he usual way. For when a great pestilence
strikes a country, it slays its thousands and goes away. Time quickly
heals the wounds of grief, and the world goes on as before. Then come
the English to sack and destroy. Nature heals their wounds, too, by the
recurring seasons, and the world goes on as before. I am inclined to
think that life, on the whole, was generally pleasant for a well-to-do
Frenchman of the period." Mr. Besant, it will be seen, concedes that
evils are evils while they last, that war and pestilence are not
pleasant things to the victims, and that the comfortable and cheery life
of the fourteenth century suffered some interruptions from these causes.
But then it was still, he insists, an agreeable life "on the whole,"
since "the recurring seasons" healed the wounds and the grief, and left
the survivors to enjoy existence "in the usual way." This, it must be
owned, is a very comfortable and cheery philosophy--for those who preach
it. We do not see that they need ever complain of "bad times," since
they can always be sure that the recurring seasons will bring
alleviation to the survivors. It may also be admitted that, as there is
no age in which the recurring seasons do not bring relief, so there has
been none when war and pestilence and similar evils did not interrupt
the usual course of life. There is, however, this difference, that in
some ages these evils last longer than in others, the wounds are deeper,
the victims more numerous, the intermissions less frequent, the relief
tardier, the survivors fewer. Such an age in France was the period of
the English invasions, comprising a great portion of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. That life was then, "on the whole," anything but
comfortable and cheery is attested by records and evidence of all kinds,
against which the mention of weddings and christenings, of
gold-embroidered mantles and robes of silk, in the pages of a court poet
will, we apprehend, count for very little, especially as the sufferers
do not appear to have solaced themselves with reflections on the sure
effects of the recurring seasons. Deschamps himself was unable, it
seems, to get his pension paid; and if he died, as Mr. Besant tells us,
about 1409, the chances, we think, are that however he may have
denounced luxury as the "crying evil" of his time, his death was the
result of starvation.

Mr. Besant, it will be perceived, is one of those writers who indulge in
haphazard assertions