to do as much for the glory of
the English Empire in one part of the world as Clive in another. But
there could hardly be two men more different than Clive and Wolfe. The
one was always an adventurer--a gentleman adventurer, indeed, and a
brilliant specimen of the class, but an adventurer still, and with some
of the worst vices of his kind. Wolfe, on the contrary, resembled more
the better men among those Puritan soldiers who rallied around the name
of Cromwell and battled beneath the standards of Monk. He cherished an
austere ideal of public and private virtue. The sweet, simple gravity
of the man's nature lives for us very vividly in the portrait Thackeray
draws of him in the pages of "The Virginians," where so many of the
famous figures of the crowded last century world seem to take bodily
shape again and live and move around us.

{283}

From the end of the fifteenth century, when John and Sebastian Cabot
discovered Canada, France considered that portion of the New World as
her own. Early in the sixteenth century a French expedition under
Verazzani formed a settlement named New France, and eleven years later
the Breton Jacques Cartier ascended the St. Lawrence as far as the site
of Montreal. The first permanent settlement was made in 1608, when
Quebec was founded. From that time Quebec seems like the prize for
which English and French arms are to strive. Canada was taken by the
English in 1629, only to be restored in 1632; but when more than a
century later France and England were newly at war, the serious and
final struggle for the possession of Canada took place.

The French settlements in America were called Canada and Louisiana.
The one comprehended the basin of the St. Lawrence River and the Great
Lakes, with a vast extent of territory west and north to the Pacific
and Arctic oceans. It was, as has been happily said, a convenient
maxim in those days of our colonization, that whoever possessed the
coast had a right to all the inland territory as far as from sea to
sea. While this gave England its boundaries from north to south, it
left from east to west open to French fancy and French ambition.
Louisiana was a term which covered in English eyes only the Mississippi
mouths and a few stations along the Mississippi and Ohio valleys; in
French minds the term extended to all the territory bounded to the
north by Canada and to the south by Mexico, and stretching from the
Alleghanies to the Pacific.

Th