are
picturesque with lively accounts of all manner of junketings, carousals,
and festivities, and the good people seem to have passed no small part
of their lives in merry-making. There is a curious entry on the occasion
of the marriage of the Archduke Philip to Mary of England. This
auspicious event was celebrated at Aire by a grand procession, followed
by 'songs and ballads in honour of the married pair;' and the treasurer
paid to 'Johan Gallant, goldsmith, iiii. livres iiii. sols for the
silver presents, to wit, an eagle, a leopard, a lion, and a fool--all in
silver--which were given to those who made the songs, ballads, and games
in honour of the said good news!'

Like Calais, St.-Omer, and other cities of this region, Aire offered a
refuge in 1553 to the unfortunate inhabitants of the ancient historic
city of Therouanne, which, after a heroic defence by d'Esse de
Montmorency, was taken in that year, five days after the death on the
ramparts of the gallant commander, by the troops of Charles the Fifth,
and by his orders razed to the ground. The details of this merciless
destruction recall the sack of Rome by the Imperialists; and it is the
blackest feature in the black record of the First French Revolution that
the men who then got control for a time of the government of France, in
the names of Liberty and Progress, deliberately and wantonly rivalled
the most unscrupulous of the kings and emperors whom they were
constantly denouncing, in their treatment, not of foreign fortresses
conquered in war, but of French cities, of the lives and the property of
French citizens, and of the most precious monuments of French history.
Charles the Bold at Dinant and Charles the Fifth at Therouanne were
outdone, in the prostituted name of the French people, by the younger
Robespierre at Toulon and by the paralytic Couthon at Lyons.

The annals of these north-eastern cities of modern France are full of
most curious and valuable materials for a really instructive history of
the French people. The most cursory acquaintance with them suffices to
show how much worse than worthless are the huge political pamphlets
which during the last hundred years have passed current with the world
as histories of the French Revolution, and how important to the future,
not of France alone but of civilisation, is the work begun in our own
times by writers like Mortimer-Ternaux, Granier de Cassagnac,
Baudrillart, Bire, and Henri Taine. Here in Artois, u