bodily over to Protestantism (as was very nearly the case)
towards the end of the sixteenth century. Heinrich Heine has
expressed the opinion that the western races contain a large
proportion of men for whom the moral principle of Judaism has
a strong elective affinity; and in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, the Old Testament certainly seems to
have exercised a much more powerful influence on the minds of
religious reformers than the New. "The Jews," says Heine,
"were the Germans of the East, and nowadays the Protestants
in German countries (England, Scotland, America, Germany,
Holland) are nothing more nor less than ancient Oriental
Jews."]

The French Calvinist peasantry, like the Scotch, were great in their
preachers and their prophets. Both devoted themselves with enthusiasm
to psalmody, insomuch that "psalm-singers" was their nickname in both
countries. The one had their Clement Marot by heart, the other their
Sternhold and Hopkins. Huguenot prisoners in chains sang psalms in
their dungeons, galley slaves sang them as they plied at the oar,
fugitives in the halting-places of their flight, the condemned as they
marched to the gallows, and the Camisards as they rushed into battle.
It was said of the Covenanters that "they lived praying and preaching,
and they died praying and fighting;" and the same might have been said
of the Huguenot peasantry of the Cevennes.

The immediate cause of the outbreak of the insurrection in both
countries was also similar. In the one case, it was the cruelty of the
archpriest Chayla, the inventor of a new machine of torture called
"the Squeezers,"[38] and in the other the cruelty of Archbishop
Sharpe, the inventor of that horrible instrument called "the Iron
Boot," that excited the fury of the people; and the murder of the one
by Seguier and his band at Pont-de-Montvert, as of the other by
Balfour of Burley and his companions on Magus Muir, proved the signal
for a general insurrection of the peasantry in both countries. Both
acts were of like atrocity; but they corresponded in character with
the cruelties which had provoked them. Insurrections, like
revolutions, are not made of rose-water. In such cases, action and
reaction are equal; the violence of the oppressors usually finding its
counterpart in the violence of the oppressed.

[Footnote 38: The instrument is