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The document provides information about the book 'Programming in C for Engineering and Science' by Larry Nyhoff, which focuses on teaching C++ programming through engineering and scientific applications. It emphasizes an object-centered design approach, practical problem-solving, and includes numerous examples relevant to the field. The book also features supplementary materials and resources for both students and instructors to enhance learning and teaching experiences.

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100% found this document useful (2 votes)
16 views

Programming in C for Engineering and Science 1st Edition Nyhoff download

The document provides information about the book 'Programming in C for Engineering and Science' by Larry Nyhoff, which focuses on teaching C++ programming through engineering and scientific applications. It emphasizes an object-centered design approach, practical problem-solving, and includes numerous examples relevant to the field. The book also features supplementary materials and resources for both students and instructors to enhance learning and teaching experiences.

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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Computer Science
Programming

for Engineering and Science


Programming in
Programming in
for Engineering and Science
C++

Developed from the author’s many years of teaching computing courses, Programming in C++
for Engineering and Science guides readers in designing programs to solve real problems
in
C++
for Engineering
encountered in engineering and scientific applications. These problems include radioactive
decay, pollution indexes, digital circuits, differential equations, Internet addresses, data analysis,
and Science
simulation, quality control, electrical networks, data encryption, beam deflection, and many other
areas.

To make it easier for novices to develop programs, the author uses an object-centered design
approach that helps readers identify the objects in a problem and the operations needed; develop

C++
an algorithm for processing; implement the objects, operations, and algorithm in a program;
and test, correct, and revise the program. He also revisits topics in greater detail as the text
progresses. By the end of the book, readers will have a solid understanding of how C++ can be
used to process complex objects, including how classes can be built to model objects.

Features
• Uses standard C++ throughout
• Explains key concepts, such as functions and classes, through a “use it first, build it later”
approach
• Shows how to develop programs to solve real problems, emphasizing the proper techniques
of design and style
• Introduces the very powerful and useful Standard Template Library along with important
class and function templates
• Develops numeric techniques and programs for some engineering and science example
problems
• Highlights key terms, important points, design and style suggestions, and common

Nyhoff
programming pitfalls in the chapter summaries
• Includes self-study questions and programming projects in each chapter
• Provides ancillary materials on the book’s website

Larry Nyhoff
K11207

K11207_Cover.indd 1 6/19/12 9:01 AM


Programming in C++
for Engineering and Science

K11207.indb 1 6/15/12 10:06 AM


This page intentionally left blank
Programming in C++
for Engineering and Science

Larry Nyhoff

K11207.indb 3 6/15/12 10:06 AM


CRC Press
Taylor & Francis Group
6000 Broken Sound Parkway NW, Suite 300
Boca Raton, FL 33487-2742

© 2012 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC


CRC Press is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business

No claim to original U.S. Government works


Version Date: 20120409

International Standard Book Number-13: 978-1-4398-2535-8 (eBook - PDF)

This book contains information obtained from authentic and highly regarded sources. Reasonable efforts have been made to
publish reliable data and information, but the author and publisher cannot assume responsibility for the validity of all materials
or the consequences of their use. The authors and publishers have attempted to trace the copyright holders of all material repro-
duced in this publication and apologize to copyright holders if permission to publish in this form has not been obtained. If any
copyright material has not been acknowledged please write and let us know so we may rectify in any future reprint.

Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Law, no part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any
form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming,
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers.

For permission to photocopy or use material electronically from this work, please access www.copyright.com (http://www.copy-
right.com/) or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400.
CCC is a not-for-profit organization that provides licenses and registration for a variety of users. For organizations that have been
granted a photocopy license by the CCC, a separate system of payment has been arranged.

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifica-
tion and explanation without intent to infringe.
Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at
http://www.taylorandfrancis.com

and the CRC Press Web site at


http://www.crcpress.com
Contents

Preface, vii
Acknowledgments, xi
About the Author, xiii

Chapter 1 ■ Introduction to Computing 1

Chapter 2 ■ Programming and Problem Solving—


Software Engineering 21

Chapter 3 ■ Types in C++ 39

Chapter 4 ■ Getting Started with Expressions 63

Chapter 5 ■ Control Structures 107

Chapter 6 ■ Functions and Libraries 149

Chapter 7 ■ Using Classes 207

Chapter 8 ■ More Selection Control Structures 261

Chapter 9 ■ More Repetition Control Structures 295

Chapter 10 ■ Functions in Depth 351

Chapter 11 ■ Files and Streams 409

Chapter 12 ■ Arrays and the vector Class Template 451

Chapter 13 ■ Multidimensional Arrays and Vectors 503

v
vi   ◾   Contents

Chapter 14 ■ B
 uilding Classes 553

Chapter 15 ■ Pointers and Linked Structures 593

Chapter 16 ■ D
 ata Structures 637

Answers to Test Yourself Questions, 677

Appendix A: ASCII Character Codes, 693

Appendix B: C++ Keywords, 697

Appendix C: C++ Operators, 699

Appendix D: Other C++ Features, 701

Index, 715

K11207.indb 6 6/15/12 10:06 AM


Preface

C ++ is a general-purpose programming lan-


guage that has both high-level and low-level lan-
guage features. Bjarne Stroustrup developed it in 1979
at Bell Labs as a series of enhancements to the C pro-
gramming language, which, although developed for
system programming, has been used increasingly in
engineering and scientific applications.
Because the first enhancement was the addition of
classes, the resulting language was originally named
Bjarne Stroustrup
“C with Classes,” but was renamed C++ in 1983.
Along with overcoming some of the dangers and disadvantages of C, these and subsequent
enhancements have resulted in a very powerful language in which very efficient programs
can be written and developed using the object-oriented paradigm. A programming lan-
guage standard for C++ (ISO/IEC148821998) was adopted in 1998 and revised in 2003 and
is the basis for this text.

Background and Content


This text grew out of many years of teaching courses in computing, including program-
ming courses intended for students majoring in engineering and science. Although the
Fortran language was first used, these courses are now taught using C++. However, most
C++ textbooks are written for the general college student and thus include examples and
some content that is not aimed at or especially relevant to science and engineering students.
In this text, nearly all of the examples and exercises involve engineering and scientific
applications, including the following (and many more):

• Temperature conversion
• Radioactive decay
• Einstein’s equation
• Pollution indexes
• Digital circuits
• Root finding, integration, differential equations
vii
viii   ◾   Preface

• Internet addresses
• A-C circuits
• Simulation
• Quality control
• Street networks
• Environmental data analysis
• Searching a chemistry database
• Oceanographic data analysis
• Electrical networks
• Coordinate transformations
• Data encryption
• Beam deflection
• Weather data analysis
• Oceanographic data analysis

Some examples are described and solved in detail, while for others the presentation in the
text outlines the solution and the complete development is available on the text’s website
maintained by the author:

http://cs.calvin.edu/books/c++/engr-sci

This text also focuses on those features of C++ that are most important in engineering
and science applications, with other features described in optional sections, appendices, or
on the text’s website. This makes it useable in a variety of courses ranging from a regular
full-credit course to one with reduced credit such as a two-credit course that the author has
taught many times, where the class lectures are supplemented by lab exercises—tutorial in
nature—in which the students develop a program to solve some problem using the new
language features presented in class.

Presentation
The basic approach of the text is a spiral approach that revisits topics in increasingly more
detail. For example, the basic C++ operations used to build expressions are presented first,
and then predefined functions provided in C++ libraries are added. Once students have
experience with functions, they learn how to define their own simple functions and then
more complicated ones. Later they learn how to incorporate these into libraries of their
own, thus extending the C++ language with custom-designed libraries.

K11207.indb 8 6/15/12 10:06 AM


Preface   ◾   ix

Learning how to develop a program from scratch, however, can be a difficult and chal-
lenging task for novice programmers. A methodology used in this text for designing
programs to solve problems, developed over years of teaching C++ to computer science,
engineering, and science students and coauthoring texts in C++, is called object-centered
design (OCD):

• Identify the objects in the problem that need to be processed.


• Identify the operations needed to do this processing.
• Develop an algorithm for this processing.
• Implement these objects, operations, and algorithm in a program.
• Test, correct, and revise the program.

Although this approach cannot technically be called object-oriented design (OOD), it does
focus on the objects and operations on these objects in a problem. As new language con-
structs are learned, they are incorporated into the design process. For example, simple
types of objects are used in early chapters, but Chapter 7 introduces students to some of the
standard classes provided in C++ for processing more complex objects—those that have
multiple attributes. In subsequent chapters, more classes are introduced and explained,
and students gain more practice in using them and understanding the structure of a class.
Once they have a good understanding of these predefined standard classes, in Chapter 14
they learn how to build their own classes to model objects, thus extending the C++ lan-
guage to include a new custom-built type.

Important Features
• Standard C++ is used throughout.
• A “use it first—build it later” approach is used for key concepts such as functions (use
predefined functions first, build functions later) and classes (use predefined classes
first, build classes later). Various other topics are similarly introduced early and used,
and are expanded later—a spiral kind of approach.
• The very powerful and useful Standard Template Library (STL) is introduced and
some of the important class templates (e.g., vector) and function templates (e.g.,
sort()) are presented in detail.
• C++’s language features that are not provided in C are noted.
• Engineering and science examples, including numeric techniques, are emphasized.
• Programs for some examples are developed in detail; for others, the design of a pro-
gram is outlined and a complete development is available on the text’s website.
• Object-centered design (OCD) helps students develop programs to solve problems.
• Proper techniques of design and style are emphasized and used throughout.

K11207.indb 9 6/15/12 10:06 AM


x   ◾   Preface

• Test-yourself questions (with answers supplied) provide a quick check of understand-


ing of the material being studied.
• Chapter summaries highlight key terms, important points, design and style sugges-
tions, and common programming pitfalls.
• Each chapter has a carefully selected set of programming projects of varying degrees
of difficulty that make use of the topics presented in that chapter. Solutions of
selected projects are available on an instructor’s website and can be used for in-class
presentations.

Planned Supplementary Materials


• A lab manual (perhaps online) containing laboratory exercises and projects coordinated
with the text
• A website (http://cs.calvin.edu/books/c++/engr-sci) for the text containing
• Source code for the programs in the text
• Expanded presentations and source code for some examples
• Links to important sites that correspond to items in the text
• Corrections, additions, reference materials, and other supplementary materials
• A website for instructors containing
• PowerPoint slides to use in class presentations
• Solutions to exercises
• Other instructional materials and links to relevant items of interest

K11207.indb 10 6/15/12 10:06 AM


Acknowledgments

I express my special appreciation to Alan Apt, whose friendship extends over many
years and who encouraged me to write this text; to Randi Cohen, David Tumarkin,
Suzanne Lassandro, and Jennifer Ahringer, who managed all the details involved in getting
it into production; and to Yong Bakos, for his technical review of the manuscript. And,
of course, I pay homage to my wife, Shar, and to our children and grandchildren—Jeff,
Rebecca, Megan, and Sara; Jim; Greg, Julie, Joshua, Derek, and Isabelle; Tom, Joan, Abigail,
Micah, Lucas, Gabriel, Eden, and Josiah—for their love and understanding when my
busyness restricted the time I could spend with them. Above all, I give thanks to God for
the opportunity and ability to prepare this text.

xi
This page intentionally left blank
About the Author

A fter graduating from Calvin College in 1960 with a degree in mathematics,


Larry Nyhoff went on to earn a master’s degree in mathematics from the University
of Michigan in 1961, and then returned to Calvin in 1963 to teach. After earning his PhD
from Michigan State University in 1969, he settled in for an anticipated lifelong career as a
mathematics professor and coauthored his first textbook, Essentials of College Mathematics
(Holt, Rinehart, Winston, Inc.), in 1969.
However, as students began clamoring for computing courses in the ‘70s, Professor
Nyhoff volunteered to help develop a curriculum and coauthored several manuals for the
BASIC, FORTRAN, and COBOL programming languages. Following graduate work in
computer science at Western Michigan University from 1981–1983, he made the transition
from mathematics to computing and became a professor in the newly formed Computer
Science Department.
A long stint of textbook writing soon commenced, beginning with a coauthored
FORTRAN 77 programming text that was published by Macmillan in 1983. This was
then followed by a Pascal programming text, which went through three editions and
became a top seller. Over 25 other books followed, covering FORTRAN 90, Turbo Pascal,
Modula-2, and Java, and including three editions of a very popular C++ text and an
introductory text in data structures using C++. Several of these texts are still used world-
wide and some have been translated into other languages, including Spanish, Chinese,
and Greek.
A year before his retirement in 2003, after 41 years of full-time teaching, Professor
Nyhoff was awarded the Presidential Award for Exemplary Teaching, Calvin College’s
highest faculty honor. Since retirement, he has continued instructing part-time, teaching
sections of “Applied C++,” a two-credit course required of all engineering students and
also taken by several science students. This textbook is the result of preliminary versions
used in that course over several semesters.

xiii
This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 1

Introduction to Computing

Contents
1.1 Computing Systems 2
1.2 Computer Organization 14
Exercises 20

I wish these calculations had been executed by steam.


Charles Babbage

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work
of one extraordinary man.
Elbert Hubbard

Where a computer like the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and
weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and
weigh only 1-1/2 tons.
Popular Mechanics (March 1949)

640K ought to be enough for anyone.


Bill Gates (1981)

So IBM has equipped all XTs with what it considers to be the minimum gear for a
serious personal computer. Now the 10-megabyte disk and the 128K of memory are
naturals for a serious machine.
Peter Norton (1983)

1
2   ◾   Programming in C++ for Engineering and Science

T he modern electronic computer is one of the most important products of the twen-
tieth century. It is an essential tool in many areas, including business, industry, govern-
ment, science, and education; indeed, it has touched nearly every aspect of our lives. The
impact of the twentieth-century information revolution brought about by the development of
high-speed computing systems has been nearly as widespread as the impact of the nineteenth-
century industrial revolution. In this chapter we begin with some background by describing
computing systems, their main components, and how information is stored in them.
Early computers were very difficult to program. In fact, programming some of the earli-
est computers consisted of designing and building circuits to carry out the computations
required to solve each new problem. Later, computer instructions could be coded in a lan-
guage that the machine could understand. But these codes were very cryptic, and pro-
gramming was therefore very tedious and error prone. Computers would not have gained
widespread use if it had not been for the development of high-level programming lan-
guages that made it possible to enter instructions using an English-like syntax.
Fortran, C, C++, Java, and Python are some of the languages that are used extensively in
engineering and scientific applications. This text will focus on C++ but will also describe
some properties of its parent language, C, noting features that these two languages have in
common, as well as their differences.

1.1 Computing Systems


Four important concepts have shaped the history of computing:

1. The mechanization of arithmetic


2. The stored program
3. The graphical user interface
4. The computer network

This section briefly describes a few of the important events and devices that have imple-
mented these concepts. Additional information can be found on the website for this book
described in the preface.

1.1.1 Machines to Do Arithmetic


One of the earliest “personal calculators” was the abacus (Figure 1.1a), with movable beads
strung on rods to count and to do calculations. Although its exact origin is unknown, the
abacus was used by the Chinese perhaps 3000 to 4000 years ago and is still used today
throughout Asia. Early merchants used the abacus in trading transactions. The ancient
British stone monument Stonehenge (Figure 1.1b), located near Salisbury, England, was
built between 1900 and 1600 BC and, evidently, was used to predict the changes of the
seasons. In the twelfth century, a Persian teacher of mathematics in Baghdad, Muhammad
ibn-Musa al-Khowarizm, developed some of the first step-by-step procedures for doing
computations. The word algorithm, used for such procedures, is derived from his name.

K11207.indb 2 6/15/12 10:06 AM


Introduction to Computing   ◾   3

(a)

(b)

(c)

Figure 1.1 (a) Abacus. (Image courtesy of the Computer History Museum.) (b) Stonehenge.
(c) Slide rule.

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4   ◾   Programming in C++ for Engineering and Science

The English mathematician William Oughtred invented a circular slide rule in the early
1600s, and more modern ones (Figure 1.1c) were used by engineers and scientists through
the 1950s and into the 1960s to do rapid approximate computations.
In 1642, the young French mathematician Blaise Pascal invented one of the first mechan-
ical adding machines to help his father with calculating taxes. This Pascaline (Figure 1.2a)
was a digital calculator because it represented numerical information as discrete digits, as
opposed to a graduated scale like that used in analog instruments of measurement such
as slide rules and nondigital thermometers. Each digit was represented by a gear that
had 10 different positions (a ten-state device) so that it could “count” from 0 through 9
and, upon reaching 10, would reset to 0 and advance the gear in the next column so as to
represent the action of “carrying” to the next digit. In 1673, the German mathematician
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz invented an improved mechanical calculator (Figure 1.2b)
that also used a system of gears and dials to do calculations. However, it was more reliable
and accurate than the Pascaline and could perform all four of the basic arithmetic opera-
tions of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. A number of other mechanical
­calculators followed that further refined Pascal’s and Leibniz’s designs, and by the end of
the nineteenth century, these calculators had become important tools in science, business,
and commerce.

1.1.2 The Stored Program Concept


The fundamental idea that distinguishes computers from calculators is the concept of a
stored program that controls the computation. A program is a sequence of instructions
that the computer follows to solve some problem. An income tax form is a good analogy.
Although a calculator can be a useful tool in the process, computing taxes involves much
more than arithmetic. To produce the correct result, one must execute the form’s precise
sequence of steps of writing numbers down (storage), looking numbers up (retrieval), and
computation to produce the correct result.
The stored program concept also gives the computer its amazing versatility. Unlike most
other machines, which are engineered to mechanize a single task, a computer can be pro-
grammed to perform many different tasks. Although its hardware is designed for a very
specific task—the mechanization of arithmetic—computer software programs enable the
computer to perform a wide variety of tasks, from navigational control of the space shuttle
to word processing to musical composition.

(a) (b)

Figure 1.2 (a) Pascaline. (b) Leibnitz’s calculator. (Images courtesy of the Computer History
Museum.)

K11207.indb 4 6/15/12 10:06 AM


Introduction to Computing   ◾   5

The Jacquard loom (Figure 1.3a), invented in 1801 by the Frenchman Joseph Marie
Jacquard, is an early example of a stored program automatically controlling a hardware
device. Holes punched in metal cards directed the action of this loom: a hole punched in
one of the cards would enable its corresponding thread to come through and be incorpo-
rated into the weave at a given point in the process; the absence of a hole would exclude
an undesired thread. To change to a different weaving pattern, the operator of this loom
would simply switch to another set of cards. Jacquard’s loom is thus one of the first exam-
ples of a programmable machine, and many later computers would make similar use of
punched cards.

(a) (b)

(c)

Figure 1.3 (a) Jacquard Loom. (Image courtesy of the Computer History Museum.) (b) Charles
Babbage. (c) Difference Engine.

K11207.indb 5 6/15/12 10:06 AM


6   ◾   Programming in C++ for Engineering and Science

The English mathematician Charles Babbage (1792–1871) (Figure 1.3b) combined the
two fundamental concepts of mechanized calculation and stored program control. In
1822, supported by the British government, he began work on a machine that he called the
Difference Engine (Figure 1.3c). Comprised of a system of gears, the Difference Engine was
designed to compute polynomials for preparing mathematical tables.
Babbage abandoned this effort and began the design of a much more sophisticated
machine that he called his Analytical Engine (Figure 1.4a). It was to have over 50,000 com-
ponents, and its operation was to be far more versatile and fully automatic, controlled by
programs stored on punched cards, an idea based on Jacquard’s earlier work. Although
this machine was not built during his lifetime, it is an important part of the history of
computing because many of the concepts of its design are used in modern computers.
For this reason, Babbage is sometimes called the “Father of Computing.” Ada Augusta
(Figure 1.4b), Lord Byron’s daughter, was one of the few people other than Babbage who
understood the Analytical Engine’s design. This enabled her to develop “programs” for the
machine, and for this reason she is sometimes called “the first programmer.” In the 1980s,
the programming language Ada was named in her honor.

(a)

(b)

Figure 1.4 (a) Analytical Engine. (b) Ada Augusta.

K11207.indb 6 6/15/12 10:06 AM


Introduction to Computing   ◾   7

During the next 100 years, the major significant event was the invention by Herman
Hollerith of an electric tabulating machine (Figure 1.5a) that could tally census statistics
stored on punched cards. This was noteworthy because the U.S. Census Bureau feared it
would not be possible to complete the 1890 census before the next one was to be taken, but
Hollerith’s machine enabled it to be completed in 2-1/2 years. The Hollerith Tabulating
Company later merged with other companies to form the International Business Machines
(IBM) Corporation in 1924.
The development of electromechanical computing devices continued at a rapid pace for
the next few decades. These included the “Z” machines, developed by the German engineer
Konrad Zuse in the 1930s, which used binary arithmetic instead of decimal so that two-
state devices could be used instead of ten-state devices. Some of his later machines replaced

(a)

(b)

Figure 1.5 (a) Hollerith’s tabulating machine. (b) Harvard Mark I. (Images courtesy of the
Computer History Museum.)

K11207.indb 7 6/15/12 10:06 AM


8   ◾   Programming in C++ for Engineering and Science

mechanical relays with vacuum tubes. Zuse also designed a high-level programming lan-
guage called Plankalkül. World War II also spurred the development of computing devices,
including the Collosus computers developed by Alan Turing and a British team to break
codes generated by Germany’s Enigma machine. The best-known computer built before
1945 was probably the Harvard Mark I (Figure 1.5b). Like Zuse’s “Z” machines, it was
driven by electromechanical relay technology. Repeating much of the work of Babbage,
Howard Aiken and others at IBM constructed this large, automatic, general-purpose, elec-
tromechanical calculator, sponsored by the U.S. Navy and intended to compute mathemat-
ical and navigational tables.
In 1944, Grace Murray Hopper (1907–1992) began work as a coder—what we today
would call a programmer—for the Mark I. Later, while working on its successor, the
Mark II, she found one of the first computer “bugs”—an actual bug stuck in one of the
thousands of relays.1 To this day, efforts to find the cause of errors in programs are still
referred to as “debugging.” In the late 1950s, “Grandma COBOL,” as she has affection-
ately been called, developed the FLOW-MATIC language, which was the basis for COBOL
(COmmon Business-Oriented Language), a widely-used programming language for busi-
ness applications.
John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry developed the first fully electronic binary computer
(Figure 1.6a), the ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer), at Iowa State University during 1937–
1942. It introduced the ideas of binary arithmetic, regenerative memory, and logic circuits.
Unfortunately, because the ABC was never patented and others failed at the time to see
its utility, it took three decades before Atanasoff and Berry received recognition for this
remarkable technology. Until then, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer,
better known as the ENIAC (Figure 1.6b), bore the title of the first fully electronic computer.
The designers, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, began work on it in 1943 at the Moore
School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. When it was completed in 1946,
this 30-ton machine had 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, and 5 million soldered
joints, and consumed 160 kilowatts of electrical power. Stories are told of how the lights in
Philadelphia dimmed when the ENIAC was operating. This extremely large machine could
multiply numbers approximately 1000 times faster than the Mark I, but it was quite limited
in its applications and was used primarily by the Army Ordnance Department to calculate
firing tables and trajectories for various types of artillery shells. Eckert and Mauchly later
left the University of Pennsylvania to form the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation,
which built the UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer). Started in 1946 and completed
in 1951, it was the first commercially available computer designed for both scientific and
business applications. The UNIVAC achieved instant fame partly due to its correct (albeit
not believed) prediction on national television of the election of President Eisenhower in
the 1952 U.S. presidential election, based on 5% of the returns.
The instructions that controlled the ENIAC’s operation were entered into the machine by
rewiring some of the computer’s circuits. This complicated process was very time-consuming,
sometimes taking a number of people several days; during this time, the computer was idle.

1 This bug has been preserved in the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution.

K11207.indb 8 6/15/12 10:06 AM


Introduction to Computing   ◾   9

(a)

(b)

Figure 1.6 (a) The ABC. (b) ENIAC. (U.S. Army photo. Image courtesy of the Computer History
Museum.)
In other early computers, the instructions were stored outside the machine on punched cards
or some other medium, and were transferred into the machine one at a time for interpretation
and execution.
It must be pointed out, however, that although men had built the machine, it was women
who learned how to make it work to solve mathematical problems that would have taken
hours by hand (Figure 1.7). And there were thousands of women doing similar work all
across the United States. A documentary called Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of
World War II that debuted in 2010 acknowledges their important work.2

2 http://www.topsecretrosies.com/Top_Secret_Rosies/Home.html

K11207.indb 9 6/15/12 10:06 AM


10   ◾   Programming in C++ for Engineering and Science

Figure 1.7 Men built the ENIAC, but women made it work. (U.S. Army photo.)

In 1945, Princeton mathematician John von Neumann wrote First Draft of a Report on the
EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) in which he described a scheme
that required program instructions to be stored internally before execution. This led to
his being credited as the inventor of the stored-program concept. The architectural design
he described is still known as the von Neumann architecture. The advantage of executing
instructions from a computer’s memory rather than directly from a mechanical input
device is that it eliminates time that the computer must spend waiting for instructions.
Instructions can be processed more rapidly and, more importantly, they can be modified
by the computer itself while computations are taking place. The introduction of this scheme
to computer architecture was crucial to the development of general-purpose computers.
The actual physical components used in constructing a computer system are its hard-
ware. Several generations of computers can be identified by the type of hardware used. The
ENIAC and UNIVAC are examples of first-generation computers, which are character-
ized by their extensive use of vacuum tubes. Advances in electronics brought changes in
computing systems, and in 1958 IBM introduced the first of the second-generation com-
puters, the IBM 7090. These computers were built between 1959 and 1965 and used transis-
tors in place of vacuum tubes. Consequently, these computers were smaller, required less
power, generated far less heat, and were more reliable than their predecessors. They were
also less expensive, as illustrated by the introduction of the first minicomputer in 1963,
the PDP-8, which sold for $18,000, in contrast with earlier computers whose six-digit price
tags limited their sales to large companies. The third-generation computers that followed
used integrated circuits and introduced new techniques for better system utilization, such
as multiprogramming and time sharing. The IBM System/360 introduced in 1964 is com-
monly accepted as the first of this generation of computers. Computers from the 1980s
on, called fourth-generation computers, use very large-scale integrated circuits (VLSI) on
silicon chips and other microelectronic advances to shrink their size and cost still more
while enlarging their capabilities.
The first chip was the 4004 chip (Figure 1.8) designed by Intel’s Ted Hoff, giving birth to
the microprocessor, which marked the beginning of the fourth generation of computers.

K11207.indb 10 6/15/12 10:06 AM


Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
one cannot shoot them. In Australia they are said to be not much
wiser than baboons—one wishes they were altogether baboons, or
altogether men. In New Zealand they are, upon the whole, a docile,
simple people. The missionaries are schooling them as they would
little children. A very simple people! They had heard of horses and of
horsemanship; it was some tradition handed down from their great
discoverer, Captain Cook. When lately some portly swine were
landed on the island, they concluded these were the famous horses
men rode upon in England. "They rode two of them to death."
Probably, by that time, they suspected there was some error in the
case.
Hapless aborigines! How it comes to pass we cannot stop to inquire,
but certain it is they never prosper in any union with the white man.
They get his gin, they get his gunpowder, and, here and there, some
travesty of his religion. This is the best bargain they make where
they are most fortunate. The two first gifts of the white man, at all
events, add nothing to the amenity of character, and happen to be
precisely the gifts they could most vividly appreciate. Our civilisation
seems to have no other effect than to break up the sort of rude
harmony which existed in their previous barbarism. They imitate,
they do not emulate; what they see of us they do not understand.
That ridiculous exhibition, so often described, which they make with
our costume—a naked man with hat and feathers stuck upon his
head; or, better still, converting a pair of leathers into a glistening
helmet, the two legs hanging down at the back, where the flowing
horse-hair is wont to fall—is a perfect emblem of what they have
gained in mind and character from our civilisation.
These poor New Zealanders are losing—what think you says Dr
Dieffenbach?—their digestion; getting dyspeptic. The missionaries
have tamed them down; they eat more, fight less, and die faster.
One of the "brethren," not the least intelligent to our mind, has
introduced cricket as a substitute for their war-dances and other
fooleries they had abolished.
When we want the soil which such aborigines are loosely tenanting,
we must, we presume, displace them. There is no help for it. But, in
all other cases, we could wish the white man would leave these dark
children of the earth alone. If there exists another Tahiti, such as it
was when Cook discovered it, such as we read of it under the old
name of Otaheite, we hope that some eternal mist, drawn in a wide
circle round the island, will shroud it from all future navigators. Were
we some great mariner, and had discovered such an island, and had
eaten of the bread-fruit of the hospitable native, and reclined under
their peaceful trees, and seen their youths and maidens crowned
with green boughs, sporting like fishes in their beautiful clear seas,
no mermaid happier—we should know but of one way to prove our
gratitude—to close our lips for ever on the discovery we had made.
If there exist in some untraversed region of the ocean another such
spot, and if there are still any genii, or jins, or whatever sea-fairies
may be called, left behind in the world, we beseech of them to
protect it from all prying circumnavigators. Let them raise
bewildering mists, or scare the helmsman with imaginary breakers,
or sit cross-legged upon the binnacle, and bewitch the compass—
anyhow let them protect their charge. We could almost believe, from
this moment, in the existence of such spirits or genii, having found
so great a task for them.
We have no space to go back to other graver topics connected with
colonisation which we have passed on our road. On one topic we
had not, certainly, intended to be altogether silent. But it is perhaps
better as it is; for the subject of transportation is so extensive, and
so complicate, and so inevitably introduces the whole review of what
we call secondary punishments—of our penal code, in short—that it
were preferable to treat it apart. It would be very unsatisfactory
merely to state a string of conclusions, without being able to throw
up any defences against those objections which, in a subject so full
of controversy, they would be sure to provoke.
In fine, we trust to no ideals, no theory or art of colonisation.
Neither do we make any extraordinary or novel demands on
Government. A great work is going on, but it will be best performed
by simple means. We ask from the Government that it should survey
and apportion the land, and secure its possession to the honest
emigrant, and that it should delegate to the new settlement such
powers of self-government as are necessary to its internal
improvement. These, however, are important duties, and embrace
much. The rest, with the exception of such liberality as may be
thought advisable, in addition to the fund raised by the sale of waste
land, for the despatch and outfit of the poor labourer or artisan—the
rest must be left to the free spirit of Englishmen, whether going
single or in groups and societies.
THE REACTION, OR FOREIGN
CONSERVATISM.
Boston, February 1849.
It is the sage remark of Montesquieu, that, under a government of
laws, liberty consists simply in the power of doing what we ought to
will, and in freedom from any constraint to do what we ought not to
will. The true conservative not only accepts this maxim, but he gives
it completeness by prescribing a pure religion as the standard of
what a people ought to will, and as the only sober guide of
conscience. And this may be added as a corollary, that so long as a
free people is substantially Christian, their conscience coinciding with
absolute right, their liberty, so far as affected by popular causes, will
preserve itself from fatal disorders. Such a people, possessed of
liberty, will know it and be content. But where the popular
conscience is morbid, they may have liberty without knowing it.
They will fancy that they ought to will what they are not permitted
to will, and the most wholesome restraints of wise laws will appear
tyrannical. For such a people there can be no cure, till they are
restored to a healthy conscience. A despotism successfully
established over them, and then moderately maintained, and
benevolently administered, is the only thing that can save them from
self-destruction.
I was not writing at random, then, my Basil, when I said in my last
letter that the first want of France is a national conscience. As a
nation, the French lack the moral sense. What sign of moral life have
they shown for the last fifty years? The root of bitterness in the body
politic of France, is the astonishing infidelity of the people. Whatever
be the causes, the fact is not to be denied: the land whose crown
was once, by courtesy, most Christian, must draw on courtesy and
charity too, if it be now called Christian at all. The spirit of unbelief is
national. It is the spirit of French literature—of the French press—of
the French academy—of the French senate; I had almost added of
the French church; and if I hesitate, it is not so much because I
doubt the corrupting influences of the French priesthood, as because
they are no longer Gallican priests, but simply the emissaries of
Ultramontanism. There is no longer a French church. The Revolution
made an end of that. When Napoleon, walking at Malmaison, heard
the bells of Ruel, he was overpowered with a sense of the value of
such associations as they revived in his own heart, and forthwith he
opened the churches which had so long been the sepulchres of a
nation's faith, convinced that they served a purpose in government,
if only as a cheap police. He opened the churches, but he could not
restore the church of France. He could do no more than enthrone
surviving Ultramontanism in her ancient seats, and that by a
manœuvre, which made it a creature and a slave of his ambition.
When it revolted, he talked of Gallican liberties, but only for political
purposes. Nor did the Restoration do any better. The church of St
Louis was defunct. Gallican immunities were indeed asserted on
paper; but, in effect, the Jesuits gained the day. The Orleans
usurpation carried things further; for the priesthood, severed from
the state, became more Ultramontane from apparent necessity, and
lost, accordingly, their feeble hold on the remaining respect of the
French people. Who was not startled, when the once devout
Lamartine talked of "the new Christianity" of Liberty and Equality
over the ruins of the Orleans dynasty, and thus betrayed the
irreligion into which he had been repelled by the Christianity of
French ecclesiastics! Thus always uncongenial to the national
character, Ultramontanism has coated, like quicksilver, and eaten
away those golden liberties which St Louis consecrated his life to
preserve, and with which have perished the life and power of
Christianity in France.
The history of France is emphatically a religious history. Every
student must be struck with it. To understand even the history of its
court, one must get at least an outline of what is meant by
Jansenism and Molinism, and Ultramontanism, and the whole tissue
of isms which they have created. No historian gives us an exemption
from this amount of polemical information. The school of Michelet is
as forward as that of de Maistre, in claiming a "religious mission" for
France among the nations; and de Stael and Chateaubriand are
impressed with the same idea. Her publicists, as well as her
statesmen, have been always, in their own way, theologians; and,
from Louis IX. to Louis XVI., the spirit of theology was, in some form
or other, the spirit of every reign. Not only the Mazarins, but the
Pompadours also, have made religion part of their craft; and religion
became so entirely political under Louis XV., that irreligion was easily
made political in its stead. In the court of France, in fact, theology
has been the common trade; the trade of Condé and of Guise, of
Huguenot and Papist, of Jansenist and Jesuit, of philosopher and
poet, of harlots, and almost of lap-dogs. Even Robespierre must
legislate upon the "consoling principle of an Etre Suprême," and
Napoleon elevates himself into "the eldest son of the church." "A
peculiar characteristic of this monarchy," says de Maistre, "is that it
possesses a certain theocratic element, special to itself, which has
given it fourteen centuries of duration." This element has given its
colour to reigns and revolutions alike; and if one admit the necessity
of religion to the perpetuity of a state, it deserves our attention, in
the light of whatever contending parties have advanced upon the
subject.
Let us begin with the revolutionists themselves. In the month of
June 1844, Monsieur Quinet, "of the college of France," stood in his
lecture-room, venting his little utmost against the "impassioned
leaven of Reaction," which he declared to be fermenting in French
society. His audience was literally the youth of nations; for, as I
gather from his oratory, it embraced not only his countrymen, but,
besides them, Poles, Russians, Italians, Germans, Hungarians,
Spaniards, Portuguese, and a sprinkling of negroes. Upon this
interesting assembly, in which black spirits and white must have
maintained the proportion, and something of the appearance, of
their corresponding ebony and ivory in the key-board of a
pianoforte, and which he had tuned to his liking by a series of
preparatory exercises, he played, as a grand finale, a most brilliant
experimental quick-step, which satisfied him that every chord
vibrated in harmony with his own sweet voice. He was closing his
instructions, and addressed his pupils, not as disciples, but as
friends. His great object seems to have been to convince them of
their own importance, as the illuminated school of a new gospel of
which he is himself the dispenser, and through which, he promised
them, they would become, with him, the regenerators of the world.
Having fully indoctrinated them with his new Christianity, it was
necessary to work them into fury against the old. He had already
established the unity of politics and religion; he had shown, very
artfully, that Christianity had identified itself with Ultramontanism,
and that France must perish if it should triumph; and he had only to
convince them of danger from that quarter, to influence the
combustible spirits of his credulous hearers to the heat which his
purpose required. This he did by bellowing Reaction, and
anathematising Schlegel and de Maistre.
You were mistaken then, my Basil, in supposing this word Reaction
altogether a bugbear, and in understanding it with reference only to
the counter-spirit in favour of legitimacy, which has been generated
by the revolution of last year. You see it was the hobgoblin of a
certain class of fanatics, long before Louis Philippe had received his
notice to quit. It was an "impassioned leaven" in French society five
years ago, in the heated imagination, or else in the artful theory, of
Quinet. What was really the case? There was, in his sober opinion,
as much danger from the reaction at that time as from the Great
Turk, and no more. He merely used it as an academic man-of-straw
to play at foils with. He held it up to contempt as an exploded folly,
and then pretended it was a living danger, only to increase his own
reputation for daring, and to quicken the development of antagonist
principles. He little dreamed the manikin would come to life, and
show fight for the Bourbons and legitimacy. He cried Wolf for his
own purposes, and the actual barking of the pack must be a terrible
retribution! The reaction of 1848 must have come upon the
professors like doomsday. I can conceive of him, at present, only as
of Friar Bacon, when he stumbled upon the discovery of gunpowder.
A moment since, he stood in his laboratory compounding the
genuine elixir of life, and assuring his gaping disciples of the success
of his experiment; but there has been a sudden detonation, and if
the professor has miraculously escaped, it is only to find chaos come
again, his admiring auditors blown to atoms, and nothing remaining
of his philosophical trituration, except his smutty self, and a very bad
smell. I speak of him as the personification of his system. Personally,
he has been a gainer by the revolution. Guizot put him out of his
place, and the Republic has put him back; but the Reaction is upon
him, and his theories are already resolved into their original gases.
"The college of France" may soon come to a similar dissolution.
Let us look for a while at foreign conservatism through Monsieur
Quinet's glasses. I have introduced you to de Maistre, and de
Maistre is to him what the Pope was to Luther. Quinet is, in his own
way, another reformer; in fact, he announces his system, in its
relations to Protestantism, as another noon risen upon mid-day. The
theological character of foreign politics is as prominent in his writings
as in those of his antagonists. Thus, to illustrate the character of the
French Revolution, he takes us to the Council of Trent; and to
demolish French Tories, he attacks Ultramontanism. This is indeed
philosophical, considering the actual history of Europe, and the
affinities of its Conservative party. Action and reaction are always
equal. The cold infidelity of Great Britain was met by the cool reason
of Butler, and sufficiently counteracted by even the frigid apologies
of Watson, and the mechanical faith of Paley. But the passionate
unbelief of the Encyclopædists produced the unbalanced credulity of
the reaction; and Diderot, d'Alembert, and Voltaire, have almost, by
fatality, involved the noble spirits of their correctors in that
wrongheaded habit of believing, which shows its vigorous weakness
in the mild Ballanche and the wavering Lamennais, and develops all
its weak vigour in de Maistre and de Bonald. Thus it happens that
Mons. Quinet gives to his published lectures the title of
Ultramontanism; for he prefers to meet his antagonists on the
untenable field of their superstition, and there to win a virtual victory
over their philosophical and political wisdom. His book has reached
me through the translation of Mr Cocks,[2] who has kindly favoured
the literature of England with several similar importations from "the
College of France," and who seems to be the chosen mouthpiece of
the benevolent author himself, in addressing the besotted self-
sufficiency of John Bull. So far, indeed, as it discusses
Ultramontanism in itself, the work may have its use. It shows, with
some force and more vociferation, that it has been the death of
Spain, and of every state in which it has been allowed to work; and
that, moreover, it has been the persevering foe of law, of science,
and of morality. This is a true bill; but of him, as of his master
Michelet, it may be said with emphasis, Tout, jusqu' à la vérité,
trompe dans ses écrits. It does not follow, as he would argue, that
political wisdom and Christian truth fall with Ultramontanism; nor
does he prove it be so, by proving that de Maistre and others have
thought so. The school of the Reaction are convicted of a mistake,
into which their masters in Great Britain never fell. That is all that
Quinet has gained, though he crows lustily for victory, and proceeds
to construct his own political religion, as if Christianity were
confessedly defunct. As to the style of the Professor, so far as I can
judge it from a tumid and verbose translation, it is not wanting in
the hectic brilliancy of rhetoric raised to fever-heat, or of French run
mad. Even its argument, I doubt not, sounded logical and
satisfactory, when its slender postulate of truth was set off with
oratorical sophistry, enforced with professorial shrugs of the
shoulders, or driven home with conclusive raps upon the auxiliary
tabatière. But the inanimate logic, as it lies coffined in the version of
Mr Cocks, looks very revolting. In fact, stripped of its false
ornament, all its practical part is simply the revolutionism of the
Chartists. Worse stuff was never declaimed to a subterranean
conclave of insurgent operatives by a drunken Barabbas, with Tom
Paine for his text, and a faggot of pikes for his rostrum. The results
have been too immediate for even Mons. Quinet's ambition. From
hearing sedition in the "College of France," his motley and party-
coloured audience has broken up to enforce it behind the barricades.
They turned revolutionists against reaction in posse, and reaction in
esse is the very natural consequence.
"Every nation, like every individual, has received a certain mission,
which it must fulfil. France exercises over Europe a real magistracy,
which cannot be denied, and she was at the head of its religious
system." So says de Maistre, and so far his bitter enemy is agreed.
But, says de Maistre, "She has shamefully abused her mission; and
since she has used her influence to contradict her vocation, and to
debauch the morals of Europe, it is not surprising that she is
restored to herself by terrible remedies." Here speaks the spirit of
Reaction, and Quinet immediately shows fight. In his view she has
but carried out her vocation. The Revolution was a glorious outbreak
towards a new universal principle. In the jargon of his own sect, "it
was a revolution differing from all preceding revolutions, ancient or
modern, precisely in this, that it was the deliverance of a nation from
the bonds and limits of her church, into the spirit of universality."
The spirit of the national church, he maintains, had become
Ultramontane; had lost its hold on men's minds; had made way for
the ascendency of philosophy, and had tacitly yielded the sceptre of
her sway over the intelligence and the conscience to Rousseau and
Voltaire. Nor does the Professor admit that subsequent events have
restored that sceptre. On the contrary, he appeals to his auditors in
asserting that the priesthood have ceased to guide the French
conscience. His audience applauds, and the enraptured Quinet
catches up the response like an auctioneer. He is charmed with his
young friends. He is sure the reaction will never seduce them into
travelling to heaven by the old sterile roads. As for the
réactionnaires, no language can convey his contempt for them.
"After this nation," says he, "has been communing with the spirit of
the universe upon Sinai, conversing face to face with God, they
propose to her to descend from her vast conceptions, and to creep,
crestfallen, into the spirit of sect." Thus he contrasts the catholicity
of Pantheism with the catholicity of Romanism; and thus, with the
instinct of a bulldog, does he fasten upon the weak points of foreign
Conservatism, or hold it by the nose, a baited victim, in spite of its
massive sinews and its generous indignation. This plan is a cunning
one. He sinks the Conservative principles of the Reaction, and gives
prominence only to its Ultramontanism. He shows that modern
Ultramontanism is the creature of the Council of Trent, and reviews
the history of Europe as connected with that Council. He proves the
pernicious results of that Council in every state which has
acknowledged it; shows that not preservation but ruin has been its
inevitable effect upon national character; and so congratulates
France for having broken loose from it in the great Revolution. He
then deprecates its attempted resuscitation by Schlegel and de
Maistre, and, falling back upon the "religious vocation" of France,
exhorts his auditors to work it out in the spirit of his own evangel.
This new gospel, it is almost needless to add, is that detestable
impiety which was so singularly religious in the revolution of last
February, profaning the name of the Redeemer to sanctify its brutal
excesses, and pretending to find in the spirit of his gospel the
elements of its furious Liberty and Equality. In the true sentiment of
that revolution, an ideal portrait of the Messiah is elaborately
engraved for the title-page of Mr Cock's translation! So a French
quack adorns his shop with a gilded bust of Hippocrates! It is a
significant hint of the humble origin of a system which, it must be
understood, owes its present dignity and importance entirely to the
genius of Mons. Quinet.
That the Reaction is thus identified with Ultramontanism, is a fact
which its leading spirits would be the very last to deny. The necessity
of religion to the prosperity of France is their fundamental principle;
and religion being, in their minds, inseparable from Romanism, they
will not see its defects; and their blind faith, like chloroform, makes
them absolutely insensible to the sharp point of the weak spear with
which Quinet pierces them. And it is but fair to suppose that Quinet
and his colleagues are equally honest in considering Christianity and
Ultramontanism synonymous. They see that the old religion of
France has become, historically, a corrupt thing, and they propose a
fresh Christianity in its place. Of one thing I am sure—they do not
over-estimate the political importance of the Council of Trent. Let it
be fairly traced in its connexions with kingdoms, with science, with
letters, and with the conscience of nations, and it will be seen that
Quinet is not far from correct, in taking it as the turning-point of the
history of Europe. It produced Ultramontanism, or rather changed it
from an abstraction into an organised system; and Ultramontanism,
in its new shape, gave birth to the Jesuits. Christendom saw a new
creed proposed as the bond of unity, and a new race of apostles
propagating it with intrigue and with crime, and, in some places,
with fire and sword. In proportion as the states of Europe
incorporated Ultramontanism with their political institutions, they
withered and perished. Old Romanism was one thing, and modern
Ultramontanism another. Kingdoms that flourished while they were
but Romanised, have perished since they became Tridentine.
Among English writers this distinction has not been generally made.
Coleridge seems to have observed it, and has incidentally employed
it in treating of another subject. But foreign literature is full of it,
either tacitly implied or openly avowed, in different ways.
Ultramontanism is, in Europe, a political and not merely a theological
word,—its meaning results from its history. Before the Tridentine
epoch, the national churches of Europe were still seven candle-
sticks, in which glittered the seven stars of an essential personality
and individual completeness. The "Church of Rome" still meant the
Roman See, and, vast as were its usurpations over the national
churches, it had neither reduced them to absolute unity in theology,
nor absorbed their individuality into its own. The Roman Church, as
we now understand it, was created by the Council of Trent, by a
consolidation of national churches, and the quiet substitution of the
creed of Pius IV. for the ancient creeds, as a test of unity. This fact
explains the position of the Reformed before and after that
extraordinary assembly. Till its final epoch, they had never fully
settled their relations to the Papal See. The history of England is full
of illustrations of this fact. Old Grostete of Lincoln spurned the
authority of the Pope, but continued in all his functions as an English
bishop till his death, in the thirteenth century. Wycliffe, in the
fourteenth, was still more remarkable for resisting the papal
pretensions, yet he died in the full exercise of his pastoral office,
while elevating the host at Childermas. Henry VIII. himself had the
benefit of masses for his pious soul at Notre Dame; and his friend
Erasmus lived on easy terms with the Reformed, and yet never
broke with the Vatican. Even the English prayer-book, under
Elizabeth, was sanctioned by papal authority, with the proviso of her
recognition of the supremacy, and for twelve years of her reign the
popish party lived in communion with the Reformed Church of
England. During all this period the dogmas of popes were fearlessly
controverted by Cisalpine theologians, who still owned their
supremacy in a qualified sense, and who boldly appealed to a future
council against the decisions of the See of Rome. Ultramontanism
had then, indeed, its home beyond the mountains, and when it
came bellowing over its barrier, it was often met as "the Tinchel
cows the game." But modern Ultramontanism is another thing. It is
an organised system, swallowing up the nationalities of constituent
churches, and giving them the absolute unity of an individual Roman
church, in which Jesuitism is the circulating life-blood, and the Italian
consistory the heart and head together. Such was the prodigy
hatched during the seventeen years of Tridentine incubation. It
appeared at the close of those interminable sessions, so different
from all that had been anticipated, that it startled all Europe. It had
quietly changed everything, and made Rome the sole church of
Southern Europe. Quinet has not failed to present this fact very
strongly. "That Council," says he, "had not, like its predecessors, its
roots in all nations; it did not assemble about it the representatives
of all Christendom. Its spirit was to give full sanction to the idea,
which certain popes of the middle ages had established, of their pre-
eminence over œcumenical assemblies. Thenceforward, what had
been the effect of a particular genius, became the very constitution
of the church. The great adroitness consisted in making the change
without anywhere speaking of it. The church which was before
tempered by assemblies convoked from all the earth, became an
absolute monarchy. From that moment the ecclesiastical world is
silent. The meeting of councils is closed, no more discussions, no
more solemn deliberations; everything is regulated by bulls, letters,
and ordinances. Popedom usurps all Christendom; the book of life is
shut; for three centuries not one page has been added." One would
think the school of the Reaction would feel the force of facts so
efficiently urged, even in spite of their towering disgust at the
purposes for which they are employed. In fact, their own maxims
may be turned against them with great power, in this matter of
Ultramontanism. De Maistre, in his argument for unwritten
constitutions, speaks of the creeds of the church as furnishing no
exception to his rule; for these, he argues, are not codes of belief,
but they partake the nature of hymns—they have rhythmical beauty,
they are chanted in solemn services, they are confessed to God upon
the harp and organ. Now this is indeed true of those three ancient
creeds which are still chanted in the service of the Church of
England; but the creed of Pius IV., which is the distinguishing creed
of the Roman church, is absolutely nothing else than a code of
belief, and is the only creed in Christendom which lacks that
rhythmical glory which he considers a test of truth! Even Quinet
notices this liturgic impotence of the Ultramontane religion. "The
Roman church," he says, "has lost in literature, together with the
ideal of Christianity, the sentiment of her own poetry. What has
become of the burning accents of Ambrose and Paulinus? Urban
VIII. writes pagan verses to the Cavalier Berni;[3] and instead of
Stabat mater or Salutaris hostia, the princes of the church compose
mythological sonnets, at the very moment when Luther is thundering
Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, that Te Deum of the Reformation."
No wonder France was reluctant to acknowledge a Council which
had thus imposed a new creed on Christendom, and which dictated
a new organisation to the ancient churches of Southern Europe.
While other nations subscribed with artful evasions, she hesitated
and submitted, but gave no formal assent. Rome had come over the
Alps to absorb her, and she was loth to yield her birthright. She
stood long in what Schlegel calls "a disguised half-schism,"
struggling against dissolution, the last lump to melt away in the
Tridentine element. But where now is the church which St Louis left
to France, strong in her anti-papal bulwarks? Where now are those
bulwarks, the labour of his life, and the chief glory of a name which
even Rome has canonised? As for Spain, Ultramontanism was riveted
upon her by the Inquisition, and she is twice dead. One sees no
more the churches of Western Christendom, fortified by Pragmatic
Sanctions, and treated with as younger sisters, even by domineering
Rome! They have disappeared; and the only light that lingers in their
places is the sad sepulchral flame that owes its existence to decay.
Such is Ultramontanism. Follow its history, in connexion with political
events in France, and you cannot fail to charge it with all the
responsibility of French infidelity, and, consequently, of the present
lamentable condition of the nation. Thrice has the spirit of France
been in deadly collision with it—in the fire, in the wind, and in the
earthquake. Its first antagonists were the Huguenots, and over them
it triumphed by the persecutions of Louis XIV., following up the
policy of Catherine de Medicis. It was next confronted by Jansenism
under Louis XV., and that it overcame by intrigue and by ridicule.
Under Louis XVI. it was obliged to meet the atheism of the
Encyclopædists, which it had itself produced, and which terribly
visited upon its head its own infernal inventions. To overwhelm the
Port-Royalists, it had resorted to low caricatures and epigrams, and
to philosophical satires upon their piety. Voltaire took from these the
hint of his first warfare against Christianity. This was first a joke and
a song, and then Ca Ira and A la lanterne; first the popguns of wit,
then the open battery of Ecrasez l'infâme, and then the exploding
mine of revolution. It merely reversed the stratagems of
Ultramontanism, which began in massacre, and finished its triumphs
with a jest; and both together have stamped the nation with its
indelible character of half tiger and half monkey. The origin of such
an issue of infamy cannot be concealed. France owes it all to her
conduct in the crisis of the Reformation. Had the Gallic Church,
under Henry of Navarre, fully copied the example of England, or had
she even carried out her own instincts, repudiating the Council of
Trent, and falling back upon the Pragmatic Sanction for a full
defence of her independence, how different would have been her
history, and that of the monarchy to which she would have proved a
lasting support! Let the difference between Henri Quatre and Louis
Quatorze, between Sully and Richelieu, illustrate the reply. Or it may
be imagined, by comparing the campaigns of Cevennes with the
peaceful mission of Fenelon to the Huguenots of Saintonge. Where
now both church and state appear the mere materials of ambition to
such as Mazarin and Dubois, or where even the purer genius of such
as Bossuet and Massillon is exhibited in humiliating and disgraceful
associations, the places of history might have been adorned by such
bright spirits as were immured at Port-Royal, or such virtue as
sketched the ideal kingdom of Télémaque, and rendered illustrious a
life of uncomplaining sorrow in the pastoral chair of Cambray. Where
the court can boast one Bourdaloue, there would have been, beside
him, not a few like Pascal; and in the rural parishes there would
have been many such as Arnauld and Nicole, training in simple piety
and loyal worth the successive generations of a contented people. As
for the palace, it would never have been haunted by the dark spirit
of Jesuitism, which has so often hid itself in the robes of royalty, and
reigned in the sovereign's name; and the people would have known
it only as a fearful thing beyond the Pyrenees, whose ear was always
in the confessional, and whose hand was ever upon the secret wires
of the terrible Inquisition. The capital would have been a citadel of
law, and the kingdom still a Christian state. Its history might have
lacked a "Grand Monarque," and certainly a Napoleon; but then
there would have been no dragonnades, and possibly no
Dubarrydom; no Encyclopædie, and no Ca Ira! The bell of St
Germain l'Auxerrois would have retained its bloody memory as the
tocsin of St Bartholomew's massacre, but it would never have
sounded its second peal of infamy as the signal for storming the
Tuileries, and for opening those successive vials of avenging woe, in
which France is expiating her follies and her crimes.
Bossuet, in his funeral oration upon Queen Henrietta, unhappily for
his own cause, has challenged a comparison between the histories
of France and England, which, if he were living in our days, he would
hardly renew with pleasure. The Anglican Reformation was rashly
charged by him with all the responsibility of the Great Rebellion; but
facts have proved that revolutions are by no means confined to anti-
papal countries, while history may be safely appealed to by
Englishmen, in deciding as to the kind of religion which has best
encountered the excesses of rebellion, and most effectually cured
the disease. The Anglican Church survived the Great Rebellion, with
fidelity to itself: the Gallic Church perished in the Revolution. Before
the vainglorious taunt of Bossuet had passed from the memory of
living men, all those causes were at work in France, which bred the
whirlwind of infidelity, and which insured a revolution, not of
fanaticism, but of atheism. The real power of the two churches, in
moulding the character of a people, and retaining the loyalty of its
noblest intellect, became, then, singularly apparent. In France, it
was superstition to believe in God. In France, philosophers were
afraid to own a great First Cause. In France, noblemen were
ashamed to confess a conscience. In France, bishops and cardinals
were foremost in apostasy, and claimed their sacerdotal rank only to
become the high-priests of atheistic orgies. It is needless to cite, in
comparison, the conduct of parallel classes during the Great
Rebellion in England; while, at the very moment in which these
things were transacting, the brightest genius in her Imperial
Parliament could proclaim himself not only a believer, but a crusader
for Christianity. It was a noble answer to the ghost of poor Bossuet,
when such a man as Burke, addressing a gentleman of France,
declared the adhesion of England to her Reformed religion to be not
the result of indifference but of zeal; when he proudly contrasted the
intelligent faith of his countrymen with the fanatical impiety of the
French; and when, with a dignity to which sarcasm has seldom
attained, he reminded a nation of atheists, that there was a people,
every whit its peer, which still exulted in the Christian name, and
among whom religion, so far from being relegated to provinces, and
the firesides of peasants, still sat in the first rank of the legislature,
and "reared its mitred front" in the very face of the throne. The
withering rebuke of such a boast must be measured by the standard
of the time when it was given. In Paris, the mitre had just been
made the ornament of an ass, which bore in mockery, upon its back,
the vessels of the holy sacrament, and dragged a Bible at its tail.
Thus the colossal genius of Burke stood before the world, in that war
of elements, trampling the irreligion of France beneath his feet, like
the Archangel thrusting Satan to his bottomless abyss. The spectacle
was not lost. It was that beautiful and sublime exhibition of moral
grandeur that quickened the noblest minds in Europe to imitative
virtue, and produced the school of the Reaction. It was rather the
spirit of British faith, and law, and loyalty, personified in him. The
same spirit had been felt in France before: it had moulded the
genius of Montesquieu, abstractly; but Burke was its mighty
concrete, and he wrote himself like a photograph upon kindred
intellect throughout the world. Before his day, the character of
English liberty had been laboriously studied and mechanically
learned; but he, as its living representative and embodiment, made
himself the procreant author of an intellectual family. I fear you will
regard this as a theory of my own, but I would not have ventured to
say this on my mere surmise. One whose religion identifies him with
Ultramontanism has made the acknowledgment before me. I refer to
the English editor and translator of Schlegel's Philosophy of History.
According to him, Schlegel at Vienna, and Goerres at Munich, were
"the supreme oracles of that illustrious school of liberal
conservatives, which numbered, besides those eminent Germans, a
Baron von Haller in Switzerland, a Viscount de Bonald in France, a
Count Henri de Merode in Belgium, and a Count de Maistre in
Piedmont."[4] From the writings of these great men, in a greater or
less degree, he augurs the future political regeneration of Europe;
and yet, strongly warped as he is away from England, and towards
Rome, as the source of all moral and national good, he does not
conceal the fact that this splendid school of the Reaction was
"founded by our great Burke." My hopes from the writings of these
men are not so sanguine: but, so far as they are true to their
original, they have been already of great service. They may
hereafter be made still more powerful for good; and if, at the same
time, the rising school of Conservatism, which begins to make itself
felt in America, shall impart its wholesome influences to an off-shoot
of England, so vast already, and of such grand importance to the
future, then, and not till then, will be duly estimated the real
greatness of those splendid services which Burke was created to
perform, not for his country only, but for the human race.
Perhaps it could hardly have been otherwise; but it must always be
deplored that the Conservatism of England was reproduced on the
Continent in connexion with the Christianity of Ultramontanism. The
conservatism of de Stael and of Chateaubriand, though repudiated
by the réactionnaires, is indeed worthy of honourable mention, as
their characters will ever be of all admiration; yet it must be owned
to be deficient in force, and by no means executive. It was the
Conservatism of impulse—the Conservatism of genius, but not the
Conservatism of profound philosophy and energetic benevolence.
The spirit that breathes in the Génie du Christianisme is always
beautiful, and often devout, yet it has been justly censured, as
recommending less the truth than the beauty of the religion of Jesus
Christ; and though it doubtless did something to reproduce the
religious sentiment, it seems to have effected nothing in behalf of
religious principle. Its author would have fulfilled a nobler mission
had he taught his countrymen, in sober prose, their radical defects
in morality, and their absolute lack of a conscience. The
Conservatives of the Reaction have at least attempted greater
things. They have bluntly told the French nation that they must
reform; they have set themselves to produce again the believing
spirit: their mistake has been, that they have confounded faith with
superstition, and taken the cause of the Jesuits into the cause of
their country and their God. Nothing could have been more fatal. It
arms against them such characters as Michelet,[5] with his Priests,
Women, and Families, and makes even Quinet formidable with his
lectures on "the Jesuits and Ultramontanism." Yet it must be urged
in their behalf, that they have been pardonably foolish, for they drew
their error with their mother's milk; and when even faith was
ridiculed as credulity, it was an extravagance almost virtuous to rush
into superstition. Such is the dilemma of a good man in Continental
Europe: his choice lies between the extremes of corrupt faith and
philosophic unbelief. This was the misfortune of poor Frederick
Schlegel; and, disgusted with the hollow rationalism of Germany, he
became a Papist, in order to profess himself a Christian. The mistake
was magnanimously made. We cannot but admire the man who eats
the book of Roman infallibility, in his hunger for the bread of
everlasting life. Even Chateaubriand must claim our sympathies on
this ground. Our feelings are with such errorists—our convictions of
truth remain unaltered; and we cannot but lament the fatality which
has thus attended European Conservatism like its shadow, and
exposed it to successful assaults from its foes. I have shown how
they use their opportunity. And no wonder, when this substitution of
Ultramontanism for Christianity has involved de Maistre in an
elaborate defence of the Inquisition—debased the Conservatism of
de Bonald to slavish absolutism;[6] and when true to its deadening
influence upon the conscience, it implicated von Haller in the
infamous perjury which, though committed under the sanction of a
Romish bishop, led to his ignominious expulsion from the sovereign
council at Berne. Chateaubriand has not escaped an infection from
the same atmosphere. It taints his writings. In such a work as the
Génie du Christianisme, denounced as it is by the Ultramontanists
generally, there is much that is not wholesome. The eloquent
champion of faith wields the glaive as stoutly for fables as for eternal
verities. The poet makes beauty drag decay in her train, and ties a
dead corpse to the wings of immortality. Truth itself, in his apology,
though brought out in grand relief, is sculptured on a sepulchre full
of dead men's bones; and, unhappily, while we draw near to
examine the perfection of his ideal, we find ourselves repelled by a
lurking scent of putrefaction.
The career of de Maistre is, in epitome, that of his school. Disgusted
with Jacobinism, and naturally delighting in paradox, it seemed to
afford him relief to avow himself a papist, in an age of atheism. He
was not only the author of the reactionary movement, but his
character was itself the product of Reaction. Driven with his king to
Sardinia, in 1792, by the invasion of Piedmont, his philosophical
contempt for the revolutionists was exhibited in his Considerations
sur la France, from which, in a former letter, I have made so long a
quotation. In this work—in some respects his best—his
Ultramontanism is far from extravagant: and not only his religious
principles as they were then, but also the effect which everything
English was then producing on his mind, is clearly seen in a
comment upon the English Church, which, as it passed his review,
and was printed again in 1817 with no retractation, must be
regarded as somewhat extraordinary. "If ever Christians reunite,"
says he, "as all things make it their interest to do, it would seem that
the movement must take rise in the Church of England. Calvinism
was French work, and consequently an exaggerated production. We
are pushed too far away by the sectarians of so unsubstantial a
religion, and there is no mean by which they may comprehend us:
but the Church of England, which touches us with one hand, touches
with the other a class whom we cannot reach; and although, in a
certain point of view, she may thus appear the butt of two parties,
(as being herself rebellious, though preaching authority,) yet in other
respects she is most precious, and may be considered as one of
those chemical intermèdes, which are capable of producing a union
between elements dissociable in themselves." He seldom shows such
moderation; for the Greek and Anglican churches he specially hates.
In 1804 he was sent ambassador to St Petersburg; and there he
resided till 1817, fulfilling his diplomatic duties with that zeal for his
master, and that devotion to conservative interests, which are the
spirit of his writings. There he published, in 1814, the pithy Essai sur
le principe générateur des Constitutions, in which he reduced to an
abstract form the doctrines of his former treatise on France. His style
is peculiarly relishable, sometimes even sportive; but its main
maxims are laid down with a dictatorial dignity and sternness, which
associate the tractate, in the minds of many, with the writings of
Montesquieu. This essay, so little known in England, has found an
able translator and editor in America, who commends it to his
countrymen as an antidote to those interpretations which are put
upon our constitutional law by the political disciples of Rousseau. I
commend the simple fact to your consideration, as a sign of the
more earnest tone of thinking, on such matters, which is beginning
to be felt among us. The fault of the essay is its practical part, or
those applications into which his growing Ultramontanism diverted
his sound theories. His principles are often capable of being turned
upon himself, as I have noticed in the matter of creeds. His genius
also found a congenial amusement in translating Plutarch's Delays of
Divine Justice, which he accompanied with learned notes, illustrating
the influence of Christianity upon a heathen mind. On his return
from St Petersburg in 1817, appeared his violent Ultramontane work,
Du Pape, in which he most ingeniously, but very sophistically, uses in
support of the papacy an elaborate argument, drawn from the good
which an overruling Providence has accomplished, by the very
usurpations and tyrannies of the Roman See. As if this were not
enough, however, he closes his life and labours with another work,
the Soirées de St Petersbourg, in which, with bewitching eloquence,
he expends all his powers of varied learning, and pointed sarcasm,
and splendid sophistry, upon questions which have but the one point
of turning everything to the account of his grand theory of church
and state. Thus, from first to last, he identifies his political and moral
philosophy with religious dogmas essentially ruinous to liberty, and
which, during three centuries, have wasted every kingdom in which
they have gained ascendency. To the direct purpose of uprooting the
little that remained of Gallicanism, he devoted a treatise, which
accompanies his work Du Pape, and of which the first book is
entitled, De l'Esprit d'opposition nourri en France contre le Saint-
Siège. Its points may be stated in a simple sentence from the works
of his coadjutor, Frederick Schlegel, who, in a few words, gives the
theory which has been the great mistake of the Reaction. "The
disguised half-schism of the Gallican church," says he,—"not less
fatal in its historical effects than the open schism of the Greeks—has
contributed very materially towards the decline of religion in France,
down to the period of the Restoration."[7] He illustrates it by the
disputes of Louis XIV. with the court of Rome, but forgets to say
anything of his extermination of the Huguenots. In one sense,
however, he is right. It was precisely the half-schism to which the
mischief is attributable. This half-way work it was that enabled Louis
XIV. to assert the Gallican theory against a semi-Protestant pope, for
the very purpose of fostering genuine Ultramontanism and favouring
the Jesuits; while under another pontiff he could repudiate
Gallicanism, and force the clergy to retract what he had forced them
to adopt! The schism of England was doubtless "an open schism," in
the opinion of Schlegel, and if so, it should have been followed, on
his theory, by worse effects; but Schlegel lives too long after the
days of Bossuet to bring her example into view. The natural appeal
would have been to that example, as its history is cotemporary; but
he adroitly diverts attention from so instructive a parallel, and
cunningly drags in "the open schism of the Greeks!" Thus, against a
bristling front of facts, he drives his theory that France has not been
Romish enough, and lends all his energies to render her less Gallican
and more Tridentine. Were he now alive, he might see reason to
amend his doctrine in the condition of Rome itself! But the condition
of France is quite as conclusive. Since the Restoration, the French
Church has been growing more and more Ultramontane, and the
people are worse and worse. Gallicanism is extinct, but results are
all against the Reactionary theory. France has no more a la Vendée;
there will be no more Chouans; the present Church is incapable of
reviving such things. It makes the infidels. I know there is less show
of rampant atheism just now than formerly; but if there is less of
paroxysm, there is less of life. France dies of a chronic atheism. The
Abbé Bonnetat, writing in 1845 on The Religious and Moral Wants of
the French Population, expresses nothing but contempt for the
alleged improvement in religious feeling. According to him, almost a
tenth of the male population, in any given district, not only do not
believe in God, but glory in their unbelief. Half of all the rest make no
secret of their infidelity as to the immortality of the soul; and their
wives are equally sceptical, to the curse of their children's children!
"The residue believe," says the Abbé, "only in the sense of not
denying. They affirm nothing, but, as compared with the others,
they lack the science of misbelief." To go on with his melancholy
picture, the divine and salutary institution of the Lord's day no
longer effects its purpose. In towns, the working classes and
tradespeople scarcely ever enter the churches. In the rural districts,
a tenth of the people never go to church at all; and of the rest, one
half may hear a mass on the five great festivals, while the other half,
though more frequent in attendance, are very irregular. One Sunday
they perform the duty perfunctorily; the next they work in the fields;
the next they stay at home, amuse themselves, and forget religion
as part of "dull care." The young folk, in many places, receive their
first and last communion at twelve or fourteen, and that is the end
of their conformity. A worse feature yet in the domestic manners,
resulting from this state of religion, is the fact that girls and boys are
brought up very much in the same way, and are thrown
promiscuously together, spending their evenings where they choose.
Parents have ceased to ask their children—Why were you not at
church? Were you at vespers? Were you at mass? and in fact are the
first to corrupt their offspring, by their brutal irreligion, and coarse
language, and shameless behaviour.[8]
Such is the moral picture of France. The Abbé has brightened his
mass of shadow with here and there a reflection of light, but there is
no mistaking his work for a Claude Lorraine. France is in a moral
eclipse, and her portrait presents, of necessity, the chiaro 'scuro of a
Rembrandt. One needs no more than these confessions of a French
ecclesiastic to account for her false and fickle notions of liberty, and
for her interminable émeutes and revolutions. Yet if Quinet has not
wholly invented his assertions, the Conservatism of France is
pledged to prescribe as remedies the same old poison from which
the disease results. It would take the Christianity of the nation, at its
last gasp, and dose it anew with Ultramontanism. They have
adopted the sound principle, that Christianity moulds a people to
enlightened notions of liberty, but they seem not to know that it
does this by acting directly upon the conscience; and hence their
political system is spoiled by their fatal substitution, for pure
Christianity, of that spurious religion whose great defect is precisely
this, that it does not undertake to cleanse and cure the conscience,
but only to subject it, mechanically, to irrational authority.
Montesquieu, in asserting the importance of Christianity, without
question failed to detect this essential defect in Popery, but he
instinctively taught his countrymen, by memorable example, to
eschew Ultramontanism. In the closing scene of a life which, with all
its blemishes, was a great life, and, in comparison with his times, a
good one, he accepted with reverence the ministrations of his parish
priest, but repulsed from his deathbed, with aversion and disgust,
the officious and intrusive Jesuits.[9] De Maistre is more devout than
Montesquieu, but he is less jealous of liberty, and his ideas of "what
a people ought to will" are limited, if not illiberal. His more moderate
ally, Ballanche, has not unjustly characterised him as "not, like
Providence, merciful, but, like destiny, inexorable." It is impossible
that a Conservatism, of which such is the sovereign genius, should
achieve anything for the restoration of such a country as France. I
have, indeed, predicted the restoration of the Bourbons, according
to de Maistre's principles, by the sheer tenacity of life which belongs
to a hereditary claim, and by which it outlasts all other pretensions.
But I cannot think that either he or his disciples have done much to
bring it about; and still less do I imagine that their system, as a
system, can give permanence to the monarchy or prosperity to the
state. On the contrary, let Mons. Berryer, or the Comte de
Montalembert, attempt the settlement of the kingdom on the theory
of the réactionnaires, and they will speedily bring it to that full stop
which Heaven at last adjudges to princes as well as to people, "who
show themselves untutored by calamity, and rebels to experience."
They will, at best, prolong the era of revolutions to some indefinite
epoch of futurity, and consign the nation to a fever, which will return
periodically, like a tertian, and wear it out by shakings.
It will be well, then, if the imperial farce that must precede "the
legitimate drama" shall prove somewhat protracted. The Legitimists,
meantime, may become convinced of the blunder of the Reaction,
and resolve upon a wiser and more sound conservatism. De Maistre
hazards some predictions in his works, on which he stakes the
soundness of his theories, and for which he challenges derision and
contempt to his doctrines, if they fail. The position of Pio Nono, from
the very outset of his career, has stultified those theories already;
and if he remains permanently where he now is, it will be to good-
breeding alone that de Maistre will owe his preservation from the
contempt he has invoked, by staking his reputation on the
conservative character of that very court of Rome, from which the
democratic wildfire, that has inflamed all Europe, has proceeded! In
any conceivable settlement of the Roman States, the Pontiff will
hardly be to Europe what he has been during the former years of
this century; and if he is to sink to a mere patriarchal primate, the
grand dream of ultramontanism is dissipated.[10] It is to be hoped,
then, that the restoration may be deferred till the Legitimists have
been effectually taught the grand fallacy of ultramontane
conservatism; and that Henry V. will ascend the throne, cured of the
hereditary plague of his immediate ancestors, and willing to revert,
for his example, to his great name-sake, Henri Quatre. He will need
another Sully to restore France to a sound mind. His cause demands
a minister who will not trust it to the tide of impulse on which it will
come in, but who will labour with prudence and with foresight, to
gain an anchorage before the ebb. Give but a minister to the
restoration capable of that kind of patient and practical forecast,
which sent Peter to the dock-yards; and let him begin with the
parochial schools, to mould a new race of Frenchmen under the
influences of true religion; and let him have the seventeen years
which Louis Philippe wasted on steam-ships and bastions, and
Montpensier marriages; and then, if it be "men that constitute a
state," there is yet a future of hope for France. And forgive me for
adding, Basil, that if England shall reverse this policy, and make the
national schools the sources of disaffection to the national religion—
then may she expect to see her Oxford and Cambridge degraded to
such seats of sedition as "the College of France," and their
ingenuous youth converted from gownsmen into blousemen, under
such savans as Quinet. Remember, too, in connexion with what I
have written, that Ireland is the most ultramontane of all nations
under heaven, and you will be able to estimate the value of
government measures for its relief! May God open the eyes of all
who seek the prosperity of the British empire to the primary
importance of a wholesome national religion, retaining its hold on
the national heart, and moulding the national conscience to the
grand political wisdom of the proverb—"My son, fear the Lord and
the king, and meddle not with them that are given to change."
Yours,
Ernest.
MADAME D'ARBOUVILLE'S
"VILLAGE DOCTOR."
The readers of Blackwood can hardly have forgotten a charming
French tale, of which an abridged translation appeared, under the
title of "An Unpublished French Novel," in the number of the
Magazine for December 1847. In the brief notice prefixed to it, we
mentioned the existence of a companion story by the same
authoress, which had obtained wider circulation than its fellow,
through arbitrary transfer to the pages of a French periodical; and
which, on that account, although of more convenient length than the
Histoire Hollandaise, we abstained from reproducing. Having thus
drawn attention to one of the most pleasing tales we in any
language are acquainted with, we fully expected speedily to meet
with it in an English version. Not having done so, our vivid
recollection of the great merits of "Le Médecin du Village" now
induces us to revoke our first decision—the more readily that we
have repeatedly been solicited to give the English public an
opportunity of appreciating a tale unprocurable in the form in which
it was originally printed, and which few persons in this country are
likely to have read in the Revue des Deux Mondes. The exquisite
delineation of the erring, but meekly penitent Annunciata, and of the
long-suffering and enthusiastically pious Christine, may well inspire a
wish to become acquainted with other productions of the same
delicate and graceful pen. The simple story of the Village Doctor will
not disappoint expectation. We ourselves, deeply sensible of the
fascinations of the Countess d'Arbouville's style, consider it her
happiest effort; and although we once hinted a doubt of the
probability of its crowning incident, we forget to play the critic when
under the influence of her touching pathos and delightful diction. In
our present capacity of translators we feel but too strongly the
impossibility of rendering the artless elegance of her style, which
flows on, smooth, fresh, and sparkling, like a summer streamlet over
golden sands. And, with all her apparent simplicity, Madame
d'Arbouville is a cunning artist, playing with skilful hand upon the
chords of the heart, which vibrate at her lightest touch. The effects
she produces are the more striking because seemingly unsought. But
her merits will be better exhibited by this second specimen of her
writings than by any praise we could lavish; and we therefore
proceed, without further preamble, to the narrative of Eva Meredith's
sorrows, as given by her humble friend,

THE VILLAGE DOCTOR.


"What is that?" exclaimed several persons assembled in the dining-
room of the château of Burcy.
The Countess of Moncar had just inherited, from a distant and
slightly regretted relation, an ancient château which she had never
seen, although it was at barely fifteen leagues from her habitual
summer residence. One of the most elegant, and almost one of the
prettiest women in Paris, Madame de Moncar was but moderately
attached to the country. Quitting the capital at the end of June, to
return thither early in October, she usually took with her some of the
companions of her winter gaieties, and a few young men, selected
amongst her most assiduous partners. Madame de Moncar was
married to a man much older than herself, who did not always
protect her by his presence. Without abusing the great liberty she
enjoyed, she was gracefully coquettish, elegantly frivolous, pleased
with trifles—with a compliment, an amiable word, an hour's triumph
—loving a ball for the pleasure of adorning herself, fond of
admiration, and not sorry to inspire love. When some grave old aunt
ventured a sage remonstrance—"Mon Dieu!" she replied; "do let me
laugh and take life gaily. It is far less dangerous than to listen in
solitude to the beating of one's heart. For my part, I do not know if I
even have a heart!" She spoke the truth, and really was uncertain
upon that point. Desirous to remain so, she thought it prudent to
leave herself no time for reflection.
One fine morning in September, the countess and her guests set out
for the unknown château, intending to pass the day there. A cross
road, reputed practicable, was to reduce the journey to twelve
leagues. The cross road proved execrable: the travellers lost their
way in the forest; a carriage broke down; in short, it was not till mid-
day that the party, much fatigued, and but moderately gratified by
the picturesque beauties of the scenery, reached the château of
Burcy, whose aspect was scarcely such as to console them for the
annoyances of the journey. It was a large sombre building with dingy
walls. In its front a garden, then out of cultivation, descended from
terrace to terrace; for the château, built upon the slope of a wooded
hill, had no level ground in its vicinity. On all sides it was hemmed in
by mountains, the trees upon which sprang up amidst rocks, and
had a dark and gloomy foliage that saddened the eyesight. Man's
neglect added to the natural wild disorder of the scene. Madame de
Moncar stood motionless and disconcerted upon the threshold of her
newly-acquired mansion.
"This is very unlike a party of pleasure," said she; "I could weep at
sight of this dismal abode. Nevertheless here are noble trees, lofty
rocks, a roaring cataract; doubtless, there is a certain beauty in all
that; but it is of too grave an order for my humour," added she with
a smile. "Let us go in and view the interior."
The hungry guests, eager to see if the cook, who had been sent
forward upon the previous day, as an advanced guard, had safely
arrived, willingly assented. Having obtained the agreeable certainty
that an abundant breakfast would soon be upon the table, they
rambled through the château. The old-fashioned furniture with
tattered coverings, the arm-chairs with three legs, the tottering
tables, the discordant sounds of a piano, which for a good score of
years had not felt a finger, afforded abundant food for jest and
merriment. Gaiety returned. Instead of grumbling at the
inconveniences of this uncomfortable mansion, it was agreed to
laugh at everything. Moreover, for these young and idle persons, the
expedition was a sort of event, an almost perilous campaign, whose
originality appealed to the imagination. A faggot was lighted beneath
the wide chimney of the drawing-room; but clouds of smoke were
the result, and the company took refuge in the pleasure grounds.
The aspect of the gardens was strange enough; the stone-benches
were covered with moss, the walls of the terraces, crumbling in
many places, left space between their ill-joined stones for the
growth of numerous wild plants, which sprung out erect and lofty, or
trailed with flexible grace towards the earth. The walks were
overgrown and obliterated by grass; the parterres, reserved for
garden flowers, were invaded by wild ones, which grow wherever
the heavens afford a drop of water and a ray of sun; the insipid
bearbine enveloped and stifled in its envious embrace the beauteous
rose of Provence; the blackberry mingled its acrid fruits with the red
clusters of the currant-bush; ferns, wild mint with its faint perfume,
thistles with their thorny crowns, grew beside a few forgotten lilies.
When the company entered the enclosure, numbers of the smaller
animals, alarmed at the unaccustomed intrusion, darted into the
long grass, and the startled birds flew chirping from branch to
branch. Silence, for many years the undisturbed tenant of this
peaceful spot, fled at the sound of human voices and of joyous
laughter. The solitude was appreciated by none—none grew pensive
under its influence; it was recklessly broken and profaned. The
conversation ran upon the gay evenings of the past season, and was
interspersed with amiable allusions, expressive looks, covert
compliments, with all the thousand nothings, in short, resorted to by
persons desirous to please each other, but who have not yet
acquired the right to be serious.
The steward, after long search for a breakfast-bell along the
dilapidated walls of the château, at last made up his mind to shout
from the steps that the meal was ready—the half-smile with which
he accompanied the announcement, proving that, like his betters, he
resigned himself for one day to a deviation from his habits of
etiquette and propriety. Soon a merry party surrounded the board.
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