she sent to England, Knox to Scotland,
Marnix to the Low Countries." Bonnivard
saw that this system was the only salvation
for Geneva, and he went in heartily
for it, and became the historian of the
Reformation. Even so he did not please
Calvin. In 1551 he put his Chronicles of
Geneva into the hands of the council, but
Calvin would not let them be printed, and
they remained in manuscript till 1831. A
second edition was put forth two years
ago; and a very one-sided history it is,
but clever, strikingly clever in its way of
hitting off a portrait in a few lines.
Bonnivard is not one-sided on purpose; no
man ever tried harder to be impartial. He
hits out at all parties: " We cry down the
papists" (he says), "and we do far worse
than they." Just as some of us now-a-days
declaim against " illiberal liberals," he talks
of difformes réformateurs. " We have said
above" (he adds) " a great deal to the
discredit of popes and their belongings, but
what good can we possibly find to say of
our own people?" No wonder Calvin
didn't like him—only tolerated him, in fact,
because of his bitter pamphlets against
the restless "libertine" party, with which
(let us remember) he had been
identified during all the time before his
imprisonment. But though he supported
the rigorous system, at least in theory, he
was no bigot, like most of its supporters.
A good many people, especially in the
"territory" outside the city, held to the
old faith. He and Farel were deputed to
meet their representatives and to argue
the question. " You must prove out of
the Bible," said Farel, "that the mass and
all your other popish ceremonies are
approved by God." The spokesman of the
Romanist party asked time to think the
matter over. " He's right," said Bonnivard,
"they ought to have time;" and he strove
as hard as he could to move Farel, who
was for " converting" everybody without
giving them time to come round of
themselves. Farel had his way, as was likely
in those days, when toleration was as little
understood as it was practised; but
Bonnivard deserves praise for a breadth of
view quite unusual then and there.

Of his essays, all that need be said is, that
they remind us of Montaigne—the same
shrewdness, the same rambling style, the
same fondness for coarse jokes, even on the
most sacred subjects. He is one of the group
of writers who helped to make Geneva a
"literary centre." The Reformation got
hold of science and art as well as of religion,
and it got hold of language as well. French
took the place of Latin; and book French
rapidly freed itself from classicalities of
construction, and adopted a more straightforward
style of arranging sentences. Bonnivard
helped to bring about this result;
if there had been a few like him among
the German reformers, book German would
not be the heavy, pompous, inverted stuff
that it is—bad enough to have been (as
Heine used to say it was) invented in the
government office of Luther's elector.

And now that we have seen something
about the real Bonnivard, let us look
at the figure which Byron (forgetting
his favourite Rousseau's brief notice of
the man, " one who loved liberty though
he was a Savoyard, and who was tolerant
though he was a priest") has dressed
up in what he rightly calls his " fable."
Chillon is a grand ruin, and contrasts
finely in its sombre grandeur with its
lovely surroundings. Byron and
Hobhouse went over it all; and it was clear
that the poet was not listening to the
explanation of the sottish corporal who played
cicerone: as he carved his name on one
of the pillars, he was thinking of the
possibilities of the place; and when he came
out he seemed wild with delight, and kept
tossing half-guineas to all the little children
he met on his road. Then came the
two days' rain at Ouchy, and during that
delay the poem was written which has
made Bonnivard famous by destroying his
identity.

The oddest thing about it is Byron's
introduction. He says, " When I wrote
this poem I didn't know enough of my
hero, or I should have endeavoured to
celebrate his courage and his virtues;"
and he then gives several paragraphs in
French with which some Genevese had
furnished him. The pompous style of this
"life," and its fulsome praise of the " great
man who never hesitated to sacrifice his
comfort or his freedom to secure the freedom
of Geneva," are amusing now that we
know the real facts, and perceive that the
real and the Byronic Bonnivard are two
perfectly distinct individuals. The poem
is a very beautiful one, but it is indeed a
"fable:" it enshrines in singularly forcible
and yet melodious verse all the commonplaces
about imprisonment; Marie Antoinette
in the Temple, De Latude in the Bastille,
and many more, have been pressed into
the poet's service. It is charming to read
about the prisoner making a footing in the
wall, not to escape, but, because