, the most significant and characteristic features of the story they deliver to us.

In his zealous desire to be complete, M. Michel finds himself in dubious and perilous ground at the beginning. It has now been so generally acknowledged as not to admit of discussion, or even to require specific explanation, that, for several centuries, the writers who spoke of the Scots and their country, referred to Ireland and its inhabitants. With mighty wrath was this humiliating appropriation of the honoured name of the "ancient nation" received by our grandfathers. A celebrated antiquary threatened retaliation by proving that ancient Ireland was in Scotland; that Ierne, as it was termed, the "glacialis Ierne" of Claudian, was originally Stratherne. Neither wrath nor logic, however, could extirpate the fact; and, when it became inevitable, we consoled ourselves with the reflection that it merely brought a slight element of confusion into a period of history which was disintegrating and disappearing, being, indeed, of a fictitious fabric, too fragile to bear the handling of modern investigators; and that the readjustment of our early nomenclature could not tarnish the lustre of our country's achievements in war and peace during the later periods of accepted history. The Scots, when they migrated from Ireland, and gradually spread over Argyllshire, brought their name with them; and the early hagiologists speak of two

Scotias-of the greater and the lesser Scotia, or of the Scots of Ierne and the Scots of Albany. Throughout the period when this source of dubiety lasted, there is little interest in the stray notices we may have of Scoti who were known within the dominions now called France. Neither the Scotland nor the France, which became united together by ties so strong, both in romantic interest and political importance to the destinies of Europe, had then resolved themselves into existence. Had there then existed maps of Europe, the Scotland and the France which afterwards united in so memorable a friendship could not have been pointed out. On the former there was the remnant of a Welsh kingdom somewhere round the Firth of Clyde; the Irish Scots had their colony to the south-west, which fell into the hands of Norman sea-kings, and was ruled by them; there was for some while a kind of Pictish state along the north-eastern district, and the south was off and on with the Saxon kingdoms of England-sometimes making the Heptarchy, Octarchy, or whatever it was, extend to the Forth; at other times including all England north of the Humber as part of Scotland. As to the other party to the alliance, that territory which, with all its late fluctuations, is now pretty much what Louis XIV. left it, in the days of the Merovingians, or when Charlemagne ruled it with the rest of the old Roman empire on the Continent, or afterwards when distributed into bundle of dukedoms-in none of these early conditions was the France we now know capable of being pointed out on the map as a separate kingdom with a separate government. Thus it may be said that the two beings in the history of whose two lives lies the epos of the connection between France and Scotland, had not yet come into existence. The hero and heroine of the romance were not then born; and the antiquary deals with their

a

obscure and dubious ancestry rather than with their own eventful

career.

Before we come to the origin of the Scoto-French alliance, another disturbing element comes up, and it is as well to dispose of this in a word or two, as thereby we may render more clear and distinct the great historical crisis whence the alliance obtained its existence and its influence on the fate of Europe. As everybody knows, the Scandinavian sea-wanderers swarmed up the French rivers, took possession of the territories that suited them best, and taking, with their energetic natures, to the Roman civilisation, which retained a sickly existence in France, became in time those models of courtesy, chivalry, and ambition, whom we speak of as the Normans. These, under William the Conqueror, established their rule in England, but not in Scotland; and this limitation of their progress is one of the emphatic finger-posts leading us to the birth of the Scoto-French alliance. Here was, indeed, for the first time, a distinct ethnical boundary, running from the mouth of the Tweed to the Sark. On the one side the Norman ruled, on the other the Saxon; and that the two kinds of rule were as distinct as the government of Austria from the government of Holland, it is unnecessary to tell the intelligent reader.

Here, then, we are with a Scotland which might have made a foreign alliance-but it did not; the time and the creative events had not yet come. There was not much quarrelling between the two kingdoms, save on the one occasion when King Malcolm, having married the representative of the old Saxon line of kings, invaded England, and fought an unsuccessful battle in their interest. The two nations got on well enough together. A sort of fusion of character was in progress, through a migration of Norman adventurers into Scotland; indeed there, though

they had not a king of their own, they were nearly as much at home as in England, and were decidedly the leaders of rank and fashion.

Hence the instances adduced by M. Michel, of French used in state papers in the reign of Alexander III. of Scotland, are evidence only of the adoption of the Norman usages prevalent in England. Though it may seem a little paradoxical to say so, yet the very use of these French documents is thus characteristic of the period when the great union with France did not exist. They came of relations with England, which had not yet been broken. When Scotland became the enemy of England and the ally of France, the French language-or, in other words, the Anglo-Norman-ceased to be used in Scotch state papers. The French names which at that time prevailed in Scotland, and the consequent alliances of those who bore them with Scotch families, arose from the same cause-the overswarming of the Normans from England. The estates they had obtained in the north were forfeited at the conclusion of the war of independence, as being the property of English enemies: and in fact it is necessary to indulge in another of these agreeable surprises called paradoxes, and to note that the French names disappeared from Scotland just as the great French alliance opened.

Our old historians tell us that the alliance of Scotland with France was negotiated and concluded between King Achaius and the Emperor Charlemagne, and that the great object which the representative of the Cæsars had in view in such a connection was the obtaining Scotch professors for the universities he was founding. Frank historians, with national politeness, accepted the story from ours without suspicion. Its origin seems to have been this: the position which Charlemagne arrogated to himself was that of the Kaiserthe emperor or supreme ruler of the world, as that office was filled by

the Roman emperors. It was not etiquette, therefore, to speak of any nation as separate and independent of his power. When our country was referred to by the historians of the newly reconstructed empire, they spoke of Scotland rather as one of its provinces than as an independent kingdom. But in after years, if the concurrence of Scotland in acts of imperial policy was admitted, it was not necessary also to admit our country to have been an integral part of the empire; and so the pride and ingenuity of our chroniclers fell upon the story of the alliance. M. Michel, though in his usual manner he crams his notes with references to the authorities for it, evidently does not believe in the Achaio - Charlemagne treaty. He mentions, however, some other treaties with France, anterior to the war of independence, which have no better support, being first told by the fabulous chroniclers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who took their ideas of the distribution and condition of nations in previous centuries from what they saw surrounding them in their own. If one has made long and weary researches in unproductive regions, it is hard to throw away all vestiges of the zeal and labour employed, and, therefore, the investigator is tempted to exhibit a specimen or two of the worthless results, just to show that he has gone over the ground. But the story loses some of its natural significance and breadth by the attempt to scatter antecedents of the league back behind the great historical revolution, out of which it grew. In its direct connection with that great revolution, in its clear, emphatic political tendency, and in the influence which this political tendency exercised over the destinies of the European nations-in these are the true sources of the deep interest which surrounds the history of the league between France and Scotland.

It arose out of that war of independence in which Scotland freed

herself from the bondage of England. The beginning of that war found the nations alike in descent, language, and habits, with no fixed causes of enmity, and little feeling of jealousy and rivalry; the end of the war saw these two nations endowed with a hatred towards each other unmatched in history by its bitterness and long endurance. After having ruled two hundred years in England, the Norman power got restless, and desired extension. Ireland had already been nominally attached-Wales was just secured, and now it needed Scotland to round off and symmetrically complete the empire of the Plantagenets. If gone about in the right way, the thing might have been managed; but the Norman tyranny with which England had been rendered familiar for two centuries was not yet known to the Scots; and when they felt the chafing of the harness, they revolted, with all the force of their obstinate and hardy nature. Everybody knows the end, but people are too apt to view it rather as a quarrel between England and Scotland than in its real character as a contest in which the Normans, after having, through a series of favourable casualties, got the command of England, were baffled in attempting to extend their rule over Scotland. There was, at the time when they were finally driven out, work arising for them elsewhere. The seeds of rivalry and strife between England and France were already sown. The dominion of the English kings in Normandy had been attached to the crown of France, and more than once there had been serious designs of invading England. Thus situated, there never perhaps were two nations to whom an alliance, offensive and defensive, came so naturally, and of necessity, as France and Scotland; and the subsequent French wars strengthened the necessity. The interest they had to assist each other is too obvious to require a word of expla nation.