oach
of negligence), calculates the emigration at 230,000 souls, namely,
1,580 ministers, 2,300 elders, 15,000 gentlemen, the remainder
consisting almost entirely of traders and artisans.

These returns, quoted by M. Capefigue, were made only a few years
after the Revocation, although the emigration continued without
intermission for many years later. M. Charles Coquerel says that
whatever horror may be felt for the Massacre of St. Bartholomew of
1572, the persecutions which preceded and followed the Act of
Revocation in 1685, "kept France under a perpetual St. Bartholomew for
about sixty years." During that time it is believed that more than
1,000,000 Frenchmen either left the kingdom, or were killed,
imprisoned, or sent to the galleys in their efforts to escape.

The Intendant of Saintonge, a King's officer, not likely to exaggerate
the number of emigrants, reported in 1698, long before the emigration
had ceased, that his province had lost 100,000 Reformers. Languedoc
suffered far more; whilst Boulainvilliers reports that besides the
emigrants who succeeded in making their escape, the province lost not
fewer than 100,000 persons by premature death, the sword,
strangulation, and the wheel.

The number of French emigrants who resorted to England may be inferred
from the fact that at the beginning of last century there were not
fewer than _thirty-five_ French Protestant churches in London alone,
at a time when the population of the metropolis was not one-fourth of
what it is now; while there were other large French settlements at
Canterbury, Norwich, Southampton, Bristol, Exeter, &c., as well as at
Dublin, Lisburn, Portarlington, and other towns in Ireland.

Then, with respect to the much larger number of Protestants who
remained in France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, there
is the same difference of opinion. A deputation of Huguenot pastors
and elders, who waited upon the Duc de Noailles in 1682 informed him
that there were then 1,800,000 Protestant _families_ in France. Thirty
years after that date, Louis XIV. proclaimed that there were no
Protestants whatever in France; that Protestantism had been entirely
suppressed, and that any one found professing that faith must be
considered as a "relapsed heretic," and sentenced to imprisonment, the
galleys, or the other punishments to which Protestants were then
subject.

After an interval of about seventy-five years, during which
Protestantism (though su