mountains, it throws the waves of the narrow lake, high and deep, creating liquid mountains and abysses, echoing fiercely through the rocks. Formerly, the night watches were doubled when the Föhn began to blow; a law forbade fires in houses; in the valleys, huge stones were placed on the roofs. Gessler and his men were terror-struck and bewildered; but Tell was known to be most skilful in the management of a boat on such emergencies, while he was thoroughly acquainted with every corner of the lake, and gifted with great muscular strength. His fetters, therefore, were taken away, and he was ordered to take the government of the boat. He directed it skilfully towards the platten fels, a flat surface of rocks, since called Tell's platten, close to which was afterwards erected a chapel. When near to the spot, he darted upon it with the rapidity of lightning, and hurled back the boat in the swelling waves. Gessler and his men long remained bounding to and fro the shore; the storm subsiding, they finally reached the extremity of the lake, and taking their horses, bent their way towards the castle of Kussnach, on the circuitous road that leads to it.

Wilhelm Tell, after his escape, climbed over the mountain, wandered in Schwitz, and finally placed himself behind a bush or large tree, on the elevated part of the ascending road to Kussnach, over which Gessler must pass, called, from its declivity, the hollow road. There he awaited his victim, and the latter advancing up slowly, fell mortally wounded. The arrow of a free man, says Zschokke, struck the heart of a tyrant. Johann von Muller observes, that Hermann Gessler died before the hour fixed for the freedom of the country; but that no one who feels how intolerable must have been to a fiery soul the scorn of the ancient liberties of the fatherland, will disapprove the deed that it was not according to established laws, but that similar actions at Athens, and Rome, and among the ancient Hebrews, have been celebrated that, in the same way, in these times, when a tyrannical power over the ancient freedom of a peaceful people cannot be borne any longer, such men become the struments of retribution. Muller

affirms that the deed of Wilhelm Tell, gave greater courage to the men of the Grütli, while the cruel authority and vigilance of Landenberg and other chieftains, became naturally fiercer. The former assertion is scarcely admissible. The league of the patriots must have been greatly endangered by the unexpected murder of Gessler, unless it could have been anticipated, and the conspiracy could have broken out at the same time, by a sudden explosion. But no! all remained tranquil; nothing stirred in the villages and valleys; and, the last day of 1307 was attained with unruffled calm, throughout the country. At the dawn of the first day of 1308, however, a young man of Unterwalden, one of the thirty of the Grütli, obtained admittance into the castle of Rozberg by the means of a rope, hung from a window, through the connivance of a girl to whom he was betrothed, and who had employment and a room in that castle: (this is the episode celebrated by the people of Unterwalden, when they sing about Joggeli and Anneli.) The youth afterwards drew up, by the same means, twenty friends who were waiting in the ditch. They instantly surprised and silently seized the commander of the tower, with his guards and servants, whom they imprisoned; every thing remaining outwardly quiet and undisturbed, in expectation of other events. Some hours after, as Landenberg emerged from the castle of Rozberg to go to mass, he was met by a number of people, who brought their offering of hares, calves, and fowls, as a new year's gift, according to the old custom. Governor welcoming it, ordered the men to bring them into the castle : in the mean time, one of those who were concealed in the tower blew a horn; it was the signal agreed upon, whereon each having fixed hastily a blade at the end of his stick, rushed on Landenberg and all the inhabitants of the castle, and made them prisoners. The whole Unterwalden was soon in commotion, and every agent of tyranny was captured. During the same day, the Twinghof was surprised and taken by the men of Uri, and Stauffacher having assembled all the people of Schwitz at Lowerzer, they swarmed round the fort of Schwanau, which offered but a feeble resistance. On the evening immense fires, like splen

The

did meteors, blazed on every accessible Alpine mountain, announcing to the inhabitants of every hill and dale of the Waldstetten, that they were free. The greetings and rejoicings were boundless. Stauffacher opened his house to all his companions. Melchtal was hailed with enthusiasm in his valley, while his old blind father thanked God that he was still living; Walter Furst returned to his home where the Uri men flocked in high glee, when, says Muller, he especially and openly honoured the husband of his daughter, Wilhelm Tell. In the explosion of their exultation, however, these men respected every right and every property! not a drop of blood was shed. The foreign oppressors were made to swear never to return, and ordered to go back to their own country. From that time the Waldstetten received the appellation of Schweizerland, in honour to Schwitz, because it had been the most prominent in patriotism, decision, and energy on the occasion. The following Sunday all the Swiss assembled and swore solemnly to remain eternally allied.

For several months the Swiss re-, mained without any tidings from the land of their former tyrants. The Emperor Albert, however, was preparing plans of vengeance when he was assassinated by his nephew, in Argau, at the foot of the hill on which still frown the ruins of the castle of Hapsburg, the cradle of his family. The day came, 1315, when his heir, the Duke of Austria, was in a position to claim the apanage of his race, and force the Swiss to a terrible reckoning for past outrages. The Duke, proud and brave, assembled a brilliant chivalry; he headed his host with confidence; he had round him a Gessler and Landenberg, both thirsting for revenge, and many of the most valorous knights of Germany. In the mean time the confederates were not slumbering: 400 men from Uri-300 from Unterwalden-500 from Schwitz, placed themselves on a hill between Einsielden and Schwitz, facing the plain, towards which the Duke and his host were bending their way. The brilliant army, dazzling with steel and plumes, beheld with scorn the mountaineers, closely serried in solemn silence the silence of prayer, when fervently swearing to conquer or die.

The enemy rashly and disorderly rushed upon the Swiss, and their horses soon becoming entangled in the mud and reeds, the patriots fell upon them like an avalanche. Nothing could resist their fury. In a few hours the Duke had scarcely a man left, and took to an ignoble flight from the immortal field of Morgarten-the Marathon of Switzerland. The battle of Morgarten, when the Swiss were not yet organized as a nation, when they were unskilled in warfare, rolled back the Germanic aggressions for a length of time. Had it been lost, Germany and Germanism might have absorbed that fair land, and annihilated its nationality. It was, therefore, a decisive battle, as much so as the battle of Marathon; and we cannot explain the reasons which induced the industrious author of the fifteen decisive battles (Professor Creasy), to refuse to it the honour of being included in his work, whilst we believe that a few of those which he introduces were not wholly decisive, and one of them especially (Karl Martel), so little so, that there are very fair grounds mentioned by Michelet and Sismondi, which would justify the belief that this decisive battle has never been fought.

One of the most instructive and interesting objects of study in history, is the simultaneous idea or principle which, at the same period, agitate, and transform into heroic bands, whole populations, distant from, and unknown to, each other. Popular insurrections form the characteristic feature of the fourteenth century; and, whilst the Swiss were proclaiming their freedom, and consecrating it for ever, at Morgarten, the Scotch, with their Bruce, were repelling the ferocious aggression of Edward the First, with an invincible perseverance. After Bruce and his force had been decimated, the Scottish hero, although in a state of languor from fatigue and privations, emerged from the desolate Isle of Rachrin, on the northern coast of Ireland, where he had taken refuge-attacked and defeated the English twice in the spring of 1307; again, on a memorable day, in 1308, and finally in June, 1313, at Bannockburn. Undoubtedly the Scottish war cannot be called, strictly speaking, a popular insurrection, since the Scotch were repelling an invasion; nevertheless, they were animated, as well as the Swiss, by the

same hatred of foreign masters, and deep love for their nationality.

Johann von Muller, in his brief narrative of the Swiss revolution, and of the adventures of Wilhelm Tell, establishes the authenticity of all his statements on the subject. In sundry notes, he adds that Tell belonged to a respectable family of Burglen; that he had two sons; that the hero's posterity ceased in 1684, in the male line, and with a certain Verena, in the female line, in 1720; still, that it is impossible to decide with precision in what relationship he stood with regard to Walter Furst; that Tell, fought at Morgarten, and lost his life, in 1354, in endeavouring to save a child from a flood at Burglen, stating as an indisputable testimony of all he advances, that in 1388, when the chapel raised on Tell's platte was inaugurated, and an annual divine service established at the Landsgemeind, near Altorf, 114 persons, then living, solemnly affirmed that they had known Wilhelm Tell. When the Scandinavian Chronicle of Saxo Grammaticus was printed for the first time in 1486, containing the adventure of the Dane Tocco, condemned also by the king to shoot an apple on the head of his son, clamorous voices were heard asserting that the person and adventure of Tell were a mere importation from the north, devoid of truth. The Swiss historian indignantly repels such an audacious, heartless scepticism, on the ground that similar circumstances may take place in another country and another age. He adduces the testimony of the Chronicle of Klingenberg, which brings its narrative to the close of the fourteenth century; that of Russ, a Lucerner, who closes his book in 1480, with a Tellenlied; that of the Lucerne state writer, Etterling, who, during the first moiety of the fifteenth century, found the memory of Tell living in every valley; Freudenberg's Danish fable; Balthazar's Defence of Tell, 1760; Emanuel von Haller's Lecture at Berne, in 1772; and finally the testimony of the 114 persons mentioned all of which he considers as irrefragable proofs of the truth of his narrative and statements about Wilhelm Tell, concluding enthusiastically"Most truly hath this hero lived, and hath God been thanked for his deed against the oppressor of the WaldStette; through him the fatherland

hath thrived so that he deserves the gratitude of posterity."

There is scarcely any event in history so interwoven with the popular feelings as the traditional records relating to Wilhelm Tell; on the other hand, there has ever existed a class of sceptics who readily reject as a myth every traditional testimony, however irrefragable and convincing it may appear; and, moreover, political passions, either of an excessive democratical patriotism, or devotion to absolutism, have made the story of Tell an instrument of their animosity. We must endeavour to exhibit the pure truth in this history, irrespective of an exaggerated, romantic patriotism, as well as of an unreasonable scepticism. We must separate the tradition from history, and see how faras it has happened so often in the history of the world-circumstances of little import, when they take place, gradually expand in narration with the course of time, are often transformed into mere fables, while they penetrate slowly into the domain of history, contradictory facts becoming embodied in one sole person. It is already more than a century since the question has often been asked, especially in Germany, what was really the part taken by Tell in the insurrection of Switzerland in 1308? The genius and noble soul of Schiller have been inspired by the subject; his tragic muse gave a new impulse to the curiosity of the public, a vast majority of which accepted the play as pure history, whilst it awoke the curiosity of the learned about the story.

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The Swiss have always been attached to the memory of their Tell he is to them the hero of their liberty; and a man thus honoured during ages, whose glory received incessant additions, through the poetry and imagination of the people, becomes unassailable; the strangest illusions about his person and actions ensue. The Swiss, for instance, forget that Tell, according to their version, must have murdered Gessler from behind a bush, and without any danger to his own person; but they defend their hero with an over-ardent zeal, arising perhaps from their anxiety of attributing a brilliant chivalric commencement to their revolution, which, however great in its consequences, was, after all, little more than a bloodless, quiet insur

name of the hero, who, at a later period, is considered as the deliverer of his country, and as having given the first blow which led to the freedom and glory of the Waldstetten. It may be observed that the details of the events of 1308 had little interest for the chronicler of the city of Berne, which Republic only joined the Confederacy in 1353; but the history could not have passed over the name of a man whose heroism was of so recent a date to whom the Confederation was indebted for its liberty and glory; it was in the natural course of things that he should mention the glorious services of the hero of Uri, in the course of his narrative, and endeavour to link the history of his city more intimately with that of the primitive cantons, with whom Berne had formed an eternal bond. Moreover, Berne had long been hostile to Austria. It was an opportunity for rendering the Austrian domination still more hateful. Could the silence of Justinger be the result of a jealousy of the glory of another canton? It is scarcely admissible, as the relations between Berne and the Waldstetten were of the most friendly nature. We must conclude that the adventures of Tell had not that importance which was attributed to them afterwards, and were not considered as having any weight in history. Had it been otherwise, his name must have appeared in a chronicle relating the events of the Waldstetten and the Austrian war; and it was in the spirit, according to the custom of the chroniclers of all times, not to allow individual and personal actions to interrupt the general history, unless they were characterized by a surpassing eclat. The chronicle of Justinger was published for the first time at Berne in 1818.

Johannes von Winterthur is the other contemporary testimony of the Swiss history during the fourteenth century. He says that he was at school at the time of the battle of Morgarten, and saw the Duke of Austria as he passed through Winterthur in his flight. Nothing very certain is known about the life of this Johannes, excepting that he was a monk, dwelling in a convent, where, it is conjectured, he died in 1348 or 1349. He left a chronicle, in bad Latin, which consists of the History of the Emperor Frederick II., to the

time of the death of the writer. In consequence of the wider field it embraces, it has claims to a more general interest than the work of Justinger. He made a judicious use of the documents then existing, and of the testimony and conversation of the elderly people who were still living, and he has entitled one-third of his chronicle as being gathered from contemporaries and eye-witnesses. Johannes cannot be free from the weaknesses of his time and of his position. Retired in his convent he has not a clear notion of the events then passing at a distance, of the Germanic affairs, for instance, at that time, very complicated; but his statements on the subject of his country, and of the confederates, evince great honesty and a fair degree of intellectual culture; they have never been doubted, and are considered as deserving of esteem and confidence by Haller, Eccard, and others. He also relates, but briefly, the Revolution, as well as the battle of Morgarten, and says nothing of Wilhelm Tell. His silence is perhaps more significant than that of Justinger. He was a contemporary of Tell; he must have heard of him; his convent was not very distant from the Waldstetten. Why has he not touched at least, on the remarkable events which must have taken place in the neighbouring mountains? How could he, with the general plan of his work, pass over a man who was supposed to be the author of so great a change? He describes the cause of the struggle with Austria, and does not mention the name of a man who must then have held a conspicuous position among the insurgents! On the other hand, it must be remembered that the chronicle of Johannes is a collection of oral news, of popular reports, and that the adventures of Tell had not yet, perhaps, penetrated widely into the mass of materials for popular gossip. The silence of this chronicle, however, on the subject of Tell is a proof that he was not a man of that importance which posterity has attributed to him; and that whatever action or deed he may have performed, it could, by no means, have any influence on the insurrection and success of the three cantons.

The medieval annalists of Germany are also silent on the subject of Tell. It may be objected that the commu