child." Why so many glass-workers?
They come in at every turn; and in Sue's novel
one of them makes the principal figure. It was
that glass-blowing, " being mouth-work and not
handicraft,'' was not held to be a degrading
pursuit. Hence many Protestant nobbles, ruined
by persecution, were glad to take up with the
only trade which they could practise without
losing caste. Gentle or simple, they were an
energetic set; and the persecutions, which lasted
much more than a century (for the synod of
Alençon, so early as 1637, prays Louis the
Thirteenth to free "those who had been sent to
the galleys during the wars"), must have been
a great drain upon the nation. Those who
"ran the blockade," and got clear out of
France, had very different fortunes. In Holland
they have thriven; in Berlin a large part
of the population (so very un-German in its
look) is of Huguenot origin; in England, at the
time, they had a great ally in Dutch William.
His Duke of Schomberg was almost one of them.
German as he was, he had won a field-marshal's
truncheon from Louis the Fourteenth, but when
the Jesuit ascendancy began he migrated and (as
Macaulay says) began the world again at eighty
rather than conform. So did the old Marquis de
Ruvigny. whom the Grand Monarque so valued
that he offered to make an exception to the rule of
conformity in favour of him and his household.
He refused, and cast in his lot with his brethren.

On the whole, however, they have not done
so well with us as elsewhere. Individuals have
risen and founded families of note both in
England and Ireland. But the mass of them
have certainly degenerated physically, if that
" Corraye, a French Protestant," who looks
so blooming in his close-fitting white
surplice among the pictures in the Ratcliffe at
Oxford, is to be taken as a fair sample.
They form the bulk of the population in Spitalfields,
where they seem (it is certainly on one
of the most unhealthy soils in the country)
to have quite lost their old energy. They
are the " liberty-boys " of Dublin, the dwellers
in the " Coombe," or hollow, sloping down to the
river, famous for their lawlessness, their strikes,
and their manufactures of poplin and tabinet.
They do not seem at all favourable specimens
of humanity as you watch them leaning out of
window in the tall, gaunt, filthy, tumble-down
houses around and beyond St. Patrick's. Other
towns besides London and Dublin got French
colonies at that time. Does not Thackeray, in
his last unfinished novel, tell of them along the
Kentish coast ? There was, as I said before, a
"congregation" at Canterbury, where, strangely
enough, they had the Black Prince's chapel
granted for their meeting-house. I remember,
more than twenty years ago, being taken
down to see the prince's tomb, and being
immensely disgusted with the ugly green-baized
pews and the utter disregard of the hero's really
fine altar-tomb. I thought, boy-like, it must
be a retribution for the sack of Limoges. The
Huguenots seem not to have been very popular
over here. Some of our people were disappointed
at their apparent "want of spirituality."
They had none of the Puritan twang. The
Frenchmen are sensible enough to feel that
they have given pledges such as few could
match of their sincerity, and that to drag in
sacred names and indulge in pious ejaculations
on the smallest provocation is by no means
a mark of true reverence. Others of us, on
the contrary, found them cantankerous and
argumentative, terrible sticklers for non-essentials,
by no means suave and conceding.
That was Bishop Burnet's estimate of them.
It probably did not occur to the bishop that
what men have given up home, and country, and
kindred for, must be important in their eyes;
so important, that they will even be rash enough
to contradict his lordship about such trifles, and
to determine to hold their own opinion, do what
he can to the contrary. Grim, dogmatic men
we can well fancy them to have been, in spite of
their talking just like ordinary mortals.

One of the great evils of persecution is that
it so case-hardens the persecuted as to render
union impossible even when both have learned
aright the lesson of toleration. And in spite of
Bishop Burnet, the immigrants were not
absorbed by our Church of England, nor have
they (as a body) been absorbed since. The
terrors of the mission bottée, the prominent part
taken against them by many of the high clergy,
gave them a horror of prelacy which extended
even to the mild form in which prelacy
exists amongst us. Genial or ungenial, however,
almost every man, woman, and child
among them could tell of hair-breadth 'scapes.
Volume after volume might be made up out of
private memoirs to show how that the unhappy
creatures were met at every turn, and how,
when captured, the alternative awaited them
recantation and peace, or firmness and the galleys.
Marteilhe's is by no means an exceptional case.
Surely when we read such accounts of trials so
bravely met and so patiently endured we cannot
help asking ourselves, should we be as brave
and patient if we were subjected to the same
trials?

Stitched in a cover, price Fourpence,
MUGBY JUNCTION.
THE EXTRA NUMBER FOR CHRISTMAS.

ST. JAMES'S HALL.
MR. CHARLES DICKENS will read (for the first time) on
Tuesday Evening, January 15, 1867,
BARBOX BROTHERS,
AND
THE BOY AT MUGBY.
The Reading will commence at Eight o'Clock, and be
comprised within two hours.

Now ready,
THE SIXTEENTH VOLUME.
Price 5s. 6d., bound in cloth.