to sailors as the Greenland dove, is not only a pretty, but it is a sprightly and active bird. If the great divers make at intervals a disagreeable croaking, their swiftness on and underneath the water is curious to watch; and they live in pairs, as old Bewick has it, "with inconceivable affection." We never yet met the individual who did not say that the straggling, mixed flocks of gulls, consisting, as they almost always do, of various kinds, enlivened the rocks by their irregular movements and shrill cries, even when the latter were deadened by the noise of the waves or nearly drowned in the roarings of the surge. Michelet, we have lately seen in his admirable work on "L'Oiseau," takes a precisely opposite view of nature in the Polar regions to that adopted by our lady traveller. "Admirable, fruitful seas," he exclaims, "replete with life in an elementary state (zoophytes and medusa); they are sought for in the favourable season by all kinds and descriptions of animal life-whales, fish, and birds -in pursuit of their daily food. It is there that they procreate each short summer in peace, and hence are the Poles the great, the happy rendezvous of love and peace to these innocent crowds." But perhaps the lady may retort, M. Mignet has not been to the Polar regions-has not passed a summer at Spitzbergen! With her, one great idea prevailed over all others--one morbid fancy alone filled her mind, to the exclusion of all other thoughts; it was the chance of wintering in that region of which she had manifestly seen more than enough the first day she arrived there. At last she was almost on the point of seeing her fearful anticipations converted into sad realities. In any other part of the world except in these Polar regions, a ship is safe when in harbour; but in Spitzbergen, as I have before said, the event most to be dreaded is not shipwreck, it is a forced wintering; from one day to another, from one hour to another, the bay that shelters you may be changed into a prison-and what a prison! No dungeon can inspire a similar amount of terror! One day I was enabled to realise the fact-it was on the 7th of August. Several members of the expedition, seeing that the weather was clear and the snow being swept away by a strong easterly breeze, made a boat-excursion to Hakluyt Point, the most northerly cape in Spitzbergen. The excursion was to last a day. I was not allowed to make one of it, so I remained on board with the captain, who, you are aware, never quits his ship. The early part of the day went off well enough, and I envied the lot of those who were going to get a few leagues nearer to the Pole-perchance to reach the limits of the great banquise of ice-the aim of all our ambitions. I reasoned with myself so as to calm my regrets, and finished by finding my position to be in a sufficiently elevated latitude. I said to myself that I ought not to be jealous of these poor men, whose pride had only exacted some twelve or fifteen leagues over me. In order to pass away the long hours when the ship, deprived of its passengers, appeared to me so deserted, I set to work writing letters, and thus filling up my solitude with all the beings so dear to me whom I had left behind. Towards four in the afternoon I was obliged to leave off, it was so dark; a dense fog would no longer permit any light to pass through the bulls-eyes, which took the place of windows. I ascended on deck, and there I found the captain busy, looking through his telescope at a fleet of great icebergs, which were taking up their position at the entrance of the bay-a spectacle that filled me with inexpressible anguish. "Captain," I said, "what is taking place? The bay will soon be closed up by all those icebergs." "Do not make yourself anxious," the commander replied to me; "it is not yet cold enough to solder the icebergs together. Besides, I am going to send a boat to see if a bar has formed itself there." "And if the bar is formed, what shall we do?" The captain did not vouchsafe an answer, but busied himself giving orders to the boat to go. My eyes followed it with deep anxiety; I saw the men row zealously, turn round the great masses of ice and pass between the smaller, till at last they disappeared in the great field of floating ice. At the expiration of an hour's time they came back; it was in vain that they had endeavoured to make their way out of the bay-no open passage remained; the cold, which no one had mistrusted, had been sufficient to solder the icebergs and to convert them into an impassable wall of rock. Although sailors make a rule of keeping untoward impressions and events to themselves, I saw that the captain looked anxious as he listened to the report of the sailors. As to me, my heart quite misgave me, and terror filled my whole soul. "And our expeditionists!" I exclaimed; "how are they to get back ?” "That is just what puzzles me," said the captain; "they have only two days' provisions. It was very imprudent." "And they are in open boats, exposed to the cold and snow. Oh, Heaven! captain, it may become frightful. What will you do?" "I will fire two or three great guns over all this to-morrow, and try and make a hole in it. As to the rest, we will wait and see what the wind will do to-night." The captain remained silent, walking to and fro on the quarter-deck, his glass in his hand, looking alternately at the sky and sea. For several hours no change was observable; the sharp points of the ice broke here and there the thick fog by which we were enveloped, but they remained motionless. My heart was even more sorrowful than this lugubrious horizon, and I reflected gloomily on our rashness in having come to expose our lives in these frightful regions, where every incident is a catastrophe, and where a mere change in the wind or a lowering of the thermometer may entail death! Towards midnight a wind sprang up which gradually increased in violence to a hurricane; the old ocean shook her mane of foam with fury, enormous waves struck the ice, the barrier broke with a loud noise, and never did a more terrible tumult give rise to happier impressions; the bay was opened-the boats could come in! They arrived, in fact, a few hours later, and the danger they had run ensured them a cordial reception. 66 The day after this warning a number of men were employed in engraving the name of the ship, the date of her arrival, and a list of her men and officers on the rock. "They did me the honour," the lady tells us, to place my name at the head of the list, and if it was not the most remarkable, it was most assuredly the most strange to meet with in such a place." It was now manifest that the delay in Magdalena Bay could not be prolonged much further. Excursions into the interior multiplied themselves accordingly, and our lady often took part in them. She would, however, on these occasions separate herself from her companions. "She took a pleasure," she says, "in feeling herself alone with this grandiose and terrible nature. Deserts have everywhere their own poetry deserts of sand or deserts of ice, still it is always the infinity of solitude, and no voice speaks a more moving language to the soul!" What an interruption the appearance of a Polar bear would have occasioned to these solitary meditations among the ices! One day, however-and only one day-it was permitted to us to see Spitzbergen enlivened; it was the 10th of August. Early in the morning the great curtains of fog, which incessantly veiled the horizon, were withdrawn as if by an invisible hand, and, wonderful to relate! the sun-a real, beautiful, shining sun-appeared; under its influence the bay assumed a new aspect! Clouds chased one another across the heavens, carried away like fleecy things, the great rocks let their mantles of snow fall off, the sea trembled and shook with the glittering ices that sank into it on all sides: it seemed as if the sun's rays had suddenly conferred life upon this dead and gloomy country, and that the earth was unrobing itself for the labours of spring. It was a thaw-a genuine thaw-noisy and joyous-a thaw everywhere welcomed as the end of the bad season. Alas! in Spitzbergen, thaw, spring, and summer only last a few hours! The very day that followed upon this fine one, the fog once more darkened the heavens, a gloomy atmosphere took the place of a brilliant day, the cold became more intense, gusts of wind moaned lugubriously, the icebergs remained stationary, once more soldering themselves to the rocks, and everything began to sleep again in that icy and funereal sleep which lasts upwards of eleven months. So brief a summer and the sudden return of winter obliged the expedition to set out on its return at once. "Toute tentative pour pénétrer plus au nord devenait impraticable," we are told; but we do not gather -at least from the lady's narrative-that there ever was any more intention of proceeding farther north than there was of wintering in the Arctic regions. In these respect, the late French expeditions, as that in the Reine Hortense, under Prince Napoleon, and that of which Mme. Léonie d'Aunet formed a part, present a truly remarkable contrast to the navigations and winterings, and to the boat and sledge expeditions carried out by our gallant countrymen in the same regions. As voyages of discovery, although made in the nineteenth century, they are only fit to take place by the rovings of the three sons of the Red-handed Eirek, or the early pioneering efforts of a Button, a Hawkbridge, or a Fox. It is almost needless to say how delighted our fair adventurer was at being rowed by vigorous arms on the 14th of August out of that fearful bay. I saw (she says) with a feeling of deep relief the torn mountains, the sharp points, the immense glaciers of Magdalena Bay disappear successively from my eyes. I felt that I was saved from imminent danger, the greatest that, I feel assured, could ever be run, that of being imprisoned in these horrible ices and of dying there, as our predecessors did, in the frightful tortures of cold; add to which, the contemplation of the sinister beauties of Spitzbergen had cast a veil of insurmountable melancholy over my spirits. This country is indeed strange and frightful, and if one is not seized with an absolute panic on first nearing it, it is because one has been prepared by degrees for the lamentable aspect that it presents. The islands of Norway and the North Cape are stations, the sight of which gradually initiates the eye to scenes of desolation; but if it was possible to be transported without transition from our cheerful Paris to those icy latitudes, I have no doubt but that the most courageous would be seized with serious fright! So much for an expedition the proposed objects of which were, according to the statement made by Mme. d'Aunet of what M. Gaimard expounded to her at the onset, to penetrate sufficiently into the Polar regions to determine if one can pass that way from Europe to America! However, if M. Gaimard was not a Collinson or a M'Clure, the experiences of a lady at the gates of the Polar regions (and Spitzbergen cannot be designated as anything more, as compared with Melville Island or Banks Land) are, at all events, exceedingly amusing. New-Book Notes by Monkshood. MARY STUART AND CATHERINE DE MEDICIS:* OR, FRANCE AND SCOTLAND IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. Ir is no way M. Chéruel's design to write the history of Mary Stuart. Even were he conscious of the power, he says, to undertake such a work, the celebrated works on that subject which have appeared during the last few years, and that by M. Mignet in particular, would effectually deter him. His plan is far more simple. Having discovered among the archives of the D'Esneval family, preserved at the Château de Pavilly (Seine-Inférieure), numerous letters by French ambassadors in England and Scotland, he thought it might be useful to publish them, with a view to illustrate the history of French diplomacy in the latter half of the sixteenth century. The alliance with Scotland, he remarks, was deeply important to France; and his first chapter is devoted to a retrospective review of it from its commencement, and the happy results to which it gave rise-no French historian, however, mentions the energetic efforts made to preserve it, during the period here concerned, by Michel de Castelnau, D'Esneval, Châteauneuf, and Pomponne de Bellièvre. The most recent historians have consulted little except the correspondence of England and Spain; the interests of France, and the part she played, being as nothing in their eyes beside the dramatic conflict that was going on between Philip II. and Elizabeth. M. Chéruel complains of them as seeing in France merely a secondary state under Spanish influence, and as duped by the tactics of England's agents, who threw on France the odium of Philip's politics, and represented the French realm as in fact an annexe of the Spanish monarchy. "The falsity of this notion will be made evident, I think, in the despatches of our ambassadors, and the historical study' in which I have retraced their negotiations and those of Catherine de Medicis. France, placed midway between the extreme opinions supported by Philip II. and Elizabeth respectively, sustained her rôle with dignity, when she had as her representatives such men as Paul de Foix, La Mothe-Fénelon, and Michel de Castelnau. To recal the services rendered by these ambassadors, is to repair a piece of unjust forgetfulness in our history. "So far has indifference to these questions proceeded, that most of the writers who have taken up the history of the sixteenth century, are ignorant of the exact epoch at which our ancient alliance with Scotland was broken off. Burnet supposes France to have kept up her protectorate over Scotland until the assassination of the Duke of Guise at Blois; and yet the treaty of Berwick, by which Scotland was definitively made over to England, was earlier than that event by upwards of two years. The historian of Charles Edward, M. Amédée Pichot, affirms that, by the time of the treaty of Edinburgh (1560), France had lost all influ * Marie Stuart et Catherine de Médicis. Etude historique sur les relations de la France et de l'Ecosse dans la seconde moitié du XVIe Siècle. Par A. Chéruel. Paris: Hachette. 1858. ence in Scotland, whereas it was there that for more than twenty years she counterbalanced the intrigues of English diplomacy. And once more, Flassan, though treating specially of the negotiations of France and her relations with foreign powers, says not a word about the second treaty of Berwick, from which dates the definite rupture of our relations with Scotland." After pointing out these errors or omissions in special writers on the subject, M. Chéruel deems it superfluous to show the deficiencies in general historians, as regards the question of France's last efforts to preserve the protectorate of Scotland. Read De Thou and Camden, Lingard and Sismondi, Robertson and Patrick Fraser Tytler, and not a word will you find, he says, about the negotiations, clever and active as they were, of Michel de Castelnau; while the last ambassador sent by France to the land o' cakes, the Baron d'Esneval, is scarcely named even. The part taken by Henri III. and by Catherine de Medicis in the trial of Mary Stuart, is a vexed question about which, to the present time, historians have vexed and disquieted themselves in vain. Now M. Chéruel so far illustrates, if not elucidates, the question, by reference to authentic documents, as to establish, to his own satisfaction, this one truth-that even if Catherine de Medicis and her son were guilty of negligence, at any rate they cannot be fairly charged with the hateful treason imputed to them by the League party, and by various modern historians. These examples are cited as sufficient to prove the real interest of the documents now published. In his opening chapter M. Chéruel observes, that there are few examples in history of an alliance so close and enduring as that between France and Scotland. The French ambassadors of our Elizabethan age make it as old as Charlemagne, in whose reign, in fact, as history attests, friendly relations were established between the two nations. Charlemagne exercised a real protectorate over Scotland, and by his munificence secured such a hold on its kings that they styled themselves his "subjects" and his "slaves”—ut eum nunquam aliter nisi dominum seque subditos ac servos ejus pronunciarent. So writes Eginhard; and his testimony is confirmed by the Saxon poet who recounted the wars of Charlemagne Scotorum reges ipsum dominum vocitabant, Both English and Scotch authors, those even who are most hostile to France, acknowledge the antiquity of this alliance. George Buchanan is here at one with William Camden. In the thirteenth century, an authentic treaty, still extant, consecrated the union of the two nations. It was while Edward I., in the "abuse of his power, ,"* menaced Scotland with a formidable invasion, that John Baliol, king of Scotland, concluded an alliance, offensive and defensive, with Philip the Fair. The friendship of the two countries became still more intimate during the long and bloody wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. At the commencement of the Hundred Years' War, in 1336, David Bruce came to France to crave the help of Philip of Valois, and promised, in the name of all the barons of Scotland, to make an energetic diversion against England, and at no time to sign a peace * Chéruel, pp. 2 sqq. |