well balanced by that of French Protestants into Scotland. James Melville, in his diary, mentions that subscriptions were raised for French Protestants in indigent circumstances in 1575; and Calderwood has a similar notice in 1622. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, a colony of French weavers, mostly from Picardy, was established in the locality where Picardy Place now stands. Under the year 1597, the same James Melville records that, 'owing to the fame of 'Andrew Melville, the University of St. Andrews was this year 'attended by a considerable number of foreign youth, Poles, 'Danes, Belgians, and Frenchmen, "whilk crabbit the King ' mickle," Andrew being no favourite of his.'* So lately as 1861, three princes of the House of Orleans sat on the forms of the High School of Edinburgh. They were distinguished for ability amongst their schoolfellows, and much beloved and cherished by the inhabitants as the last and noblest representatives of the old friendship of the two kingdoms. It is not so easy a matter as it at first appears to determine when the special relations between France and Scotland originated, or what were the causes which led to the formation of the habit amongst Scotchmen of which we have spoken. The common opinion is, that the connexion arose entirely after the attempted conquest of Scotland, which they viewed as a separate Saxon kingdom, by the Norman kings of England, and that it was fostered mainly by the part which the Scotch took in what is known in France as the hundred years' war. We are quite willing to put out of account at once the treaty between Charlemagne and King Achains, though it figures in the preamble of almost every subsequent treaty, down to the times of Louis XIV., on the ground that neither France nor Scotland existed in the sense of separate treaty-making countries at that day. To account for the connexion by a treaty of which nothing can be either affirmed or denied, reminds us of Müller's ingenious solution of the difficulty of fixing responsibility on poor humanity by ascribing sin to a free act of self-determination anterior to consciousness. If the proposition did not admit of being very satisfactorily established, it was one which no subsequent theologian was very likely to disprove; and the treaty in question, we presume, is equally safe from any search that will ever be made into the archives either of France or Scotland. We are aware, moreover, that the four treaties which M. Michel ascribes to the twelfth century rest upon evidence which is not only questionable, but which has been gravely questioned since he wrote; and we admit that the fact of Alexander III. having sworn his coronation oaths in French is sufficiently accounted for by the Normanising fashion which, in his time, had extended itself to the Scottish Court. Still, there are facts cropping out, here and there, which do not seem to admit of much doubt, and which are scarcely explicable on any other assumption than that the connexion existed anterior to the war. Let us try the effect of a slight comparison of dates. The death of Alexander III., and the accession of the Maiden of Norway, took place in 1286; the date of the famous conference of Norham is the 10th of May, 1291, and it was not till 1314 that the battle of Bannockburn was fought. Now, M. Michel informs us that, in 1313, there was a street in Paris in which the Scotch students lived in such numbers that it was known as the Rue d'Écosse; that a street bearing a similar name existed at Dieppe, and that in 1292 there were sixty persons of the name of Scot, (variously spelt) mentioned in the Livre de la Taille, for that year, as permanent residents, and of course persons of some means, in Paris. As surnames by this time were common, and as Scott never was a very common surname in Scotland, sixty Scotts in a condition to pay taxes speak for a considerable resident population of Scotchmen. It is probable, however, that in a foreign country, the national title Scot' was sometimes used in place of a surname. In a subsequent passage M. Michel says, that at the commencement of the fourteenth century, there were numbers of Scotchmen to be found in many of the smaller towns of France, at a great distance from the places of their usual disembarkation. As an example, he mentions a Scotch colony at Mézin in 1327. Nor is M. Michel the only antiquarian who has collected facts bearing in the same direction. Tytler, in his history, and more recently Mr. Innes, both following Mathew Paris, whom the latter characterises as an intelligent and unsuspected testimony,' mentions the curious fact, that when Louis IX. set out on his memorable expedition to the Holy Land, one of the ships used for the transport of the horses of the men-at-arms was built for a great French lord, the Earl of St. Pol, at Inverness. Taking into account the heterogeneous character of which the crusading hosts consisted, the fact of a French nobleman building a ship at Inverness is far more significant of a connexion between the countries than even the large number of Scotchmen who joined that disastrous expedition. Then, as indicating the extent of the continental trade of Scotland, and the tendency of the Scotch to form continental connexions generally, it is not unimportant to bear in mind that during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Flemish colonies have been traced in Berwick, St. Andrews, Perth, Dumbarton, Ayr, Peebles, Lanark, Edinburgh, and in the districts of Renfrewshire, Clydesdale and Annandale. These strangers lived under the protection of a special code of mercantile law; and recent investigations have established the fact, that, a hundred years before the great Baltic Association came into being, we had a Hanseatic league in Scotland, small and unimportant comparatively, but known by that very name. This was in the time of David I., towards the middle of the twelfth century. A hundred years later the chronicler of Lanercost, speaking of the now insignificant town of Berwick-on-Tweed, informs us that it was a city so populous, and of such trade, ⚫ that it might justly be called another Alexandria, whose riches were the sea, and the waters its walls. In those days the 'citizens, being most wealthy and devout, gave noble alms.' In confirmation of these remarks, Mr. Tytler mentions that the customs of Berwick under Alexander III. amounted to 2,1977. 88. sterling, while the whole customs of England in 1287 produced only 8,4117. 19s. 11d. The trade of Berwick was unquestionably a continental trade, carried on with Flanders, and to a large extent, probably, with the coast of France. Now if we take into account that cities that can by any stretch of the imagination even of a monkish chronicler, be likened to Alexandria are not built in a day-that it is not just after the first few wanderers arrive that streets are called by their name in towns like Paris and Dieppe, where there are a good many both Scotch and English residents to whom no such compliment is paid in our day, and that it must have taken some little acquaintance with Scotland to enable a French noble to fix upon so strange a place as Inverness for ship-building-we may conclude, with some confidence, that, however it may have arisen, there was in point of fact a close connexion between France and Scotland, of long standing, previous to the War of the Succession. Nor are we at all shaken in this belief, which the mention of long-standing friendship and goodwill in the treaty of 1326 strongly confirms, by the reflection that till the war broke out there was no very special reason for the continuous intercourse of which we seem to find traces between France and Scotland. There is nothing in general that seeins more surprising to us than the amount of international intercourse which existed in Europe in the middle ages. We regard it now as a new thing for an English monarch to have travelled as much as our own Prince of Wales. But King Alfred had made the journey to Rome twice before he was seven years old; and the proceeding was by no means an exceptional one in his day. On the subject of the intercourse which our Saxon ancestors maintained with Rome, Dr. Pauli, in his excellent Life of Alfred,' has the following remarks: 'Ever since the arrival of Augustin, the islanders had preserved an uninterrupted communication with Rome. No long period elapsed till a house was established for the reception of their pilgrims and the instruction of their clergy. We have already seen two kings of the West Saxons die there. It was from the hands of the chief shepherd of Rome that the English archbishops received the pallium, and many bishops their consecration. Offa's 's name was as familiar at St. Peter's as in the Court of Charles.' It was by Offa, King of the East Saxons, that the hospital or college over which Cardinal Wiseman presided in our own times, and the Church of the Holy Trinity, subsequently known as that of St. Thomas of Canterbury (Sto. Tommaso degli Inglesi), were founded in 775. Nor was it Italy alone that was familiar with English faces and English tongues. Every reader of Count Robert of Paris, even if he should have neglected to dip into Ducange, or should have forgotten his Gibbon, is familiar with the Varangian Guard that body of our countrymen with whom the emperors of the East surrounded themselves, from the battle of Hastings down to the taking of Constantinople, pretty much as their predecessors had done with the Prætorian guards, or as the kings of France did with the Scottish archers. When was there a merrier'excursion train' than that which started from the Tabard' in Southwark one April morning, somewhere about the year 1383, on a visit to Canterbury? The object of Chaucer was to exhibit the social habits of his time, and, with this view, the characters of the pilgrims whom he has brought together are, as a learned editor has remarked, 'as various as, at that time, could be found in the 'several departments of middle life; that is, in fact, as various ' as could, with any probability, be brought together, so as to 'form one company; the highest and the lowest ranks of society being necessarily excluded.' But what we wish to call attention to is not the habit of home travel to which such an expedition testifies, but the extent to which that of foreign travel is revealed by the account which is given in the prologue of the various members of the party. First we have the knight, who had ridden Sir Harry Nicolas, Pickering's edition, vol. i. p. 261. VOL. CXVIII. NO. CCXLI. R 'As wel in Christendom as in Hethenesse, The next few lines contain a catalogue of his voyages : 'At Alisandre he was whan it was wonne. In Lettowe hadde he reysed and in Ruce, Whan they were wonne; and in the Grete See, At mortal batailles hadde he ben fiftene, Agen another hethen in Turkie,' &c. 6 Then there is his son, a lusty bacheler' of twenty, who has already been ' in chevachie, In Flaunders, in Artois, and in Picardie.' The merchant and the shipman are travelled men, of course; and we are not surprised to hear that the pardoner is 'streit comen from the Court of Rome.' But it does surprise us a little to learn that the wife of Bath has been thrice in Jerusalem, and hadde passed many a strange streme.' 'At Rome she hadde ben, and at Boloine, In Galice at Seint James, and at Coloine.' The fiction, however, is not stranger than many well-authenticated facts. A very learned friend told us, the other day, that, in his historical researches, he recently came across the traces of a bailie of Peebles, who was just setting out on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem! Even as regards the mere amount of locomotion, there can be little doubt that we deceive ourselves in supposing it to be so very greatly in favour of modern times. But the increase in the quantity has unquestionably far exceeded that in the quality of travel, if by the quality we understand not its lazy ease, but its efficacy for purposes of human culture and developement. In former times, when scarcely any organised means of land transport existed, so ordinary an affair as a journey from London to Rome was itself a positive school of instruction. It was im |