an lives on his ancestral acres; and his farm or vineyard is not
too large to be cultivated by himself and his family. There are amongst
them no titles of honour, and scarce any distinctions of rank and
circumstances. They are a nation of vine-dressers, husbandmen, and
shepherds. In their habits they are frugal and simple. Their peaceful
deportment and industrial virtues have won the admiration, and extorted
the acknowledgments, even of their enemies. In the cultivation of their
fields, in the breed and management of their cattle and their flocks, in
the arrangements of their dairies, and in the cleanliness of their
cabins, they far excel the rest of the Piedmontese. To enlarge their
territory, they have had recourse to the same device with the Jews of
old; and the Vaudois mountains, like the Judaean hills, exhibit in many
places terraces, rising in a continuous series up the hill-side, sown
with grain or planted with the vine. Every span of earth is cultivated.

The Vaudois excel the rest of the Piedmontese in point of morals, just
as much as they excel them in point of intelligence and industry. All
who have visited their abodes, and studied their character, admit, that
they are incomparably the most moral community on the Continent of
Europe. When a Vaudois commits a crime,--a rare occurrence,--the whole
valleys mourn, and every family feels as if a cloud rested on its own
reputation. No one can pass a day among them without remarking the
greater decorum of their deportment, and the greater kindliness and
civility of their address. I do not mean to say that, either in respect
of intelligence or piety, they are equal to the natives of our own
highly favoured Scotland. They are surrounded on all sides by
degradation and darkness; they have just escaped from ages of
proscription; books are few among their mountains; and they have
suffered, too, from the inroads of French infidelity; an age of
Moderatism has passed over them, as over ourselves; and from these evils
they have not yet completely recovered. Still, with all these drawbacks,
they are immensely superior to any other community abroad; and, in
simplicity of heart, and purity of life, present us with no feeble
transcript of the primitive Church, of which they are the
representatives.

The lotus-flower is said to lift its head above the muddy current of the
Nile at the precise moment of sunrise. It was indicative, perhaps, of
the dawning of a new day upon the Vau