" Lescarbot,
"Champlain Society Publication," 7:342.] there was later the news of the
death of Henry IV heard from a fisherman of Newfoundland; and there was,
above all else except the "indomitable tenacity" of Champlain, the
unquenchable enthusiasm, lively fancy, and good sense of Lescarbot, the
verse-making advocate from Paris.
There is so much of tragic suffering and gloom in all this epic of the
forests that one is tempted to spend more time than one ought, perhaps, on
that bit of European clearing (the only spot, save one, as yet in all the
continent north of Florida and Mexico), in the jolly companionship of that
young poet-lawyer who had doubtless sat under lecturers in Paris and who
would certainly have been quite as capable and entertaining as any
lecturers on the new world brought in these later days from America to
Paris, a man "who won the good-will of all and spared himself naught,"
"who daily invented something for the public good," and who gave the
strongest proof of what advantage "a new settlement might derive from a
mind cultivated by study and induced by patriotism to use its knowledge
and reflections.
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