Cahors, its slopes clothed with vines, and you find yourself in the country of the mulberries. Spread before you a landscape of some thirty or forty leagues, a vast ocean of tillage, a confused mass, losing itself in the vapour of the distant horizon, above which rises the fantastic outline of the Pyrenees with 'their silvery peaks. Oxen, yoked together by the horns, slowly beneath the eye of an ardent sun, labour this fertile valley. At 'mid-day, a storm; the ground becomes a lake; in an hour the 'sun has restored it to its state of dust. At night you enter 'some big dull town; Toulouse if you will. At the first sound of that nasal accent you might think yourself in Italy; and look at the faces of the people, they are not French, quite another thing, Moorish perhaps, or Spanish.' (Michelet.)

Nor, we hope, are we singular. Among the shoals of the frivolous and dissipated which this country annually discharges upon the continent, there are, we would hope, to be found some few thoughtful travellers who are attracted to foreign lands by a love of the localities associated with the memory of the great and the saintly of ancient times. Such is perhaps the nearest approach we may make to the motives of the Christian pilgrim. Such a voyager, if it has ever been his hap to turn his feet to Orleans, and descending to the water-side to embark in one of the tiny iron steamers belonging to M. Larochjacqueline, glide with sinuous course down the Loire, its banks still clad with the broom which gave their title to the Plantagenets, the sunny and laughing landscape once only gloomily broken as we sweep beneath the frowning Blois; such a voyager will seldom feel this spell upon his spirit more powerfully than when, before sunset of a long summer's day, the little vessel is moored to the quay of Tours.

What a host of thoughts and images that one name carries! The ecclesiastical capital of early France-what Canterbury was to England-the depository of the wonder-working remains of the Apostle of Gaul, the light of the Western Church in the fourth century. The virtue of St. Martin's precious relics was in most active operation during the fifth and sixth centuries. The miracles and power of the saint called forth the devotion and munificence of the people, poor and rich alike, and Tours became the centre round which churches, monasteries, and religious foundations crowded. Of all this what now remains? The healing power had been long withdrawn, and at last Providence was pleased to permit the body itself which He had so highly endowed to be dishonoured and carried off. With it went the splendour which had accumulated round it. The Huguenots had pillaged the shrine; the revolution swept it away altogether. Of the vast cathedral of St. Martin, of whose

abbey the king of France was Abbot, and a crowd of the great of all lands were canons, two towers are all that remain. The Church of St. Julian, equal in size to most cathedrals, was in 1842 a coach-house, and at the very time we are now writing, is placarded with bills, "To be sold or let." Grope among those vineyards and orchards in the little village over the bridge, you may detect an archway, and a piece of a wall; that was the abbey of Marmontier, founded by St. Martin himself. All this is familiar enough to us in our own country-but it strikes us more in one which is still to so great an extent catholic as France. Are the Church's saints in this respect like the heroes of the world, that there may come a time when they shall be as though they had never been? when all that the Church retains of them is the memory of their example; and that a book is a more enduring legacy than a saintly life, and a body gifted with miraculous power?

For so it is, that while the Church of France possesses not a vestige of St. Martin, another saint of the same city of Tours has left a book which is not only esteemed in the Church, but has had the honour, which the actions of saints so seldom have, of commanding the respect of the world. The "History of the Franks" of St. Gregory is not only a most valuable monument of the history of the early French monarchy, but it is the only one. It is in this respect like Bede's "History of the English nation," though widely different from it in other respects. But for Bede we should know nothing of the early history of the Saxons in England-without Gregory of Tours, we should be equally ignorant of the first settlement of the Franks in Gaul. But in all other points it is a complete contrast to Bede. In the first place, the style of Bede, if not elegant Latin, is yet correct, sufficiently classical. It is a written style, such as was learnt in the cloister schools by the help of Donat, Tullius Rhetorica, and matured by reading the Latin fathers, St. Augustine, and St. Ambrose. St.Gregory of Tours has no style, barely grammar; barbarisms and solecisms of all kinds abound, and the brevity and conciseness with which events most important to understanding his narrative are related, if it does not make his meaning obscure, at least requires great attention in the reader not to overlook anything. In the opening he "prays pardon of his readers if he should in letter or syllable infringe the art of grammar, with which he is indeed not fully imbued." In fact, Bede is writing in a dead language, Gregory in a living. Bede no doubt spoke it and heard it spoken every day in cloister, but then he had learned to do so from books; Saxon came first and readiest to his lips. While the Latin which Gregory writes, is with little difference, his native tongue.

The difference is not less in the matter of the two histories. Bede viewed the world only from the retirement of his cell. He knew events chiefly as they appeared in books. Even the history of his own time is drawn from what was communicated to him. So that, however correct it may be, it wants that truth of delineation which can only be given by one who has been himself an agent in the scenes he describes. This St. Gregory was. For the ten books of which his history consists may be divided, as regards the authority on which it rests, into four portions. 1. All that precedes the arrival of the Franks in Thuringia is little more than a short chronological epitome of the history of the world derived from some of the compendious chronicles then in use, and abounding in errors. 2. From this period to the middle of the sixth century his materials are chiefly Sulpicius Alexander, the letters of Sidonius, St. Remigius, and the Gesta of the saints of the period. 3. For the generation preceding his own time his authority is tradition, chiefly that of his uncle St. Gall, and St. Avitus, successive bishops of Clermont, in whose house St. Gregory was brought up. 4. The last forty or fifty years he describes what he himself saw and knew, and in which he played an active part.

This is therefore the most valuable part of the book. He occupied the see of Tours twenty-three years, from 573 to 596. The value and interest of the last five books of his history which are occupied with this period, we should rate far higher than any part of the writer who stands in a similar relation to our own history, and with whom we have already compared him. They are not the learned and accurate arrangement of the annals of the several Frankish kingdoms, the successions of the bishops, royal houses, etc., all which is indeed most valuable to the antiquarian, but dry and profitless to others. On the contrary, they present a living stirring picture of the Church and State of those days: the rude violence, and unscrupulous cunning of the Merovingian princes; their ambition and lawless passions; brought into contact with a moral power claiming their obedience, and forcing from them a sort of recognition of its claims, while they at the same time endeavoured by some clumsy expedient, or grotesque ruse, to evade it. The Church studying the barbarian temper for the purpose of winning it to Christ; often obliged to give way, but never compromising principle; always yielding as to brute force, not out of a timid complaisance; managing, coaxing the despot, as a fond nurse an overgrown and dangerous child, not fawning upon him as on a patron who has much to give. For no chair of dignified ease was a bishop's throne in the sixth century. To do one's duty thoroughly is not easy in the most peaceable times. But then a

conscientious bishop might be truly said to place his life in jeopardy every hour. Not even within the precincts of a Turkish seraglio were the knife and the poison-cup more lavishly employed than by Fredegonde.

"This genuine female barbarian possessed herself of the poor king of Neustria, more a theologian and grammarian than a prince; who owed to the crimes his queen perpetrated in his name, the title of the Frankish Nero. She made him first strangle his legitimate spouse Galswinthe; her sons-in-law followed; then the rival king of Ostrasia Sighebert. This terrible woman, surrounded by men whom her genius for murder had fascinated, deranging their minds by drugged beverages, beautiful and deadly, devoted to pagan superstitions, might be taken for a Scandinavian Walkirie."

Such was the true and patient policy of the Church, and such the situation of those bishops who were faithful to their Master's calling. For there were without doubt many of a very different stamp, as the following narrative will show, while it will at the same time give a far better idea of the state of things under the Merovingian princes, than any comments of ours. Gregory himself is the chief actor, and exhibits in a situation of the utmost difficulty and peril, a union of prudence, tact, firmness, and unshrinking principle, which may furnish an example for a Christian bishop in all ages.

It may just be premised for the sake of making our story more intelligible, that the Franks had been in Gaul now about a century (the event we are about to narrate occurred in the year 577), and that the footing on which they stood with the old Gallo-Roman population was now pretty well understood on both sides. The Franks were the stronger, and therefore the masters; the Romans were the more able, and therefore indispensable to their masters, who were thus obliged to use them well. And this good usage was not entirely dependent on the caprice of the Frank, but was secured by law, if that could be called security which he had the power of violating whenever he chose. They were something in the relation of the Turk and the Greek in Greece, before the Greek revolution; with this important difference, that the Frank owed submission to the religion of the vanquished party, and learned with implicit submission his faith from the mouth of the Roman priest.

In a territorial point of view, the Frank empire was divided into three portions-which the chronicles, latinising the Frank terms, call the kingdoms of Neustria, Austrasia, and Burgundia. Tours was comprehended in Neustria, which, under Chilperic,

* Michelet, i. 227.

extended from the Meuse almost to the present southern limits of France. Chilperic's capital was Soissons. Sighebert, king of Austrasia, or the East, which extended from Bar-sur-Aube into Bohemia, had lately fallen a victim to Fredegonde's assassins, and the throne was occupied by a minor, whose mother, the famous Brunchilde, governed as regent for him. Merovig, a son of Chilperic, but not of Fredegonde, had married Sighebert's widow, Brunchilde. Sighebert was his uncle, and marriage with his uncle's widow was forbidden by the law of God, the canons of the Church. It was also, but for quite another reason, highly displeasing to his father Chilperic. Merovig however found one who was willing, from personal attachment to himself, to violate the canons, and to brave Chilperic's or rather Fredegonde's resentment, by performing the marriage sacrament between himself and the Austrasian queen. This was the bishop of Rouen, Prætextatus, who from the day when he had held the young prince over the baptismal font, had felt for him one of those devoted unreasoning attachments, of which only a mother or a nurse are thought capable.

This was Prætextatus's offence. It was Fredegonde's object to punish him for it. And the surest and least obnoxious means of doing so seemed to be, by bringing him to a regular trial before a synod of bishops for his flagrant infraction of the canon law, in giving the marriage benediction to persons related in the degree in which Merovig and Brunchilde were.

The Trial of Prætextatus.

The bishops within the limits of the kingdom of Neustria were summoned to meet in synod, at Paris, at the latter end of the spring of 577. Chilperic and Fredegonde journeyed from their capital, Soissons, to attend it in person. The assembly was to be held in the Church of St. Genoveva, which crowned a height at no great distance from the City Island, then confined within the two arms of the Seine. The church had been built by Clovis, at the time of his departure for the war against the Visigoths. Arrived at the destined spot, he hurled his battleaxe straight before him, that the length of the edifice might remain a standing monument of the vigour of the Frank conqueror's right arm. It was one of those basilicas of the fifth and sixth centuries, built in imitation of the earlier Roman basilicas, more remarkable for the richness of their decorations than for beauty of architectural proportions. Its interior was ornamented with marble columns, and a profusion of paint, carving, and gilding; like one of the Jesuits' churches of the seventeenth century. Its roof was sheeted, like St. Peter's, with copper.

On the appointed day, forty-five prelates were assembled