It is, however, to an American of Puritan stock that the story we are illustrating owes, for the English reader certainly, its most conspicuous recital. Two volumes of Francis Parkman’s series of France and England in North America concern more especially the period covered by the administrations of Frontenac, De la Barre, and Denonville; these are his Frontenac, and New France under Louis XIV. (Boston, 1877), and his La Salle, and the Discovery of the Great West (Boston, 1879); but the consideration of the last of these belongs more particularly to another chapter. Of Parkman as an historian there has been a wide recognition of a learning that has neglected no resource; a research which has proved fortunate in its results; a judgment which, though Protestant, is fair and liberal;[724] a critical perception, which in the conflict of testimony keeps him accurate and luminous; and a style which has given his narrative the fascinations of a romance.
John Dennis wrote a tragedy,—Liberty Asserted,—which was acted in London in 1704, in which Frontenac was made a character, together with an English governor and Iroquois chief. Betterton acted in it. A romantic picture of the period is furnished in an amusing novel by M. Joseph Marmette, formerly of Quebec, but now of Paris, entitled François de Bienville. Frontenac figures as one of the principal characters in the story. Frontenac’s expeditions against the Iroquois were made the subject of a poem by Alfred B. Street,—Frontenac: or, the Atotarho of the Iroquois. London and New York, 1849.
M. T. P. Bedard, of the Archives department, has a paper in the Annuaire de l’Institut Canadien, nos. 7 and 8, 1880, 1881, which discusses the first and second administrations of the Count, and sheds some light on the social and political aspects of the country between 1672 and 1698, the year in which Frontenac died.
[EDITORIAL NOTES.]
THE QUEBEC MEDAL.
This is engraved from a copy kindly lent by W. S. Appleton, Esq., of Boston. See Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xi. 296, and Shea’s Charlevoix, iv. 190, and his Le Clercq, ii. 329. See the “Historic Medals of Canada,” in the Quebec Lit. and Hist. Soc. Transactions, 1872-1873, p. 73.
A. Frontenac’s Second Term.—Mr. Parkman has accompanied his narrative[725] of the attempt on Quebec in 1690 with an indication of the sources of the story. Besides the despatches of Frontenac and the Relation of Monseignat (both printed in the New York Colonial Documents, vol. ix.), there is an account taken by vessel to Rochelle, which is without place or date, and was probably there printed. It is entitled, Relation de ce qui s’est passé en Canada, à la descente des Anglais à Québec, au mois d’Octobre, 1690, faite par un Officier (Harrisse, no. 168; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,426), and contains Phips’s summons to Frontenac (also given in Mather’s Magnalia, and repeated by Parkman, Frontenac, p. 266), and Frontenac’s verbal answer.