of Chillon. It is not by any intentional
imposture on his part that he goes stalking through modern literature
disguised in the character of hero, saint and martyr, and shouting in a
hoarse chest-voice his "appeal from tyranny to God." In fact, if he
could be permitted to revisit his cherished little shelf of books about
which has grown the ample library of the University of Geneva, and view
the various delineations of himself by artist, poet, and even serious
historian, it would be delightful to witness his comical astonishment.
Perhaps it is not to be laid to the fault of Lord Byron, who after
visiting the old castle and its dungeon beguiled the hours of a rainy
day at the inn at Ouchy with writing a poem concerning which he frankly
confesses that he had not the slightest knowledge of its hero. Hobhouse,
his companion, ought to have been better informed, but was not. If
anybody is to blame, it is the recent writers, who do know the facts,
but are unwilling to hurt so fine an heroic figure or to dethrone "one
of the demigods of the liberal mythology." Enough to say that the Muse
of History has been guilty of one of those practical jokes to which she
is too much addicted, in dressing with tragic buskins and muffling in
the cloak of a hero of melodrama, and so palming off for earnest on two
generations of mankind, the drollest wag of the sixteenth century.

A wild young fellow like Bonivard, with a lively appreciation of the
ridiculous, could not fail to see the comic aspect of the fate which
invested him with the spiritual and temporal authority and emoluments
of the priory of St. Victor. This was a rich little Benedictine
monastery just outside the eastern gate of Geneva, on the little knoll
now crowned by the observatory, surrounded with walls and moat of its
own, independent of the bishop of Geneva in spiritual matters, and in
temporal affairs equally independent of the city: in fact, it was a
petty sovereignty by itself, and its dozen of hearty, well-provided
monks, though nominally under the rule of Cluny, were a law to
themselves, and not a very rigid one either. The office of prior, by
virtue of a little arrangement at Rome, descended to Bonivard from his
uncle, immediately upon whose demise the young potentate of twenty-one
took upon him the state and functions of his office in a way to show the
monks of St. Victor that they had no King Log to deal with. The document
is still extant, in the Latin of the period, i