the title-page of all his books after 1604 he is styled
the 'Sieur de Champlain.'] Dionne, in a biography of
nearly three hundred pages, does indeed mention the names
of his father and mother, but dismisses his first twenty
years in twenty lines, which say little more than that
he learned letters and religion from the parish priest
and a love of the sea from his father. Nor is it easy to
enlarge these statements unless one chooses to make
guesses as to whether or not Champlain's parents were
Huguenots because he was called Samuel, a favourite name
with French Protestants. And this question is not worth
discussion, since no one has, or can, cast a doubt upon
the sincerity of his own devotion to the Catholic faith.

In short, Champlain by birth was neither a peasant nor
a noble, but issued from a middle-class family; and his
eyes turned towards the sea because his father was a
mariner dwelling in the small seaport of Brouage.

Thus when a boy Champlain doubtless had lessons in
navigation, but he did not become a sailor in the larger
sense until he had first been a soldier. His youth fell
in the midst of the Catholic Revival, when the Church of
Rome, having for fifty years been sore beset by Lutherans
and Calvinists, began to display a reserve strength which
enabled her to reclaim from them a large part of the
ground she had lost. But this result was not gained
without the bitterest and most envenomed struggle. If
doctrinal divergence had quickened human hatreds before
the Council of Trent, it drove them to fury during the