re never sanguinary. His ardor was never of a kind to make him
imprudent. He was not distinguished for great strength of arm, or great
skill in his weapon. We have no proofs that he was ever engaged in
single combat: yet the concurrent testimony of all who have written,
declare, in general terms, his great services: and the very exaggeration
of the popular estimate is a partial proof of the renown for which it
speaks. In this respect, his reputation is like that of all other heroes
of romantic history. It is a people's history, written in their hearts,
rather than in their books; which their books could not write--which
would lose all its golden glow, if subjected to the cold details of the
phlegmatic chronicles. The tradition, however swelling, still testifies
to that large merit which must have been its basis, by reason of which
the name of the hero was selected from all others for such peculiar
honors; and though these exaggerations suggest a thousand difficulties
in the way of sober history, they yet serve to increase the desire, as
well as the necessity, for some such performance.

*****

The family of Marion came from France. They emigrated to South Carolina
somewhere about the year 1685, within twenty years after the first
British settlement of the province. They belonged, in the parent
country, to that sect of religious dissenters which bore the name of
Huguenots; and were among those who fled from the cruel persecutions
which, in the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV., followed close upon
the re-admission of the Jesuits into France. The edict of Nantz, which
had been issued under the auspices of Henri IV., and by which the
Huguenots had been guaranteed, with some slight qualifications, the
securities of the citizen, almost in the same degree with the Catholic
inhabitants, had, under the weak and tyrannous sway of the former
monarch, proved totally inadequate to their protection. Long before its
formal revocation, the unmeasured and inhuman persecutions to which they
were subjected, drove thousands of them into voluntary banishment. The
subsequent decree of Louis, by which even the nominal securities of
the Huguenots were withdrawn, increased the number of the exiles, and
completed the sentence of separation from all those ties which bind
the son to the soil. The neighboring Protestant countries received the
fugitives, the number and condition of whom may be estimated by the
simple fact, not commonly known,