the soldiers hesitated. Presently, however, fearful of exciting still more the wrath of their outraged captain, they seized and dragged away the defiant Tryntie, who continued to scold vociferously all the way to the dock.

So vigorous, moreover, was the resistance of the wiry, determined little woman that it required the combined efforts of four strong men to carry out the captain's order.

Close upon the edge of the dock the instrument of torture stood ready. It was a simple contrivance, consisting of a stout plank laid across a block. To the end of the long arm of the lever overhanging the water was fixed a stool,

"I tell ye a day of judgment is coming. Think not to escape; ye shall pay for your wickedness."

At this moment the sound of heavy footsteps and the clanking of weapons were heard down the street. Recognizing the familiar tramp of his men-atarms, Leisler called aloud for them to come to his aid.

"Ei! Ei! Call for help, big brat! shout! split your throat! Ye tremble! ye 're afraid of one woman! Afraid, I say!" she repeated, drawing still nearer, and with a look so threatening that the perplexed commander involuntarily shrank back. "Ah-h-h, I have a mind

to tear your eyes!"

Happily for the dignity and safety of the luckless official, several soldiers came bursting through the crowd at this junc

ture.

"Take this she-devil," gasped Leisler, "and give her the ducking-stool! Now,

now, at once! Take her, I say, and duck her till her damned tongue can never wag again!"

Startled at first by the unexpected order, and doubtful perhaps of their right to usurp the functions of the schout,

At a given signal she was plunged into the water. Coming up gasping and choking, she no sooner caught her breath than she used it with vigor in bitterly upbraiding her tormentors, calling down upon them and their master the heaviest curses of Heaven.

Cheered by the crowd, the plucky vrouw continued the unequal contest as long as she could speak. Even at the end it was only the flesh which succumbed.

Down, and down, and down again she was plunged, until, exhausted by the repeated shocks, she sank half lifeless in her seat.

Then only they released her. Willing hands, a score or more, were stretched forth from the crowd to support the hapless creature as she came staggering up the dock, her clothes dripping, her lank hair falling on her shoulders, her eyes sunken, her skin blue and corpse-like; while a hoarse murmur of disgust and indignation followed Leisler's henchmen as they moved away, which would have sounded ominously in ears not deaf to all signs and portents.

Edwin Lassetter Bynner.

IN Mr. Hamerton's charming book, Human Intercourse, occurs an anecdote about a Frenchman who, on hearing mentioned the name of an English artist of some distinction in his own country, exclaimed, "Son nom n'est pas connu au Salon; donc il n'existe pas." Exclusiveness of this kind is no doubt commendable as a principle, but its results are far from pleasant to any one thus kept outside the pale. Unfortunately, colonies are too often made to assume this position, much against their strong young wills. When their energies are for a moment turned away from what is supposed to be their legitimate function of trade, the recognition they get is small and grudgingly doled out by the mother country. England, with her boundless stores of literature, naturally looks upon her transatlantic colony as by nature intended to supply prize beef and to be seamed with railways. She is more than satisfied if the beef is sound and the railways are kept in good repair. Indeed, so far as other things are concerned, Canada seems to hold the place of a modern Nazareth, out of which no good can be expected to come; and if it so happens that the quelques arpens de neige do occasionally show something worth reading and thinking about, it is almost certain to be treated as a useless form of colonial produce for which there is no demand. In the United States it fares little better with the Canadian writer, for his critic, who often possesses his own share of American self-assertiveness, is only too glad of a chance to throw into relief the productions of a literature still en bas âge by contrast with one still younger. Canada, thus placed between the comparative indifference of England and

The only notice of M. Fréchette's work known to me is to be found in The Catholic VOL. LXIV. -NO. 382. 13

the positive coldness of the United States, has been forced to fall back upon her own resources of self-praise, almost destructive of true critical standards. The Canadian press represents the country as teeming with inglorious Miltons, and the party cry of "Canada First" becomes the watchword of a school of provincial writers whose strongest point is the richness of laudatory adjectives to be given to the members without stint. In the colony, the lack of a large and cultivated reading public allows the reviewer to praise in what terms he pleases, while the critics of periodicals in other countries, not free from the provincialism of large cities, seem to treat de haut en bas anything out of the acknowledged circle of the highest literary life. The Canadian poet's lot is thus by no means a happy one; and it is with the hope of striking a fair average between the fulsome praises of Canadian journalism, on the one hand, and the almost complete silence of the outside English press, on the other,' that the writer has undertaken his task. First, let us cast a rapid glance at the actual condition of French Canada, to see whether a fit home for poetry can be found in so icebound a province. Secondly, we shall examine the poetical work of one who deserves to be known beyond the bounds of his own country.

I.

Where else in America can one look for conditions, past and present, better adapted to poetic themes and a certain degree of literary culture than in New France? Quebec, in spite of a climate as severe as that of St. Petersburg, incloses in its now crumbling walls a history more varied and better known World, a publication unknown, except by name, to numbers of English readers.

than that of any other city in America; and no historical panorama is richer in contrasts than that which, beginning with Cartier, Champlain, and Laval, brings us down to Wolfe, Montcalm, and Lévis, with the bronze face of the savage as a perpetual background. Companies of traders, cowled monks, Sulpician bishops, Jesuits, royal governors and intendants, English generals and nobles, one after another, have played their part in this fortress of the west, while around the incidents of their rule has slowly collected a mass of story, tradition, and legend. The original facts of these tales, although obscured by successive repetitions through the gossip of generations, still retain much of their early freshness; and when related by a graybeard habitant to a group around a winter fire, they carry one's thoughts back to the days when the white banner of the Bourbons fluttered on the ramparts of the citadel, when the taille and corvée still embittered the peasant's bread. Feudal burdens have long since passed away. Intendant Bigot, whose name is even yet a curse in the country, would have less chance of peculation nowadays; but during all régimes, notwithstanding every change, one power never for a moment slackened its grasp. The Church of Rome, more frowning than ever, keeps a firm hand on this country, now almost her last stronghold. The orders of Sulpicians, Récollets, and Jesuits, finding their influence slowly on the wane in Europe, sent out to French Canada detachment after detachment of priests and missionary monks; by these means gradually bringing the whole province under their sway. In all their absorbing work of settling the country, of establishing parishes and bishoprics, of exacting tithes for the building of churches and monasteries, they never entirely forgot the pressing educational wants of the people, and they gave them such instruction as the reactionary views of the orders would admit.

has

In the numberless monastic establishments which dot the valley of the Lower St. Lawrence with their sombre piles of brick and stone, and to which Heine's epithet of écoles polytechniques de l'obscurantisme, alas, so fitly applies, there is, in spite of the waste of time and energy over patristic latinity and the metaphysics of the schools, a spirit of studious and peaceful culture of a certain kind. It has been much the fashion of late with English-speaking Canadians to discuss the ecclesiastical influences upon education in Quebec, as though their sole result must be philosophical views as vicious as those of Aquinas, expressed in scholastic rhetoric. But, apart from the stupefying air of mediævalism which the student breathes in the Romish seminaries and colleges of Lower Canada, something better must doubtless be gained from a thorough training in Latin and an intercourse with priests, of whom at least a fair proportion may be called cultivated men. The time spent in other institutions upon mathematics and pure science is there devoted to endless Latin themes, the tedious subtleties of formal logic, and other studies of a distinctly literary kind. Hence a certain finish in matters of style and taste, which leaves upon the writing of French in Canada a stamp too often absent in English of analogous nature. The local newspapers, for example, being addressed to different nationalities, are necessarily written in one language or the other; and it is not too much to say that the French journalists possess on the whole a fuller knowledge of their language and write with purer diction than their English rivals. The reason of this is that while the former have for the most part fol lowed the cours de rhétorique of a provincial college, the latter often seem to have received no training at all except in a newspaper office.

If we now turn our attention to the circumstances of public life in Quebec,

an incentive for a cultivated man to devote himself to literature appears in the pettiness of a political career. For while in a broader arena politics may lead to generous action and self-sacrifice, a mere game of in and out, in which the smallest of personal ambitions and jealousies are ever prominent, can offer no temptation to a poet. Thus, although many an able man has wasted his talents in the acrimony of debate or in the columns of a third-rate local press, the truly representative writers of Canada have given their energies to more enduring and dignified work. Some of them, it is true (and among them we must place the subject of this article), have for a time written in party newspapers; but the best of them have always withdrawn before it was too late. Finally, we must take into account the real isolation of a large and growing community, whose religious prejudices, fomented by a somewhat unscrupulous hierarchy, have served to accentuate the natural difference of language and race which prevents them from mingling freely with their English neighbors. Severed in this way from the general interests of their own country, and a fortiori from those of the outside world, with an intellectual horizon of which the Index Expurgatorius forms the boundary, the writers of French Canada have been fain to seek in the history and traditions of their province a field offering fair scope for the exercise of mental power. and again an independent spirit shakes off prelatical supremacy, but a stern law of taboo makes him an outcast among his own people, who literally boycott him; or it drives him into the ranks of the English, where, in the course of a generation, race and language disappear.

Now

1 It may be well to state, as an example of the Church's power in Quebec, that certain strictures on the Jesuits contained in the first edition of Garneau's History of Canada were withdrawn in the second; not, indeed, from the discovery of facts casting new light on the machinations of that holy order, but simply

As may be expected, therefore, men of talent who, from policy or from conviction, remain in the bosom of the Church find their safest and pleasantest activity in a region where the priest ceases to interfere. The folk-tales of the early settlers, the struggles of the infant colony and its heroes, the strife between the French and the English, all these become for them subjects of inspiration ; and as a successful treatment of prose fiction would demand a greater strength of construction and sense of literary perspective than a clerical education can impart, it is natural that these stories should find expression best of all in short narrative poems, often of semilyrical nature. Thus, when one examines the literature of New France, it appears that, with the single noteworthy exception of Garneau, the historian, the men of more than usual ability and culture have devoted their gifts (if they have not wasted them in the consuming fire of party journalism) to the writing of national poetry. It might be thought by careless persons that because the country is young its voice cannot have passed out of the stage of boyhood; but to show that one singer, at least, has touched a manly and commanding note is the object of what is to follow.2

II.

De Banville, in one of his charming Esquisses Parisiennes, tells of a prize offered by a rich and eccentric Englishman to the man who practices the most extraordinary profession imaginaable, and after a long contest it is assigned "à un poète lyrique qui vit de son état." Canada is neither very eccentric nor very conspicuously wealthy, so that what rewards she can afford to from the pressure put upon the author by the clerical power in the country.

2 Louis Honoré Fréchette. Pêle-Mêle, Montréal, 1877; Les Fleurs Boréales, Les Oiseaux de Neige, Paris, 1881; Légende d'un Peuple, Paris, 1887.

give are oftener bestowed upon successful politicians than upon poets, however deserving. In spite of the praise given in plenty to his earliest verses, M. Louis Honoré Fréchette found himself driven into journalism for some years; and the lack in Canada of a large appreciative public induced him to entrust the first edition of Les Fleurs Boréales to a Parisian publisher. Its appearance was soon followed by the commendations of the French Academy and a crown of honor. His last volume, Légende d'un Peuple, was brought out in the same way, and enjoyed the favor of a eulogistic preface from the pen of M. Jules Claretie. So well was M. Fréchette received in Paris that he had at one time almost made up his mind to settle there, in the hope of a suitable return for his work. One could hardly help thinking that he had at last wearied of the Canadian mistress, whose smiles were slow in coming, and that in leaving her he remembered the truth of the saying, "Pour quitter la maîtresse, il faut quitter la ville." However, this purpose has not been carried out, for the poet has returned, laden with honors, to his Canadian home, probably intending to show his countrymen that he is still alive to feelings of patriotism which he has sung so often and so well.

His poems fall naturally into two classes one treating of national, that is French Canadian subjects; the other consisting of verses which might have been written in any country, with due regard to local colors. The former are found almost entirely in Légende d'un Peuple, to the contents of which must be added two or three from Les Fleurs Boréales. They perpetuate the remembrance of the nobler days of our country, when patriotism had not degenerated into mere provincial sentiment and race hatred, when the antagonism between English and French was as legitimate a feeling in Canada as on the battle-fields of Blenheim and Ramilies.

But they do much more than this. Beginning with the solitudes of the primeval forest, broken only by the red man in pursuit of his game, they retrace in a long series of pictures the history of a colony brilliant even under a cloud of obscurity. As it comes down through successive ages, this epic in short poems shows in three epochal divisions the development of the country from wilderness into settlement, from settlement to the strife of the occupants, and from the victory of the English race to events still painfully fresh in the memory of Canadians.

"O notre histoire, écrin de perles ignorées," says the poet; and with the most finished art he arranges the jewels of his casket, disposing each so as to bring out its best and purest glitter. But although in his superb historical pictures grouping, light and shade, and other matters of technique are attended to even in their minutest details, it is evidently with the forerunners of civilization that he best loves to dwell, — with the men impelled by that spirit

"Which bids men be and bear and do

And die beneath blind skies or blue."

Only such a profound knowledge of history as this poet possesses can give one an adequate idea of what was done by our forefathers in their struggle of centuries against the treachery of the Indian, the rigor of the climate, and the advance of a foreign race. M. Fréchette, learned and patient as a monk, has expended all his energy and poetic gifts in immortalizing the courage and strength of the heroes who proved what was the stuff of which the old Gallic temper was made. Cartier, La Salle, Jolliet, Daulac, the missionary martyrs, and others usually left "unnamed among the chronicles of kings" stand first with him; and though generals and statesmen get a full share of praise, it is with humbler men that he chiefly loves to linger. In a poem addressed to his friend, l'Abbé Tanguay,