nor of the nascent town of
Quebec.

Never was colony founded under more pious auspices; for some time past
the Recollects had been zealously laboring for the conversion of
unbelievers; seconded by the Jesuits, who were before long to remain sole
masters of the soil, they found themselves sufficiently powerful to
forbid the Protestant sailors certain favorite exercises of their
worship: "At last it was agreed that they should not chant the psalms,"
says Champlain, "but that they should assemble to make their prayers." A
hand more powerful than that of Madame de Guercheville or of the Jesuits
was about to take the direction of the affairs of the colony as well as
of France: Cardinal Richelieu had become premier minister.

The blind gropings and intestine struggles of the rival possessors of
monopolies were soon succeeded by united action. Richelieu favored
commerce, and did not disdain to apply thereto the resources of his great
and fertile mind. In 1627 he put himself at the head of a company of a
hundred associates, on which the king conferred the possession as well as
the government of New France, together with the commercial monopoly and
freedom from all taxes for fifteen years. The colonists were to be
French and Catholics; Huguenots were excluded: they alone had till then
manifested any tendency towards emigration; the attempts at colonization
in America were due to their efforts: less liberal in New France than he
had lately been in Europe, the cardinal thus enlisted in the service of
the foreigner all the adventurous spirits and the bold explorers amongst
the French Protestants, at the very moment when the English Puritans,
driven from their country by the narrow and meddlesome policy of James
I., were dropping anchor at the foot of Plymouth Rock., and were
founding, in the name of religious liberty, a new Protestant England, the
rival ere long of that New France which was Catholic and absolutist.

Champlain had died at Quebec on Christmas Day, 1635, after twenty-seven
years' efforts and sufferings in the service of the nascent colony. Bold
and enterprising, endowed with indomitable perseverance and rare
practical faculties, an explorer of distant forests, an intrepid
negotiator with the savage tribes, a wise and patient administrator,
indulgent towards all, in spite of his ardent devotion, Samuel de
Champlain had presented the rare intermixture of the heroic qualities of
past times with the zeal for scienc