Frobisher was received and thanked by the queen at Windsor. Great preparations were made and considerable expense incurred for the assaying of the great quantity of "ore" (about 200 tons) brought home. This took up much time, and led to considerable dispute among the various parties interested. Meantime the faith of the queen and others remained strong in the productiveness of the newly discovered territory, which she herself named Meta Incognita, and it was resolved to send out a larger expedition than ever, with all necessaries for the establishment of a colony of 100 men. Frobisher was again received by the queen at Greenwich, and her Majesty threw a fine chain of gold around his neck. On the 31st of May 1578 the expedition, consisting in all of fifteen vessels, left Harwich, and sailing by the English Channel on the 20th of June reached the south of Greenland, where Frobisher and some of his men managed to land. On the 2nd of July the foreland of Frobisher Bay was sighted, but stormy weather and dangerous ice prevented the rendezvous from being gained, and, besides causing the wreck of the barque Dennis "of 100 tons, drove the fleet unwittingly up a new (Hudson) strait. After proceeding about 60 m. up this "mistaken strait," Frobisher with apparent reluctance turned back, and after many buffetings and separations the fleet at last came to anchor in Frobisher Bay. Some attempt was made at founding a settlement, and a large quantity of ore was shipped; but, as might be expected, there was much dissension and not a little discontent among so heterogeneous a company, and on the last day of August the fleet set out on its return to England, which was reached in the beginning of October. Thus ended what was little better than a fiasco, though Frobisher himself cannot be held to blame for the result; the scheme was altogether chimerical, and the "ore " seems to have been not worth smelting. In 1580 Frobisher was employed as captain of one of the queen's ships in preventing the designs of Spain to assist the Irish insurgents, and in the same year obtained a grant of the reversionary title of clerk of the royal navy. In 1585 he commanded the " Primrose," as vice-admiral to Sir F. Drake in his expedition to the West Indies, and when soon afterwards the country was threatened with invasion by the Spanish Armada, Frobisher's name was one of four mentioned by the lord high admiral in a letter to the queen of "men of the greatest experience that this realm hath," and for his signal services in the "Triumph," in the dispersion of the Armada, he was knighted. He continued to cruise about in the Channel until 1590, when he was sent in command of a small fleet to the coast of Spain. In 1501 he visited his native Altofts, and there married his second wife, a daughter of Lord Wentworth, becoming at the same time a landed proprietor in Yorkshire and Notts. He found, however, little leisure for a country life, and the following year took charge of the fleet fitted out by Sir Walter Raleigh to the Spanish coast, returning with a rich prize. In November 1594 he was

FROCK, originally a long, loose gown with broad sleeves, more especially that worn by members of the religious orders. The word is derived from the O. Fr. froc, of somewhat obscure origin; in medieval Lat. froccus appears also as floccus, which, if it is the original, as Du Cange suggests (literula mutata), would connect the word with "flock" (q.v.), properly a tuft of wool. Another suggestion refers the word to the German Rock, a coat (cf. "rochet "), which in some rare instances is found as krock. The formal stripping off of the frock became part of the ceremony of degradation or deprivation in the case of a condemned monk; hence the expression "to unfrock" (med. Lat. defrocare, Fr. défṛoquer) used of the degradation of monks and of priests from holy orders. In the middle ages "frock "was also used of a long loose coat worn by men and of a coat of mail, the "frock of mail." In something of this sense the word survived into the 19th century for a coat with long skirts, now called the "frock coat." The word in now chiefly used in English for a child's or young girl's dress, of body and skirt, but is frequently used of a woman's dress. Du Cange (Glossarium, s.v. flocus) quotes an early use of the word for a woman's garment (Miracula S. Udalrici, ap. Mabillon, Acta Sanctorum Benedict. saec. v. p. 466). Here a woman, possessed of a devil, is cured, and sends her garments to the tomb of the saint, and a dalmatic is ordered to be made out of the flocus or frocus. "Frock" also appears in the " smock frock," once the typical outer garment of the English peasant. It consists of a loose shirt of linen or other material, worn over the other clothes and hanging to about the knee; its characteristic feature is the " smocking," a puckered honeycomb stitching round the neck and shoulders.

FROEBEL, FRIEDRICH WILHELM AUGUST (1782-1852), German philosopher, philanthropist and educational reformer, was born at Oberweissbach, a village of the Thuringian forest, on the 21st of April 1782. Like Comenius, with whom he had much in common, he was neglected in his youth, and the remembrance of his own early sufferings made him in after life the more eager in promoting the happiness of children. His mother he lost in his infancy, and his father, the pastor of Oberweissbach and the surrounding district, attended to his parish but not to his family. Friedrich soon had a stepmother, and neglect was succeeded by stepmotherly attention; but a maternal uncle took pity on him, and gave him a home for some years at Stadt-Ilm. Here he went to the village school, but like many thoughtful boys he passed for a dunce. Throughout life he was always seeking for hidden connexions and an underlying unity in all things. Nothing of the kind was to be perceived in the piecemeal studies of the school, and Froebel's mind, busy as it was for itself, would not work for the masters. His halfbrother was therefore thought more worthy of a university education, and Friedrich was apprenticed for two years to a forester (1797-1799).

Left to himself in the Thuringian forest, Froebel began to study nature, and without scientific instruction he obtained a profound insight into the uniformity and essential unity of nature's laws. Years afterwards the celebrated Jahn (the "Father Jahn" of the German gymnasts) told a Berlin student of a queer fellow he had met, who made out all sorts of wonderful things from stones and cobwebs. This queer fellow was Froebel; and the habit of making out general truths from the observation of nature, especially from plants and trees, dated from the solitary rambles in the forest. No training could have been better suited to strengthen his inborn tendency to mysticism; and when he

left the forest at the early age of seventeen, he seems to have been possessed by the main ideas which influenced him all his life. The conception which in him dominated all others was the unity of nature; and he longed to study natural sciences that he might find in them various applications of nature's universal laws. With great difficulty he got leave to join his elder brother at the university of Jena, and there for a year he went from lecture-room to lecture-room hoping to grasp that connexion of the sciences which had for him far more attraction than any particular science in itself. But Froebel's allowance of money was very small, and his skill in the management of money was never great, so his university career ended in an imprisonment of nine weeks for a debt of thirty shillings. He then returned home with very poor prospects, but much more intent on what he calls the course of self-completion" (Vervollkommnung meines selbst) than on "getting on " in a worldly point of view. He was sent to learn farming, but was recalled in consequence of the failing health of his father. In 1802 the father died, and Froebel, now twenty years old, had to shift for himself. It was some time before he found his true vocation, and for the next three and a half years we find him at work now in one part of Germany now in another-sometimes land-surveying, sometimes acting as accountant, sometimes as private secretary; but in all this his "outer life was far removed from his inner life," and in spite of his outward circumstances he became more and more conscious that a great task lay before him for the good of humanity. The nature of the task, however, was not clear to him, and it seemed determined by accident. While studying architecture in Frankfort-on-Main, he became acquainted with the director of a model school, who had caught some of the enthusiasm of Pestalozzi. This friend saw that Froebel's true field was education, and he persuaded him to give up architecture and take a post in the model school. In this school Froebel worked for two years with remarkable success, but he then retired and undertook the education of three lads of one family. In this he could not satisfy himself, and he obtained the parents' consent to his taking the boys to Yverdon, near Neuchâtel, and there forming with them a part of the celebrated institution of Pestalozzi. Thus from 1807 till 1809 Froebel was drinking in Pestalozzianism at the fountainhead, and qualifying himself to carry on the work which Pestalozzi had begun. For the science of education had to deduce from Pestalozzi's experience principles which Pestalozzi himself could not deduce. And "Froebel, the pupil of Pestalozzi, and a genius like his master, completed the reformer's system; taking the results at which Pestalozzi had arrived through the necessities of his position, Froebel developed the ideas involved in them, not by further experience but by deduction from the nature of man, and thus he attained to the conception of true human development and to the requirements of true education" (Schmidt's Geschichte der Pädagogik).

Holding that man and nature, inasmuch as they proceed from the same source, must be governed by the same laws, Froebel longed for more knowledge of natural science. Even Pestalozzi seemed to him not to "honour science in her divinity." He therefore determined to continue the university course which had been so rudely interrupted eleven years before, and in 1811 he began studying at Göttingen, whence he proceeded to Berlin. But again his studies were interrupted, this time by the king of Prussia's celebrated call "to my people." Though not a Prussian, Froebel was heart and soul a German. He therefore responded to the call, enlisted in Lützow's corps, and went through the campaign of 1813. But his military ardour did not take his mind off education. "Everywhere," he writes, "as far as the fatigues I underwent allowed, I carried in my thoughts my future calling as educator; yes, even in the few engagements in which I had to take part. Even in these I could gather experience for the task I proposed to myself." Froebel's soldiering showed him the value of discipline and united action, how the individual belongs not to himself but to the whole body, and how the whole body supports the individual.

Froebel was rewarded for his patriotism by the friendship of two men whose names will always be associated with his,

Langethal and Middendorff. These young men, ten years younger than Froebel, became attached to him in the field, and were ever afterwards his devoted followers, sacrificing all their prospects in life for the sake of carrying out his ideas.

At the peace of Fontainebleau (signed in May 1814) Froebel returned to Berlin, and became curator of the museum of mineralogy under Professor Weiss. In accepting this appointment from the government he seemed to turn aside from his work as educator; but if not teaching he was learning. More and more the thought possessed him that the one thing needful for man was unity of development, perfect evolution in accordance with the laws of his being, such evolution as science discovers in the other organisms of nature. He at first intended to become a teacher of natural science, but before long wider views dawned upon him. Langethal and Middendorff were in Berlin, engaged in tuition. Froebel gave them regular instruction in his theory, and at length, counting on their support, he resolved to set about realizing his own idea of " the new education." This was in 1816. Three years before one of his brothers, a clergyman, had died of fever caught from the French prisoners. His widow was still living in the parsonage at Griesheim, a village on the Ilm. Froebel gave up his post, and set out for Griesheim on foot, spending his very last groschen on the way for bread. Here he undertook the education of his orphan niece and nephews, and also of two more nephews sent him by another brother. With these he opened a school and wrote to Middendorff and Langethal to come and help in the experiment. Middendorff came at once, Langethal a year or two later, when the school had been moved to Keilhau, another of the Thuringian villages, which became the Mecca of the new faith. In Keilhau Froebel, Langethal, Middendorff and Barop, a relation of Middendorff's, all married and formed an educational community. Such zeal could not be fruitless, and the school gradually increased, though for many years its teachers, with Froebel at their head, were in the greatest straits for money and at times even for food. After fourteen years' experience he determined to start other institutions to work in connexion with the parent institution at Keilhau, and being offered by a private friend the use of a castle on the Wartensee, in the canton of Lucerne, he left Keilhau under the direction of Barop, and with Langethal he opened the Swiss institution. The ground, however, was very ill chosen. The Catholic clergy resisted what they considered as a Protestant invasion, and the experiment on the Wartensee and at Willisau in the same canton, to which the institution was moved in 1833, never had a fair chance. It was in vain that Middendorff at Froebel's call left his wife and family at Keilhau, and laboured for four years in Switzerland without once seeing them. The Swiss institution never flourished. But the Swiss government wished to turn to account the presence of the great educator; so young teachers were sent to Froebel for instruction, and finally Froebel moved to Burgdorf (a Bernese town of some importance, and famous from Pestalozzi's labours there thirty years earlier) to undertake the establishment of a public orphanage and also to superintend a course of teaching for schoolmasters. The elementary teachers of the canton were to spend three months every alternate year at Burgdorf, and there compare experiences, and learn of distinguished men such as Froebel and Bitzius. In his conferences with these teachers Froebel found that the schools suffered from the state of the raw material brought into them. Till the school age was reached the children were entirely neglected. Froebel's conception of harmonious development naturally led him to attach much importance to the earliest years, and his great work on The Education of Man, published as early as 1826, deals chiefly with the child up to the age of seven. At Burgdorf his thoughts were much occupied with the proper treatment of young children, and in scheming for them a graduated course of exercises, modelled on the games in which he observed them to be most interested. In his eagerness to carry out his new plans he grew impatient of official restraints; so he returned to Keilhau, and soon afterwards opened the first Kindergarten or “Garden of Children," in the neighbouring village of Blankenburg (1837). Firmly convinced of the importance of

his system in a weekly paper (his Sonntagsblatt) which appeared from the middle of 1837 till 1840. He also lectured in great towns; and he gave a regular course of instruction to young teachers at Blankenburg. But although the principles of the Kindergarten were gradually making their way, the first Kindergarten was failing for want of funds. It had to be given up, and Froebel, now a widower (he had lost his wife in 1839), carried on his course for teachers first at Keilhau, and from 1848, for the last four years of his life, at or near Liebenstein, in the Thuringian forest, and in the duchy of Meiningen. It is in these last years that the man Froebel will be best known to posterity, for in 1849 he attracted within the circle of his influence a woman of great intellectual power, the baroness von Marenholtz-Bülow, who has given us in her Recollections of Friedrich Froebel the only lifelike portrait we possess.

These seemed likely to be Froebel's most peaceful days. He married again in 1851, and having now devoted himself to the training of women as educators, he spent his time in instructing his class of young female teachers. But trouble came upon him from a quarter whence he least expected it. In the great year of revolutions (1848) Froebel had hoped to turn to account the general eagerness for improvement, and Middendorff had presented an address on Kindergartens to the German parliament. Besides this, a nephew of Froebel's, Professor Karl Froebel of Zürich, published books which were supposed to teach socialism. True, the uncle and nephew differed so widely that the "new Froebelians" were the enemies of " the old," but the distinction was overlooked, and Friedrich and Karl Froebel were regarded as the united advocates of some new thing. In the reaction which soon set in, Froebel found himself suspected of socialism and irreligion, and in 1851 the "cultus-minister " Von Raumer issued an edict forbidding the establishment of schools "after Friedrich and Karl Froebel's principles " in Prussia. This was a heavy blow to the old man, who looked to the government of the "Cultus-slaat" Prussia for support, and was met with denunciation. Whether from the worry of this new controversy, or from whatever cause, Froebel did not long survive the decree. His seventieth birthday was celebrated with great rejoicings in May 1852, but he died on the 21st of June, and was buried at Schweina, a village near his last abode, Marienthal, near Bad-Liebenstein. "All education not founded on religion is unproductive." This conviction followed naturally from Froebel's conception of the unity of all things, a unity due to the original Unity from whom all proceed and in whom all "live, move and have their being." As man and nature have one origin they must be subject to the same laws. Hence Froebel, like Comenius two centuries before him, looked to the course of nature for the principles of human education. This he declares to be his fundamental belief: "In the creation, in nature and the order of the material world, and in the progress of mankind, God has given us the true type (Urbild) of education." As the cultivator creates nothing in the trees and plants, so the educator creates nothing in the children, he merely superintends the development of inborn faculties. So far Froebel agrees with Pestalozzi; but in one respect he went beyond him. Pestalozzi said that the faculties were developed by exercise. Froebel added that the function of education was to develop the faculties by arousing voluntary activity. Action proceeding from inner impulse (Selbstätigkeit) was the one thing needful.

The prominence which Froebel gave to action, his doctrine that man is primarily a doer and even a creator, and that he learns only through "self-activity," has its importance all through education. But it was to the first stage of life that Froebel paid the greatest attention. He held with Rousseau that each age has a completeness of its own, and that the perfection of the later stage can be attained only through the perfection of the earlier. If the infant is what he should be as an infant, and the child as a child, he will become what he should be as a boy, just as naturally as new shoots spring from the healthy plant. Every stage, then, must be cared for and tended in such a way that it may attain its own perfection. Impressed with the

These

devoted himself to the instruction of mothers. But he would not, like Pestalozzi, leave the children entirely in the mother's hands. Pestalozzi held that the child belonged to the family; Fichte, on the other hand, claimed it for society and the state. Froebel, whose mind delighted in harmonizing apparent contradictions, and who taught that "all progress lay through opposites to their reconciliation," maintained that the child belonged both to the family and to society, and he would therefore have children spend some hours of the day in a common life and in well-organized common employments. assemblies of children he would not call schools, for the children in them ought not to be old enough for schooling. So he invented the name Kindergarten, garden of children, and calied the superintendents "children's gardeners." He laid great stress on every child cultivating its own plot of ground, but this was not his reason for the choice of the name. It was rather that he thought of these institutions as enclosures in which young human plants are nurtured. In the Kindergarten the children's employment should be play. But any occupation in which children delight is play to them; and Froebel invented a series of employments, which, while they are in this sense play to the children, have nevertheless, as seen from the adult point of view, a distinct educational object. This object, as Froebel himself describes it, is "to give the children employment in agreement with their whole nature, to strengthen their bodies, to exercise their senses, to engage their awakening mind, and through their senses to bring them acquainted with nature and their fellow creatures; it is especially to guide aright the heart and the affections, and to lead them to the original ground of all life, to unity with themselves."

Froebel's own works are: Menschenerziehung ("Education of Man "), (1826), which has been translated into French and English; Pädagogik d. Kindergartens; Kleinere Schriften and Mutter- und Koselieder: collected editions have been edited by Wichard Lange (1862) and Friedrich Seidel (1883).

A. B. Hauschmann's Friedrich Fröbel is a lengthy and unsatisfactory biography. An unpretentious but useful little book is F. Froebel, a Biographical Sketch, by Matilda H. Kriege, New York (Steiger). A very good account of Froebel's life and thoughts is given in Karl Schmidt's Geschichte d. Pädagogik, vol. iv.; also in Adalbert Weber's Geschichte d. Volksschulpad. u. d. Kleinkinder erziehung (Weber carefully gives authorities). For a less favourable account see K. Strack's Geschichte d. deutsch. Volksschulwesens. Frau von Marenholtz-Bülow published her Erinnerungen an F. Fröbel (translated by Mrs. Horace Mann, 1877). This lady, the chief interpreter of Froebel, has expounded his principles in Das Kind u sein Wesen and Die Arbeit u. die neue Erziehung. H. Courthope Bowen has written a memoir (1897) in the "Great Educators series. In England Miss Emily A. E. Shirreff has published Principles of Froebel's System, and a short sketch of Froebel's life. See also Dr Henry Barnard's Papers on Froebel's Kindergarten (1881); R. H. Quick, Educational Reformers (1890). (R. H. Q.)

FROG, a name in zoology, of somewhat wide application, strictly for an animal belonging to the family Ranidae, but also used of some other families of the order Ecaudata of the sub-class Batrachia (q.v.).

Frogs proper are typified by the common British species, Rana temporaria, and its allies, such as the edible frog, R. esculenta, and the American bull-frog R. calesbiana. The genus Rana may be defined as firmisternal Ecaudata with cylindrical transverse processes to the sacral vertebra, teeth in the upper jaw and on the vomer, a protrusible tongue which is free and forked behind, a horizontal pupil and more or less webbed toes. It includes about 200 species, distributed over the whole world

The word "frog" is in O.E. frocga or frox, cf. Dutch vorsch, Ger. Frosch; Skeat suggests a possible original source in the root meaning, "to jump," to spring," cf. Ger. froh, glad, joyful and "frolic." The term is also applied to the following objects: the horny part in the center of a horse's hoof; an attachment to a belt for suspending a sword, bayonet, &c.; a fastening for the front of a coat, still used in military uniforms, consisting of two buttons on opposite sides joined by ornamental looped braids; and, in railway construction, the point where two rails cross. These may be various transferred applications of the name of the animal, but the "frog" of a horse was also called "frush," probably a corruption of the French name fourchette, lit. little fork. The ornamental braiding is also more probably due to "frock," Lat. floccus.

Public opinion was now keenly exoited; he received an ovation from the Munich students, and the king, to whom he owed his appointment, supported him warmly. A conference of Catholic savants, held in 1863 under the presidency of Döllinger, decided that authority must be supreme in the Church. When, however, Döllinger and his school in their turn started the Old Catholic movement, Frohschammer refused to associate himself with their cause, holding that they did not go far enough, and that their declaration of 1863 had cut the ground from under their feet. Meanwhile he had, in 1862, founded the Athenäum as the organ of Liberal Catholicism. For this he wrote the first adequate account in German of the Darwinian theory of natural selection, which drew a warm letter of appreciation from Darwin himself. Excommunicated in 1871, he replied with three articles, which were reproduced in thousands as pamphlets in the chief European languages: Der Fels Petri in Rom (1873), Der Primat Petri und des Papstes (1875), and Das Christenthum Christi und das Christenthum des Papstes (1876). In Das neue Wissen und der neue Glaube (1873) he showed himself as vigorous an opponent of the materialism of Strauss as of the doctrine of papal infallibility. His later years were occupied with a series of philosophical works, of which the most important were: Die Phantasie als Grundprincip des Wellprocesses (1877), Über die Genesis der Menschheit und deren geistige Entwicklung in Religion, Sittlichkeit und Sprache (1883), and Über die Organisation und Cultur der menschlichen Gesellschaft (1885). His system is based on the unifying principle of imagination (Phantasie), which he extends to the objective creative force of Nature, as well as to the subjective mental phenomena to which the term is usually confined. He died at Bad Kreuth in the Bavarian Highlands on the 14th of June 1893.

In addition to other treatises on theological subjects, Frohschammer was also the author of Monaden und Weltphantasie and Über die Bedeutung der Einbildungskraft in der Philosophie Kants und Spinozas (1879); Über die Principien der Aristotelischen Philosophie und die Bedeutung der Phantasie in derselben (1881); Die Philosophie als Idealwissenschaft und System (1884); Die Philosophie des Thomas von Aquino kritisch gewürdigt (1889); Über das Mysterium Magnum des Daseins (1891); System der Philosophie im Umriss, pt. i. (1892). His autobiography was published in A. Hinrichsen's Deutsche Denker (1888). See also F. Kirchner, Über das Grundprincip des Wellprocesses (1882), with special reference to F.; E. Reich, Wellanschauung und Menschenleben; Betrachtungen über die Philosophie J. Frohschammers (1894); B. Münz, J. Frohschammer, der Philosoph der Welt phantasie (1894) and Briefe von und über J. Frohschammer (1897); J. Friedrich, Jakob Frohschammer (1896) and Systematische und kritische Darstellung der Psychologie J. Frohschammers (1899); A. Attensperger, J. Frohschammers philosophisches System im Grundriss (1899).

FROISSART, JEAN (1338-1410?), French chronicler and raconteur, historian of his own times. The personal history of Froissart, the circumstances of his birth and education, the incidents of his life, must all be sought in his own verses and chronicles. He possessed in his own lifetime no such fame as that which attended the steps of Petrarch; when he died it did not occur to his successors that a chapter might well be added to his Chronicle setting forth what manner of man he was who wrote it. The village of Lestines, where he was curé, has long forgotten that a great writer ever lived there. They cannot point to any house in Valenciennes as the lodging in which he put together his notes and made history out of personal reminiscences. It is not certain when or where he died, or where he was buried. One church, it is true, doubtfully claims the honour of holding his bones. It is that of St Monegunda of Chimay. "Gallorum sublimis honos et fama tuorum, Hic Froissarde, jaces, si modo forte jaces."

It is fortunate, therefore, that the scattered statements in his writings may be so pieced together as to afford a tolerably connected history of his life year after year. The personality of the man, independently of his adventures, may be arrived at by the same process. It will be found that Froissart, without meaning it, has portrayed himself in clear and well-defined outline. His forefathers were jurés (aldermen) of the little town of Beaumont, lying near the river Sambre, to the west of the forest of Ardennes. Early in the 14th century the castle and

|'seigneurie of Beaumont fell into the hands of Jean, younger son of the count of Hainaut. With this Jean, sire de Beaumont, lived a certain canon of Liége called Jean le Bel, who fortunately was not content simply to enjoy life. Instigated by his seigneur he set himself to write contemporary history, to tell "la pure veriteit de tout li fait entièrement al manire de chroniques. With this view, he compiled two books of chronicles. And the chronicles of Jean le Bel were not the only literary monuments belonging to the castle of Beaumont. A hundred years before him Baldwin d'Avernes, the then seigneur, had caused to be written a book of chronicles or rather genealogies. It must therefore be remembered that when Froissart undertook his own chronicles he was not conceiving a new idea, but only following along familiar lines.

Some 20 m. from Beaumont stood the prosperous city of Valenciennes, possessed in the 14th century of important privileges and a flourishing trade, second only to places like Bruges or Ghent in influence, population and wealth. Beaumont, once her rival, now regarded Valenciennes as a place where the ambitious might seek for wealth or advancement, and among those who migrated thither was the father of Foissart. He appears from a single passage in his son's verses to have been a painter of armorial bearings. There was, it may be noted, already what may be called a school of painters at Valenciennes Among them were Jean and Colin de Valenciennes and Andrè Beau-Neveu, of whom Froissart says that he had not his equal in any country.

The date generally adopted for his birth is 1338. In after years Froissart pleased himself by recalling in verse the scenes and pursuits of his childhood. These are presented in vague generalities. There is nothing to show that he was unlike any other boys, and, unfortunately, it did not occur to him that a photograph of a schoolboy's life amid bourgeois surroundings would be to posterity quite as interesting as that faithful por traiture of courts and knights which he has drawn up in his Chronicle. As it is, we learn that he loved games of dexterity and skill rather than the sedentary amusements of chess and draughts, that he was beaten when he did not know his lessons, that with his companions he played at tournaments, and tha! he was always conscious—a statement which must be accepted with suspicion-that he was born

"Loer Dieu et servir le monde."

In any case he was born in a place, as well as at a time, singu larly adapted to fill the brain of an imaginative boy. Valenciennes was then a city extremely rich in romantic associations. Net far from its walls was the western fringe of the great forest of Ardennes, sacred to the memory of Pepin, Charlemagne, Roland and Ogier. Along the banks of the Scheldt stood, one after the other, not then in ruins, but bright with banners, the gleam of armour, and the liveries of the men at arms, castles whose seigneurs, now forgotten, were famous in their day for many & gallant feat of arms. The castle of Valenciennes itself was illustrious in the romance of Perceforest. There was born that most glorious and most luckless hero, Baldwin, first emperor of Constantinople. All the splendour of medieval life was to be seen in Froissart's native city: on the walls of the Salle le Comte glittered-perhaps painted by his father-the arms and scutcheons beneath the banners and helmets of Luxembourg, Hainaut and Avesnes; the streets were crowded with knights and soldiers, priests, artisans and merchants; the churches were rich with stained glass, delicate tracery and precious carving; there were libraries full of richly illuminated manuscripts on which the boy could gaze with delight; every year there was the fête of the puy d'Amour de Valenciennes, at which he would hear the verses of the competing poets; there were festivals, masques, mummeries and moralities. And, whatever there might be elsewhere, in this happy city there was only the pomp, and not the misery, of war; the fields without were tilled, and the harvests reaped, in security; the workman within plied his craft unmolested for good wage. But the eyes of the boy were turned upon the castle and not upon the town; it was the splendour of the knights which dazzled him, insomuch that he