e author,--young men who in the glory and
beauty of their youth, the joy and hope of parents who yielded the
costly sacrifice, gave themselves to the deliverance of our country from
the ruin plotted for it by a slave despotism.

Mr. Parkman mentions--allowing to it in his brief reference all the
weight which it probably deserves--a vague tradition, which, had it been
sustained by fact, would have introduced an entirely new element into
the conditions involved in the rival claims to the right of colonizing
and possessing America, as practically contested by European nations.
The Pope's Bull which deeded the whole continent to Spain, as if it
were a farm, reinforced the claim already conventionally yielded to her
through right of discovery. For anything, however, to the knowledge of
which Columbus came before his death, or even his immediate successors
before their death, all the parts of America which he saw or knew might
have been insulated spaces, like those in which he actually set up
Spanish authority. What might have been the issue for this continent, or
rather for the spaces which it covers, had it been really divided by the
high seas into three immense islands like Australasia, so that Spain,
France, and England might have made an amicable division between them,
would afford curious matter for speculation. The tradition referred to
is, that the continent had been actually discovered by a Frenchman four
years before the first voyage of Columbus hitherward. A vessel from
Dieppe, while at sea off the coast of Africa, was said to have been
blown to sight of land across the ocean on our shores. A mariner,
Pinzon, who was on board of her, being afterwards discharged from French
service in disgrace, joined himself to Columbus, and was with him when
he made his great discovery. It may have been so. But the story,
slenderly rooted in itself, has no support. Spain was the claimant, and,
so far as the bold and repeated attempt of the Huguenots to contest her
claims in Florida was thwarted by a diabolical, yet not unavenged
ruthlessness of resistance, Spain made good her asserted right.

Mr. Parkman sketches rapidly some preliminary details relating to
Huguenot colonization in Brazil and early Spanish adventures. The zeal
of the French Huguenots had anticipated that of the English Puritans in
seeking a Transatlantic field for its development. A philosophical
historian might find an engaging theme, in tracing to diversities of