like a fragment or boulder of a distinct formation--an island enshrining
the picturesque institutions of the _ancien régime_, in the midst of
an ever-encroaching sea of British nineteenth-century enterprise. The
English, it has been truly said, emigrate, but do not colonise. No
concourse of atoms could be more fortuitous than the gathering of
'traders, sailors, deserters from the army, outcasts, convicts, slaves,
democrats, and fanatics,' who have been the first, and sometimes the only
ingredients of society in our so-called colonies. French Canada, on the
contrary, was an organism complete in itself, a little model of medieval
France, with its recognised gradations of ranks, ecclesiastical and
social.

It may, indeed, be doubted whether the highest forms of social life are
best propagated by this method: whether the freer system, which 'sows
itself on every wind,' does not produce the larger, and, in the long run,
the more beneficent results. But if reason acquiesces in the ultimate
triumph of that busy, pushing energy which distinguishes the British
settler, there is something very attractive to the imagination in the
picture presented by the peaceful community of French _habitans_,
living under the gentle and congenial control of their _coûtumes de
Paris_, with their priests and their seigneurs, their frugal,
industrious habits, their amiable dispositions and simple pleasures, and
their almost exaggerated reverence for order and authority. Politically
speaking, they formed a most valuable element in Canadian society. At one
time, indeed, the restless anarchical spirit of the settlers around them,
acting on the sentiment of French nationality, instigated them to the
rebellion of 1837; but, as a rule, their social sympathies were stronger
than their national antipathies; and gratitude to the Government which
secured to them the enjoyment of their cherished institutions kept them
true to England on more than one occasion when her own sons threatened to