guage, to form themselves into a nation, and to separate themselves absolutely from the French, to whom they were indeed inferior in the arts of war, but whom they greatly excelled in all the attainments of civilization.

The numerous courts of the small princes amongst whom these countries were divided aspired to be models of taste and politeness. They lived in festivity; their chief occupation was tournaments, courts of love, and of poesy, in which questions of gallantry were gravely decided. The cities were numerous and flourishing. Their forms of government were all nearly republican; they had consuls chosen by the people, and had long possessed the privilege of forming communes, which rendered them nearly equal to the Italian republics with whom they traded.

In the midst of such growing prosperity was this lovely region delivered to the fury of countless hordes of fanatics, its cities ruined, its population consumed by the sword, its commerce destroyed, its arts thrown back into barbarism, and its dialect degraded, from the rank of a poetic language, to the condition of a vulgar jargon. This horrible revolution was not, in its commencement, directed by the French government; but some of its consequences were, that the Provençals ceased to be a nation,-that the influence of the king of Aragon over a large part of the South of France was destroyed,-and that the power of

the kings of France was, at last, extended to the Mediterranean Sea.

The preaching of a first religious reformation amongst the provençals was the occasion of the devastation of this beautiful country. Too early enlightened, proceeding too rapidly in the career of civilization, these people excited the jealousy and hatred of the surrounding barbarians. A struggle began between the lovers of darkness and those of light, between the advocates of despotism and those of liberty. The party that wished to arrest the progress of the human mind had on its side the pernicious skill of its chiefs, the fanaticism of its agents, and the number of its soldiers. It triumphed; it annihilated its adversaries; and with such fury did it profit by its victory, that the conquered party was never able to rise again in the same province, or amongst the same race of men.

In the countries which used the Provençal tongue the clergy had been enriched by immense dotations; but the bishoprics were generally reserved for members of powerful families, who led disorderly lives, whilst the curates and inferior priests, taken from the vassals of the nobility, their peasants and slaves, retained the brutality, the ignorance, and the baseness, of their servile origin. The people of these provinces were too enlightened not to feel contempt for the vices of the ecclesiastics; and so general was this contempt,

that expressions the most offensive to churchmen were become proverbial. I would rather be a priest, said they by imprecation, than have done such a thing! Nevertheless, the disposition of the people was towards religion; and that devotion which they could not find in the church, they sought for amongst the sectaries. These were numerous in the province; and the most ancient historian of the persecution affirms, that Toulouse, whose name, says he, ought rather to have been Tota dolosa, had been scarcely ever exempt, even from its first foundation, from that pest of heresy which the fathers transmitted to their children.2

Those very persons who punished the sectaries with frightful torments have alone taken upon themselves to make us acquainted with their opinions; allowing, at the same time, that they had been transmitted in Gaul from generation to generation, almost from the origin of Christianity. We cannot, therefore, be astonished if they have represented them to us with all those characters which

might render them the most monstrous, mingled with all the fables which would serve to irritate the minds of the people against those who professed them. Nevertheless, amidst many puerile or calumnious tales, it is still easy to recognize

1 Prologus Chronici de Podio Laurentii, p. 666. In Duchesne Script. Franc. tom. v. Histoire de Languedoc, liv. xxi, ch. ii, p. 129.

2 Petri Vallis Cernai Hist. Albigens. cap. 1. apud Duchesne Script. Franc. tom. v, p. 555. Le même; éditio Trecensis 1615, 8vo.

the principles of the reformation of the sixteenth century amongst the heretics who are designated by the name of Vaudois, or Albigeois. Numerous sects existed at the same time in the province; and this was the necessary consequence of the liberty of inquiry which formed the essence of their doctrine all agreed, however, in regarding the church of Rome as having absolutely perverted Christianity, and in maintaining that it was she who was designated in the Apocalypse by the name of the whore of Babylon. Some, however, who were distinguished by the name of Vaudois, or Waldenses, did not differ from her on the points which are the most important, whilst others had given such license to their imaginations as almost to destroy the entire system of revelation. They attributed the Old Testament to the principle of evil; for God was there represented, they said, as a homicide, who destroyed the human race by a deluge, Sodom and Gomorrah by fire, and the Egyptians by the inundation of the Red Sea.3

But, with respect to those who opened the ca reer to the reformers of the sixteenth century, we recognize their teaching by their denial of the real presence in the eucharist. "If the body of Christ," said they, "was as large as our mountains, it must have been destroyed by the number of those whom they pretend to have eaten of it."

3 Hist. Albigens. cap. ii, p. 556.

They rejected the sacraments of confirmation, of confession, and marriage, as vain and frivolous; they charged with idolatry the exposure of images in the churches; and they named the bells, which summoned the people to the adoration of these images, trumpets of demons. Their teachers or priests were contented with a black coat, instead of the pompous vestments of the catholic clergy. After they had caused their proselytes to abjure idolatry, they received them into their church by the imposition of hands and the kiss of peace. Whilst their enemies endeavoured to blacken their reputation by charging them with permitting, in their teaching, the most licentious manners, and with practising, in secret, all kinds of disorders, they still allowed that, in appearance, they observed an irreproachable chastity; that, in their abstinence from all animal food, their rigour exceeded that of the severest monks; that, through their regard for truth, they admitted on no occasion any excuse for falsehood; that, in a word, their charity always prepared them to devote themselves to the welfare of others. Several poems of the Vaudois, written in the twelfth century, and recently published, confirm the resemblance between the doctrine and discipline of the early and later reformers."

4 Petri Vallis Cern. Hist. Albig. de diversis hæreticorum sectis, tom. v, 556, 557.

5 Choix des poésies originales des Troubadours, tom. ii. La nobla leycaon, lo novel Sermon, &c.