| Philip de Commines. Less picturesque and inventive in
| style than Froissart, Commines has earned, from his power
of reasoning on the character of men, especially of great
men, the title of the Father of Modern History. He was
| the Tacitus of France, as Froissart was the Livy. The
period of history embraced in his memoir is from 1464 to
1498, thirty-four years of great and stirring events. They
| came to an end nearly twenty years before the Reforma-
tion, and six years after Columbus had made his first
voyage to the New World. De Commines stands at the
very verge of the middle ages, which, with their chivalry
and their feudalism, were passing away. He is a pleasant,
talkative writer, an easy-going, common-place philosopher
| and moralist, very like Samuel Pepys in much of his
quaint talk. From such a source Scott drew his story,
| and so wonderful is the power of delineation that the
history of France and Burgundy, with its bewildering
mass of secret societies and political intrigues, and the
collateral events in England, come before us like the bright
clear pictures of a phantasmagoria. Let us stand aside
and watch some of the shadows as they flit past. There
is the chivalrous young Scottish hero, whose hair-breadth
escapes and dangerous dilemmas never lose their interest.
We catch a glimpse, in the pages of Scott and De
Commines, of the double-dyed traitor Louis de Luxem-
bourg, Count de St. Paul, the High Constable who
_ plotted with England, France, and Burgundy all at once,
and following on his track, silent, watchful and implac-
able comes Louis XI., who, false and crafty himself, could
never forgive falsehood or craft except in his own service.
We see the king in his different characters, now like a
western Haroun Al Raschid, assuming disguises or worm-
ing out his people’s secrets as quiet, unassuming Maitre
Pierre, or sitting like a grim old spider among the cages and
dungeons at Plessis or Loches, or joining in the hunt with
| the execrable Cardinal Balue, or consigning with grim
pleasantry the Cardinal to the custody of one of those
eruel iron cages which he had himself invented. Yet
another scene, we see “the perjured king a leaden saint
revere,’ and kneeling before his hat garnished with little
effigies of the Virgin Mary and some of the Saints; the
false, suspicious monarch, the very slave of superstition,
in spite of his evil ‘life, utters some vow or oath with a
mental reservation, or vows to create the Virgin a
Countess and Colonel of his guards, a promise which he
actually performed. Anon, we see Louis trembling in
the presence of his astrologer Galeotti, formerly secretary
and tutor to Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, and
his son. Or, last scene of all, we look upon the dying
moments of the wretched Louis, racked by suspicions,
unfriended, unloved; he had made companions of the
lowest; and most worthless of his creatures, men like
Oliver Dain, generally characterized as le diable, and
Tristan l’Hermite, the grim chief of the police. De
Commines teaches us a valuable lesson in his description of
the king’s death-bed, and shows how a course of falsehood,
cruelty, and tyranny, unrelieved by one spark of chivalrous
honour or truth, must end in ignominy and wretchedness.
The picture of the French king, fearful of every one about
him, shrieking to the saints, not for pardon of sin, but for
a prolongation of his wicked life, foolishly trusting to the
false relics and jugglery of a hermit, half mad, half knave,
and expiring at last without a tear being shed for him, is
| drawn in a manner which shows how fully De Commines
was competent to be a moralist as well as an historian.

|
|
|
|

| SIR WALTER SCOTT. 157
a

The period of history which is sketched in this story
is deeply interesting, and in spite of some anachronisms,
we may gain a good insight into the times from the
novelist’s graphic pages. We are reminded of the general
symptoms of revolt among the people, a sign that the
ice of feudalism is breaking up; the wars of York and Lan-
caster had hardly ended, draining away the best blood of
England’s nobility, and thus paving the way for the
growth of the people's influence in the ensuing reigns.
The insurrection of the Jacquerie against French taxes,
and the rise of the Swiss Cantons against the power of
Austria, had been shadows of the coming events; and in
the period under our notice we find the Swiss again
asserting their independence against the fiery, wrong-
headed Charles the Bold, another noticeable shadow
which passes by us as we follow the novelist’s course.
We see Charles painted to the life, as De Commines
painted him, though Scott, more honest than the time-
serving courtier, does not praise him in prosperity and
abuse him when the misfortunes of Granson and Morat
end in his defeat and death at Nancy, on that fatal
“ Twelfth-eve,’ 1476. De Commines thus moralizes in
his quaint way on the rash duke’s end :—“TI saw a seal-
ring of his, after his death, at Milan, with his arms cut
curiously upon a sardonyx, that I have often seen him
wear in a riband at his breast, which was sold at Milan
for two ducats, and had been stolen from him by a varlet
that waited on him in his chamber. I have often seen
the duke dressed and undressed in great state and for-
mality, and by very great persons; but at his last hour
all this pomp and magnificence ceased, and both he and
his family perished on the very spot where he had
delivered up the constable not long before, out of a base
and avaricious motive: but may God forgive him.” We
are constrained to think on another moralist’s words
concerning the narrow sarcophagus which was large
enough at last for Alexander the Great, and of the stern
fact that

Imperial Czesar, dead and turn’d to clay,
May stop a hole to keep the wind away.

Other shadows pass us by,—the handsome voluptuary,
Edward IY. of England, the swarthy mysterious Bohe-
mian, a member of one of those gipsy tribes which first
appeared in Europe in the beginning of the 15th century,
condemned to wander for a period, as they stated, fora
penance; anon we are among the fire and smoke and clash
of arms which mark a battle, a scene in which Scott ex-
celled. It is within the walls of Liége, where the people
have revolted against Louis de Bourbon, their venerable
bishop, and that savage figure who heads the insurgents,
dressed in a scarlet uniform, with a boar’s head em-
broidered on it, is William de la Marck, a ferocious baron,
known as the Wild Boar of Ardennes. Whilst, however,
we join in the fight at Liége, we must not forget our
chronology. Scott, for the purposes of his story, places
this murder of the bishop and death of De la Marck, in
1468, but, in reality, the bishop was slain by the baron in
1482, and De la Marck expiated his crime three years
later, when Maximilian, Emperor of Austria, arrested
him at Utrecht and had him beheaded. Turning to
“« Anne of Geierstein,” we find the period of history there

treated of, contemporary with that of “Quentin Durward.” |

The terrible wars of the Roses have fully justified the

prophecy—
Stal This brawl to-day,