The French fur-traders on the St. Lawrence and its tributaries were necessarily brought into connexion with the Indian, but not alone was this the case with the French trader; the French missionary kept pace with him, and even went far a-head, and became the great European explorer of the interior of North America. We have seen with admiration, the zeal of Eliot and his coadjutors in Christianising the feeble remains of the Indian tribes in New England; and George Fox and his friends equally nobly preaching to those of Maryland, Carolina and Virginia, as to “men and brethren” in whose souls the Divine Voice had an utterance as well as in their own; we have seen William Penn legislating for them equally as for the whites, and forming with them a covenant of peace which has obtained a world-wide reputation. But the Christian zeal and uprightness of these men was far surpassed in intensity by the devotedness, the constancy, and the heroism of the Jesuit missionaries of New France, who in their earnestness to save the souls of the heathen, died the death of martyrs and counted their loss great gain in Christ. Too little is known by general English readers of this affecting portion of American history, which is unsurpassed by anything we have yet related. When, in 1632, Quebec was restored to the French, a hundred associates, Richelieu, Champlain and various opulent merchants being of the number, obtained a grant of New France from Louis XIII., the grant including “the whole basin of the St. Lawrence, and of such other rivers of New France as flowed into the sea, besides Florida, which was claimed as a French province by virtue of Coligny’s unsuccessful efforts.” Champlain, the governor of New France, a man of a religious mind, who had already declared that the salvation of a soul was worth more than the conquest of an empire, was the earnest supporter of missionary labours. As missionaries of New France, he would have selected priests of the Franciscan or mendicant order, as being “free from ambition;” but he was overruled, and the mission of converting the heathens of the New World was intrusted alone to the Jesuits. They had here the monopoly of souls. Their labours, however, were of the most apostolic character. “They had,” says Bancroft, “the faults of ascetic superstition, but the horrors of a Canadian life in the wilderness were resisted with invincible passive courage and a deep internal tranquillity. The history of their labours is connected with the origin of every celebrated town in the annals of French America; not a cape was turned, no a river entered, but a Jesuit led the way.”