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influences which have produced in towns | tinctive garb with the conservatism which is the foundation of the French national character; each province displays its peculiarities of race and of language. Party feeling often runs high in secluded regions; here, the Church is all powerful; there, is found a Protestant remnant descendants of the combatants in religious wars; on one side of a river men's hopes run high that a monarch will one day rule over France again; beyond the stream survives some of the spirit which sacked the châteaux and the convents a hundred years ago. Yet amid all this variety of race and of occupation, of sentiment and of class, there are two characteristics which throughout France are universal every one works, and every one is imbued with an intense love of country. The industry and the patriotism of France more than counterbalance all her national defects, and, in spite of her misfortunes, guard her in the front rank of nations.

There are many features in the life of provincial France which, with deep regret, we refrain from touching upon, some of which are suggested by the volumes before us. We should have liked to enter at some length on the subject of peasant proprietary, and of the French farming system generally, a topic which is often referred to in England, and usually with considerable misapprehension. Many English writers upon French economics seem to imagine that the whole agricultu ral area in France is cut up into small portions, whereas large landowners are found in almost every department. In the Nièvre, for instance, although the greater number of proprietors are small owners, the greater proportion of the district is in the hands of large proprietors. This is an example of the extreme difficulty of making any general statements which are correct regarding France, apart from her administrative institutions. The metay

Vigor and health are the chief impressions which a sojourn in the French provinces leaves upon the observer, both in the people and in the soil. As one travels through France what variety of landscape meets the eye day after day and week after week, though strangers who make a rapid transit through the country often complain of the monotony of the scene. The vast horizons of the plains unbroken by acclivity or hedgerow; the waving fields of corn which stretch to such boundless distance that they remind one of the forests of Canada when golden in the autumn; the hillsides covered with vineyards; the royal forests pierced with paths affording endless vistas of verdure; the orchards laden with fruit; the rugged slopes of the mountains where the unpromising soil is subdued to fertility by indefatigable labor. Then there are the larger villages clustered round the tower of an ancient church, with irregular, illpaved streets impregnated with a rustic odor; the little towns, half asleep beneath the shadow of historic walls, which revive memories of the romantic age of France; Chinon, Blois, and Fontainebleau, once the residence of kings; Vendôme, Loches, Gisors, and Amboise, ancient capitals, and once strong places which sustained war-age system, too, is deserving of careful like sieges, whereon depended the desti- examination, and it will be surprising to nies of France. At this place the heroic many English readers to know that there maid of Orleans halted on her patri- are parts of rural France, which they may otic progress through the land; a few pass through by railway half a day's jour leagues hence the associations of the grey ney from Paris, where the corvée is still towers, now grim with age, are with the in operation. We should have liked also gentler tradition of Agnes Sorel or of to consider the position of the clergy in Diane de Poitiers. Again there is the the provinces. Although the Church has varying aspect of the different classes of unhappily lost a large proportion of the the people; the laborious, sturdy peasant, intellectual and vigorous manhood of frugally self-denying in order that he may France, yet the vast majority of the nation own a scrap of the earth's surface; the continues to enter upon life baptized in more active and nervous mechanic; the the ancient faith, and to pass from it at its industrious trader. Each class and call- close fortified by the sacraments. Pering has, to some extent, retained its dis- haps, on a future occasion, we may be

permitted to review the present condition | liable for warlike service every husband, and the future prospects of the Catholic Church in France, but in the mean while we would say that the truth of the matter is to be found neither in the heated polemics of pamphleteers, who hold a brief for the extreme clerical faction which longs for the day when the civil power shall make absolute submission to the Church, nor in the repressive policy of the secular party which, not content with curbing the pretensions of arrogant ecclesiastics, would do away with the religious faith of the mothers of France after having first outraged it.

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son, and brother in the land is a guarantee against rash enterprise. Although, on the one hand, the genuine royalist sentiment is almost extinct, the republican sentiment, on the other hand, has become cool. The younger generation is republican in the sense of disbelieving in the possibility of a monarchical restoration, but the ardent republicanism of the old doctrinaires is almost as dead as the advocacy of the divine right of kings. In the present state of Europe it is impossible to make a forecast of even a few years ahead; but it seems likely that the present form of government will continue in France, until disturbed by a European commotion which shall gravely affect the French nation.

Every writer, empirical or experienced, who describes French life, has a remedy to offer, sometimes indeed for ills which do not exist. Our excellent but insular Britons, who have pleasantly described We feel that our observations upon protheir home in the Aveyron, seem to think vincial France are imperfect and cursory, that there must be something radically but we shall be content in the thought wrong in a country where man can go that perhaps they may be the means of forth to work in the morning without hav. attracting some of our countrymen in their ing exercised his carnivorous appetite at days of leisure to a personal study of a an early breakfast. The American dem- great people who, though our nearest ocratic editor professes that all would be neighbors, know us as imperfectly as we well with France if the detestable institu- know them. To study a tract of France, tion called a republic could give place to to become acquainted with its natural a monarchy of ultramontane tendencies; features, the way of life of its people, and while the accomplished English_maiden its historical associations, is a holiday lady, who describes "The Roof of France," occupation as easy of accomplishment as joins direct issue with him, gallantly and it is interesting; but if life be too short gaily proposing that for the salvation of for a space of it to be devoted to a minute France the clergy should renounce their examination of a portion of this sunny celibacy. France is as likely to accept land, then we would counsel travellers to one of these prescriptions as the other. take some simple series of historical What she really requires has been discov- events as a guide for their more extended ered by the author of " Round my House,' journeyings. For example, no better genwho in his recent work sagaciously ob- eral idea of provincial France could be serves that the chief desire at present in obtained in a brief tour than by visiting France is rest; that there is a weariness all the chief places associated with the of change after the most disturbed century brief story of Joan of Arc. The towns of national existence, and that the single and villages must of course be taken in wish of the people is to pursue their avo- geographical order, and not in the chronocations in peace. It sounds like a paradox, logical sequence of the rapid events in the but is none the less true, that the chief crowded life of La Pucelle. The traveller barrier to a monarchical restoration in may, however, start at her birthplace at France is the growing conservatism which Domremy almost beneath the shadow of has always, amid all ebullitions of excited the Vosges. Thence making his way feeling, been inherent in the French char- westward he would halt at Reims where acter. The people know that a change in the Maid brought Charles VII. to be the form of government could only be crowned, at Compiègne where she was brought about by a revolution or as the imprisoned, at Rouen where she laid down result of a war, and they shrink from the her life; then turning to the south he contemplation of either eventuality, pre- would come to Orleans, the city which ferring to accept the present condition of delivered by her had the honor of giving things though it rouses no enthusiasm. to her its name, passing on his way Patay, It must always be remembered that the where Joan took prisoner the invincible French, though a nation of soldiers, are Talbot, defeating the English on an 18th far from being a bellicose people, and the of June, four centuries before Waterloo ; fact, that universal conscription makes thence to Chinon, where rise the crum

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bling walls of the vast castle whither | sir. I hanna ever heered on a place wi' came the Maid to seek the crownless king, that name." and so to Poitiers. Here the journey may well end, for if the chief cities on the road between Lorraine and Poitou have been visited, if their monuments have been examined and their traditions noted, the traveller will take home with him a living knowledge of the history of France, and a vivid reminiscence of the scenes in which it has been made, such as years of literary study might not afford, and moreover will gain an insight into the life of the people which will help to a better understanding of the problems which have to be solved by France of to-day.

Whether Paris be the heart of France, or the head of France, has never been decided to the satisfaction of disputants who do battle about words; but, in the mean while, it is true that the soul and body of France, which suffers for the errors of its rulers and afterwards compensates for them with wealth, and enterprise, and bravery, to the admiration of the world, are found remote from the capital in the workshops and the homes of provincial towns, and among the vineyards and the cornfields of the pleasant land.

But if the stranger should improve upon the mistake by saying that he meant Arbury Hall, the miner's face would smile even through its duskiness, and he would be sure to say, "Oh! you mean Old Charley's place. Poor old Charley Newdigate, him as died two or three years ago, as good a gaffer, sir, as 'appen I shall ever drive a pick for, above ground or below ground either. O yes, sir, I can show you the way to Harbury Hall, an' I shanna be long about it, I reckon. But as for Chev'ral Manner, or what you calls it, as you just spoke on, why I hanna ever heered on that name i' these parts; and I've lived i' Griff and Beddorth boy an' man this fortythree year."

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By the same token that a man is no hero to his valet, a mere writer of books is a poor critter" in the eyes of Strephon, even when Strephon is covered with coal dust instead of the agricultural loam. A writer born in the midst of squalid and rural surroundings may often be " monstrously clever" in the art of making books, but to his neighbors who know nothing of books, except the Bible, and sometimes not much of that, he is a pitiful object indeed, and fair game for the wit that is indigenous to the bucolic and the mining mind. Those whose armor has been pierced by a jagged shaft of humor shot from the broad mouth of a villager, be he miner, ploughman, cowman, or village

GEORGE ELIOT AND HER NEIGHBOR-molecatcher, will know that sometimes

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this wit, by its very rawness and crudeness, wounds more deeply than the satiric arrow of a polished and cultivated mind.

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And so George Eliot, a monstrously clever woman," as a friend of mine, a former Bedworth coal-master and a man who knew Mary Ann Evans in the flesh some eighteen years ago, is always fond of repeating, is no heroine to her own countrymen. Some of the more rough diamonds among them would look as confused at the name of George Eliot as at Cheveral Manor; and the stranger who had the hardihood to ask for direction to Shepperton Church would be met with the reply that "Theer inna a church o' that name i' these parts. Theer be Coten, Beddorth, Exhul, Astley, an' Corley, but I donna mind heerin' tell on such a place as Shep'ton. You mun mean Coten 1 'spect, or 'appen Beddorth wheer Muster Evans be the parson."

Perhaps this, to the literary mind, painful lack of knowledge or remembrance of a singularly gifted writer on the part of

her own immediate country people may | Leicester, brings the traveller to Griff and be accounted for with two reasons; one, Bedworth, and close to the Cheveral that many of the inhabitants of those little Manor of " Mr. Gilfil's Love Story." That villages, clustered together in small, loving South Farm, too, where George Eliot was groups, from which George Eliot drew born on that dull November morning in most of her characters, have ceased to 1819, will be within measurable distance weave the warp and woof of life, being of the traveller's survey. A very long long ago laid to rest under the chestnuts time ago, before the Newdigates became in the quaint little graveyards; and, two, possessors of Arbury, there was in exist because the average villager is no more ence, near the park, a farm known as bookish now than in the days when "Adam Temple House. It was an old building, Bede " found its way to Griff and clove an surrounded by a moat, and belonged to entrance into the hermetically sealed in- the principals of an ancient manor theretellects there, and this is simply owing to abouts, called the Manor of St. John of the fact that so many of them knew for Jerusalem. Surely the South Farm, in certain that they were "put in "the book. which Mr. Robert Evans used to reside, Extended education makes little head- and in which his illustrious daughter first way in small towns and villages. The saw the light, must have risen from the oldest inhabitant dies, perhaps, however, ruins of Temple House. not before having performed the duty of handing down to his children and grandchildren the oral traditions of the place; but, alas! his children and grandchildren "inna given to the writin' o' things down," on paper or in their memory; and so, as one by one the old inhabitants disappear, the oral traditions of the village disappear with them, until there is but one left of all that there might have been, and that so faintly remembered as to be almost a doubt.

But the cadaverous and painfully careful historian, a man from the bricked-in square of a big city, who writes for the future at a very small price per page, makes some amends for the forgetfulness of the oldest inhabitant. He writes everything down, prints everything he has written, places his book in a library where it is never or hardly ever opened, and then dies of a broken heart, accelerated by long years of wanton neglect and biting poverty.

Arbury Hall will in the ages to come be noted for its connection with George Eliot, who has made it the Cheveral Manor about which the Griff miner "hanna ever heered on." In the far past, however, that lean and pale man, the writer of contemporary history, was busy there; and there is, also a glamor of ro. mance associated with a former owner of the hall, which has not even found its way into George Eliot's books or the guidebooks of the day, but which is nevertheless a fact which greatly adds to the interest of this neighborhood, in the midst of which the famous Sir Roger Newdigate raised his ecclesiastic and semiGothic pile.

A six-mile walk from the "city of three tall spires," along the leafy and pleasant road that leads to Nuneaton, and on to

Before it was ecclesiastic which it became under the head of Sir Roger Newdigate, the Gothic-loving baronet of Cheveral Manor - Arbury Hall was monastic. It was called Erebury Priory then, and was founded in the reign of Henry II. by Ralph de Sudely as a home for the St. Augustine Order of Canons. At the dissolution of monasteries, in the twenty-seventh year of the reign of Henry VIII., Erebury Priory was suppressed, and its possessions granted by royal letters patent to Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. It is at this point in the history of Cheveral Manor that the romance comes in, which is not to be found in any of George Eliot's books, and does not figure in the topographical prints of the period.

A very rare pamphlet, of which it is supposed there are only two copies now extant, entitled "English Adventures," was printed and published in 1667. It dealt with strange occurrences that had befallen old and noble families of the time; and no doubt, as many of the adventures related were repugnant to the descendants of the families concerned, being thus publicly promulgated, steps were taken to suppress as many of the pamphlets as possible. One of the adventures was connected with the life of Charles Brandon, one of the early owners and occupiers of Arbury Hall, or Cheveral Manor, when in its more monastic form, and was as follows:

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amiable in her manners, attracted the at-
tention of both brothers. The elder, how-
ever, was the favorite, and he privately
married her; which the younger not know-
ing, and overhearing an appointment of
the lovers the next night in her bed-
chamber, he, thinking it was a mere
intrigue, contrived to get his brother
otherwise employed, and made the signal
of admission himself. His design, unfor-
tunately, answered only too well.

"On a discovery the lady lost her rea-
son, and soon afterwards died. The two
brothers fought, and the elder fell, cut
through the heart. The father broke
down, and went to his grave in a very
short time. Charles Brandon, the younger
brother, and unintentional author of all
this misery, quitted England in despair,
with a fixed determination of never return-
ing. Being abroad for several years, his
nearest relations supposed him to be
dead, and began to take the necessary
steps for obtaining his estates. Aroused
by this intelligence, he returned privately
to England, and for a time took private
lodgings in the vicinity of his family
mansion.

standing his fits of caprice, he was capable of a cordial and steady friendship. He was sitting in Council when the news of Suffolk's death reached him, and he publicly took that occasion, both to express his own sorrow, and to celebrate the merits of the deceased. He declared that during the whole course of their acquaintance his brother-in-law had not made a single attempt to injure an adversary, and had never whispered a word to the disadvantage of any one; 'And are there any of you, my lords, who can say as much?" The king looked round in all their faces, and saw that confusion which the consciousness of secret guilt naturally drew upon them."

From the fact related in the early his tory of Charles Brandon, who upon being created Duke of Suffolk, and having the estates of Arbury granted to him by the king, came to live there, the poet, Thomas Otway, took the plot of his tragedy, "The Orphan." To avoid causing unnecessary pain, however, to descendants of the families affected who were living at that time, Otway transferred the scene of his trag. edy from England to Bohemia. The character of Antonio, which the dramatist would appear to have elaborated with great pains into an old debauched senator, rav. ing about plots and political intrigues, is supposed to have been intended for that eminent personage, Anthony, the first Earl of Shaftesbury.

"While he was in this retreat, the young king, Henry VIII., who had just buried his father, was one day hunting on the borders of Hampshire, when he heard the cries of a female in distress issuing from an adjoining wood. His gallantry immediately summoned him to the place, though he then happened to be detached So late ago as 1825 there was a large from all his courtiers, when he saw two painting of the Brandon incident at Wo ruffians attempting to violate the honor of burn, the seat of his Grace the Duke of a young lady. The king instantly drew Bedford, and the old dowager duchess in his sword upon them; a scuffle ensued, showing this picture to a nobleman a few which roused the reverie of Charles Bran-years before her death, is said to have don, who was taking his morning walk in an adjacent thicket. He immediately ranged himself on the side of the king, whom he then did not know, and, by his dexterity, soon disarmed one of the ruffians, while the other fled.

"The king, charmed with this act of gallantry, so congenial to his own mind, inquired the name and family of the stranger; and not only repossessed him of his patrimonial estates, but took him under his own immediate protection.

"It was this same Charles Brandon who afterwards privately married King Henry's sister, Margaret queen dowager of France; which marriage the king not only forgave, but created him Duke of Suffolk, and continued his favor towards him to the last hour of the duke's life. He died before Henry; and the latter showed in his attachment to this nobleman that, notwith

related all the particulars of the story.

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Associations like these serve to make the site of the Cheveral Manor of George Eliot doubly interesting, and the marvel is that the author of "Scenes of Clerical Life" did not make use of this pretty romance in some way - either in describing the ancient history of the place, or in a neatly woven story, such as she knew well how to weave; but George Eliot was essentially a delineator of modern manners, not a writer of historical scenes, and so the visitor to Arbury Hall must look elsewhere for the primeval history of the place. It is a little impressive, however, to find out that an ex-queen of France and a noble duke used formerly to walk through the fine tree-studded park where the late Charles N. Newdigate was wont to sit and frame his measures for keeping atheists out of the House of Commons;

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