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nearly two centuries ago, the Revocation | myself in the same atmosphere of damnaof the Edict forced its founders to flee tion and eternal salvation in which I was their native land. The name of the settle- brought up." The men and women presment is Friedrichsdorf, in the landgraviat ent not only chanted and prayed in French, of Hesse-Homburg, so called in honor of but looked French; and yet from the winthe landgrave Frederick II. This prince dows of the temple could be seen the gave the site of the village and some fields spires of Kiedorf and Seulberg, the one a to a number of refugees from Champagne, German Catholic, the other a Lutheran the Isle of France, and Languedoc, who village. M. Weiss found himself in the in 1687 arrived in the country, and craved presence of an ethnologic curiosity, — a his protection. Nor did his liberality end petrified piece of France, two hundred here. For ten years the settlers were to years old. But though the people of be entirely exempted from taxation; at Friedrichsdorf are of pure French blood. the expiration of that time they were to and cling so tenaciously to the customs of pay a land-tax of a florin an acre. They their ancestors, they are not the least were also allowed to organize themselves French in spirit. They know little or after their own fashion, to elect their own nothing of the land from which they came, mayor and aldermen, to manage their own and look upon Germany as their country, law affairs with the exception of one or the country for which, if need be, they two unimportant reservations and to would fight and die. Considering the exclude from the village anybody to whose treatment their forefathers received in presence they might object. These immu- France, the way in which they were driven nities have helped Friedrichsdorf, which out of it, and the welcome they received in now numbers about twelve hundred the land of their adoption, this is, perhaps, French-speaking inhabitants, to maintain not greatly to be wondered at, though M. almost intact the manners, customs, and Weiss evidently thinks it both strange language of their refugee ancestors. This and unnatural. On the other hand, these village, in the heart of Germany, is prob- people are both proud of the language ably a better sample of the France of they speak and the race to which they Louis Quatorze than anything that can be belong. They consider it derogatory to found in France itself. intermarry with their German neighbors; and though they are not in the least moved by a recital of the sufferings of France in 1870-71, they fire up at once if you hint that their men are in any way inferior in strength or their women in beauty to the Hesseners and Brandenburgers around them. Though living in the same country, educated in the same gymnasiums, and trained in the same regiments as their Teutonic neighbors, they are resolute to maintain the natural superiority of their breed. They esteem themselves both better and braver than the folks of Kiedorf and Seulberg; the women being especially proud of their origin and conservative of their customs. Their language is the quaint and beautiful French of the seventeenth century. Anybody who would know how French was spoken and pronounced in the grand siècle must go to this German village. In France itself the secret is lost. But while some of the villagers speak as Madame de Sévigné wrote, others use "vicious and vulgar phrases," which shows, in the opinion of M. Weiss, that the original immigrants were composed of two classes,-one educated and refined, the other ignorant and uncultured. Several of the phrases in common use, though obsolete in France, are expressive and convenient. For instance, they say vio lonner (to fiddle), souventes fois, une paire

An interesting account of Friedrichsdorf, the existence of which has been almost, if not altogether, forgotten in the mother country, appeared lately in a French periodical, from the pen of M. J. J. Weiss, a politician and writer of some note. Hearing at Homburg that there was a Huguenot village in the neighborhood, he was moved by curiosity to make a visit of inspection. As he neared his destination, he overtook a letter-carrier. "Wo bin ich, bitte?" he asked, and received the rather surprising answer, spoken in excellent French, "Vous pouvez parler Français." This opening naturally led to a conversation; but after a few more questions had been put and answered, the letter-carrier begged to be excused, on the ground that it was Sunday, and it was time to go to the Temple. This excited the visitor's curiosity still more, and he, too, went to the Temple. The pastor was in the pulpit, reading the Confession of Sin in French, from which were omitted none of the characteristic phrases of primitive Calvinistic Christianity, albeit in France itself two-thirds of them have long been obsolete. "I could have believed myself in the New Temple at Rochelle," says M. Weiss, "or in the Paris Oratoire, hearing a sermon from the stern old Pastor Grandpierre. I found

de fois. On the other hand, they know nothing of the thousands of words and forms with which, during the last two hundred years, the French language has been enriched. The speech of Friedrichsdorf, in fact, is literally the speech of 1687. Since that time it has undergone no alteration whatever. What it was then it is now. The fact is curious, but it is natural. The persecuted Protestants who arrived in Hesse-Homburg in 1687 were thenceforth cut off from communication with their country and their kindred. So far as French literature was concerned, they might almost as well have been in the wilds of Africa. The children learned French from their mothers, and from the few books they brought with them, which, no doubt, were mainly religious books.

The Friedrichsdorfers are necessarily bi-lingual; and all their material interests being centred in Germany, they must needs obtain their news, their literature, and their secular ideas from German sources. French is kept for worship and domestic use; and it is to their religious separateness, more than any other cause, that the long survival of their mother tongue is to be ascribed. There is no test for sincerity and constancy like the fiery ordeal of persecution; and the Huguenots, who, after undergoing contumely and reproach, stripes and bonds, ended by sacrificing their country to their faith, were more than sincere, they were fanatical. Huguenots lived in an intolerant age, and the doctrine of exclusive salvation, together with the conviction that they were God's elect, made them as intoler ant as Scottish Covenanters. Whenever they had the opportunity they proscribed the Catholic religion as stringently as the Catholics had proscribed theirs. To those stern Calvinists from Languedoc and Champagne, the Lutheranism of Seulberg was hardly less abhorrent than the Mariolatry of Kiedorf. If they could have worshipped in common with their neighbors, all trace of their mother tongue would have perished in the second generation. But their religion was more of Moses than of Christ, and they developed much of that Judaic spirit to which the Jews owe their isolation. To worship in French, to hear the word in the speech in which they had been wont to hear it in the Temple and the Desert-the speech in which, when beset by enemies and overwhelmed with trouble, they had besought the help of the Most Highseemed to these simple souls necessary to their salvation. Thus the old tongue became in some sort sacred to them; it

was a part of their religion, to be handed down reverently to their children, together with the family Bible and the Confession of Sins, which, as M. Weiss tells us, the present generation still repeat in the unmutilated form used by their ancestors before Louis XIV. drove them from France.

M. Weiss speculates as to how much longer the French language is likely to survive at Friedrichsdorf. He thinks that its disappearance is within measurable distance. Germans are no longer excluded from the village; fifty years ago there were only four, now there are four hundred Teutons at Friedrichsdorf. It may, therefore, be presumed that the process of assimilation has already begun. French is still taught in the village school, but "the brutal uniformity of Prussian law" compels the teaching of German, and "we may expect before long to see French treated in Friedrichsdorf as it is treated in Lorraine." It seems impossible for a Frenchman to speak of Prussia in any connection without saying something abusive. But M. Weiss overlooks the causes that are most likely to put an end to this curious religious survival, — the decay of old customs and the waning of religious zeal. Friedrichsdorf, at least if it remains Calvinist so long as it remains religious, can hardly resist the tendency of the age; and in Germany, at least, that tendency is towards unbelief. Calvanism is not the religion of the future; it is dead in Calvin's own city; it is fast dying in France; it cannot much longer survive even in remote Friedrichsdorf; and when the Huguenot wanderers of 1687 lose their faith, they will probably forget the tongue in which they learnt to worship the God of their fathers.

From The Spectator.

BOYS IN THE CHRYSALIS.

WE published on October 20th, 1883, a paper on the "Autobiography of Anthony Trollope," in which we maintained, what a great many correspondents evidently considered a very odd thesis, namely, that Mr. Trollope probably was, as a boy, as disagreeable, loutish, and incapable as all his comrades, including his brother, almost all his masters, and at least one of his able superiors considered him to be. We maintained that if Mr. Trollope had told the truth, and of that there was no reasonable doubt, there could be but one explanation of the facts, and that was that Anthony Trollope the boy differed

essentially as well as in outward seeming from Anthony Trollope the man. The one developed into the other, but it was by a sudden start and not by a gradual process, just as the tadpole, which is not a frog, but something quite different, belonging, indeed, to a different branch of the animal kingdom, becomes suddenly a frog. People are so possessed with the phrase, "The boy is father of the man," that many thought this a little absurd, half a dozen assured us that no such change could occur in a human being, and one excellent man gravely warned us that if a solution of continuity could occur in life, so it might in death, and then what would become of continuous identity in another world? We need not say we intended nothing so absurd as this gentleman im agined, but we did intend to say that the difference, the radical difference, between the boy and the man, which constantly startles as well as puzzles preceptors, is seldom sufficiently reckoned on, especially by parents, whose experience of their children is often so great and so minute as to be delusive. It is frequently a positive change, as it was in Trollope's case, as if the nature had been compressed in a case, subsequently to be burst; and while compressed, lacked qualities which could only come to it after its release. We are pleased, as well as amused, to find that this idea, which was a product of con siderable experience, is confirmed by Dr. James Martineau, who has probably much greater experience, having, like all religious teachers of mark, been compelled to make a special study of the young. In the course of the remarkable sketch of his family history, and of his differences with his sister Harriet, which he published in the Daily News of Tuesday, Dr. Martineau says: "If I do not misconstrue a class of facts frequently noticed, there are natures and among them some of the most energetic and gifted in the endwhich remain through childhood in a kind of chrysalis state; and first begin to quiver with their intdneed life, and at length break forth upon the wing in the second half of their second decade. As that is also the time when young people often leave the early nest for some new experience, bringing them into contact with fresh types of character and manners, the change of scene is apt to get all the credit of the marvellous hues and vivid flight now taken by the creature once so colorless and dull. But the metamorphosis would not be wrought upon a brother or sister differently tempered. It is essentially the unfolding of an inward nature

reserved for this birth-hour, on the stroke of which it eagerly seizes on the relations which crowd in upon it from the novel elements around." That passage conveys, in better words, precisely the idea we endeavored to make plain, with the exception that we think the change a little greater than breaking-forth, the actual nature being occasionally modified, as we, though rarely, sometimes see it modified in maturer life, under religious or other influence, and that we should put the pos sible time of its occurrence much later. The man's difference from the boy is sometimes not established till he is fiveand-twenty, unless circumstances have been very favorable to independence, either of judgment or of action. Trollope was a man before his true nature appeared, even in respect of efficiency for the work of life; and we have noted the alteration in men older than he, and that, too, in the peculiarities we think least liable to change, such as temper and frankness. It seems impossible to most parents that the violent lad should become gentle-tempered, and the reserved lad frank; but both changes do in rare instances mani. festly occur. There is no reason, indeed, why they should not. The relaxation of pressure upon the inner nature, which is often the consequence of independence or other change of circumstances, not only allows the wings of the mind, as Dr. Martineau says, to be unfolded, but permits them to grow where they were not before. Tying up a child's limb may only distort it; but it may also take out of the general frame its inherent vigor, its natural health, its characteristic and special power, and that larger result of compres sion is true also of the mind. It is not only genius which requires room, but sometimes ordinary nature also. Ten per cent. of the most ordinary natures would have been crushed out of shape by a boy. hood like that of John Stuart Mill as com pletely as that of a Shelley or a Coleridge would have been. The crust over the mind, though it often compresses only its powers, a phenomenon known in every third household, where Tom's success in life never ceases to cause a mild surprise, - sometimes also squeezes and deadens, or suspends vitality in the essential character. The difference between Prince Frederick and Frederick the Great was not only one of mental strength, and though in part he may have hidden himself deliberately, in part also, when the flagstone was lifted by his father's death, his character changed.

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We wonder whether the converse differ

upon children with the irresistible and allpervading weight of an atmosphere. One can easily imagine that if life, with its hard facts such as the necessity of eat. ing, of obedience to "musts," and of standing alone-restores this old influ. ence, the lightsome youth of our day will display as men, changes at least as startling, though in an opposite direction, as those which have struck Dr. Martineau and ourselves. Some of our Prince Hals will become Henry the Fifths. The alteration will be attributed to experience, and work, and contact with the unsympathetic; but it will not be wholly due to those causes, but to the fact that pressure has brought out qualities only existing before in the germ. The man will not be in all instances the lad developed, but the lad transformed. He is not really transformed, of course; but neither is he, as we contend, only grown, but rather he has enlarged, and new characteristics have come out as if they had been created. The potentiality of hardness must be in the clay; but still, pottery is not clay only. We have most of us witnessed this change

ence often occurs, and a character injured | moval of the compression which once fell by want of compression, of the discipline which reveals that there are "musts" in the world, ever recovers strength under the pressure of actual life, so that the light nature becomes serious and strong. We have not seen that, and do not remember in biography a clear instance of it; but Shakespeare knew human nature, and he thought it perfectly possible. If it is, and if the occurrence is frequent, the relief to the fathers of this generation will be considerable. There is an impression current, derived principally, we think, from satiric literature, that the defect of the new generation is premature manliness, that all children, boys more especially, because they are more examined, display "old heads on young shoulders," and that youthful priggishness is on the increase. That is not, however, the opinion of most schoolmasters and tutors, or of the few men we have encountered who have been compelled to study unusual numbers of lads. They say that the enormous change which has occurred in household discipline a change which extends to all classes, and has immensely modified society while it has made the young dis--if not in others, then in ourselves—as tinctly happier, and to a most curious degree conscious of their happiness, and conscious, too, that being dependent on their irresponsibility, it will soon end, has left them with characters altogether lighter, weaker, and less capable of steady endurance. They have not learned in the same degree to govern the will, they are more reluctant to face difficulty, and they shrink from the great drawback to work ing life its inevitable monotony, with a painful deficiency in fortitude. They are not shallow, for they assimilate knowledge, and sometimes like it; they think with a clearness quite unknown in the past, and they observe as if they were old; but there is something lacking in the character which the older and harsher processes of bringing-up did produce. They were vexing processes, many of them, and they seem to parents of to-day quite out of the question, and to the young tyrannical; but they yielded their fruit. If the clay were conscious, it would probably not like the wheel, and would certainly detest the fire; but fire and the wheel make the pipkin, and the pipkin is water-tight, and until broken the most durable thing known. An Etruscan vase of pottery would last like a diamond, if only it were let alone, and it is only clay. There is a want of hardness, or rather hardsettedness, in the new race which perplexes the elder one, and which is undoubtedly due to the re-ders?

regards one quality, patience; and why should not there be others? Many among us do not grow patient, so much as acquire the faculty of patience; and this often in conscious, yet very sudden leaps. The pressure, whatever it be, has annealed that side of the character, until it is as different from the previous character as pottery from clay. Sharp suffering is the quickest pressure, and the one most rec ognized; but the hydraulic pressure of life acts too, and nearly or quite as effectually. The loss is mainly one of time; and though it is impossible for parents to think so, that is not always loss. The longer childhood is after all something to the good, and there is pliability in gristly bones. Most boys of to-day are ready for anything from learning Arabic to driving cattle, and for the work of life that is a set-off against the three or four years which seem to be lost from a certain want of "breeze," in the builders' sense, visible in so many characters. It is odd to find the moth in the cocoon, and the silk-spinner out of it; but that happens with the human worm, and only strikes us because we are accustomed to another sequence. The one change, when we have once seen it occur or recognized that it can occur, is as little miraculous as the other. The stupid lad becomes the brilliant novelist. Why not the blithesome lad the steadiest of plod

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