for the illegal conventicles which they had begun to hold for Protestant worship in their houses, or in the desert, as, in their Scriptural phraseology, they termed the solitary places among the hills. Nor were preachers wanting. The parting prediction of their exiled pastors, that God would not leave them without shepherds, but that out of the mouths of babes and sucklings he would teach them his truth, seemed to be instantaneously fulfilled. A new race of preachers rose up, illiterate and rude, but powerful in their native force and their new-born enthusiasm. Leaving their ploughs or their looms, men with hard hands and sunburnt faces stood up before the crowds who gathered to hear them, and acted the part of preachers and expounders of the Scriptures. The most celebrated of these rustic preachers was Vivens, a woolcarder of Valleraugue. Some students of theology likewise joined them. Round these preachers congregations of men, women, and children gathered; and from morning till night, nothing was heard in the desert but the groans and sobbings of excited spirits, mingled with prayer and psalm-singing.

When intelligence of these proceedings in the Cevennes reached court, it was believed that some of the Protestant pastors must have returned from their exile. Louvois instantly issued a declaration, condemning every such pastor to death; all those who held communication with him to punishment-the men to the galleys, and the women to perpetual imprisonment; and the houses in which pastors lodged to destruction. Rewards

were likewise offered for the apprehension of the preachers. New bodies of dragoons were quartered in the district, by whom several field-meetings were surprised and dispersed the fugitives being slashed down with sabres, some of them hanged from trees, and others reserved for public trial. The first preacher who fell a victim was Falcrand Rey, executed at Beaucaire in the beginning of 1686. These efforts failing, Bâville even condescended to negotiate with the Cévenols, and to make an agreement with Vivens, in the name of his brother preachers, promising to allow them to go into exile, and carry their property with them. Divided into three bodies, the preachers left the Cevennes. Having thus purged the population of what he considered the insurrectionary leaven, Bâville prepared to prevent any further outbreaks in the Cevennes. An army of about 40,000 men was distributed, in a judicious manner, through Languedoc; the officers appointed to command the regiments posted in the Cevennes were chosen from the recent converts to Catholicism, whose zeal was naturally most savage and unhesitating; roads were begun through the mountains, to render them accessible to horse and artillery; and three forts were erected, one at Nismes, one at Alais, and one at St Hippolyte.

The years 1687 and 1688 passed in tolerable quiet. The Cévenols and the other French Protestants seemed overawed, and

were careful to hold their illegal meetings secretly. The great majority of their clergy had sought refuge in Holland, where they officiated as pastors to their fellow-exiles, engaged in theological and literary pursuits, and corresponded, as occasion offered, with their friends in France.

The year 1688 is remarkable in the history of Europe as the date of the English revolution. This event-the accession of William of Orange, the protector of European Protestantism, to the throne of Great Britain-was hailed at the time with universal enthusiasm by the Protestants of the continent. Among the exiled pastors in Holland especially it produced the utmost excitement; it seemed to them the harbinger of better days for France. The fervid soul of one of them, Peter Jurieu, seized upon the event as the prelude to the downfall of Antichrist foretold in the book of Revelation. By a calculation applied to the eleventh chapter of that book, he had some time before concluded that the death of the two witnesses there mentioned was a prophetical allusion to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The three days and a half, during which the bodies of the witnesses were to lie unburied, being interpreted, as usual, to mean three years and a half, it appeared to him that as the death of the witnesses, or the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, took place in October 1685, their resurrection, or the triumph of French Protestantism, must happen in April 1689. So confident was he in the truth of his views, that he published them in 1686, under the title of "The Accomplishment of the Prophecies, or the Approaching Deliverance of the Church." The book caused an immediate sensation. The Catholic leaders replied both by ridicule and serious refutations. On the general spirit of the time the book fell like a spark among inflammable gas. Its notions spread like wildfire among the persecuted Protestants of France, stimulating all the excitable minds to a pitch of fervour which had something in it of the grand and supernatural. The Spirit of God, it was believed, had again descended on the earth, and the times of prophecy had revived previous to the final triumph of the Protestant faith. "Since the time of Voltaire," says M. Peyrat, by way of preface to his narrative of those strange excitements and flights of the mind which form so remarkable a feature in the history of the Camisard persecutions, "it is difficult for one to speak of prophecies and prodigies without provoking sarcasm and derision. Nevertheless," he adds, " ecstacy is incontestably a real state of the human mind. Abnormal and unusual as it is at the present day, it was quite common in the infancy of the human species in the first ages of the world. Now the Reformation by Luther produced in the modern world a violent irruption of the old Hebrew or Asiatic spirit. The laws, customs, language, and images of the infant world were revived'; and it would seem as if the susceptibility to ecstacy had revived also." Be

this as it may, there can be no doubt that extraordinary danger or suffering has the effect of changing and enlarging human nature; of stimulating the human emotion, spirit, imagination, or whatever we choose to call it, to a pitch of which, in the calm routine of civilised life, we have no experience. Without bearing this in mind, it is impossible for any one to understand the history of such religious persecutions as those of the Scottish Covenanters, or the French Camisards, or indeed to understand any important period of history whatever.

Nowhere did Jurieu's book produce such effects as in Dauphiny-the province contiguous to Languedoc. Kindled by it into a state of ecstacy, an old man named Du Serre not only began to prophesy himself, but founded a school of prophets. The contagion spread, as if carried by the atmosphere, and in a short time the whole province was filled with rumours of prophecies, apparitions, angelic visits, &c. "The first instance of these imagined celestial appearances," says M. Peyrat, was in 1688, in the neighbourhood of Castres in Languedoc. A little girl of Capelle, about ten years of age, saw one day, when keeping cows, an angel resembling a child in figure, and clothed in white. It came out of a bush, and, advancing to the young shepherdess, said, 'My sister, I descend from heaven to forbid you, in the name of the Lord Jesus, from going to the mass.' It then withdrew, and disappeared among the bushes. The little damsel returned home, and related the miraculous vision. The news spread from village to village. From Viane, from Lacaune, and all round about, the people ran to Capelle to see the shepherdess, and to ask her about the apparition. The child told the story with simplicity. The people believed in the reality of the miracle, and, according to the orders of the angel, deserted the churches. The priests, raising a cry of alarm, made the subdeputy, Barbeyrac, arrest the young prophetess. She was sent to a convent of Sommieres, at the foot of the Cevennes. But after her departure, the miraculous appearances continued in the district of Castres."

This was in Languedoc: in Dauphiny the ecstacy reached to still greater heights. "Of the disciples of Du Serre, three young shepherds, of eight, fifteen, and twenty years of age respectively, named Bompart, Mazet, and Pascalin, became distinguished above the rest. They presided over assemblies, called apostates to account, preached, baptised, married, advised the people, and exercised all the functions of the fathers of the church. They were put in prison; but were immediately replaced by a multitude of other ecstatics, of whom the chief were Isabella Vincent and Gabriel Astier. The former, commonly called the Beautiful Isabella, was the daughter of a woolcarder of Saou. Forced by poverty to leave her father's house, she went, at about ten years of age, to reside with a relation, a labourer, who made her keep his cattle. A stranger came one day into the sheepfold,

preached, and left her, at parting, the spirit of prophecy. She began to preach, and with such success, that her name became known over all Dauphiny, as far as Geneva, and even in Holland. Towards the end of May 1689, the desire to see the young shepherdess, of whom such marvels were reported, induced an advocate of Grenoble, by name Gerlan, to visit her abode. He entered, and asked something to drink, as if wearied by his long journey. While she served him with a cup of water, he observed her attentively. Her figure was small and slender; her face irregular, thin, and browned by the weather; her forehead large, with great black eyes of a sweet expression, and level with the head. My sister,' said he, 'blessed be God, who has permitted me to see and hear you, that I may be strengthened in the faith, and receive the consolations of his persecuted children.' 'Be welcome,' she replied: this evening I shall preach to some of our brethren assembled in the mountain.' She went out about dusk, accompanied by two young girls and twenty peasants, who followed with the advocate of Grenoble. She walked very fast, although the road was rough, and the night dark. A numerous assembly waited her. 'Of myself,' she said, 'I am unable to speak; but,' continued she, falling on her knees, 'do thou, oh God, loosen my tongue, if it be thy good pleasure, that I may be able to proclaim thy word, and console thine afflicted people.' Forthwith," says the narrator, "the spirit seized her. She offered up a long prayer. I thought I heard some angel speaking. After the prayer, she made them sing a psalm, and raised it herself melodiously; then she preached from the text-'If any man shall say unto you, Lo! here is Christ, or there, believe it not.' She delivered a discourse so excellent, so pathetic, with such holy boldness and such zeal, that one was almost compelled to believe that she had something in her above human. She uttered great lamentations for the wretched condition of the Protestants of France, who were in the dungeons, in the galleys, in the convents, and in exile. She promised, in the name of God, forgiveness, peace, blessing, and eternal joy to those who did not reject the fatherly solicitations of his goodness; she promised also, with precision and earnestness, the re-establishment of true religion in the kingdom." "Isabella," adds M. Peyrat, “could not read, and therefore quoted Scripture from memory. She preached in French. Her language was wonderfully pure, well connected, pathetic, and adorned with biblical images. Her inspiration came with such abundance and fury, that the words, like a stream long dammed up, escaped impetuously from her lips, flowed for some time with astonishing volubility, then slackened, and even towards the conclusion became embarrassed. "At last the intendant Bouchu, who tracked out everywhere the prophets of Dauphiny, caused the young prophetess of Saou to be arrested. 'Here I am, sir,' said she to him; 'you can put me to death. God will raise up others, who will say finer things

than I.' She was confined in the prisons of the general hospital of Grenoble."

The other prophet of Dauphiny before-mentioned was Gabriel Astier, a labourer, about twenty-two years of age. Altogether of a more sombre and melancholic genius than the prophetess Isabella, his preaching was attended with greater excitement and disturbance of the peace. Various bloody engagements took place between his followers and the troops sent into the Vivarais by Bâville and Broglie. Many of the insurgents were taken alive, and hanged. Gabriel, however, contrived for a whole year to elude pursuit. At last, in the spring of 1690, he was recognised in the town of Montpellier taken, and broken on the wheel.

Scarcely was the insurrection in the Vivarais suppressed, when the Cevennes caught the blaze. It will be remembered that, in the year 1686, Bâville entered into an agreement with a number of itinerant preachers, at the head of whom was François Vivens, promising them free exit from France. Owing to Bâville's treachery, Vivens and a body of his companions were conducted into Spain, from which they escaped with difficulty to Holland. Suddenly, in the beginning of 1689, Vivens reappeared in the Cevennes. He was about twenty-six years of age, of small stature, and lame, but robust and energetic. The Cévenols gathered round him, and the field-meetings, which, since 1686, had been almost discontinued, again became common.

Vivens was soon joined by a coadjutor illustrious in the history of the Camisards. This was Claude Brousson, a man of good family, who had practised as an advocate at Nismes, had gone into exile in Lausanne in 1683, and had since that time been actively engaged in the communications which the persecuted Protestants of his native country were holding with William of Orange; but who now, moved by a sudden impulse of selfdevotion and enthusiasm, returned to France to lead the life of a prophet of the desert, leaving his wife and child in Switzerland. After being ordained by Vivens and Gabriel, he commenced his labours. Already forty-three years of age, he abandoned a life of ease and security for one of toil, danger, and suffering. "To be almost always alone; to travel in the night through wind, rain, and snow; to pass through the midst of soldiers or robbers; to sleep in woods on the bare ground, on a couch of grass, or of dried leaves; to dwell in caves, in barns, in shepherds huts; to glide furtively into a town or village, and when received into a pious house, not even to be able to caress at the fireside the little ones of his generous host, lest their innocent prattle should betray him to the neighbours; to be discovered in his retreat, and surrounded by soldiers; to hide in lofts, in wells, or to cheat the troops by going boldly up to them, and sending

* Histoire des Pasteurs du Désert, by M. Peyrat.