national character, to the aims which stirred in human spirits, and to
fickle circumstances of date or place, the contrasted issues of failure
and success in the different enterprises. To human sight or foresight,
the Huguenots had the more hopeful omens at the start. But religious
zeal and avarice, combined in a way most cunningly adapted to
contravene, if that were possible, the Saviour's profound warning, "No
man can serve two masters," were, after all, only combined in a way to
bring them into the most shameful conflict. The Huguenot at the South
shared with the Spaniard the lust for gold; and the backers alike of
Roman and Protestant zeal in Canada divided their interest between the
souls of the Indians and the furs and skins of wild animals.

The heroic and the chivalric elements in the spirit and prowess of these
early adventurers give a charm even to the narratives which reveal to us
their fearful sufferings and their atrocities. Physically and morally
they must have been endowed unlike those who now hoe fields, make shoes,
and watch the wheels of our thrifty mechanisms. Avarice and zeal, the
latter being sometimes substituted by a daring passion for the romantic,
nerved men, and women too, to undertakings and endurances which shame
our enfeebled ways. The partners in these enterprises were never
homogeneous in character, as were eminently the Colonists of New
England. They were of most mixed and discordant materials. Prisons were
ransacked for convicts and desperadoes; humble artisans and peasants
were accepted as laborers; roving mariners, whose only sure port of rest
would be in the abyss, were bribed for transient service, the condition
always exacted being that they must be ready for the nonce to turn
landsmen for fighting in swamp or bush. These, with a sprinkling of
young and impoverished nobles, and one or two really towering and master
spirits, in whom either of the two leading passions was the spur, and
who could win through court patronage a patent or a commission, made in
every case, either South or North, the staple material of French
adventure.

After a graphic sketch of the line of Spanish notables in the New
World,--of Ponce de Leon, of Garay, Ayllon, De Narvaez, and De
Soto,--Mr. Parkman concisely reviews the successive attempts at a
settlement in Florida by Frenchmen. His central figures here are Admiral
De Coligny and his agents, Villegagnon, Ribaut, and Laudonniere. They
had no fixed polic