Memoirs of Anne C.L. Botta,: written by her friends. With selections from her correspondence and from her writings in prose and poetry.

Enne C. Z. cotta
*been imposed upon the city of Rennes, which, if not paid, was to
be doubled in twenty-four hours and collected by the soldiers,
who had cleared houses and streets of their occupants, and forbidden any one, under pain of death, to receive the evicted people;
so that old men, children, and women near confinement were
wandering round, crying, without food or shelter. " Day before
yesterday," she writes, "a fiddler was broken on the wheel for
getting up a dance and stealing some stamped paper. He was
quartered after death, and his limbs exposed in the four corners
of the city. Sixty citizens have been thrown into prison, and tomorrow begins the business of punishing them. This province
sets a fine example to others, teaching them above all to respect
their governors."
The fifteenth century marked a great era in the history of
humanity. Constantinople, the last stronghold of the Eastern
Empire, long besieged by the Turks, fell before them, and Greek
learning and art took refuge in Western Europe. The invention
of printing came upon the darkness of the middle ages like the
sun on a polar night. Literature,before confined to manuscripts
the possession of the learned few, and so precious that a book
was sometimes accepted as the ransom for a city, was suddenly
spread abroad; the human mind was stirred with new impulses,
and new vistas were opened, along which it rapidly advanced.
Toward the close of this memorable century, the discovery of a
new world suddenly broke upon mankind; and following upon
these great events came the Reformation, proclaiming the right
of private judgment in religious belief, breaking the bonds of
ecclesiastical domination, and opening the way for a still further
advance. But while we recognize the law of progress, it must
be observed that the law is also imperative that progress must be
through conflict. This has never been more forcibly illustrated
than in the results of the Reformation. For more than a century the great principle it asserted was combated by the most
cruel and destructive wars that have devastated Europe, laying
waste cities, towns, and villages, and giving up men, women,
and children to fire and sword. But the sword of the Spirit is
mightier than any material weapon; ideas are the invisible, in
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