season the counsels of wisdom with _sauce piquante_ and rustic
bonhomie.... He prepares the way for Calvin, while having nothing of the
Calvinist; he is gay, he is jovial; he has, even when he censures, I
know not what air of gentleness that wins your heart."

[Illustration: _A Bit of Villeneuve_]


IX

This and all the rest that I know of Bonivard I learn from a charming
historical and topographical study of Montreux and its neighborhood, by
MM. Rambert, Lebert, etc.; and I confess it at once, for fear some one
else shall find me out by simply buying the book there. It leaves you
little ground for classifying Bonivard with the great reformers, but it
leaves you still less for identifying him historically with Byron's
great melodramatic Prisoner of Chillon. If the Majority have somewhere
that personal consciousness without which they are the Nonentity, one
can fancy the liberal scholar, the humorous philosopher, meeting the
romantic poet, and protesting against the second earthly captivity that
he has delivered him over to. Nothing could be more alien to Bonivard
than the character of Byron's prisoner; and all that equipment of six
supposititious brothers, who perish one by one to intensify his
sufferings, is, it must be confessed, odious and ridiculous when you
think of the lonely yet cheerful sceptic pacing his _vionnet_, and
composing essays and verses as he walked. Prisoner for prisoner, even if
both were real, the un-Byronic Bonivard is much more to my mind. But the
poet had to make a Byronic Bonivard, being of the romantic time he was,
and we cannot blame him. The love of his sentimentality pervades the
region; they have named the nearest hotel after him, and there is a