There are two modes by which the influence of religious truth, in a Christian state, may be obstructed or neutralized. The one is, by acting on the infidel principle, which, if it did not positively interdict, would teach an indifference about it; the other, on the latitudinarian principle, which regards every species of dissent as equally entitled to respect; and therefore would leave out of the elementary instruction in the National Schools, whatever was repugnant to the principles or the prejudices of any class of believers. Thus, a respect for accidental errors would be suffered to overrule, if not prohibit, the teaching of essential truths; and genuine and vital faith would be swallowed up by a spurious charity.

We will not here be tempted, beyond the line of the abstract reasoning to which our author confines himself, into any application of these principles to the subject of National Education in Ireland. Suffice it to say

The important question which here arises, as to the nature and amount of the interference which a government, as such, ought to exercise in the direction of the national education, cannot be treated advantageously, without reference to the peculiar circumstances of the particular state to which the question may be applied; and this does not come within the scope of the present argument, which is confined to the indication of a general principle, which those who acquiesce in the truth whence it is derived, will find no difficulty in applying in detail, not only to the question of national education, but to the other subjects which make up the business of governments."

We could have wished that our author entered more fully upon the subject of an Established Church. We know not what his particular views are; but, as our readers have seen, he is a man of sense and reflec tion, and he can scarcely have failed to see, in our own particular Church Establishment, much to encourage the hope that, if duly improved and extended, it may cherish amongst our people that knowledge and that love of Christian truth, which is the best, if not the only antiseptic to the paroxysms of revolution.

That France is a sort of fuglenation, raised up for the purpose of

exhibiting, as a warning example to the civilized world, the extravagancies of modern reformers, whose schemes of government are irrespective of religion, is a notion which recent proceedings in that country may lead many sagacious thinkers very allowably to entertain. Mr. Morier observes, in his concluding letter

"The events, especially, of the last few months, must have raised doubts in all reflecting minds, as to the soundness of those maxims of government which postpone the moral and religious interests economical, and may, perhaps, awaken of society to the merely materiel' and in many the conviction that Christianity furnishes the one immutable standard of political as well as of moral truths.

"Faith in the providential direction of the world's affairs, towards a determinate and predicted end-the vindication of God's revealed truth against the perversions and falsehoods of its opponents-first suggested the train of thought which led my own mind to that conviction; and it also furnished the ground of the belief you have heard me frequently express, that if God granted you to live the ordinary term of man's life, you would witness events still more appalling, and universally affecting the destinies of mankind, than even those which sounded the knell of the last century. I am persuaded that the real causes of the catastrophe, under the shock of which the whole civilized world is now reeling, can be explained, and its remoter consequences appreciated, only by reference to the laws of God's moral government, as expressly declared in his Word."

been supplied, than by the insane alacrity' with which the entire population poured in their adhesions' to the first acts of the provisional government created by the clamours of a Parisian mob. The unanimous and instantaneous acceptance of the republic at such hands by the whole French nation, can only be accounted for by that mobility of character, resulting from the absence of all fixed principles, which, while it leaves them open to the sway of every momentary impulse, renders them now, as it ever has done, favourable to the exercise of arbitrary power, and must, on that account, unfit them for rational liberty.

"It required, therefore, no gift of prophecy to predict, that the labours of the statesmen and legislators now deliberating in the names of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, under the protection of bayonets and cannon, could not produce any other result but that which is before the eyes of the world."

May we be warned in time! May our Chartists and our Repealers, before it is too late, awake from their delusions! But are we not also called upon earnestly to adjure our rulers to take from the bold, bad men, by whom the peace of the country is disturbed, the pretexts by which they have played upon the credulity of their dupes, by removing, as far as human legislation can remove them, every real grievance of which they have reason to complain? While we look with gladness at the congregations which now throng our places of public worship, where they hear the word of God read, and prayers offered up in a tongue which they understand, shall we not point out to them the increasing numbers of those "who are ignorant and out of the way," and supplicate for an extension of those religious ministrations, by which they, too, may be brought within the fold of faith? "And shall we not deprecate that laxity of principle, and that latitudinarianism, so visible in but too many of our rulers, which regards all creeds and all sects as entitled to equal legislative favour, and deals the same, if not a greater, measure of encouragement to the teachers of the most pernicious errors, which is extended to the appointed

guardians of the faith, as set forth in the doctrine and discipline of the Established Church?

We have not, it is true, as yet been guilty of the insane drivelling of Lamartine, who had the audacity to put the wild democracy, of which he was, for a season, at the summit, upon the level with Christianity." "We

in England," Mr. Morier observes—

"Thank God, have not so learned the Christian code. We know of no new Christianity, and only listen with wondering pity, if we turn not aside with disgust, from the unmeaning jargon, which claims for the crude, bewildered notions of self-complacent philosophism the respect due only to the majestic simplicity of Divine truth, and which, simulating the language of God's Word, seeks to confound Christian liberty with the licentiousness of an ungovernable ochlocracy."

And assuredly, when we cast our eyes upon the continent, and contrast almost every part of it, with the tranquillity which, notwithstanding many causes and provocatives of discontent, prevails in our own more favoured land, we have much cause of thankfulness to the all-wise Disposer; and when we consider the causes of this, Mr. Morier's conclusion will be forced upon every reflecting mind :—

"That in exact proportion to the amount and intensity of the Christian elements which enter into the composition of the national character, and into the public measures of the state, but no further, will the great objects of stability and order, real liberty, and social progress, be attained."

Nor will any of our Christian readers dissent from him when he adds

"God grant that we in England may so order our own affairs, both public and private, at home and abroad, that we may bear to be put to that test, and thus, measuring our social progress by our nearer and nearer approach to the immutable standard of His truth, may confidently trust to stand secure and uninjured amid the great convulsion, of which the first throes are now quickening and inflaming the pulses of the whole civilized world."

Or all the provinces over which the kings of France claimed feudal sovereignty in the early days of the House of Valois, Brittany was the most uncertain in its submission, and the most stubborn in the assertion of its independence. It retained, as to some extent it still retains, the strongest elements of distinct nationality; it had its own language, its own literature, its own ancient traditions, its own political institutions, its own special usages, habits, and customs. It was more thoroughly Cymric than Wales itself; a detestation of foreigners was one of the first principles of Breton existence; during the wars waged by the Plantagenets, the dukes of Brittany often changed sides; but the Breton people never swerved from their common feeling, equal hatred of French and English, or, as their bards denominated them, of Frank and Saxon.

Francis II., last Duke of Brittany, had an only child, a daughter; in her were centred all the hopes of his race, for the long wars of the fifteenth cen. tury had swept away all the collateral branches, and in case of her death, the determination of the next heir would have perplexed all the genealogists that ever attempted to trace a pedigree. Francis was anxious to secure the independence of Brittany, and the inheritance of his race; he resolved, therefore, that the husband of his daughter should be a prince sufficiently powerful to protect her states from the menacing covetousness of the French monarchs; and when she had attained her fifth year, he signed a contract of marriage between her and Edward Prince of Wales, son of our Edward IV. Two years afterwards, her husband, after having for a few days enjoyed the title of Edward V., was murdered by his uncle, the crook-backed Richard. The hand of the heiress again was free, but the duke was in no hurry to form a new contract; it was not until she had attained her thirteenth year, that suitors for her hand began to be named. Three competitors appeared, Alan sire d'Albret, who had pretensions to be King of Navarre;

Louis Duke of Orleans, afterwards Louis XII.; and Maximilian of Austria, King of the Romans. Before their rival pretensions could be determined, Duke Francis died; bands of marauders from Les Landes pillaged the country; the tortuous policy of Louis XI. menaced the independence of Brittany, and such was the poverty of the state, that it became necessary to substitute for money, pieces of lea ther, having in the centre a small silver nail, on which the nominal value was inscribed. Such was the state of Brittany, when a new candidate for the hand of the young duchess appeared in the person of Charles VIII., who had just ascended the throne of France. Although the States of Brittany had actually concluded a contract of marriage with Maximilian, the necessity of peace with France was too pressing to be resisted, and Anne was married to Charles at Langeois in Touraine, December 16th, 1491.

The contract of marriage contained some singular stipulations. It was agreed that all the laws and institutions of Brittany should be preserved intact, and that no change in them should be valid, without the general consent of the states of the duchy. Anne, in default of heirs, ceded all her ducal rights to the king-a stipulation clearly illegal-and the king ceded back these rights on the same terms to the duchess. But the most singular article remains; in case of the death of Charles without heirs, Anne bound herself to marry his successor. one objected that this successor might be already married, as in fact he was; or that the parties might not have suited each other; all such difficulties were settled by the presence of Jean de Resli, Professor of Theology, and confessor to the king, who declared that all the articles of the contract were "in perfect accordance with the laws of God and of his holy church."

No

Six years elapsed, Charles died without heirs; the Duke of Orleans, already married to Jane of France, as cended the throne, and the duchessqueen returned to Brittany, where she

acted as a sovereign princess, coining money in her own name, issuing edicts regulating the most important affairs of state, and granting titles of nobility. Louis XII., as we have seen, had been one of Anne's original suitors; his love for her continued unabated, and policy showed the expediency of preserving the unity between Brittany and France. A previous marriage was only an apparent difficulty, for Alexander Borgia was at this time pope, and he was a pontiff who never allowed scruples of conscience to interfere with the course of his ambition. A bribe to the pope's natural son, Cæsar Borgia, soon brought the bulls for the divorce and the new marriage; Louis XII. separated from the wife to whom he had been married for twenty-four years, and on the 8th of January, 1499, received the hand of the object of his first affections.

The duchy was thus united to the kingdom, without being incorporated in it; Brittany was as distinct from France as Hungary from Austria, or Poland from Russia, and its strong feeling of nationality was sustained not merely by moral but by physical causes. Brittany is the true fairy land; the chronicles of the middle ages and the romances of chivalry declared it to be the favourite sojourn of Arthur, and the enchanter Merlin, the beautiful Fairy Morgana, was supposed to have her palace of diamonds and gardens of crystal in the district of Comonailles; the castle of the original Bluebeard is still shown near Angers; and at every opening in the forests or bocages the peasants pointed out the wondrous circles in the grass which marked the spots where fairies held their midnight dances. Even now, the traveller who crosses the Sarthe at le Mans or Angers, feels that he is entering a new and marvellous country. He meets primæval forests, druidical remains, granite-rocks poised upon precipitous peaks, lakes said by tradi tion to mark the site of submerged cities, traces of calaclysms and natu

ral convulsions; feudal castles and towns that seem not to have varied any of their features since the days of Charlemagne.

French is the language of the towns, but Cymric is still preferred by the peasant; it is preserved by the national ballads, in which no part of the world is so rich as Brittany. The Breton institutions combined the Celtic system of clanship with baronial feudalism, and in spite of revolutions, the ties between suzerain and vassal, between castellan and peasant, remain in many places still unbroken.

The Breton noble, however, was a very different being from the Norman baron he was as rustic and unrefined as any peasant; he dug the ground, he guided the plough, he joined in every kind of agricultural labour, and only ceased to be a farmer when summoned to a convocation of the states, or called to serve in war. No fewer than thirty thousand Breton nobles had a right to vote in the assembly of the states, which had thus a striking likeness to the ancient Polish Diet. When the states were convoked at Dinan, the Breton nobles travelled thither in rude carts with wooden wheels, not unlike those which may still be seen in remote parts of Ireland. These primitive vehicles, in which the nobleman and his family sat on a mass of straw, or heath, or sometimes a bed, were drawn by the stout Breton ponies, and driven by the peasant who walked be side the cart, armed with an iron-tipped cudgel instead of a whip. The tedious. ness of the journey was relieved by the recital of historic legends, in which were told the heroic efforts made by the Bretons of old to maintain their independence, and the sad fate that befell those whom ambition led to seek their fortunes at the court of the Franks, and to tempt the dangers of the wicked city of Paris. As the Breton ballads are little known, we shall give a literal translation of one of those histories, entitled