LITTELL~S LIVING AGE. No. 476.~i~ 2 JULY, 1853. CoNTENTS. 1. America from the Cosmopolitical Point of View, British Quarterly Review, . 3 2. A Fireside Gossip about Books Hoggs Instructor, . . . 17 3. The Tuileries till 1815, and after 1815, . Bentleys Miscellany 21 4. The Prince of Madagascar orn the German of Karl Gutzkow, 31 5. Lady Lees Widowhood Part V., . . Blackwoods Magazine 49 POETRY: The Little Straw Hat Aetivity in the Royal Dockyards, 1; The Age of Patience A Swells Homage to Mrs. Stowe, 2; Omnipotence, 30; Sun and Shadow, 48; Song by Barry Cornwall, 63. SHORT ARTICLES: Tennysons Oriana Portable Homes, 2; Dr. Dunlop Canine Mad- ness, 16; The Crown and the Broad-brim in Bavaria, 20; Hints as to Manures The Mirage in Australia Marriage under Difficulties Sound Sense in Singing, 64. ThE LITTLE STRAW HAT. T is a dear little hat, and it hangs there still And its voice of the past bids our heart-strings thrill, For it seems like a shadow of days passed oer, Of the bright one who that hat once wore. T is a dear little hat, fer each simple braid Tells that oft oer its plaiting those fingers played, And many a wreath for its crown hath been twined, To the grateful taste of his youthful mind. Yes ; there silent it hangs with its curling front, Still as playfully rolled as had been its wont; But the golden ringlets which waved below Have curled their last clusters long ago. Ay, the hat is the same, but it shades no more Those light blue eyes as in days of yore; And the sun-lit smile that danced oer that brow, Can but light up our hearts sad memories now. Sad memories they are; oer their quivering strings Each breath of the by-gone a tremor flings, And joys that we fain would waken again, In memory are wreathed with a thrill of pain. Then recall not the past though the dimpled hand May never again clasp the braided strand, Though the breeze no longer may bear the tone Of the ringing laughter of childhoods own. Ah! think of him now, with a glittering crown Oer his heavenly forehead resting down, While his fingers stray oer the golden wire, That blends with his voice mid the cherub choir. Ay, I see him now with the holy light Ponring broad on his brow with radiance bright, CC~CLXXYI. LIYLNO AGE. YOL. ii. 1 And I hear the tones which in heaven have birth 0, call him not hack to this saddened earth From Punch. ACTIVITY IN THE ROYAL DOCKYAItDS. BY AN EYE-WITNESS. I STOOD in Portsmouth, on the Dockyard ground, And looked about for industrys display; But when of work I did not hear the sound, I thought, of course, it was a holiday. I was mistaken; things pursued their course According to the customary track I saw nine men uniting all their force To move what one might carry on his back. I saw four stalwart fellows, tall and stout, Who with their arms compactly folded stood, Looking at one, who, as he stared about, Morticed by fits and starts a bit of wood. I saw two brawny men with feeble blows An iron hoop upon some timher dpive; And when t was on for practice, I suppose To take it off again they did contrive. I saw four others working at a mast; But their pursuit I scarce had time to con, When I perceived with admiration vast Nine more at the proceeding looking on. I saw two horses drag a single stone; At scarce two miles an hour their pace I fix, Though by one horse the job could have been done Not at two miles an hour, but five or six. Yet Portsmouth boasts, they say, a model yard; Weve heard that story many a time and oft; But he who henceforth thinks theyre working hard At Portsmouth Dockyard, will be precious soft. 2 From the National ~ra. 1 THE ANGEL OF PATIENCE. A FREE PARAPHRASE OF THE GERMAN. To weary hearts, to mourning homes, Gods meekest angel gently comes No power has he to banish pain, Or give us back our lost again, And yet, in tenderest love, our dear And heavenly Father sends him here. There s quiet in that angels glance, There s rest in his still countenance, He mocks no grief with idle cheer, Nor wounds with words the mourners ear; But ills and woes he may not cure He kindly helps us to endure. Angel of Patience! sent to calm Our feverish brow with cooling balm; To lay the storms of hope and fear, And reconcile lifes smile and tear; And throbs of wounded pride to still, And make our own our Fathers will! 0! thou, who mournest on thy way, With longings for the close of day, He walks with thee, that angel kind, And gently whispers, Be resigned Bear up, bear on, the end shall tell, The good Lord ordereth all things well! From Punch. A SWELLS HOMAGE TO MRS. STOWE. A IIU5T wead Uncle Tom a wawk Which, A m afwaid s extwem~ly slow, People one meets begin to talk Of Mits. HARWIETBEEcHASTOWE. T is not as if A saw ha name To walls and windas still confined; All that is meawly vulga fame: A dont wespect the public mind. But Staffad House has made haw quite Anotha kind a pawson look, A countess would pasist, last night, In asking me about haw book. She wished to know if I admiawd EVA, which quite confounded me; And then haw Ladyship inqwawd Whethaw A did nt hate LEOwEE? Bai JOVE! A was completely fiawd; A wishd myself, or haw, at Fwance: And that s the way a fella s bawd By evwy gal he asks to dance. A felt myself a gweata fool Than A had evaw felt befaw A Ii study at some Wagged School The tale of that old Blackamaw. THE ANGEL OF PATIENCE, ETV. TENNYSONS OUANA. Perhaps no one acquainted with the beautiful Scotch ballad I wish I was where Helen jies, on first reading Tennysons Oriana could fail to be struck with their similarity of catastrophe, though brought about by incidents so far apart. A writer in an evening paper, giving an ac- count of Prof. Aytouns third Lecture, says that the professor, speaking of the two poems, seemed to hold an opinion, but not absolutely affirming it, that Helen of Kirconnell may be deemed the original after which Oriana has been formed, and that their agreement is not fortuitous. This opinion is perhaps the correct one but the question can be decided only by the poet himself. Entirely disclaim- ing any intention of making an invidious coin- parison between the two poems, or of depre- ciating the undoubted but differing excellencee of Oriana, I would invite attention, by those unacquainted with the merits of the old ballad, to points in which the author of Oriana seems to employ cording suggested by the text of Helen of Kirconnell : e.g. Curst be the heart that thought the thought, And curst the hand that fired the shot, When in my arms burd Helen dropt, And died to succor me whep hurling imprecations against the un- happy arrow by whose glancing aside his mistress became its victim. But the pathetic relation of Helens self-sacrifice, and its speedy retribution, are told in a strain of poetry uu- equalled in Oriana : None but my foe to be my guide, Oer fair Kirconnell Lee. I lighted down, my sword did draw; I hacked him in pieces sma, I hacked him in pieces sma, For her sake that died for me. A BORDERER. PORTABLE HOMEs. To a casual observer pass- ing up or down the river Thames, the Isle of Dogs has at present the aspect of a newly-dis- covered gold region. Numerous temporary erec- tions of galvanized tinned iron arise one day, and are the next unbolted, unscrewed, and packed in the smallest possible space for the colonies. Curious that the mother country should provide homes for the emigrant from her shores ! Front what we have recently seen, through the courtesy of Messrs. Moorewood and Rogers, of the Steel- yard, Thames street, not only is the small shed, or the dwelling of 2 to 12 rooms, with every ap- pliance of English comfort, to be had to order, but warehouses, factories, and even foundries are equally subject to a tariff of so much per foot. One of the latter a foundry for Australia, of 150 by 80 feet, of the simplest geometrical prin- ciples of strength and proportion, was in the course of ereetion during our visit. London Morning Herald. AMERICA FROM THE COSMOPOLITICAL POINT OF VIEW. From the British Quarterly Review. White, Red, Black: Sketches of Society in the United States during the Visit of their Guest (Kossuth). By FRANCIS and ThERESA PUL- SzKY. 3 vols. London: Tr~ibner and Co. 1853. AMERICA has been written about, and writ- ten about, till we have a perfect library of volumes treating of American society and its peculiarities. Yet the subject is far from be- ing exhausted. There is, in particular, one quite new point of view from which America is only now beginning to be regarded, and from which it presents aspects not yet familiar even to those who are best acquainted with its social statistics. hitherto that which has most interested the rest of the world in the great transatlantic republic has been its history as a part of the earth disconnected from the other and older parts, a theatre where an independent civil- ization has sprung up under new and remark- able conditions. At the time when Franklin and Washington were born, there were, per- haps, not more than half a million of individ- uals in the British colonies of America; and now the commirnity forlned by that half mil- lion and their immediate descendants, has swelled into a vast nation of twenty millions, possessing a continent over which its energies may expatiate for generations to come, or- ganized on a basis of political arrangements such as the world has never seen before, and pervaded throughout its entire mass by senti- inents, customs, and institutions, developed, it is true, out of germs taken from old Eu- rope, but developed with a very extraordinary (litlerence. To describe the constitution of this youngest addition to the great family of nations, to trace the successive steps by which it has become what it is, and to derive from its example hints for the instruction of older societies, have already been the laudable aims of many European writers and political theo- rists. But the world is beginning to be struck with an entirely new idea in reference to America. It begins to be felt that this reser- voir, which has been gradually filling, has now reached such a point of fulness that it is very likely to run over. It begins to be felt that this great accumulation of the race on a new theatre, and under new conditions, has not been going on for nothing; that it is not any longer as a mere spectacle that America claims the interest of the cisatlantic nations; but that, having served long enough as a pas- sive illustration of the working of certain prin- ciples and forms of government, she is rousing herself even now for a work of aggression and propagandism. For the America of to-day is not the America of Washington and Jefferson; nor can the maxims of these men serve any longer as the adequate breath and inspiration of so vast a body-politic. The America for which they lived and labored was a mere strip of coast, separated by a voyage of six weeks from an old world, from which it had been politically cut adrift; the America of to- day has that preponderance assured to it in the general affairs of the world, which belongs to the virtual proprietorship of an entire con- tinent. It is hardly an exaggeration to 5it~ that what America can do in the world at present, is limited only by what she herself chooses to attempt. Not what lessons the nations may spontaneously learn from Amer- ica, but what lessons America will be apt to teach the nations whether they care to learn them or not this is no~v the question ; this is the new point of view from which America must be looked at. Among the things which have awakened the attention of speculative politicians to this new view of the p lace and duty of America in the general a airs of the earth, the most important by far has been Kossuths trip across the Atlantic. The very purpose of the visit of the great Hungarian was to expound to America, more clearly than she could do herself, her place and mission among the contemporary nations. Nor can this question be more appropriately discussed than in con- nexion with a book written by two of Kos- suths personal friends, who accompanied him on his visit, and whose impressions of American society were determined in the main by this very idea of what America could do if she were to let herself loose among the nations as a force of change and rectification. In the volumes before us,.it is true, there are sketches of American society in various other aspects, and even criticisms of American manners and custonas, as they appeared to minds capable of judging them by the high- est standard of European refinement; but, on the whole, the matter of the volumes, and certainly their greatest merit, consists, not in social criticisms for the behoof of America itself, but in what is suggested and implied as to the function of America in a cosmopo- litical point of view. It is to this part of the subject that Mr. Pulszky elsiefly addresses himself in the portions of the book to which ho lays claim ; the less disquisitional portions, containing what may be called the gossip of Kossuths progress through America, and the cursory delineations of American manners na they attracted the remark of the Hungarian visitors, come more appropriately from the pen of Madame Pulszky. What with the disquisition, and what with the gossip, the work is one of very great interest. The first thing to be attended to, in a. theoretical study of the civilization and des- tinies of any people, is the nature of the geographical theatre which they occupy, or over which they are to expatiate; and wa. 3 4 AMERICA FROM THE COSMOPOLITICAL POINT OF VIEW. have very rarely seen a more admirable ex- ample of geographical description than in the following physical survey of North America, quoted by Mr. Pulszky from a native American authority, Colonel Gilpin. Let the reader observe particularly the closing portion of it, in which the geography of North America is contrasted with that of the continents of the Old World. The chain of the Andes, debouching north from the Isthmus, opens like the letter Y, into two primary chains, or Cordilleras. On the right t.he Sierra Madre (Rocky Mountains), with their Piedmoet, the Black Hills, which mask the front of the Sierra, trending along the coast of the Mexican Gulf, divides the Northern Con- tinent almost centrally, forming an unbrokeu water-shed to Behrings Straits. On the left the Andes follow the coast of the Pacific, warp around the Gulf of California, and, passing along the coast of California and Oregon, under the name of Sierra Nevada, terminate also near Behring Straits. The immense interval between these chains is a succession of intramontane basins, and forms the great platform of the table-lands, being a longitudinal section about two sevenths of the whole area between the two oceans, but walled from both, and having but three outlets for its waters, the Rio Grande, the Colorado, and Columbia. Columnar basalt forms the base- snent of this whole region, and volcanic action is everywhere prominent. Its general level is about 6000 feet above the sea. Rain seldom falls, and timber is rare. The ranges of mountains which separate the basins are often rugged and capped with perpetual snow, while isolated masses of great height elevate themselves from the plains. Such is the region of the table-lands ; beyond these is the maritime region, for the great wall of the Andes, receding from the beach of the Pacific, leaves between itself and the sea a half valley, as it were, forming the seaboard slope, across which descends to the sea a series of fine rivers, like the little streams d~scending from the Alleghanies to the Atlantic. This resembles and balances the maritime slope of the Atlantic side of the continent, from the Alleghanies to the sea ; it is of the highest agricultural excellence, basaltic in formation, and grand beyond the powers of description, the snowy points of the Andes being everywhere visible from the sea, whilst its climate is entirely exempt from the frosts of winter. Such, and so grand, is our con- tinent towards the Pacific. Let us turn our ~glance towards the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, and scan the geography in front. Four great .vkdleys appear, each one drained by a river of first magnitude. First, the Mississippi valley, ,greatest in ma6nitude, and embracing the heart and splendor of the continent, gathers the waters ~of 1,500,099 square miles, and sheds them into the Gulf of Mexico; second, the St. Lawrence, ~whose river flows into the North Atlantic; third, theNelson and Severn Rivers into the Hudsons Bay; and fourth, the great valley of the Mac- Kenzie River, rushing north into the Hyperborean Sea. These valleys, everywhere calcareous, have a uniform surface, gently rolling, but destitute of mountains, and pass into one another by dividing ridges, which distribute their own waters into each valley, but whose superior ele- vation is only distinguishable among the neneral undulations by the water-sheds they form. Around the whole continent, leaving a compara- tively narrow slope towards the oceans, runs a rim of mountains, giving the idea of a vast am- phitheatre. Through this rim penet.rate, towards the south-east and north, the above great rivers only, forming at their ddbouchds the natural doors of the interior ; but no stream penetrates west, through the Sierra Madre, which forms an unbroken water-shed from the Isthmus to Behr- ring Straits. Thus we find more than three fifths of our con- tinent to consist of a limitless plain, intersected by countless navigable streams, flowing every- where from th6 circumference towards common centres grouped in close proximity, and only divided by what connects them into one homo- geneous plan. To the American people, then, belongs this vast interior space, covered over its uniform surface of 2,300,000 square miles with the richest calcareous soil, touching the snows towards the north, and the torrid heats towards the south, bound together by an infinite internal navigation, of a temperate climate, and consti- tuting in the whole the most magnificent dwell- ing-place marked out by God for mans abode. There we perceive, in the formation of the Atlantic part of the American continent, a sublime simplicity, a complete economy of arrangement singular to itself, and the reverse of what distinguishes the ancient world. To understand this, let us compare them. Europe, the smallest of the grand divisions of the land, contains in its centre the icy masses of the Alps ; from around their declivities radiate the large rivers of that continent, the Danube directly east to the Euxine, the Po south-east to the Adriatic, the Rhone south-west to the Medi- terranean, the Rhine to the Northern Ocean. Walled off by the Pyrenees, and Carpathians, and the Ural, divergent and isolated are the Tagus, the Elbe, the Vistula, the Don, and Volga, and other single rivers, affinents of the Baltic, of the Atlantic, of the Mediterranean, and of the Euxine. Descending from common radiant points, and diverging every way from one another, no inter-communication exists between the rivers of Europe ; navigation is petty and feeble, nor have art and commerce, during many centuries, united so many small valleys, remotely isolated by impenetrable bar- riers. hence upon each river dwells a distix~ct people, different from all the rest in race, lan- guage, habits, and interests. Though often politically amalgamated by conquest, they again relapse into fragments from innate geographical incoherence. The history of these nations is a story of perpetual war. Exactly similar to Europe, though grander in size and populations, is Asia. From the stupen- dous central barrier of the Himalaya and the table-land of Tartary run the great rivers of China, the Blue and the Yellow, due east to discharge themselves beneath the rising sun; AMERICA FROM THE COSMOPOLITICAL POINT OF VIEW. towards the south run the rivers of India, the Indus and Gauges, with their tributaries ; to- wards the west, the Oxus and Jaxartes ; and north to the Arctic Seas, the four great rivers of Siberia. During fifty centuries, as now, the Alps and the Hinclukush have proved inseparable barriers to the amalgamation of nations around their bases, and dwelling in the valleys which radiate from their slopes. The continent of Africa, as far as we know the details of its sur- face, is even more than these split into disjointed fragments. Thus the continents of the Old World re- semble a bowl placed bottom upwards, which scatters everything poured upon it, whilst Northern America, right side up, receives and gathers towards its centre whatever falls within its rim. There is a stroke of Yankee genius in this comparison of the North American continent to a bowl right side up, which receives and gathers to its centre whatever falls within its run. The next thing, of course, is to inquire what are the ingredients that have been put into the bowl. That whatever social material is deposited on such a geographical theatre will, by mere geographical necessity, be more thoroughly amalgamattd, and made one homogeneous substance, than it could be in any continent of the old world, may, as Colonel Gilpin avers, be true enough ; but, after all, the most important question is, whether the material there deposited has been such, that the resulting amalgam is sure to be not an amalgam of rubbish, like that which the continent has once already had in the native American tribes, but an amalgam of precious stuff, good to be looked at as a whole on its own proper area, and to be used in flakes and morsels for chemical comnmixture with the rest of the world. On this point, fortunately, there is every reason to be well satisfied. The American people is an amalgam of all the picked races of the world, with the Anglo-Saxon predomi- nant. English, Scotch, Irish, French, Span- iards, arid Germans in large masses ; Jews, Poles, Italians, Hungarians, Swedes, Danes, and Chinese in smaller proportions such are the elements out of which the American nationality has been or is being formed; a nationality also comprehending within its bosom, though itdoes not civilly acknowledge, an immense population of Africans. In some ~ arts of the Union there are still considerable nots of some of these races undissolved into the general mass Spaniards, for example, in the south, Frenchmen on the Mississippi, and Germans in the western settlements; everywhere, however, the process of absorp- tion is going on, and there can be no doubt that ultimately all the white population will be a tolerably homogeneous amalgam of the various constituent races united in their relative proportions, speaking one English language, which will also be common to the outstanding blacks. Whether the blacks, too, will ultimately be incorporated in this amalgam is a problem of the future. Of the ethnographical constituents as they now stand, the Anglo-Saxons are indubitably in the ascendant. A claim, indeed, has recently been advanced in favor of the Colts; and it has been maintained that, taking into account the immense Irish immigration of the last half-century, the actual m~ajority of the American people are not of Anglo-Saxon, but of Celtic extraction. This claim, however, the fond illusion of some patriotic Colt, has broken down most completely under the figures furnished by the American census; arid theorists are still at liberty to make as much as they like out of the fact, that the Americans are in the main a people of the Anglo-Saxon stock. After the Anglo-Saxons, the probable order of numerical proportion, reckoning only the more important of the white ingredients, and omitting the blacks entirely, would be as follows Colts from the British islands, Germans, French, Span- iards. In some spots the Germans are a very large percentage, and there are still in the Union about a million of persons using the German language. Now, though our ethnographical science is not byany means in such a state as to enable us to appreciate very precisely the effects of this amalgamation of so ninny races in one nationality, yet that a nation so formed must be different, in essential respects, from any yet existing on the face of the earth, may be assumed as self-evident. It seems even to be a natural supposition that such a nation is a nearer approach, than ar~ything yet seen, to that final condition of humanity to which the whole world is tending. For, if there is to be progress at all, one of two things must ulti- mately happen either the fusion of the nations of the earth into one population homogeneous in the main, or their organiza- tion in a confederacy in which all will be represented. In either case, the great ques- tion is, what elements are to have the pre- ponderance, and what are to be eliminated. If the result is to be a fusion of all the races into one, what are the true combining pro- portions of the races, as they now are? If the result is to be a confederacy, on what pm~inci- plo of proportionate value are the nations to be co~irdinated? The mere attempt to con- sider such questions inevitably leads the thoughts to America. The proportions in which the races are commingled there may not be the true combining proportions which theory would prescribe for the ultimate amal- gam, but they are a practical experimnent in that direction ; and the amalgam they form must, at all events, be regarded as a necessary intermediate between our day and the final 5 6 AMERICA FROM THE COSMOPOLITICAL POINT OF VIEW. result. On the other hand, if confederacy is to be the rule, we have here, in the vast transatlantic nation, weight enough to break down any scheme of confederacy we may have been forming with reference only to the nations of the old world. It is not long ago since a theorizing Frenchman, propounding his scheme of the confederacy which was to take the lead in civilization, formulized it under the notion of what he called an Occidental Pentarchy, embracing the five great nations of western Europ3 the French, the English, the Italians, the Germans, and the Spaniards. The common aspirations of these five nations the elite of humanity, as he termed them were to be represented and turned to account by a central committee, sitting at Paris (of course!) ; this committee to consist of twenty delegates, in the following inter- national proportions six from France, that country having the right to the first place in virtue of its general superiority in all respects; five from England, to represent the practical saga city of our countrymen; four from Italy, that the admirable msthetic spontaneity of the Italians might have its part in the evo- lution ; three from Germany, as the native country of the generalizing tendency ; and two from Spain, as the land of personal dignity and catholicity of spirit. We sadly fear that, even at the time when this scheme of a Pentarchy of the west was propounded, a due consideration of Russia and eastern Europe, not to speak of the interests of the Scandinavian north, would have sufficed to knock it on the head. But, in any case, the appearance in the other hemisphere of such a phenomenon as the American Republic, would rob the Pentarchy of aught like cosmo- political precedency. There a cower is form- imlg itself, by the other process of physical fusion, involving all the tendencies of race (with the single exception, perhaps, of the admairahle vesthetic spontaneity accorded to the Italians), which it would be the office of the Pentarchy to adjust and coinirdinate by clever cogitation. And thus there would be a rivalry of method between the two hemi- spheres. In the American hemisphere, where divers elements are in process of union to form one body politic, the ~vatchxvord of civilization would be Annex, intermarry, and speak English; in the old hemisphere, cut up as it is into obdurate national masses, the watchword would continue to be, Fight each other as there is necessity, and eodperate as well as you can. An Occidental Pen- tarchy in Europe would be but a cluster of separate nationalities, menaced by Russian Panslavism on the one hand, and taunted by American Pan-ethuicism on the other; while between Russia and America would lie the expanse of motley and incorrigible Asia. Not only, however, is the American people an amalgam of a great variety ef races and nations; it is an amalgam, moreover, oF what may be called the ejected and expelled of those nations. This is a very important fact. America was colonized originally, and is being colonized still, not by the normal representatives of the various nations of the old world, but by men representing whatever these nations have produced extreme in senti- ment, in character, or in systematic creed. Who were the first colonists of America The Puritans and other sectaries of England, including the Quakers; the cadets of royalist houses during the civil wars; the most daring adventurers among the Spaniards; the most restless of French adventurers, including Jesuit missionaries. America, at the very first, was the refuge for whatever was either intellectually or morally extreme in the society of Europe the most noble conscientiousness, the most reckless blackguardism. And who have been the immigrants into America since Still sectarians and refugees Protestants too Protestant for home, such as Huguenots from France, and Moravians, Dunkers, Mennonites, and Sclmwenkfeldians from Germany; Catho- lics persecuted on the other hand for their ultra-Catholicism ; Irishmen, full of fury against Great Britain; exiles of all lands flying from the pains of despotism. American society is thus an amalgamation of the ex- treme opinions, the extreme isms of Europe, whether in religion, in character, or in politics. All that Europe has rejected as too advanced for it, or as anomalous in it this is the very material with which American civilization has set out in its operations, and which it is its business to harmonize and to work up. The statistics of religion in Ameri- ca are especially curious under this head. In the whole Union, according to Mr. Pulszky, there are upwards of 36,000 places of worship, belonging to the leading religious sects in the following proportions: first, the Methodists, the most active sect in the United States, who, from having only 83 ministers in the year 1784, have increased so as now to have 6000 regular and 8000 local preachers, these representing, as we may suppose, about 13,000 churches: next, the Baptists, who, from having 900 ministers and 1150 churches in 1790, have now 8000 ministers and 13,500 churches; next, the Presbyterians, holding about 5960 churches; next the Con- gregationalists, or faithful representatives of the original Puritans, holding about 2000 churches, of which 1400 are in New Eng- land; next the Episcopalians, with about 1550 churches, chiefly in the larger cities; next, the Roman Catholics, with 1073 churches; and lastly the Unitarians, chiefly in New England, with 300 churches. These statistics do not fairly represent the numerical proportions of the various sects in the popula AMERICA FROM THE COSMOPOLITICAL POINT OF VIEW. tion the Roman Catholics, for example, being estimated at a hioher fi~ure than the numl)cr of their churches would indicate, namely, at upwards of two millions. But it is clear from the above statistics that America differs from all other countries in this, that, while it offers a refuge to all creeds, it is par excellence the home of the extreme forms of the prevailing cis-Atlantic creeds. The broken-off tips, as it were, of the leading European creeds have taken root there, and shot up and spread so as to become the creeds of large masses; while again, out of these very creeds, new creeds with all kinds of names are budding and sprouting. The far west, especially, is said to be rife in new forms of belief and fanaticism. Whatever the materials of which the na- tionality of the United States is composed, the mechanism, at all events, by which these materials have been and are being nation- alized, the system of political forms from which they have taken their impress, is of Anglo- Saxon origin the admirable device of those practical Anglo-Saxon heads who had the business of making a constitution for America, after the War of Independence. Mr. Pulszky makes some very acute and sug- gestive remarks on the difference between this constitution and our cis-Atlantic forms of government, whether the parliamentary government of England, or the centralized monarchy of the continental countries. When, during and since the great French Revolution, constitutions were devised for the different nations of Europe, they were always shaped, or at least said to be shaped, according to the English model, though it is fully under- stood that the English aristocracy is peculiar to the English, and that this institution, and the aristocratic spirit and legislation in respect to landed property, does not and cannot exist any- where on the continent. The study of public law has, by this means, become very much abridged, and the word constitution got a quite conventional meaning amongst the journal- ists and professional politicians viz., a combi- nation of a King and a Parliament consisting of Peers and Commons. The result of this combination in England was, that the Crown in conjunction with the Parlia- ment destroyed, little by little, the municipal life, and introduced the uniformity of centraliza- tion ; that, on the other side, the Parliament, backed by the masses, curtailed the traditional prerogative of the Crown, until at length panic- ?nentcery omnipotence was established, the rep- resentatives of a portion of a nation and the hereditary peers exercising the most unlimited legislative power, leaving for the Crown but the theoretical right of the veto, the choice of the ministry from amongst one of the two aristo- cratic parties of the Parliament, and the disso- Intion of the latter. Towards the nation Par- liament is yet less checked. The member has, in fact, to give a palatable speech to his constit- uency before his election but, generally speaking, he has not much to care for the opinion of the electors. He can absent himself at every important occasion, and he may vote against the wishes of his constituents, for he cannot be called to account ; not to mention the inequality of the constituencies, which are se arranged as to give in every case a large ma~ jority of the seats in the House of Commons to the aristocracy of the country. Theoretically, it is a very illogical constitution, but practically, it works reasonably enough, because it does not obstruct the development of the nation, whose mind is sound, and whose character is sober and moral ; and, therefore, even the faults of the constitution become of value, as there is always something to be mended, and the great commu- nity can rejoice every year that their matchless constitution has again been improved. For the Continent, the combination of King, Peers, and Commons, has a somewhat different meaning, according to the notions even of the English liberal newspapers and statesmen. In England, it means parliamentary omnipotence; on the Continent, merely the omnipotence of the Crown, under the screen of legislative forms, In England the government must retire, if de- feated in the Commons after the appeal to the people by a dissolution, and the Crown must take its advisers from the opposition. On th~ Continent, on the contrary, the Commons must submit after a dissolution, lest the Crown declares that it is impossible to go on with this consti- tution, and abolishes it altogether, rather than give up an unpopular minister or measure. The philosophy of English constitutionalism is evi- dently that the government and the majority of Parliament must be of the same principles ; if there arises a difference of opinions between them, the one of the two must yield, otherwise it would be impossible to avoid either a revolu- tion or a coup dltat. According tcr this theory, all the European journals predicted the French catastrophe long before it happened. The constitution of 184~ was criticized most severely for establishing two supreme powers one legislative, the other executive both responsible to the people, but neither of them so far superior to the other as to have the means of forcing the other to give way. . . It was but a few days after the arrival of the tidings about the 2nd of December, that I came to Washington, under the impression of the coup ditat, and of all the previous dia- triles on the inevitable consequ~nces of a collision between the executive power and the Legislative Assembly, which, in all the papers of Europe, preceded the tragedy of Paris. But when I inquired about the constitution of the land and the party statistics in Washington, I found, to my great astonishment, two supreme powers established, both issuing from the universal suffrage of the nation the executive and the legislative the President not having the power of dissolving the Congress ; and, actually, I found a Whig President, surrounded by a Whig min- istry, whilst the Whigs were in a considerable minority in the Senate as well as in the Assembly, 7 8 AMERICA FROM THE COSMOPOLITICAL POINT OF VIEW. and yet nobody seemed to be afraid either of a revolution or of a coup dc1 at, or of a standstill of the administration. The reason is, that neither the President nor the Congress has any- thing to do with the government of the individual States, which govern themselves as sovereign States. The executive and Congress have but the general direction of the Union, not its gov- ernment, in the European sense of the word. The President has no nomination, nor any share whatever in the election of the officials of any State, nor has the Congress the power to inter- fere with the way in which the administration and legislation of the individual States is going on. I saw at once the difference of the basis of the constitution in America and Europe in Amer- ica they do not know anything about parliamen- tary omnipotence; in Europe, nothing about the inviolability of municipal autonomy, de- veloped in America as State rights. I had later often the opportunity to see how the constitu- tion of the United States leaves perfect freedom to each State, and how this admirable arrange- ment suits the wants of a country whose cli- mate, population, and interests, are so much at variance, and which occupies the whole extent of a continent from 28 to 49 degrees north lati- tude. The freedom and sovereignty guaranteed by the constitution to the individual States, gives to the Union so sound and broad a basis, that all the alarm about its dissolution, which excites the people, at certain intervals, turns out to be void of any serious foundation. And yet this constitution was framed at a time when the Union comprised merely the eastern sea-shore States, and had scarcely extended over the Alleghanies Even the boldest statesman amongst the framers of the constitution could not anticipate that their work was to be recognized as the organic law over the whole temperate zone of North America. There is something providential in this most important social arrangement. Never did the Americans aim at a uniformity like the French, or even like the English; never at concentrating the legislative power in the Congress ; each States legislature makes and unmakes the civil and criminal laws for the State. They contract debts and tax themselves as they please ; they regulate their banking system and financial administration; they pro- vide for the education. Each State has its own full sovereignty, with the exception of a few powers ceded to the general government. They gave up the right to enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation with another State or foreign power,.or engage in war, coin money, or lay duty on imports, exports, or tonnage. To pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility, to make a law re- specting an establishment of religion, or pro- hibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances ; all these points are forbidden to each State, as well as to the Congress of the Union. The right of the people to bear arms cannot be infringed by Congress., and the trial by jury is secured to every person. Such being the geographical theatre on which the American nation has reared itseW, such the materials of which it is composed, and such the general political form in which it is cast, what, it may be asked, are the actual and observed qualities in the result which make it most interesting in a cosmo- political point of view l First of nil, then, the Americans are a na- tion; they display and are pervaded by a most intense spirit of nationality. No small nation of the Old World not the Swiss, not the Scotch before the Union, not the Danes, are possessed and animated in so extreme a degree by the pure sentiment of nationality as this large and highly.factitious nation of North America. True, the Union is divisible into four groups of States, presenting very marked differences from each other, as regards inter- ests, social condition, and even physiognomy. First, there is the New England group of States comprehending Maine, Massachu- setts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Con- necticut, and Vermont the land of the gen- uine Yankees, the hard-headed, laborious, dogmatic, shrewd, free, and enterprising de- scendants of the old Puritans. Next, there is the middle group of States comprehend- ing New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, and New Jersey the seat of the great coma- mercial interests, and of the more comprehen- sive political tendencies, of the Union. Then there is the southern group ot States Vir- ginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Arkan- sas, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, the Carolinas and Delaware the seat of slavery, and of aristocratic leisure and luxury, and the population of which, though less industrious, enterprising, and even intellectual, than the New Englanders, are yet distinguished as having supplied the greatest number of states- men to the Union. Lastly, there is the west- ern group of States including parts of Ken- tucky, Missouri, and Ohio, and the States of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa the land of independent small farm- ers, the paradise of the agricultural immi- grant, and the home of absolute democratic equality. But though these four groups of States have their distinguishing character- istics, and even their points of antagonism, in some cases exaggerated (as in the slavery- controversy between the south and the north) into threats of political disruption ; yet, on the whole, the inhabitants of all the four have no deeper feeling than that which displays itself in the boast that they are Americans. The nationality of the Americans is, as we all know, proverbially offensive. There never was a nation on the earth so vain of its own merits, and so contemptuous of the merits of 9 AMERICA FROM THE COSMOPOLITICAL POINT OF VIEW. others. Are we not a great nation, sir ? is their salutation to every foreign traveller in the States; and the common phrases of bom- bast put into the mouths of Americans in works of fiction, We are an almighty fine people ; We can put the Atlantic in one pocket, and the Pacific in another, and reduce the universe to nowhere and a spot of grease, are hardly exaggerations of the actual slang with which the Americans regale their own sense of their national importamice. Disagree- able in individuals, this national braggardism is formidable and respectable when viewed as characteristic of a people in the aggregate and its possession by a people composed ethno- graphically of such heterogeneous elements is an illustration of Kossuths remark, that the nation of every man is not a certain fragment of population marked out for him by consid- erations of race or even of language, but the seat of those social forms under whose influ- ence his being has been developed. Even a lilack in America disclaims being an African, and says proudly, when he is asked to what country he belongs, I am an American. In the second place, the Americans are not only a nation, full to the brim of the con- sciousness of nationality; they are also en- titled, according to any test or measure that can be applied to them, to rank high in the cosmopolitical scale. Tried by the numerical measure of population they are already on a par with Great Britain, and will soon ~ave it behind. Even Russia, with its fifty millions, must regard America as a full-grown nation. Again, tried by the test of exports and Am- ports that is, of commercial necessity to the rest of the world the United States hold a place with the first. Further, if we make military and naval prowess the test of cosmo- political importance, America will still stand second to none. She has already, in the past, given sufficient proof of her capacities for fighting, both by sea and land; and, if it be not yet admitted that the Americans are supe- rior to the English at sea, it is at least certain that the despotic powers of the Old World would be more chary of iasuldng the star- spangled banner, than of insulting the flag of England. A Yankee captain, indeed, is notoriously the most terrible thing going; and chips of the American block generally, though they are recognized everywhere as the most braggart and irreverent of the sons of men, are recognized, also, as the most dangerous to be locked up or called in question for anything they say or do. Add to all this the consid- eration that in all departments of intellectual labor America is a leading nation. In art and literature, indeed, as well as in the higher walks of pure speculative science, America is yet behind England; though there is evi- dence, even now, that a spirit of more original effort in such things is at work among the Americans. But in the application of science to social uses, in industrial invention, and generally in such exercises of the intellect as give a country practical eminence among the nations of the world, they have already an acknowledged superiority. Among the ma- chines for agricultural and other purposes sent to the Great Exhibition, those sent from America were the most useful; and Colts pistol is but one example of an invention pro- ceeding from America, and claiming instantly the attention of the whole world. Essen- tially the same thing, in reality, with this claim of America to high cosmopolitical esti- mation, in virtue of her Colts pistols, her im- proved ploughs, reaping machines, models of ships, and the like, is her claim to cosmopo- litical estimation in virtue of the fact that she is already in possession of a great many con- clusions on important social questions, which are, by their very nature, interesting to all the world alike, and that she is at present the richest known field of experimentation, with a view to the elucidation of other social ques- tions. The very thing that most of all gives a country cosmopolitical importance is its ability to furnish out of its own experience answers to the questions that chance at the moment to be of greatest social interest to other countries, or to exhibit going on within its bosom processes and experiments, the issue of which is not yet clear perhaps even to itself, but which nrc curious, novel, and sug- gestive in their nature. Russia, in this re- spect, is almost a blank on the map. It has a claim to cosmopolitical respect, because it is a formidable power of conquest, and because it supplies us with hemp and the like; but who ever looks to Russia for solutions of prob- lems common to all parts of the world, or for brilliant social sights and suggestions? America, on the other hand, is like a black- board on which something new is ever being chalked. up, whether in the way of solution or of interrogation. For example, the entire political system of America is a practical so- lution of the great problem, everywhere im- portant, of the reconciliation of local self- government with federation. The question of national defences without standing armies is also set in a new light to us by the militia system of America; while the question of the competence of a people to ac~ on the aggres- sive, without standing armies, also receives light from the experience of America in vol- unteer enterprises. A hundred such examples might be given of points of great social inter- est, on which America may be said to have fully made up its mind, while the other na- tions are still only bungling in the dark. Lastly, what are such odd manifestations as the spirit rappings, the Mormonite outburst with its consequences, and all the other similar developments of American inquisitiveness or 10 AMERICA FROM THE COSMOPOLITICAL POINT OF VIEW. credulity, but chalkings, as it were, on the black-board of the world for the other nations to look at? If it be the case that humanity has not yet filled out its utmost constitutional limits, but that from age to age it is contin- ually efflorescing into new manifestations, which seem at first anomalies, but are in reality normal and natural, where shall we look for the last efflorescence, the freshest sprouts, but in that country where human nature isnewest and most advanced? The third remark we would make about the American nation, regarded from our present point of view, is that no nation of the world seems to combine such an incessant and uni- versal disposition to political activity, with such a beggarly show of internal political questions whereon to gratify that disposition. The American nation coiabines, more con- spicuously than any other yet known, extreme sociability, that is, an extreme anxiety on the part of individuals to concern thcmselves with the general polities of the state, with extreme individual freedom that is, an extreme want of apparent necessity for any political activity at all. The ancient Athenians, in the days of their palmy democracy, were not charac- terized by greater political zeal and activity than the Americans. Every American is an active politician; every American, as a cit- izen, has an interest in public affairs, widen- ing from the little circle of his own neighbor- hood to the great area of the federal govern- ment. Ilenee a development among the Americans of all kinds of political aptitude aptitude in business arrangements for a po- litical purpose, in public speaking on political questions, and the like unrivalled among any other modern people. Stump-oratory among the Americans is as necessary a part of their civilization as was the eloquence of popular assemblies among the Athenians. And yet, with all this political energy diffused among individuals, the field of disputed points over which political energy may range, might seem to be less important and extensive than in any of the older nations. In America, the great questions of civil liberty, of the sovereignty of the people, of a state church or no state chureh, of secular or ecclesiastical education these, and all the other great questions of life or death, which are and for a long time will be the standing difficulties against which polit- ical energy in the older countries must dash and display itself, have been settled and ex- tinguished. Even pauperism has hardly the rank of a great public question in a country where there is such indefinite room for an expansion of the population. With the ex- ception of the single matter of slavery, there seems to be no question in the internal poli- tics of America of very great magnitude, as measured by a general human standard. In short, that general Condition-of-America question, on which the politicians and peo- ple of the United States divide themselves into parties, seems, to eyes looking on from the out- side, to be a macre aggregate of a great number of little questions of finance and the like, floating on the wave of passing circumstances. Yet, out of this most hopeless condition of things, as it might seem, for political activity, the Americans have contrived to raise a whirl- wind and palaver, such as has hardly ever been seen even in a country agonized by ques- tions of death, and life, and liberty. Nowhere does party-spirit run so high as in the United States, nowhere is political controversy carried on with greater virulence and more tremen- dous excitement. And who are the antagonis- tic forces in this political strife, the Big-end- ians and Little-endians of this enormous war of Lilliput? They are the Wlmigs and the Democrats in other words, the great strug- gle ~vhich tears the vitals of America is the difference of opinion subsisting betveen one party calling itself the Democratic Party, and another calling itself the Democratic Wisig Party! It requires a microscope to see the confessed points of difference between these two parties, from whose respective plat- forms, i. e., declarations of principles with a view to the Presidential election for the year 1852, Mr. Pulszky ~ives us several pages of extract. Comparing the two platforms, says Mr. Pulszky, we do not become wiser as to the questions which divide the parties. One of them is for liberty and order, the other for order and liberty. One is liberal-conserv- ative, the other is conservative-liberal. We see only that both are for the Presidency on behalf of their nominees, and for the govern- ment patronage for the party and party lead- ers. Mr. Pulszky adds one or two elucida- tions, from which it appears that the two parties hardly dift~r from each oLber at all on the propriety of making slavery a question for political discussion, and that the only questions of internal politics which ostensibly tlivide them at present are these the ques- tion of the tariff, the question of improvements or~ the Lakes and the Mississippi, and a ques tion relating to the western settlements em- bodied in a bill called the homestead Bill. Yet, though separated by such a small array of ostensible differences, the two parties cmmrrv in them quite different traditions and ten- dencies, which Mr. Pulszky thus expounds Notwithstanding this similarity of the two plat- forms, no fusion of the two parties is possible each of them is held together by unwritten prin- ciples, understood by every American, though not published in the platform. The object to which the Whigs aspire, for the individual States as well as for the Union, is an aristocracy in the literal sense of the word the government of the best, with the aim of taking the lead of the people; a government, therefore, AMERICA FROM THE COSMOPOLITICAL POINT OF VIEW. 11 which has the intention and the means to do an analysis of the American population as it good. Their principal aim is to enrich the na- divides itself between the parties, and an cnu- tion, to make her industry independent of Eu- meration (much needed in this country) of rope, to develop the resources of the country the various sub-parties into which each of the not to extend its territory. As a rule, they do great parties is cut up. not court the masses, but they endeavor to raise the standard of their morals and of their educa- It is natural, from the above-mentioned facts, tion. They do not object to higher taxation for that the great bulk of the manufacturers, bankers, the construction of canals and railways by the merchants, and of the wealthier inhabitants of individual States ; they advocate the protection the great cities, are Whigs ; the comniercial in of American steam navigation by premiums, of terest is theirs, whilst Democracy sways over all their fisheries by bounties, of their manufactures the agricultural and planting States and coin- by a high tariff. They demand that the States munities, and especially over the slaveholding should establish higher institutions for science; South; as non-interference on the part of the fed that Congress should open and repair harbors, eral government which, according to the Demo- and remove the obstructions of rivers ; and are crats, must follow the wishes of the people gives friendly to an expansive banking system. They more guarantee of stability to their peculiar insti ttre opposed to all war, but ready to confide power tution than a strong and meddling Whig admin- to the heads of the States or Federal administra- istration going ahead of public opinion. The Irish tion; they would give to the people the right of and German emigrants are also a continual source only electin, representatives, not of binding them of accession of power to the Democratic party, as by instructions. To sum up their principles in a its very name is a bait for the multitude coming few words, the Whigs represent authority, com- from Europe, though European Democracy is merce, ~vealth, and centralizing tendencies. somewhat different from the American Democratic The Democrats, on the other side, take it for party. The Whigs feel this very strongly, and granted that government is nothing but a nec- they have, therefore, appended the designation essary evil. They think that, by the frailty of of Democratic to their party-name. As far as I human nature, every government is too apt to was able to find, this measure has remained with- extend its power, to encroach upon the rights of out success, and the Irish and Germans take the the people, and to squander the public income. Whigs generally for enemies, not only of the They require, therefore, a government which Democratic party, but also of Democratic insti does as little as possible; they claim only that it tutions. They do it so much the more, as a set should not obstruct the free development of the of narrow-minded conservative Whigs, in the people, according to its own wants and require- seaport cities, have constituted themselves as the ments. They like military glory, and territorial .Alztive Party, wishing to restrict the laws of extension. Government, according to them, must naturalization, thus to withhold the right of be powerful and commanding towards the for- voting in elections from all the emigrants, and eigner; protecting the citizens and their pursuits reserving the vote for those who were born in abroad, but not interfering in any way with their America. Some years ago the native party concerns at home it has always to act accord- found many theoretical supporters amongst the ing to the expressed wishes of the people, which Whigs, and some few even amongst the Demo- has the right of directing the government. The crats ; but after having created ill-feeling amongst Democrats, therefore, are free-traders in prin- the emigrants, and driven al~ the naturalized ciple, and advocates of a gold currency; they citizens to the Democratic ranks, it went on de leave the construction of canals and railways to dining, and is only in a few places still of some the speculation of individuals and of companies, local importance. and are generally averse to the government sup- But the party-division does not stop here. In port of such undertakings. They oppose the in- the ranks of the Democrats, as well as of the crease of the standing army, but war is always Whigs, there are different shades, each of them popular with them, because it extends the ter- characterized by a nickname, and all quarrelling ritory of the Union, and rouses the slumbering with one another, though at the elections fight- energies of the masses, to whose will and to ing under the common banner against the oppo- whose passions they readily submit. Their rep- site party. The conservative Democrats, who resentatives arid senators are strictly delegates, sturdily oppose every progressive measure, got and have to give up their seats if their instruc- the nickname of Old Hunkers. They are always tions do not agree with their convictions. They at hand when spoils are to be divided, and often affirm, as a cardinal truth, that the world is get a share even of the Whig government con- governed too much. They are enemies of cen- tracts. The progressive wing of Democracy was tralization, and of all restriction, and as every originally called Locofocos, or concisely Locos, law is a restriction, they do not like much leg- from the fact that, at a great Democratic meet-. islatiag, fully convinced that the people is al- ing, where the Old Hunkers, after having carried ways able to govern itself well, without being led their resolutions in a hurried way, adjourned, by the officials. The Democrats represent lib- and put the lights out, the progressive section erty, self-government of the people, agriculture, remained in the dark hall, and lighting the gas and territorial expansion. up by a locofoco-match (the American name for lucifer-matches) continued the meeting, and re- To this account of the general principles considered the resolutions of the conservatives. and tendencies of the two great parties of the The name of Locofoco, however, is now applied American political world, Mr. Pulszky adds to the whole party ; for, to the Whig~, every 12 AMERICA FROM THE COSMOPOLITICAL POINT OF VIEW. Democrat is a firebrand. The thorough-going, liberal Democrats got, therefore, in New York, another name viz., Baruhurners, from a phrase of nne of their orators, who said that they must burn the barns in order to expel the rats; in Maine, they are called Wildcats. The Soft- shells form the transition between the Hunkers and Barnburners they are half-and-halfs whilst the Hardshell Hunkers are the most con- servative party in the world, averse to every social and intellectual movement. During our stay in the United States a new party distinction arose amongst the Democrats Young .-qmerica, comprisin~ all the ardent and generous minds of the party, in opposition to the Old Fogies, as the professional politicians were called by them. The conservative Whigs, the Fillmore men, are termed Silvergreys, as one of their chiefs, when attacked for his clinging to the old statesmen, who had devised the Fugitive Slave Bill as a com- promise between the South and the North, ex- claimed, that he remained rather a private amongst the Silvergreys, than a leader amongst the JVoolly-heads. Those Woolly-heads, or Seward-men, are the Liberals amongst the Whigs, and got their origin in the political strug- gle about the comproniise. They are opposed to the territorial extension of slavery ; they wish to remove slavery from the pale of general legisla- tion, therefore they endeavor to have it abolished in the District of1 Columbia and the territories and they made a strong opposition against the Fugitive Slave Law, because it did not secure a trial by jury to the defendant. They agree in respect to this question entirely with the Free soilers, who belonged ori~inally to the Democrats, but had seceded from thens in 1848, whilst the Seward party remained in communion with the Whigs, in spite of the platform of 1852. Instead of forming a separate organization, they endeavor to carry their theories by getting first a majority for them in the party itself. This example was followed lately by many of the Democratic bolters of 1848, amongst whom we notice the originators of the name and party, Martin and John Van Buren. But some of the original Freesoilers re- mained beyond the pale of the Whigs and Demo- crats, and were reinforced by many noble-hearted men, principally in Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio, who do not care for momentary suc- cess. They called themselves at first the Liberty- party, and got in Massachusetts the balance of power in their hands; but knowing the force of names, they constituted themselves, at the late convention at Pittsburgh, as Free Democracy. Their creed is given in the resolution of the Bos- ton Ratification Meeting Resolved That no maa on this earth can own another man; that the slave power in this country must be de- stroyed; that the Fugitive Slaw Law should be repealed; that human bondage in the territories and in the district (Columbia) should be abol- ished; that all the new States should be free States; that our government should acknowledge the independence of Hayti ; that the rights of American colored citizens in every State ought to be protected ; that t.he general government is a great organization of freedom, and should go for it everywhere; that it should always be on the side of the weak against the strong, the slave against the tyrant, the people against the des- pot. The .,qbolitionists proper, the Garrison- men, are a less numerous, but energetic party; they denounce slavery in the scriptural language of the prophets, which is not entirely parlia- mentary. Front this delineation of the parties and the politics of the United States, it will be seen that, with the exception of the slavery ques- tion, there is hardly a question of internal American politics that does not belong to a region of practical interests far in advance of those in which most other nations have still the misery to be entangled. While many European nations are struggling for the first elements of liberty, such as free government. freedom of the press, open trial according to law, and the like, while even England has the five-barred gate of the suffrage and other siani- lar obstacles yet to clear, America is career- ing away ~hr ahead among questions which she seems almost to create for the purpose of c& ntinued parliamentary exercise. That she makes such a. fuss with these questions, rais- ing clouds of dust, and filling columns of news- papers, and having periodical combinations of her Hunkers and the like against her Silver- greys and the like, and even fighting duels, and trying libel cases in the interest of Homestead Bills, and Improvement Bills, and all the thousand-and-one little controversies that arise out of liability of the federal gov- ernment to collision with the rights of the States is not, however, to be regarded as a waste of energy, or of time. These chance to be the questions of the day in America; and there is no more healthful thing for a community then the incessant discussion by all and sundry in that community of the ques- tions of the day, whatever they are, and their willing co~iperation, as citizens, with a view to settle them in the most sagacious possible manner. Were the Amnericans to cease front this display of political activity, and to sink into the condition of happy listlessness which their position, as a nation that has already conquered for itself all the prime liberties of humanity, might permit, they would be un- true even to their own interests, and the tide of retrogression would set in apace. Still, however, it remains emphatically true of America that it is the country of the greatest amount of political palaver and political aptitude, with the smallest reserve of purely domestic opportunities for the exercise of what is properly called statecraft. America is rapidly nearing thnt goal of no-government, of the absolute independence of the social atoms of any eontrol on the part of the social mass as a whole, which is described by theo- rists as the ultimatum to which all human society is tending. Three questions alone seem at present to 13 AMERICA FROM THE COSMOPOLITICAL POINT OF VIEW. interpose between America and a state of sheer dissipation of her political energy among such social ininutim as indicate the approach to an era of no-government; three questions alone seem yet to afford her opportunities for the display of statesmanship as distinct from mere local activity in public meetings and committees. These are,first, the question of no-government itself in its practical aspects; secondly, the slavery question; and, thirdly, the question of international relations. I. The Question of Government or No- Gov- ernment. This is specially an American ques- tion. No other country in the world has arrived at such a stage of progress as to re- quire its being entertained, or even to suggest the possibility of its being made a question. But in America it is constantly presenting itself in the form of disputes as to the limits which separate the rights of the federation from the rights of the individual States. From this, one step in descent will lead to the question as to the limits between State rights and municipal rights. In this stand- ing controversy the Whigs are on the side of government, the Democrats on the side of no- government. The Whigs are for increasing the powers of the central government they would authorize it to act as a kind of inde- pendent thinking organ for the nation at large, surveying the condition of the nation, and planting here and there over its surface a new institution, or a social improvement, for the accomplishment of any end that might seem desirable. The Democrats, on the other hand, would rather diminish than increase the powers of the central government, which they regard as properly fulfilling only a kind of neg- ative function within the nation, that of pre- venting any interference ~vith the spontaneous development of the people. On the whole, the l)emocrats seem to have gained the day; and the following passage from the Washington Address of their nominee, President Pierce, may pass as a guarded declaration of the sentiments now professed by the bulk of the American people on the point under notice. The dangers of a concentration of all power in the general government of a confederacy so vast as ours, are too obvious to be disregarded. You have a right, therefore, to expect your agents, in every department, to regard strictly the limits imposed upon them by the constitution of the United States. The great scheme of our consti- tutional liberty rests upon a proper distribution of power between the State and Federal authori- tIes; and experience has shown that the har- moiiy and happiness of our people must depend npon a just discrimination between the separate rights and responsibilities of the States, and your common rights and obligations nader the general government. And here, in my opinion, are the considerations which should form the true basis of future concord in regard to the questions which have most seriously disturbed public tran- quillity. If the federal government will confine itself to the exercise of power clearly granted by the constitution, it can hardly happen that its action upon any question should endanger the institutions of the States, or interfere with their right to manage matters strictly domestic accord- ing to the will of their own people. This is not very precise ; but, on the whole, as compared with what a Whig president would have been expected to say on a similar occasion, it is a declaration in favor of the limitation of the powers of the central govern- ment within the narro~vest circle marked out by the constitution of the republic. There is one point, we believe, in which many Democrats would go so much farther than the president as even to disallow to the central government one of the prerogatives specially reserved for it by the constitution. By the constitution, the central government alone has the right of making peace or war; but we are mistaken if there are not Democrats who would claim this right, in some cases, for the separate States while it is not only in the case of the Lopez invasion of Cuba that evidence has been afforded of a disposi- tion on the part of the Americans to arrogate the right of military enterprise to any private association of individuals who may have con- quest or colonization in view. II. The Slavery Question. This is a question which will one day shake American society to the foundations, and the issues of which will have a cosmopolitan interest. At present, however, America has distinctly refused to make it a political question, and, under cover of the general declaration that the central government is precluded by the constitution from tampering with the domestic interests of the several States, has referred the question back into the vague category of unripe social problems. General Pierces expressions of opinion on this subject arc dis- tinct and unmistakable. I believe 1~mat involuntary servitude, as it ex- ists in different States of this confederacy, is recognized by the constitution. I believe that it stands like any other admitted right, and that the States where it exists are entitled to efficient remedies to enforce the constitutional provisions. I hold that the laws of 1850, commonly called the Compromise Measures, are strictly consti- tutional, and to be unhesitatingly carried into effect. I believe that the constituted authorities of this republic are bound to regard the rights of the south in this respect, as they would view any other legal and constitutional right, and that the laws to enforce them should be respected and obeyed, not with a reluctance encouraged by abstract opinions, as to their propriety in a different state of society, but cheerfully, and according to the decisions of the tribunal to which their exposition belongs. Such have been AMERICA FROM THE COSMOPOLITICAL POINT OF VIEW. and are my convictions, and upon them I shall act. I fervently hope that the question is at rest, and that no sectional, or ambitious, or fanatical excitement may again threaten the durability of our institutions, or obscure the light of our prosperity. Such are the words of the Democratic president; but, if a Whig had been in his place, the declaration on the slavery question would not have been a whit different. In the Whig platform, put forth in reference to the last presidential election, there was a clause to this effect: We deprecate all future agitation of the slavery question as dangerous to our peace, and we will discountenance all efforts at the renewal or continuance of such agitation in Congress or out of it, whenever, wherever, or howsoever the attempt may be made, and will maintain this system of measures as policy essential to the nationality of the Whig party, and the integrity of the Union. Thus both of the great American parties alike drive back the slavery question into the limbo of mere social adjournments. It will probably not be on the political arena, therefore, or at least not there for a long time to come, that the question will be fought. But fought the question must be. An anomaly so huge cnnnot exist in any portion of human society, without the elements themselves being in a state of unrest all round it; and it is perhnps a providential fact for America herself, that, in her dearth of all ordinary domestic provocatives to the grief of great statesmanship, she still retains this stain on her conscience, this canker in her heart. III. The Quest/on of International Relations. This is the great question which makes the American republic indubitably the most im- portant nation in the world in a cosmopoliti- cal point of view. The question breaks itself into two the question of the relations of the republic to those portions of the New World which at present lie out of the Limits of the confederacy; and the question of the relations of the republic to the nations of the Old World. In regard to both these ques- tions, the America of to-day is a very different thing from the America of Washington and Jefferson. The legacy of these men to the republic over whose infant fortunes they presided, consisted in an earnest dissuasive from two things war for the purposes of territorial extension within the American continent; and interference with the politics of the European nations. America has now flung aside these maxims as a full-grown child repudiates leading-strings. In vain has Whiggism striven to preserve some faint lingering of respect for such maxims; Democ- racy is now, and we believe finally, trium- phaDt; and the mind of American Democracy, in reference to international polities, is summed up in two words Annexation within the New World; Interference in behalf of popular rights every~vhere out of it. It is the apparent destination of the American Republic to become coextensive with at least the whole northern half of the American continent. Such space as is blank and unclaimed as yet by any other govern- ment, the Americans are rapidly overrunning Oregon, California, and the Mormon settlements lying between these outposts nnd the States proper, are the first patches over a surface yet to be covered. The elastic con- stitution of the Union will permit the ready recognition as States of the new societies which start up in this region ; to add a new State to the Union is but to add a star to the national banner. But even where the ground is already claimed and covered as in the case of Mexico, of the Canadas, and of Cuba the same tendency to territorial extension is evident. In vain have eminent statesmen and moralists protested against the policy of annexation. It is a popular instinct, coincident with wide-spread individual inter- est; and the very peculiarity of the United States consists in this, that, as the people is both sovereign and accustomed to the use of arms, anything that the people, or a consid- erable portion of them, have set their hearts on, will either be authorized by the govern- ment, or done in the face of the government by private association. Americans squatted in Texas, and the American government was obliged to annex Texas. And so also with regard to Cuba. There are three stages in the process for annexing this island private enterprise discountenanced by the govern- ment, private enterprise authorized by the government, and public enterprise led by the government. The first stage of the process is probably over the death of Lopez finished it; and we shall probably see the policy of annexation go through the other two. That Cuba will be annexed there is no manner of doubt. The following passage from President Pierces Washington Address is none the less significant that it is somewhat obscure With an experience thus suggestive and cheer- ing, the policy of my administration will not be controlled by any timid forebodings of evil from expansion. Indeed, it is not to be disguised that our attitude as a nation, arid our position on the globe, render the acquisition of certain possessions, not within our jurisdiction, emi- nently important for our protection, if not, in the future, essential for the preservation of the rights of commerce and the peace of the world. Should they be obtained, it will be through no grasping spirit, but with a view to obvious national interest and security, and in a manner entirely consistent with the strict observance of national faith. Here there is no direct mention of Cuba, 14 AMERICA FROM THE COSMOPOLITiCAL POINT OF VIEW. 15 but, in one way or another, Cuba will very for the compulsory propagation of her own soon belong to the American Republic. Nor principles of equality and freedom. There is it probable that this will be the only an- are but three steps in the process first, nexation. Any desirable territory which the volunteer enterprise discountenanced by gov- government cannot get ceded to it by inter- eminent; next, volunteer enterprise author- national arrangement, needs only to be lighted ized by government; next, a national crusade on by a cloud of volunteers from a nation all with government at its head. the citizens of which are sovereigns; and, in How near we are to such an assumption by the end, the government, however reluctant, America of the greatest cosmopolitical fune- will he obliged to back thcse volunteers, and tion that can devolve upon a nation it is diffi- legitimize whatever they do. cult to say. One thing is clear that Kos- And so, in the relations of America with suths visit to America has been productive the politics of ~the Old World. In Great of immense effects. Direct assistance in the Britain, where the government, though theo- way of arms or money he seems to have retically representative of the people, is in received but in small measure; but this, at reality a distinct agglomeration of sentiment least, may be said that, when he landed in and will, against which the general sentiment America the mind of the nation was full of of the people fumes and breaks, with p ower the Whig sentiment of non-interference, and to modify and alter, but not to dissofve or that when he left it the American mind was annihilate, it there may very well exist a full of the notion of its cosmopolitical fune- universal popular sympathy with the cause tion. We do not think that, prior to Kos- of oppressed Ireedoma on the continent; and yet suths visit to America, such language as the that sympathy may receive the faintest possible following would have been used by an Amer- expression when translated through the rec- ican president ognized organs of international action. But in America it is different. There, if the mass Of the complicated European systems of of the people are really interested in the national polity we have heretofore been inde- cause of struggling European freedom, they pendent. From their wars, their tumults and have only to associate to carry their sympa- anxieties, we have been, happily, almost entirely thies into practical results. They may sub- exempt. While these are confined to the nations scribe money, or contribute arms to assist the which gave them existence, and within their patriots; they may even organize a volunteer legitimate jurisdiction, they cannot affect us, except as they appeal to our sympathies in the expedition of American rihles, and steam cause of human freedom and universal advance- across the Atlantic on a mission of propa- meat. But the vast interests of commerce are gandist warfare. Government might frown, common to all mankind, and the advantages of but were the enterprise based on a sufficiently trade and international intercourse must always extensive popular feeling, it could do nothing present a noble field for the moral influence of but hold back for a while, and then submit. a great people. With these views firmly and Such development has the system of volunteer honestly carried cut, we have a right to expect, warfare received in America that we verily and shall under all circumstances require, believe that, if it could be shown that the prompt reciprocity. The rights which belong to enfranchisement of Italy or Iiun~ary by us as a nation are not alone to be regarded, but American arms would pay as a spe~ulation, those which pertain to every citizen in his mdi- the contract would be taken to-morrow by an vidual capacity, at home aad abroad, must be American firm, and all the stock subscribed sacredly maintained. So long as lie can discern for in a day or t~vo at New York or New every star in its place upon that ensign, without Orleans. Were the island of Sicily, for ex- wealth to purchase for him preferment, or title to secure for him place, it will be his privilege, ample, made over to an association of Amen- and must be his acknowledged right, to stand can citizens, on condition of their enfranchis- unabashed even in the presence of princes, with ing the rest of Italy, and setting it up as an a proud consciousness that he is himself one of independent republic, who shall say the a nation of sovereigns, and that he cannot, in thing might not be done I The Americans legitimate pursuit, wander so far from home are a nation of sovereigns; they are also a that the agent whom he shall leave behind in nation trained to the use of arms; and the the place which I now occupy, will not see that very theorypf central government in America no rude hand of power or tyrannical passion is is, that what the people desire, it shall not laid upon him with impunity. He must realize prevent them from carrying out. Whenever, that, upon every sea and on every soil, where our therefore, whether for the purposes of gain or enterprise may rightfully seek the protection of of philanthropy, the American people, ora our flag, American citizenship is an inviolable of them, are desirous of actively panoply for the security of American rights. great mass And, in this connection, it can hardly be bestirring themselves in behalf of political necessary to re& ffimm a principle which should freedom in the Old World, America is on the now be regarded as fundamental. The rights, verge of asserting her cosmopolitical impor- security, and repose of this confederacy reject tance by a direct crusade among the nations the idea of interference or colonization, on this DR. DUNLOP.cANINE MADNESS. side of the ocean, by any foreign power, beyond present jurisdiction, as utterly inadmissible. This is guarded, but at the same time bold. President Pierce is evidently Cull of the notion of the cosmopolitical function devolving on America in the present state of the world. Whether there is any such understanding between the political party which he repre- sents and Kossuth, as may pledge him in his place, as president, to a course of direct in- terference on behalf of European freedom, it is impossible to say; but we should not wonder, if, befbre the expiry of President Pierces term of office, we were to see the American volunte~ uniform, or to hear the crack of the American rifle, on the coasts of Italy, or on the plains which separate Pesth from Vienna. From the Athenisum. DR. DUNLOP. Twenty-& ven Years in Canada West; or, the Experience of an Early Settler. By Major STRiCKLAND, C. M. AMONG the eccentric characters whom Major Strickland chanced to fall in with was Dr. Dunlop, best known as a contributor to Black. woods Ma Gazine. Of him, a trait or two will suffice He was a humorous, witty man, and never re- garded time or place when any opportunity oc- curred for displaying his facetious propensities. Upon one particular occasion, I remember, he amused the House of Assembly by his comical questions and witty rejoinders. I think it was seven or eight years ago, when Montreal was the seat of government, that a bill was brought be- fore the House to tax dogs and whiskey. The doctor, who spoke on this occasion, asked If any member present could inform him how many quarts of whiskey were usually made from a bushel of wheat, Indian corn, or rye? when the member for the second riding of Northumberland replied, He believed sixteen quarts. I be- lieve, rejoined the doctor, the young gentle- man is right, but Heaven defend me from your sixteen-quart whiskey! I like a stiff horn. I have read of the beast with two horns, and of the beast with ten horns, but I am a beast of many horns.~ The whole House were convulsed with laughter at this sally of the doctors, the concluding assertion of which, I am sorry to say, was too true. In every other relation of life the doctors character might have safely borne the strictest scrutiny. The following anecdote has been related of the doctor. Its authenticity I do not doubt, for it is highly characteristic of the man. The doctor, and his brother the captain, both old bachelors, lived together on their estate of Galbraith, near Goderich, with a respectable Scotch-body, as the doctor called her, for their housekeeper. Now, whether any scandal had been raised, or whether the doctor thought it would conduce to their greater comfort, if he or his brother were to marry the housekeeper, or whether he meant it only for a joke to tease his brother, does not appear. Be that as it may, the doctor proposed, in consequence, lie said, of some unpleasant remarks, and their lonely situation, for one of them to marry her. Now, Sandy, you know I would almost as soon hang myself as put my head into the matrimonial noose, yet I think it only fair to stand my chance. So, what I propose is, that each of us shall toss up a cop- per three times, and he who has the most heads shall be free. As this appeared a very fair proposition, the captain at once consented to the arrange meat, and they immediately proceeded to bring this friendly contest for a wife to an issue. The doctor would not have consented to run the risk of losing his liberty, if he had not been per- fectly sure of winning, for by some chance he had become the possessor of a halfpenny with a head on either side. So when they came to toss up, as might be expected, the poor unconscious cap- tain was duly elected for matrimonial honors, to the great glee of the roguish doctor, who, I make no doubt, chuckled over his successful stratagem. The Doctor, we are subsequently told, died of the many horns or, to speak less metaphorically, of disorders brought on by drinking whiskey. CANINE MADNEss. Can the Animals Friend Society produce an instance of friendship more touching than the subjoined advertisement ? GENTLEMAN, who, through the death of his A lady, has a very small and exceedingly hand- some SLACK and TAN TERRIER noc, weighing a tittle eves 3 lbs., for which he has been offered a large sum, wishes to PART WITH it, to he kindly treated. Would be. happy to exchange with any lady or gentleman having a horse, which they wished to be also kindly treated (and having no use for), for his own riding or driving. Undeniable references will be asked for and given. Apply by letter, post paid. This must be the dearest little dog that ever yelped too dear to be sold. The wish to part with itarising, doubtless, from some very serious cause can only contemplate an ex- change of so beloved a pet for a horse. What sort of a horse? Would an ordinary hack do? or a hunter be expected? or would nothing be taken under the winner of the approaching Der- by? Weighing only 8 lbs., the canine darling must be appraised at its own weight. in golda very nugget of a dog. We should l~ike to take it at our valuation, and barter it at its proprietors, in which case we should ultimately obtain a gal- lant steed by the original sacrifice of an old hat or pair of highlows. If any poor mantua-maker girl should happen to read this advertisement, we would exhort her to suppress the feeling of envy, should that baleful passion be excited in her bosom, by the comparison of her own hard pallet with the cosy clover which is probably the couch of this beatified little beast. Punch. 16 From Hoggs Instructor. A FIRESIDE GOSSIP ABOUT BOOKS. BOOKS ! said my uncle, contemptuously, I am tired of the sight of books ! It is of the sight only, dear sir, cried Margaret, the prettiest and the merriest of the party at that moment assembled in the library of our hospitable host, for I think I isever see you read ! Read ! repeated Sir Anthony, with the same accent as before, no, indeed! My nieces and nephews, and, in fact, the world at large, have disgusted me with reading. We are absolutely swamped with what I hear called literature now-a-days. New books are as plentiful as the stars in the sky, or the sands on the sea-shore; and Ill have nothing to do with them. Since the present generation took to writing, I have done with reading. Then you used to read once upon a time ? said Margaret. Come, now, Sir Anthony and with an insinuating air she placed a chair beside herself sit down amongst us; and, on condition you tell us who used to be your favorite old authors, you shall revile our modern ones as much as you like. Not, however, I hope, without some one undertaking their defence, said another of our party, lifting from the book he was read- ing eyes of such active intelligence, that they seemed to guarantee the worth of the author lie had chosen. Before I report the talk that followed, in which I earnestly entreat the reader to take a part, just let me say who and where ~ve the speakers were. My uncle (I am proud of the relationship, l)eing adopted daughter and potential heiress) is lord of a certain manor-house in the north of England, that stands on sunny slopes, and overlooks a landscape rich in wood and water, l)lended as we all know wood and water only are in our own dear island. The beauty of the scene is thrown up, as one may say, by distant glimpses of wild moorlands stretching out to the horizon, and far beyond our sphere of sight, with an aspect as lonely as if never trodden, making a stern background to the laughing scene. Not that the scene laughed then, for a hard, relentless frost had rigorously subdued all its beauties ; arid we, Sir An- thony~s Christmas guests, had sat all the morning so close round the hot library fire, that our cheeks were burned scarlet, swollen veins rose on delicate hands, and the covers and leaves of our respective volumes curled to the seductive influence. I think my uncle who had left us thus before he went to rive an dience to some querulous farmers, who, under cover of the desperato weather, had signed a round-robin for lower rents was a ccccLxxvi. LIVING AGE. VOL. 11. 2 17 little annoyed to find us in the same attitade when lie came back, after a few hours ab- sence, and all seemingly as intent over our books as ever. I attributed to this feeling the impatient attack above described. How- ever, Margaret soothed his slightly ruffled temper, persuaded him to take the offi~red ~air, and then Sir Anthony looked round on the circle with a half-contemptuous, half- good-natured smile, that obviously meant he intended to avail himself of that young ladys permission to revile their ocetipation. Come, now, he began, let each of you give up the name of book and author, and I 11 venture to say, not one out of tli~ dozen has a classic in his or her hand. Please, sir, said Margaret, with her roguish glance, what is a classic ? A classic, returned my uncle, with an air of decision, a classic is hera I 11 leave scholars to define the word, but- Shakspeare is a classic ! Thank you for the illustration, Sir An- thony, said Margaret; hut have we no scholars here equal to the definition? If not, how shall we decide l Anything of first-class excellenc& is a classic, I suppose, said the young man before mentioned; but (no offence to you, Sir Anthony) bowing with a courtesy that disarmed resentment it is one of those convenient words of which we avail ourselves when we have no very precise idea of our own meaning when we wish to admire, without the trouble of discriminating. how- ever, taking it as I have defined it, 1 am pre- pared to maintain I hold a classic in my hand. Name sit, said Sir Anthony. Marcus turned the title-page of the book towards the circle. We could all read it Essays of Elia. Pshaw! said my uncle, conclusively; never could see anything in it is nothing,. in short. I dont like Elia, said I. Is there no one to support my assertion l asked Marcus, with a smile that, I thought, quivered on the boundary line of contemnt; for he was a youth of ~quick feelings. There was a dead silence. My uncle laughed. Marcus looked calm and proud, in his intellectual superiority, no doubt. Read us a passage, suggested Margaret, and enlighten our obtuse perceptions. Let us judge of your favorite. Yes, said I; give my uncle The Superannuated Man, or let him taste tM ecstatic humor of The Convalescent. 0, no ! said Marcus, that is not as Charles Lamb should be read. To appreciate and enjoy certain books thoroughly, they m~ist be read to ones self. Elsa is one of these. Our intercourse with this author A FIRESIDE GOSSIP ABOUT BOOKS. ia A FIRESIDE GOSSIP ABOUT BOOKS. should be a t~te-~-t~te; there is something so endurance, what magnanimity of self-sacrifice, exquisitely confidential in his style, that a in that mysterious but quiet life of his ! third person seems to destroy the charm. Marcus, at universal request, entered into But, pray, turning to me, why do you not detail, and, after having repeated one or two like Elia? of his quaint but exquisite sonnets, he con- Margaret answered for me. 0 ! she sidered he had established his position, and said, laughing, he skims too lightly over called on the lady opposite to announce her the surface for cousin Mary; there is a dash author. of recklessness she cannot affect. The lady blushed. She was reading one of I cannot suffer the imputation of reckless- Ida Hahn Hahns novels. ness to rest upon Elia, returned Marcus. Trash ! pronounced my uncle, vile I confess there is an appearance of it, but trash! Mary, I hope you never read such it is only an appearance. With his light things. Pray, my dear, turning to the touch he knows how to unseal some of the reader, have you anything to say in defence deepest and purest springs of our nature. of your author? Is she a classic ? There is a profounder sadness in the very No, said she, languidly, except that smile he sometimes provokes, than in the they are so very interesting so much more tears which other writers may call forth. He interesting than English novels. is one of those authors who excite a personal Give up such works, my dear young tenderness, and whom one defends with the lady, said an elderly member of our circle, tenacity of friendship. More than that (I whom we all loved and respected, they are grant you this much, Mary), if you consent pernicious food. They make life seem flat to receive him at all, you must receive him as and insipid, and indispose to vigorous action; he is; I mean, you must not allow any they make the head ~veary, and the whole minute fault-finding with your friend. I will heart faint. They teach you to look within not say he is not open to it, but affection will upon your own heart and nature with a false be blind to his gentle shortcomings. and jaundiced eye; and they leave you nerve- I smiled. My uncle said, You talk like less and incapable for the fit business of ex- a book, Marcus ; but, for all that, your de- istence. Dont you agree with me, sir I she fence does nt prove the India clerk a clas- asked, addressing Marcus. Perfectly, madam; yet I have felt their Nevertheless, said Marcus, I under- fascination. I suppose you do not deny that take to prove it. Are you a judge of prose, they possess a certain charm; where do you Sir Anthony? I call this its perfection; and consider it to lie? if you like wit of that order, which is above In their subtle appeal to all that is Un- raising a laugh, but that excites a smile, healthy and morbid within us, of which we which testifies how every finer perception all have something some more and some thrills beneath its keen yet delicate stroke, less. There is a half truth in them which you have that here as well. Listen. makes them doubly dangerous; they would Sir Anthony fidgeted a little under the in- have us the victims rather than the conquer- fiction, but the rest of the party being unan- ors of ourselves; and they weep and sympa- imous, Marcus began to read. He selected thize, when nothing but reprobation should be The Old Benehers of the Middle Temple ; expressed. and lie read it well; had he written it, he Madam, said my uncle, I make you could not have read it with a more intelligent my best bow; you express my views to a and delicate comprehension of its meaning. nicety. I hope these young people will lay We all applauded when he had done. it to heart. Pray, Maggie, ~vhat book have Not so much amiss, said m~ uncle, re- you ? lentingly. You read very wel , Marcus; A classic, fair sir, laughed Margaret, our family always did. Suppose we try an- indubitably a classic. But dont praise me other Elm1 too soon, for I am conscientiously compelled Marcus colored as one might who was en- to add, I have not very heartily enjoyed it. joying a triumph. He gave us that delight- Marcus presumed to look over her shoulder. ful paper, Books and Reading ; and after- The Faery Queen? exclaimed he; 0! wards, at my desire, Blakesmoor in H for shame. shire. Pray, 5ir, returned my friend, turning Sir Anthony said the latter was baby- sharply upon him, did you ever read through ish ; perhaps he meant its effects, for I saw the Faery Queen? him and Margaret wipe their eyes. Marcus colored slightly, and we all laughed. And, Sir Anthony, concluded the en- No, he said, I ani bound to confess I thusiastic Marcus, Elia was a hero. Cole- never read it through, but I have thoroughly ridge describes him as winning his way, with enjoyed its parts. I could spend many a sad and patient soul, through evil, and pain, morning over it without weariness, I hope; and strange calamity. What strength of yet, I grant, it is not a book one reads con- A FIRESIDE GOSSIP ABOUT BOOKS. secutively. After a time, its style and very sweetness pall. I can hear my testimony to that, said another gentleman, dryly. Last summer, when about to recreate for a time in the coun- try, I bethought myself I had never read Spenser, and that I would take thc opportu- nity. However, on looking the work over, I considered that three out of the half-dozen old-fashioned, musty volumes, would be as much, perhaps, as I should get through. I am compelled to own I never got through the first. 1 used to carry it about perpetually in my pocket, take it oat when occasion offered, read a few stanzas, reflect, yawn, and put it in again. I dont think 1 shall evcr renew the attempt. My uncle smiled. The classics are cer- tainly in a minority, he said. And yet, said Marcus, what exquisite descriptions we have in Spenser! his suns always rise and set well. I remember, one passage especially, or rather (lest I misquote), lend me the book, Margaret. He soon found it, and read aloud: At last, the golden, oriental gate Of greatest heaven gan to open fair, And Phubus, fresh as bridegroom to his mate, Came dancing forth, shaking his dewy hair, And hurls his glistening beams through gloomy air. Yes, said Margaret, when a single gem is separated from the bewildering heap, and offered me alone, I can admire its beauty. Sir Anthony defied us to match the lines amongst the moderns. Marcus smiled, but, declining at that moment to take up the chal- lenge, extracted another gem By this the Northern Wagoner had set his sevenfold team behind the steadfast star, That was in ocean waves yet never wet, But firm is fixed, and sendeth light from far To all that in the wide deep wandering are And cheerful Chanticleer, with his note shrill, had warned once that Phubus fiery car In haste was climbing np the eastern hill, Full envious that Night so long his room did fill. Then, said Marcus, looking up upon his attentive audience, there is that wonderful episode about Despair, that the enraptured Sydney ceased to read lest he should dispense his whole estate in gratitude to the poet. You know that verse spoken by this fell de- mon of the knight who has succumbed to his influence and committed suicide, and ad- dressed to Unas champion, whom he would fain persuade to do the same lie there does now enjoy eternal rest, And happy ease, which thou dost want and crave, And further from it daily wanderest; What if some little pai~m the passage have, That makes frail flesh to fear the bitter wave Is not short pain well borne that brings long ease, And lays the soul to sleep in quiet grave I Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, Ease after war, death after life, does greatly please. Such an effect had this subtlety upon the harassed and exhausted knight, that His hand did quake And tremble like a leaf of aspen green, And troubled blood through his pale face was seen To come and go with tidings from the heart, As it a running messenger had been. Truly, said Sir Anthony, that s quite Shakspearian. With this remark, which, of course, clinched the poets merits, we passed on to another reader. lIe was in the third volume of The Caxtons. I dont intend, he said, to argue my authors merits as a whole. His place in literature will scarcely be established during his own lifetime; we must leave coming years to decide what will be retained nnd what thrown away amongst his numerous ~vritings. But this is a delightful work what I call a remunerative work. Many up- ward steps, morally and intellectually, must this progressive man of talent have taken since he wrote Pelham. have you read it, madam I he asked, addressing the lady who had condemned the German novels. No, she said, smiling; I very rarely read novels; and I am not, in general, an admirer of Btdwer Lytton. You must not judge of The Caxtons, was the answer, by any former ~vork of the same writer. In his Family Picture he has broken new ground. lie dispenses with romantic incident and character, and gives us life in its quiet domestic flow. Instead of thrilling interest, we have the results of thought and observation a genial wisdom that soothes while it instructsand principles raised to the height of Christianity. The best characters, I think, are Roland and Austin Caxton. 1revanion is good, but that class of character has been o ten sketched before. Sir Sedley Beaudesert is well done, too; but I think Pisistratus, the biographer, gives us but a faint idea of his own individuality. Surely there is a want of skill there. Viewed as a work of art, said Marcus who, be it observed, was hard to please it is defective; but, considered as a repos- itory for some of the authors experiences of men and manners; for his more serious thoughts and views of things; as a vehicle for the display of diverse talent, it is, as you say, a delightful work. I owe to the writer some hours of pure enjoyment. My uncle thought He might look intoit. Another of us had a volume of Longfe.l. lows Poems; but my uncle (smarting still with extreme national pride under the resulk of the glorious War of Independence), who 19 A FIRESIDE GOSSIP ABOUT BOOKS. thought nothing good could come from Amer- But, said the Lady Mentor of our party, ica, would scarcely hear a word on the sub- there is a deficiency in Longfellows phi- ject. losophy. Surely, however heroic, man is not quite enough for himself in all the emergen- cies of time. Your poet seems to me to ignore this. There is too little recognition of our dependence on the Divine Power, too high an exaltation of mans unaided capac- ities. Man cannot be so strong as Longfellow would have him, unless he consent to receive strength from a source to which Longfellow seldom, if ever, directs him. Of course, said my uncle, nodding ap- probation to every word, you are perfectly and admirably right, madam. If you please, we will dismiss the American profossor. My dear sir he spoke to an intelli- gent Scotch student, sitting in a retired corner. what is that very thin little book you seem so unwilling to give up reading? Is the quality apportioned to the quantity, as in the old adage? Before he could answer, the dressing-bell rang, and we were forced (for my uncle was very methodical) to abandon our gossip. A Yankee pedago~ue a poet ! he said, derisively; the idea is an anomaly. Nevertheless, we made him hear reason, though he refused to receive it; and Longfel- low got his due. Marcus warmed into magnanimity over The Psalm of Life. The original student insisted on proving that Excelsior was a perfect poem, and thought he established the point. Then those exquisite lyrics, The Light of Stars, and The Day is done, were expatiated upon; for it seemed as if the whole party knew Longfellow, and had but one opinion of his merits. Excelsior, said Marcus, with heaving breast and kindling eyes, is the one watch- word of all he writes; and it is worthy to be shouted and followed in the battle of life. I hope, said Sir Anthony, he practises what he preaches. From Punch. the days of Chartist tom-foolery, having ordered THE CROWN AND THE BROAD-BRIM ~ the arrest of everybody wearing point lace, or of every one pointing with his hand on the ground, BAVARIA. under the apprehension that the point particu larly in the case of the hand with its four fingers TuE following paragraph, though a genuine and thumb must indicate some sympathy with extract from the foreign correspondence of a Lon- the five points of the Charter. Mental imbecility lon (laily paper, reads more like a bit of burlesque such as this must disqualify those who are af- from some mock account of some imaginary revo flicted with it for the duties of government. lution How any nation can be ruled over for a day by BAVARIA. persons displaying such a puerile notion of the Munich, April 5. The police have been in- means and appliances of power, is a miracle only structed to arrest all persons who are found with to be accounted for by the supposition that the Calabrian broad-brimmed hats. These instructions mass of the people are still lower in the intellec- have been carried out. Large numbers of young tual scale than their governors. men have been arrested and taken to the stations. To complete the idiotic coloring of this picture, They were subsequently liberated, but the police we are told that the persons arrested were hib retained their hats. Complete ignorance prevails erated, but the police retained their hats. as to the motives of this measure, but it is thought The danger to the government is thus imputed that the authorities have acted in consequence of to the hats themselves, and not to the heads they advices which have reached them from abroad, covered. We shall not he surprised to hear that the hats have been all tried on by court- Surely the first of April, and not the fifth, martial and shot, for it is quite impossible to sug- should have been the dat.e of this news we can- gest any bouiids to the idiotic proceedings of a not dignify anything so absurd with the title of government that has taken a lot of old hats into intelligence. We hope that none of our custody on a charge of high treason. Of course friends, the Quakers, will find themselves ar- every person who has been deprived of his hat rested on account of their broad-brims, under by the executive will be known to have had re- theshade of which treason is supposed to lurk; lations with a revolutionary broad-brim, and the though, by the way, dissatisfaction with the fact of his going about bare-headed will render Bavarian government is far more likely to be met him liable to arrest on bare suspicion. We have with in a Wide-awake. It is, really lamentable not heard the measurement of brim which con- to think of the inanity that must possess what stitutes the offensive width, but we believe the eaght to be the miiid of that ruler who can have Bavarian government allows very little margin. resorted to such a piece of imbecile tyranny as If this is not filling up the cup of oppression to the arrest of everybody with a hat of a particu- the very brim, we know not what will constitute Jar fashioi. Imagine our own government, in the full measure of tyranny. 20 THE TUILERIES TILL 1816. From Bentleys MisceiJany. THE TUILERIES TILL 1815. IT is quite characteristic of France and French dynasties that they should have no Windsor and no Westminster. no spot in either town or country, kept sacred as haunt, as residence, or as temple, by the family of sovereigns; no spot hallowed by recollections of glorious, of feudal, of chivalric kind. The only remains of the residence of the old French Kings within the old .city of Paris are the chapel and the prison, which flanked the royal residence on either side. The & zintc Chapelle, restored indeed, but still with sufficient of genuine antiquity which recalls St. Louis, and the Conciergerie have reminiscences of the old Justiciaries. But the modernized Pubis de Justice is as unlike Westminster as if there was a determiaatioim to suggest a contrast. What more different than Westminster hall and the Salle de Pas Perdus, which answers to it; modern, noisy, glaring, full of police and petty vendors? rhe old royal palace there, as well as the later palaces built around, such as that of the Tournelles, have disappeared, and there is now no royal residence in Paris more an- cient than the Louvre, none in the provinces more ancient than Fontainebleau. The palatial history of France, however, like that of most other countries, is symbolic of its political and social progress. England, which still retains the chivalrous and the feudal element even in its modern constitution and habits, has preserved the old donjon of Edward the Third, in which the trophies of Crecy still hang; and it is surrounded by edifices of each successive century. The pa- latial history of Windsor is the counterpart of the political history of England. Russia never passed through feudalisia ; there are, consequently, nothing but Corinthian and Ionic columns at St. Petersburg. The Kremlin of Moscow has vanished, and, despite of restora- tim-i, all the vestiges of the barbarian antiquity of Russia have disappeared. The palatial antiquity of Prussia goes no further back than the great Frederic. Pots- dam is all in all. There, and at Spandau, is Prussian history written. The Hofburg at Vienna tells equally well the story of the house of llapsburg. Built on the very battlements, and ovei~rooking the very glacis, which so short a time ago repelled the be- sieging army of the Turks, it is still a fortress, though not a feudal one, and bespeaks the military sovereign, surrounded with imperial power. Not very far from it, indeed, hetween the palace and the gate of Carinthia, took place the late mad attempt on the life of the young Emperor. In France, the change . from those old turreted and befossed residences of the four- teenth century, to the courts and halls of the Louvre, bespeaks the kingdom having emerged from feudalism into a more civilized period. Francis the First fitted up the Louvre chiefly for the purpose of receiving Charles the Fifth, lie employed his architects and ar- tists to fit out ~tnd adorn the palace, so as to give the highest idea of the magnificence of its master. Italy then, instead of Machia- velism, w~hich it matured in the previous cen- tury, had, under the school of the Medicis, coase to practise itself, and, of course, to give the example of, magnificence in princes. The Medici adorned Florence and Rouse: Francis was determined to vie with them, and throw all the capitals of his rival, Charles, into the shade. He therefore planned, built, and painted the Louvre. His palace, formincr but one side of the square pile of building~ now called the Louvre, is, however grandiose for that period, nothing remarkable fhr this. his interior arrangement and decoration, too, were of the frittered and fantastic kind, which succeeding sovereigns did not respect. And little remains of Francis, beyond his portraits by Titian, his goldsmiths work and armor by Benvenuto, Isis porcelain, and his carvings. Francis was a magnificent upholsterer. The Louvre, which he built to inaugurate French magnificence, was devoted for the rest of the century to the plots, meannesses, and cruelties of a miserable set of bigots. Here was Guise murdered; here was the signal for the Massacre of Saint Bartholomews day given. The most beautiful specimen of architecture in the Louvre is the end-window, that looks upon the Seine. Near this window, and from its stone-balustrade, Charles the Ninth fired with his own royal hand upon the Iluguenots, as they fled from massacre across the bridge. The infancy of the Louvre was magnificence and gilding; the maturity was intrigue, cruelty, and blood. Even Catherine of Medicis was appalled by the spectral reminiscence of the gloomy Lou- vre. She removed to the Tuileries in order to forget, amidst its gardens and green fields, the grim aspect of the royal palace and its deeds. It was Francis the First himself, whilst in the midst of his rearing up the Louvre, who niade the site of the future Tuil- cries royal property. Louise of Savoy, his mother, complained that her residence, the Palace of the Tournelles, was unwholesome. Francis, therefore, purchased for her a small residence, about a bowshot countrywards of the Louvre. It had been a place for drying tiles or slaughtering cattle, until M. De Villeroy had enclosed it and built a small house. This Francis purchased, and Louise - inhabited. Later, Catherine of Medicis took possession of it, and spent her Florentine. taste and fortune in building~ the central tower and tIme two wings, which form about THE TIJILERIES TILL 1815. half, and that the central part, of the present edifice. The Louvre still remained the royal abode. It and the Palais Royal remained for a cen- tury -longer the seat of intrigue and power. With Louis the Fourteenth commenced another epoch and another taste. He, first of French, and perhaps of European princes, conceived a horror of the close walls and narrow streets of and around the old town- residences. His youth was passed in a kind of captivity in the Pidais Royal and his first impulse, on taking power into his hands, was to transfer his court to more open and independent space, away from the prying eyes of citizens. lie, first of monarchs, felt that he could do this in security. His pred- ecessors required a castellated residence, with moat and drawbridge, well guarded against surprise or conspiracy. But by Louis the Fourteenths time the frowardness of the nobility was broken, religious dissent crushed, civic freedom destroyed, the parliament so humbled that the king could enter there, whip in hand, and control them in the rud- est manner. Louis the Fourteenth thought the windows of his residence need no longer look into a narrow court, or contemplate a watery ditch. He hated the Louvre, and for- sook St. Germains. He deemed the finest palace nothing without its adjunct of garden and grove, lake and waterworks. Tie found an artist to his taste in Lenotre, and a par- terre becaIne to him as essential as a pilaster. Louis the Fourteenth enlarged the 1uileries, and built Versailles. In saying that he con- sidered a garden the necessary adjunct to a palace. we were wrong. It should have been said, that he considered a palace the neces- sary adjunct of the garden for the garden was the principal object with him, and the palace was built so that its every window should affrd a view of alley and fountain. But although Louis the Fourteenth com- pleted the Tuileries itself, as well as the long gallery connecting it with the Louvre, it was not to inhabit it. Marly, and finally Ver- sailles, were his favorite residences. And all the reverence of monarchy and court, its splendor and pettiness, intrigue and ambition, were confined to Versailles. The characteris- tic of the sovereigns of the French, from the commencement of the century to the extinc- tion of the monarchy, was timidity, reserve, almost bashfulness. They had no desire more strong than that of escaping from the world, hiding themselves from the metropolis, creating for themselves a kind of retirement, in which woman, womans pleasures, and womans ways, quite superseded every manly ambition and manly thought. E~eminacy without purity, idleness without repose, soli- tude without seriousness, such wa5 the un- happy lot of monarchs, endowed with all that the world would consider an immense accu- mulation of enjoyment. There was no greater cause of the estrange- ment of the Parisians from the Bourbons, and of the harshness first dealt in judgments upon their character, and then in cruel insult upon their persons, than the simple act of their altogetherdeserting the capital, and inhabit- ing Versailles. Here the court resided. Had it passed the winter months at the Tuileries, it could not fail to have sent forth the ramifi- cations of oUligation and dependence amongst the middle and lower ranks of the Parisian population... The expenditure, thef~tes, the shows, the ceremonials, the small and large acts of benevolence, personal contact and condescension these thousand things would have endeared the prince and his family to thousands. Instead of this, the French kings had raised up a rival city, peopled by courtiers, and nothing else, not containing, inf~ct, any body of the people, and leaving the capital widowed of the splendor, gayety, and scattered wealth, attendant on a court. No troops ever resounded in the deserted courts of the Tuileries, no equipages rattled through them, no lights illumined its long line of windows. Nor did the gay forms of courtiers enliven the garden proInenades. Versailles ~vas all, Paris nothing, except the abode of that parliament to which the king came from time to tiiiie to dictate the regis- try of his decrees of injustice and taxation. The hatred of Paris against Versailles was one of the foremost causes of the Revolution of 1789; a cause that has never been suffi- ciently taken into account. Here again the palatial history typifies the political. The French dynasty turned their back on the middle classes, and ignored the existence of the lower, shutting themselves up with courtiers and noblesse, that crowded to Versailles for means and permission to prey upon the people. Louis the Fifteenth and Sixteenth saw nothing of the people, save their courtiers, and, notwithstanding the triple row of etiquette and the profundity of obeisance, there was no great amount of mu- tual love or respect engendered even between monarch and noblesse. At last caine the catastrophe of 1789, when the citizens and the mob of Paris rose simultaneously against the courtiers of Ver- sailles, the end of the first act of that terrible drama being tIme triumphant re-capture of the king by the poissardes of Paris, who brought the monarch away from Versailles in procession to inhabit the Tuileries. The transferring of royalty thither was indeed a revolution. It at once established a very different kind of monarchy from that which had thriven at Versailles. Instead of being. surrounded by cohrtiers and gardes du corps, it was watched by an envious public, whilst 22 THE TUILERIES TILL 1815. the sentinels on duty at its gates were now taken from the National Guard, aad bidden to receive the orders, not of the monarch, but of Lafayette. The memoirs of the period represent the distresses of the royal family, driven from their comfortable apartments in Versailles to those of an uninhabited palace like the Tuil- eries, in which there was neither comfort nor convenience. Yet what luxury was it coin- pared with what awaited these hapless vic- thus! Had the populace of Paris, or their terrible tribunes, who were at that time as- suming the sway over it had these had the building of the Tuileries, they could not have planned a royal residence, where privacy was more impossible, or where the monarch could he more completely watched ahd intruded upon by his people. It is, in fact, a mere gallery of glass, that can be seen through ; a long series of apartments, without even room for corridors to establish separate cominuni- cation. Poor Louis the Sixteenth was obliged to develop the ingenuity of an artisan in order, first, to sink in the wall an iron closet or recess for the holding of valuable papers, and, secondly, to devise his escape, and that of his family, from such a transparent palace. Such concealinents had, however, a fhcility which they could never have at present. This was, the space no~v open towards the Carousel, bet~veen the palace and the grille, was occupied by a cluster of low buildings and courts, which obstructed the vigilance of the citizen guard, and the suspicion of the revolutionary police. Never was so painful and so tedious a royal martyrdom as that which Louis, his queen and sister, now endured. Their residence in the Tuileries was attended with as much misery and more incertitude than when they came to be confined in the Temple. The king was confiding, the queen suspicious, and when Louis might have got help from the Constitu- tionalists, Marie Antoinette would never allow him. The unfortunate and doomed couple invariably refused all reconciliation or under- standing with any party, as long as that party had power to save them; but the mo- ment they ceased to have that power, then the royal pair were ready to enter upon terms with them. The reason was natural enough; as long as a party was in power, they spoke the language of the people, and were obliged to echo the inveterate and universal suspi- cions of the court. As soon as they declined from popularity and po~ver, more moderate sentiments resumed their sway. But their moderation was but in proportion to their feebleness and want of influence. The queen would never trust Lafayette; the king never trusted Mirabeau, till he had lost his power and health. Nor would he listen to Barrave or the Girondins, till these had been reduced to a minority, and made to stand on the defensive for their lives. The (Jonstitu- tionalists of their day were not more wise than those who caine after them, but they were more energetic. They left the king a full command of money; and if they did not leave him the command of an army, it was that the old r6gime had left no army to com- mand. But with the money he had, the army that was left, and the Constitutionalists who were ready to aid him, if he had trusted to them, and given them the right guarantees, Louis might have been saved. But he would trust no one, save M. de Bonill6 and the emigrants; in other words, he refused to make friends, or make use of the aid, of any influential or acknowledged party within his kingdom. And the wonder is, not that he was taken at Varennes, but that the royal fugitive had escaped so far on his way to the frontier. One of the great difficulties even at present for the tenants of the Tuileries is, how to take the air. There now extends a narrow garden, railed off under the windows; a promenade far from private. In Napoleons time there was a subterranean passage discovered, leading from the cellar of the palace underneath the garden. It was supposed to be for the secretion of treasures. The passage was prolonged by Louis the Eigh- teenth, and it was brought to open upon the terrace which overlooked the Seine. Thr6ugh this dark and long passage the Duchess of Bern, while enceinte, used to proceed to her morning promenade on the terrace, which was considered the safest for her. Poor Louis and Marie Antoinette were worse off. The authorities assigned to them the Terrace des Fenillans, that on the side of the Rue Rivoli, for their promenade, and the public were shut out from it at certain hours by ropes. Here the royal family walked not very often; for they met with more insult than respect. It was no wonder, for the walk extended on the opposite side to the very foci of agitation. On the site of the present Rue des Pyramides stood a large wooden building, in which the Assembly sat, and around which crowds were wont to press, not merely of the enthusiasts and the idle, but of deputations and petition- ers. Here, of course, in the very head- quarters of sans-culolte publicity, were cried those flying sheets of calumny, impiety and blood, which gave dread immortality to the names of Hebert and Marat. The waves and the clamors of such a tide could not break and rise around the walls of the Tuileries without bursting into it. And accordingly, on two occasions the popular ocean did burst in, once 23 THE TUILERIES TILL 1815. in a kind of cssay of strength, to insult and see how far popular violence might be carried with impunity. It was then that poor Louis got behind a table of the hail adjoining the Pavilion do Flore, and harangued the mob with protesta- tions that he had accepted the revolution, and would carry out its interests and behests. The mob expressed at once their approbation and contempt by pulling a greasy red night- cap over the powdered locks of the king. Louis himself seemed unaware of the indignity, till one of his friends in the crowd withdrew the revolutionary badge. This was the fhrerunner of the tenth of August. Santerre very needlessly brought his artillery into the Carousel to blow open the gates. The Swiss guards were incapable of any prolonged defence, at least of such a pervious building, consisting of a suite of halls and the wide-staircase of the Tuileries. These, as has been said, seemed made to tempt a mob. Indeed, no royal occupant of the Tuileries had ever been attacked by a popular force without at once losing all eo~mrage, and giving up all strength of resolu- tion. It was just the same with Louis Phil- ippe at the close of the revolutionary period, as with Louis the Sixteenth at its commence- ment. After having been the scene of the long agony of Louis the Sixteenths decline, from the period of his capture at Versailles to that of his escape into the wooden building in which the Assembly sat, and which was still standing in 1820, on the site of the pres- ent Rae dos Pyrarnides, and from which build- ing he ~vas transferred to the Temple, the Toilerics became the seat of the Convention and its government. Paris, in truth, did not contain another building suitable for the pur- pose and the many issues from it were con- sidered advantageous for enabling the deputies to escape upon occasion the fury of the mob. The true government, however, will never be found in a legislature, or in the place of a legislative sitting, hut beside it. And thus the government of France, though nominally established at the Tuileries, was in reality to be sought at the Jacobins, or found in the hall of the Hotel de Yule. The armed force of the capital was in the hands of those who held the municipal magistracy and this enabled the Terrorists to send the Girondists to the scaffold, and, later, enabled Robespierre to sacrifice Davnton and Desnioulins. A very slight degree of moderation and address would have secured to Robespierre a reign of some duration. But he had become like a wild beast, that must have prey, and his friends and fellow-assassins were obliged to turn against him, lest he should devour them. The ruileries was the scene of the fearful s~ruggle,in which Louis the Sixteenth and his queen were fully avenged. Tb eroyal victims left the palace to the executioners as an abode of fhctiou, terror, of death-struggles and mutual extermination. Soon after caine the l)irectory, and the sepa- ration of Executive and Legislature, the Direc- tars withdrawing to the Luxemabourg and leav- ing the Tuileries to the Assembly; But even then, the terror over, the royal palace was a place of panic and of trial to those who sat in it. In the reaction of the moimment the better thinking of them became royalists and sought a restoration. Time republican Direc- tors punished them for it by arrest, and by a sweeping deportation to Cayenne. fhe young citizens, who entertained the same royalist ideas, and who without the Assembly sought to establish themselves in the streets, were crushed by the cannon of Bonaparte, firing from the steps of St. Roche. The Directory in employing Bonaparte had taught the military instrument how to put down themselves. This, after a glorious cammmpaign, he had the character and the courage to effect. And Bonaparte, as First Consul, took possession of the luileries at time commuemmee- mnent of the century. 1-le was time first occupant to whom time residence of the Tuileries really brought pros- perity, and for the tirnme happiness. The locale he contrived to render splendid. If the first object of Louis the Fourteenth was to have a garden to contemplate, which imispired ideas of the beautiful and the graadiose, the first object with Bonaparte was a good review- ground. And he forthwith formed it by removing all time cross-buildings ammd courts that obstructed the palace on time side of the Carousel. These he swept away, and was enabled always to review 20,000 soldiers from his balcony. This was the diversion lie loved. It was to him, what guillotining ~vmms to Robespierre, a pleasure lie could not dis- pense with. And as the one cut off heads, till his comrades, in fear of timeir o~vn, cut off his, so Napoleon went on marshalling and marching armies against his dear friends and brother sovereigns, Alexander and Frarmeis and Frederic, until they turned their big armies against him, and, having crushed himn once, declared they would miever trust him with an army again Inside, Napo1eon filled the Tuileries with the best and most enlightened society that his position could comanmand. his wife was eharmaing, agreeable, and had the manners of the highest class under the old court. Napo- leon himself patronized men of science, wmms an ardent lover of the drama. The Institute, and the timeatres, both objects of his care and patronage grew emuimment under his fostering care. Y~utb philosophy, and that descriptmon of letters which partakes of it, and brings large and philanthropic views into its views 24 THE TUILERIES TILL 1815. and rules for men, these could never be brought in harmony with a despotism, of which the very principle was to annihilate freedom and publicity, to forbid politics to the masses, and proscribe all intellect that would not wear the livery. Genius and art, there- fore, were not to be found in her saloons. Let it be ho~e~, however, that, had the age demanded a X~taire, a Montesquieu, or a Rousseau, ther~ would have been politicians, there would have been moral, religious, and political philosophers, in despite of despotism, to answer the demand. From 1800 to 1815, was, however, a halt for the French mind a syncope of its intellects. if the Tuileries were an abode of triumph and success for Napoleon, they were not so for those who succeeded him. For as he grew and swelled from the general into the emperor, he flung off from him all his old friendships, loves, companions, and society. Duroc and l3erthier were the only military commanders who enjoyed his intimacy. A cannon ball carried off the one, whilst the other lived to be a traitor to him. Talley- rand and Fouchd fell into disgrace, which both found the opportunity of avenging. Jo- sephine, who at first rendered the saloons of the Tuileries so charming, and who made herself generally beloved by the noblesse, whom she protected~ and the people, who ap- preciated her virtue, had even cause to re- gret her country retreat of Malmaison, and the private condition which was hers ere advanced to grandeur. At first rendered unhappy by the favor of Mademoiselle Georges, she soon found more serious cause of anxiety in the project to remove her from her throne, in order to make way for the daughter of the Cesars. The cold faste of Marie Louise was very different from the enjouernent of Joseph- ine. But whatever regrets were felt or shown by either her husband or by the court for Josephine, were soon extinguished in the breasts of both by the emulation and hope, arising from the birth of the King of Rome. it was no longer the mere reign of the hero, l)ut the dynasty and the empire, that prom- ised to be eternal. This mighty jubilation gave a high tone to national feeling. It swelled Napoleons p ride and confidence to a degree that mocked all prudence, and the orders for the Russian expedition were given. Napoleon did not again see the Tuileries un- til after his return from Moscow. And then, day after day, its court was filled with troops, which, he as anxiously as ever reviewed. But they were no longer the veterans of his early victories, but beardless youths, torn from their families, who adored his renown, indeed, and were prepared to sacrifice theni- selves to uphold it, but in whom even Napo- leon could no longer see the certitude of vic- tory. There are few pictures more touching than that of the emperors departure for the next campaign, when the troops filling the ground before the Tuileries were no longer of the line, but consisted of the National Guard of the capital, to whom the Empress Marie Louise appeared on the balcony, holding in her arms the King of Rome. Napoleon en- trusted these pledges, lie declared, to the protection of the National Guard of Paris pledges that he was destined never more to behold. The marshals, without perhaps an alternative left, abandoned them. The brother of the emperor despaired of the capital and the empress, with the ladies of the court, carefully packing up their jewels, escaped to Blois, almost without an escort, certainly without one stanch follower or friend. Thus were the T~iileries a prize for which royal pretenders and rival politicians strug- gled, pleaded, conspired, and intrigued. ThQ game was played out in the saloons of Talley- rand at the corner of the Rue St. FlorentinQ. The Bourbons carried the day, and Louis Dix- huit, with legs like those of an elephant clothed in enormous gaiters, was wheeled into the Tuileries, swore there to the peo- pl& s liberties, which he meant to be illusive, and received in turn the oaths of allegiance, which were given with the same conviction. Within the year the chair of the great king was wheeled out, even before the grand offi- cers were installed. Then came more re- views, the rekindled enthusiasm of the young, the redoubled mistrust of the old, more promises of constitutions, and more oaths of allegiance and attachment. The fortune of war fixed the duration and value of both, and Napoleon, flying from Waterloo, hid himself in the Elys~e, nor dared to ELce the sombre grandeur of the Tuileries. 1he Constitutionalists bearded him in the Elysde, whilst Fouch6 tracked and cast his nets around him. Fortunately he threw himself on board an English ship, for Baron Mufflings Memoirs, containing Gneisenaus original let- ters, prove that Wellington had some dilhi- I culty in saving his old rival from being actu- ally shot by the Prussians.. Gneisenau stig- mnatizes the dukes determination in this re- spect as a signal proof of his weakness. When such were the feelings of the allies, the marvel is that there were not more exe- cutions. And Louis the Eighteenth must be done the justice to admit, that at such a mo- ment of general reijetion, he stood as firm as could be expected of him against the hosts of proposals which were showered upon him for establishing tyranny and shedding blood. A younger person, or a more active man, might have been carried away by this sava~e and retrograde zeal. But Louis sat in his easy chair, thought of iiartwell, of English senti- ments, principles and ways, and so withstood 25 THE TUILERIES FROM 1815. the frenzy, not merely of his courtiers, but of the Chamber of Deputies itself. Louis estab- lished himself in the. pavilion or square to~ver of the Tuileries near the river, his brother, the Count dArtois at the other end. The Duke and Duchess of Angoul~me took the ground-floor apartment on the south side of the great entrance. The princes and courtiers filled the old palace to the very garrets. And secretaries and aides-de-camp were obliged to seek lodgings elsewhcre. The gardes des corps, composed of youths, who could claim birth with the ~Dent & isses, who could merely boast height, now filled the & llc de Mare- clzau.x, a great square guard-room under the central clock; a beardless generation compared with the old moustaches,, whom they expelled. The Count dArtois restored, ns far as he ccnild, the old etiquette of Versailles, whilst the Duchess dAngoul~me tried to bring back with it the prior usages, which the Court of Versailles had neglected. The Chapelle Roy- ale began to be the great resort, and almoners came to jostle aides-de-camp on the great staircase. _______ The most futile of all attempts, whether in politics, or in taste, is to resuscitate the past. The past may have been very good, very ex- emplary, very sublime, very praiseworthy, but whatever it was, it is past, and cannoi be resuscitated. And all attempts to revive a system of government, or a peculiar aspect of religion, a phase of taste, as they occurred centuries ago, have always and must al~vays prove a failure. Take the present as it is, and anything may be made out of it. A des- potism may be made out of a republican society, and purity may be awakened amongst the most thou0htless and suffering people; but to do this one must take thin~s as they are, and start from the new point, instead of foolishly trying back for an old one. The ultra party, which came back with the Bourbons, would never understand this. They not only wanted France to be monarchic, but monarchic as it was in 1780, which was an impossibility. They therefore brought back all the etiquette and pride, and obstruction of the old court, with none of its fascinations and splendor. Pages might be written illus- trative of them, but no number of pages, or variety of anecdotes, could depict it so strong- ly, as one very trifling circumstance. One of the greatest changes in the internal arrangement of the Tuileries effected by Napoleon, was the same, indeed, which had taken place in all French houses, viz., the establishment of a sane and well-ordered system of water-closets. One of the first acts of the Bourbons, on re& i- tering the Tuileries, was to order them all to be removed, as an innovation on ancient eti- quette, and on the ancient r~gi?ne! There was little to alter in the chateau, however, except the erasure of the bees, and the substitution of the fleur-de-lis. There was a careful alteration of names, but, of even these, some could not be changed. The great square ball at the top of the staircase, orna- mented with pictures of the living marshals (when dead their effi~ies are trmnsferred to the Invalides), still retained its title of the Salle des Mar6chaux. This the Swiss guards tried to defend on the 10th of August, since when, many as have been the dynasties dethroned, no guard royal or imperial ever defended the palace of the sovereign. There were no festivities in the Tuileries until the Due de Bern was niarried. The Duchess of Angoul~me was occupied with works of charity, on which, indeed, sl~e ex- pended her allowance. Of every letter or petition that she received, she tore off the seal and threw it into a basket, and the con- tents were regularly sold and converted to pious uses. The duchess knew nobody in France. She tried hard to learn a little of society, of who different ladies were, with their characters and leanings. But the per- sons she applied to to furnish her with such necessary information, were selfish and ma- lignant, and the duchess receptions became often an insult, not a compliment, even to those the least deserving of such vengeance. The Duchess of Bern came of a different school, from Naples, the hotbed of scandal, true or false. She was as inclined to be in- dulgent, as the Duchess of Angoul~me was to be severe. But the pregnancy of the Duchess of Bern, so fraught with joy to the royalists, was at the same time a continual source of terror. The attempts upon her life, and upon that she was about to bear, were fre- quent, and party did not shrink from employ- ing petards with so base a purpose. This very naturally exasperated the royalists, and drove them from tolerating literature or poli- tics, or trying conciliation in social life, when the Due de Berns murder brought matters to a climax, and forced Louis the Eighteenth to put himself into the hands of the ultras. Resentment was then the only thought at court, nor did the lamentations cease till the Due dAngoul~mnes triumphant march through Spain changed it into confidence and exulta- ti()n. Among the few pictures that Louie the Eighteenth ordered (he cared not for the arts) was the capture of the TrocaderoI)el- aval painted it. It became one of the few pictures that ornamented the Tuileries, and was destroyed by the mob in 1830. From 1824 the Duchess of Bern gathered influence. Her son and daughter were grown up. her conduct was irreproachable, but still there were youth and spirit about her, which attracted the young of both sexes, and she made friends, which afterwards served her in her adventurous expeditions. The i26 THE TIJILERIES FROM 1815. Duc de Bern, after his marriage, had lived at the Elysde, but after his death, his widow retired to the Pavilion de Flore, and there by degrees gathered around her a little court, that was not silenced by the gravity of the Duchess of Angoul~Lae. There never were two people more like thaa the Duchess of I3erri and Mademoiselle Dejazet, the actress like in feature, like in spirit, like in rouge. It may be imagined that a court thus presided over bade fair to be a gay one. No one has yet written the life of the I)uchess of Bern, or given a picture either of her society at the Tuileries, or her adven- tures in La Vend6e. At least, very few and very meagre sketches have appeared. Even Lamartine, who has confined his volumes on the Restoration to much of Jeromes anecdotes and personal portraiture, too much respected the l)uchess of Bern, as still living, to make free with her name and life. But whilst throwing a veil over the inhabitants of one wing of the Tuileries, he has left a most vivid picture of all that passed on the other. One may say, that he has applied a photographic machine to those interviews between Louis the Eighteenth and Madame Du Cayla, which he depicts with so much unction and decorum. The truth was, that Louis the Eighteenth was so weary of life and so sickened, after his being compelled to get rid of M. Decazes with the grandes seigneurs, the grandes dames, and the high priests, whom his brother would alone tolerate at the Tuileries, that Louis the Eighteenth would do nothing for any of them. Deprived of the use of his limbs, of the en- joyment of his faculties, and even of his will, the poor king lay or sat like a huge hulk, ofl~ring nothing but a passive resistance to the sea of courtiers around him. He became unmanageable, pretty much as the late Em- peror of Austria ~vas, except that the latter was from his birth idiotic, and that Louis the Eighteenth was an hom~ne desprit, of whose bodily infirmities his brother took advantage, to coerce him. The same remedy was applied in both cases. A Tyrolese woman was found, who exercised a kind of fascination over the Emperor Ferdinand, and at her bidding he signed papers, and went through the formal duties of royalty. Madame Du Cayla was in- troduced to Louis the Eighteenth, and obtained the saiae intluence over him. In both cases the relatives of the monarch, his old courtiers, and the prie3thood, got possession of the mov- ing power, and intluenced the monarch through her. Louis the Eighteenth devoted his Wednes- days to Madame Da Cayla. On that day no one but herself was allowed to penetrate into his cabinet, and when she retired in the even- ing she was observed to carry with her through the Salle des Gardes for she loved conecal- meat a bag containing fifty thousand francs. Lam artine considers Louis~ the Ei~hteenth and Madame Du Cayla as a pair of saints, and there seems to have been nothing faulty in their connexion. But it made the Salle des Gardes laugh, and gave birth to a host of anec- dotes. The keeper of the seals, Peyronnet, once approached the monarch, who was, as then usual, slumbering in his chair. Louis, startled, exclaimed the name of Madame Da Cavla, which was Zoe. Peyronnet was indis- creet enough to tell the story, and he gained from it a sobriquet, lie was called Robinson Cruzoe. But one must be almost a French- man to understand the pun. Nothing so perplexed and annoyed the Duchess dAngoul~me and the Count dArtois, in the last months of Louis the Eighteenths life, as his obstinacy in refusing to receive the archbishop and to submit to the ceremonies which the Catholic Church imposes upon dying moments. He refused, as a condemned mann would the visit of the executioner. At length Madame Du Cayla induced him to con- sent, and in so doing closed the door of the kings apartment against her for the rest of her days. Louis, grateful, made a will in her favor and left it on his desk. But Charles the Tenth entered his brothers cabinet, carried off all the papers, burnt the will, and made a beggarly compensation to Madame Dn Cayla of a thousand a year for her life. Singular to say, Charles the Tenth began his reign liberally and gayly. He restored the liberty of the press; lie restored his apanage and rank to the Duke of Orleans. He courted popularity, and it was really not his hatred of the people, or theirs of him, that drove him to extremes. This was done by the royalists themselves, who went into opposition because they were indulged with office and with power. The great fault of Charles the Tenth was his not knowing how to manage a court. lie was austere, too much given to priestly solem- nity. Could he have gathered his court around him, given fetes, and fallen somewhat into the ways of the ancient monarch, he might win over those royalists in his chamber who joined the liberals against him. lie summoned Prince Polignac in anger, gave up everything to his gendarme, and retired with the court to St. Cloud. There was the royal residence when the Ordonnances appeared. But it was from the Tuileries, nevertheless, that Marmont issued his orders for putting down the insurrection. The struggle of 1830 began, in fact, between the people, excited to revolution heat in the Palais Royal, and crowded colonnades of the Thdatre Fran~ais, whilst the royalist officers and stat major, in the neighboring wings that stretch from the Tuileries, were provoked and sent the lancers to charge them. This was the evening of the 27th. In the afternoon of the 29th the populace 27 THE TUILERIES FROM 1815. burst into the Tuileries, from whence merely a few shots were jired. One ofthem happened to strike a youth of the Polytechnic school, who was leading the assault. The victors carried him in with them, and placed him, dying, on the throne, nnd in the actual chair in the throne-room where Charles the Tenth had so lately sat. It was thus dyed with the hlood of the popular hero, ere it was broken to pieces and its tapestried cover torn down. There was an enthusiasm of honesty in those ~vho first invaded the Tuileries. Any who attempted to plunder were certain to be shot, as was the case with the poor devil who had secreted a huge pair of scissors, and tried to get off on the pretext that it was a weapon. There was a very large sum of money in one of the cellars, but none were broken open, at least on the first day. By degrees, however, all those who had families, business, or home elsewhere, evacuated the palace; but a large body remained behind, who had none of these things, ragged, homeless wretches, who thus succeeded to the Bourbon kings in the old palace of the race. They even found a com- mander, pretended to form a corps, and posted guards, armed either with lances or muskets, at the different gates and exits, letting none enter without the password. The same band kept possession of the Tuileries-garden. The leader of these fellows had apparently but a shabby uniform, and the Tuileries possessed no store of such clothes. He therefore donned a flowered silk robe de chainbre of Charles the Tenth, and wrote his orders from a silken can- opy. The cock of the band was a wonderful~ fellow, who~ robed himself in some feminine garments, and who proceeded to make a won- drous cuisine. The next day some authorities bade the occupants of the Tuileries to dislodge. They presented lances and bayonets and re- fused. Guards were then placed outside to prevent all ingress, and it was proposed to starve them into surrender. On this they threatened to burn the chateau. What was to be done? Some of the Polytechnians, and of the young fellows, who afterwards formed the Garde Mobile, offered to march to the assault of the chateau. This offer was accepted. They were marshalled for the purpose, and the fellows inside were summoned for the last time to surrender. Surrender they would not, but they professed their willingness to treat. The negotiation lasted many anxious hours, and the Carousel was thronged with spectators, who came to see the chateau carried by assault. The chief condition they insisted on was the liberty of marching out in a body without any of them being searched. Amidst the boasted honesty and boasted courage of the time these conditions were granted them, and about one hundred and fifty ruffians marched with all the portable spoil of the Tuileries, and, thereby, with all the honors of war. Some of the ras cals remained behind, and taunted the ma- rauders on their mingled qualities of patriots and burglars. But the National Guard, erect- ing its head-quarters in the chateau, cleared it by degrees even of the dregs of its late occupants. After a few months hesitation and timidity, Louis Philippe took up his station in Louis Dix-huits easy chair, although even then Queen Amelia resisted long that final, and what she thought that fatal, move. The revolution of July has been most graph- ically told by Dumas, who has reproduced and reintroduced his Trois Mousquetaires, or at least two of them, in the persons of the two youths of the Polytechnic school, Charras and Lothon. The pictures are in general true, though Dumas, strangely enough, gives them the air of fable. He has preserved two most excellent and striking anecdotes. Some of the richest scenes of those days took place in the council chamber, which are well known and universally recounted. How good is the fol- lowing answer of Louis Philippe to Dupin! The latter came up to the king, much huffed and indignant from some cause, no doubt for not being consulted, which, as member of the cabinet, sans portefeujile, he felt himself en- titled to be. I fear, sire, said Dupin, we cannot live or set up our horses together any longer.~ I have been of this opinion my- self a long time, M. Dupin, said the mon- arch; but I had not the courage to express it. It was droll enough, the succeeding minis- tries of the two bankers, neither of whom knew aught of tine politics, and who had but one idea each, Laffitte that of going on, and Perrier that of stopping short. In the first year of Louis Philippes reign and residence at the Tuileries, any one could mount the royal staircase on reception even- ings, and that was almost every evening, give his name to the kuissier, and walk or take part in the business or the converse of the hour. His majesty was not the least surprised at seeing a visitor whom he had not the honor. of knowing. Nor was there a master of the ceremonies to ask the impertinent question of what brought him there. Indeed, a National Guards uniform was a passport anywhere. These citizen soldiers alone kept guard over the palace; and for a long time the officers on duty dined at the royal table. The king, however, who picked his crown out of the dust, and got his fortune by negotiation with the vilest rabble, set quietly, gradually but care- fully to polish the one, set the other to rights, and restore respect to both. But the expense of keeping royal house frightened him. Louis Philippe was a man who could throw away a million upon masons, whilst he grudged francs to cook and prov~ditore. Lie accordingly in- troduced into the Tuileries the rule, which he 28 THE TUILERLES FROM 1815. had observed in the Palais Royal, that of pay- ing for banqueting expenses at so much a head, :~nd contracting with a restaurateur to do it. Even the expenses of the princes caf6 and cggs were taxed and arranged in the same precise and economic fashion. It was de- bated which did least honor to the royal palace, the elder Bourbons, who from ideas of majesty refused to allow any one to dine with them, or the younger Bourbon, who in- vited every one to dine with him, hut who gave no more sumptuous repast than could be pro- ,ured at three francs a head. As kings, how- ever, do not go out into mixed company, Louis Philippes plan had the advantage of putting him in communication with all persons worth zonvcrsing with; and for the first years of his reign no one could be better or more fully in- formed. Latterly, as Louis Philippe grew old, md testy, and economic, and infirm, and shrunk rom seeing any one save old acquaintances, he became so little aware of what was passing oven astride his door, that February, 1848, took him completely by surprise. One of the most striking scenes in the later umbers of Dumas Memoirs, is that where ~he deputation, in July, 1830, goes to Nenilly ~ offer the crown to Louis Philippe, who was ~bsent. The deputation could only find Louis Philipp& s wife and sister Queen Amelia nd Madame Adelaide. The former indig- iantly refused the crown in her husbands nine, but the latter, with eagerness and -droitness, accepted it. This sufficiently marks he difference between the t~vo women the ne desirous of keeping Louis Philippe a wince, the other seeking to make him a rev- lutionary and liberal ~overeign. Unfi)rtu- ately Madame Adelaide died, leaving Odilon ~arrot one of her executors; and the king ecame more of a Bourbon prince than before. lot only such men as Barrot and Thiers were anished from the Toileries, but every free- poken man. Louis Philippe became testy, nd ij:mtolerant of contradiction. His trust in Juizot was unbounded, and Guizot alone was he welcome councillor of the Tuileries. How did M. Guixot lose his hold of the ing, and why was he not allowed to defend he Tuileries and the crown Simply because I. Guizot forgot one of the first and necessary raditions of the French statesman, which is, lways to wear a sword himself, or be assoem- ted with some one of eminent military repu- ition. The first requirement for any French ,overnment was an i/lustre 6p~e. Louis Phil- ppe had Gerard, but he was dead; then ~oult, who was superannuated. Lastly, Bu- caud, but Bugeaud quarrelled with Guizot, and :ould only act with Thiers. So that Gui- ot, having no general, was dismissed when he menacing moment came, and when Bu- eaud was summoned, Thiers came necessarily :ith him. Bugeaud forthwith set himself to examine the means of defence, and found that there was no ammunition. The supply of so useful a material of war rested with the Due de Montpensier, a boy, but governor of Vin- cennes. He had not made the requisite pro- vision. Marshal Bugeaud accordingly re- fused to defend the king and the chateau. In the mean time, the Tuileries presented the same anarchy which was observed after the revolution of 1830. Every one that pleased rushed up its staircase, and into the kings presence, to propose terms or offmr advice. It was Emile de Girardin one moment, and M. Cremicux the next. What ~vas the cabinet de travail of the king, was encumbered with peo- ple of all kinds. The king ran from it into his bedroom, and from his bedroom back into it, clothed in a kind of dressing jacket, greatly perturbed, now listening to some alarming reports, then comforting his family, which had crowded to his side; then receiving a deputation, then retiring to ponder upon an answer. The editor of the Constitutionel, then an opposition paper, had conic in with the others, and coolly sat himself down with pen and ink at a table, to be any ones and every ones secretary. He wrote out all kinds of proclamations arid addresses and decrees, some of which appeared, and some did not. The queen was more excited and indignant than the king; and when persons entered to give friendly counsel, whom she knew to be at times conspiring against the king, she told them to leave the room. She saw too M. Cremieux, but he minded her not. The rnaj- esty that did hedge the queen was lost upon the future members of the republican govern- ment. At last, it came to abdication; an act to which neither the king nor his faniily could have been brought, if the chiefs of the insur- rection had not sent several guarantees that, in that case, the throne should be secured to the little Count de Paris. This done, the old king put on his hat, took the queen under his arm, and walked down the great staircase, and across the garden of the Tuileries, until they met a fiacre, in which the shipwrecked royalty embarked. The kings abdication and departure were so sudden that none even of the family were aware of it, except those who were present. The Due de Nemours, with the Duchess of Orleans and children, went to the chamber, where they and their friends mismanaged and threw away a cause which the stanchuess of one general might have saved. The Dues dAumnale and Joinville were in Algiers. The Due de Montpensier ought to have taken care of their wives. But they were forgotten, amid the mob was in the Princess de Joinvilles apartments before she fled, leaving her bon- net as a trophy. It would have been for- tunate for the family of Orleans had any of these been arrested; but they showed great 29 30 OMNIPOTENCE. alacrity of flight. The chief ruflianry of the against the idea of a senator whose sole mob was this time kept out of the Tuileries. equipage is his umbrella. Such measures at They were allowed to wreak their barbarous least render the imperial palace more like the fury on the Palais Royal and upon Neuil[y. abode of kings, than it had been during the The more respectable tribe of insurgents took time when the Duchess of Angoul~me re- possession of the Tuileries, under the corn- ceived no one but her almoner, or when Louis mand of the famous chess-player, St. Arnaud, Philippe dined his guests at so many francs who had been caissier of the Temps. a head. The French boast of themselves, that As usual, after a revolution, the Tuileries they like ~galit6, and yet we find theni not returned to the keeping of the National Guard. reluctant to admit the claim of those who The members of the Provisional Government boldly and proudly assert superiority. ensconced themselves in their several minis- tries. And when they went to the Council, it was to the Hotel de Ville, not the Tuileries. The latter palace remained tranquil. But From Frasers Magazine. the revolution of 1848 had precisely the same OMNIPOTENCE. want of a high military officer, that Louis Philippe experienced. So great is the general FROM TUE 5AN5KRIT. BY DR. BowRIYo. respect in France for such a character, that, a GOD, God alone is truth as million sparks few days after the revolution, Bugeaud could Spring from the blazing fire, so living things, show himself in the streets, and be well re- All living things all life, proceeds from Him, ceived. The great perplexity was the want And unto Him returns. He, He alone of even a war minister. The Provisional Gov- Is glorious, formless, perfect, and unborn, eminent sent to Algiers for Cavaignac, who Pervading all within, without. Nor life cane, and we know the consequences. He Nor mind is His.* His purity divine conquered for the Moderates of the Assembly~ Towers over all existence: higher still, he put the people down for them; and the That even His own almighty energy, in return asked the people to discard hums The life, the mind, the sense, ether, air, and to elect, as President of the Republic the Light, water, and the all-containing earth, Proceed from Him. His head the highest heaven, future Emperor of the French. It was, ater The sun and moon His eyes, His ears the points all, an inevitable choice. Still it was for the All round the zodiac. La the voids His speech, newly elect a three years struggle, against His life the air, His bosom natures breadth, the revolutionists on the one hand, and the His feet the earth. The all-pervading He, monarchists on the other. T was his perfection that created heat, The latter entrenched~ themselves in the Whose fuel is the sun. The moon He launched, Tuileries, under the command of Changarnier. Rain to engender rain to raise the corn, All remember the long antagonism between Which feeds the germinating source of life, the Tuileries and the Elysee. All know the Whose impregxmtion animates the world. blinding zeal with which Changamnier carried He hath created gods and demigods, on the war, as well as the persevering and Men beasts, birds, vital airs, and corn, and cool adroitness of him who triumphed, and wheat; who wears the crown of his uncle in the old Truth, contemplation, veneration, all palace of the Tuileries. The claims of duty and the rites of law. Napoleon the Third has certainly gained very much in public opinion, and has assumed He, the seven orifices of the head, quite another position before it, since he With their perceptive powers, the objects, too, quitted the Elys6e, and has taken up his abode Of their perception, and perceptions self, in the Tuileries. Report or calumny used to He formed, and seated in the heart that life Which r represent the Elys~e as the retreat of dissipa- evels in the organs given to all. tion and a place of orgy. Imagination is tree Oceans and mountains all proceed from Him; to draw what picture it pleases of bachelors From Him all rivers flow. From Him all food life; but with an empress at the Tuileries, Receives its flavors, and its strengthenizig powers. an empress well known and admired as a mem- T is He who to the body binds the soul. her of the higher circles of the metropolis, His perfect Deity is all in all! scandal has no longer a hold. The palace has Object of every holy thought, and aim been rendered far more hospitable and splen- Of each divine observance. He, supreme! did than it was even in Napoleons time, al- Immortal He! and 0 ! beloved one! though the taste of that day is restored as If He be seated in thine inmost soul, far as is compatible with the ideas of this. Soon wilt thou break the bonds of ignorance, Napoleon the Third likes splendor, and And glory in bright knowledge. show, and expenditure. He has greatly raised the salaries of all functionaries, but lie insists ~ Life and mind are here spoken of as created on their spending them. lie sets his face things, and therefore not attributes of the divine nature. THE PRINCE OF MADAGASCAR. 31 THE PRINCE OF MADAGASCAR. TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN OF KARL GUTEKOW, FOR THE LIVING AGE. [We are not aware that any of the writings of the apparently deserted room, and looks ahout Gutzkow have heen translated, either in England in all the corners for his master, whom lie at or in this country, although he is at this time one last sees, and addresses by his baptismal of the most distinguished romance writers in Ger- name, Hippolytus. many. His largest work, The Knights of the ~ almost began to think I should not find Spirit, was the first attempt in Germany at bring- you again, said he, with true-hearted ani- out a c in numbers in a ~ournal after mation; our affairs go well, however, and ing romane are, I think, imp roving. I found the profes the manner of the French Feuilleton; and it has sor, fortunately, in the sixth story. in the been said, that Brockhaus, the editor of the Alge- Latin quartera charming man, full of mucine Zeitung, for which it was written, paid the knowledge, without any pride, of refined author four thousand thalers for the copyright of it. manners, and knows all the languages in the It was drawn out to a great length, and fills, now world. He will be here in a fc~v monicnts. that it is complete, eight octavo volumes. We Ilippolytus appeared to have been only find occasional notices of Gutzkow in the English waitino~ for the old man, to ree his nain spirits. reviews of foreign works, and a late number of lie received laughingly, with a cheerful nod the Revue des Deux Mondes criticizes his great of the head, and his thanks, the information one of the foremost brought by him, him as Colas. work, and alludes to him as addressing Colas, however, did not appear pleased at writers of Germany at this time. He has pub- this laugh, which he thought indicated lished several volumes of shorter stories, from one doubt, and said: of which we copy the following.] Why do you laugh, Ilippolytus Can you not stay alone half an hour without losing your courage? Good heavens! duling your CHAPTER I. whole life I have never lost sight of you, and now a crisis comes, and are not all my cx- IN the back room of a coffee-house, which pectations about to be fulfilled? What is was neither the best nor the worst in Paris, there to laugh at? The professor will be appears a young man, who seems to be count- here in a moment. ing the hasty steps with which he measures Hippolytus had not meant to express by the narrow apartment. Sometimes he goes his laughter what his old friend and tutor to the window which looks out upon the feared, but explained to him, most earnestly, street, and casts down upon it an expectant how much he wanted the professor, and that look; sometimes he hastens to the ante-chain- he desired nothing so ardently as his assist- her to discover the time by the clock which ance. hangs there, because he apparently possesses You need have no mistrust of me, Colas, no other hour-measurer but his own impa- continued he; our plan has been the dream tiencq. Did he fear to miss the overture of of my youth, which has now ripened to real- the new opera? Had he given his word for ity. I have always thought of the lands, some transaction of honor? Did he wish to of which an envious fate has deprived me, hit the precise moment for a meeting with a and I will no longer give them up, since I lady or a patron, or a secret party at cards? have strength to put myself in possession of We should not venture to question the young them. The sound of the waving of the trees man himself about the matter, for he stands in niy native forests falls upon my ears; the there, looking dark and gloomy, and the pe- twilight of the time that is past holds me in culiar formation of his face shows an anxiety strong bonds. Yes, I feel I must regain my which is increased by his remarkably dark rights, and that only weakness can deprive me complexion, and seems to be in some measure of them. Shall I remain any longer in this justified by his exterior, which exhibits the unfortunate condition in which 1 now live, appearance almost of poverty, unknown, without means of support? Shall You may forbear, however, from getting I continue to vegetate without the advan- up a subscription for my poorly clad hero, tages to which my birth entitles me? Shall for, the fact is, he is still in a condition to I remain any longer in Paris, the object of a keep a servant. The old, but still active and tiresome and useless compassion, or rather cheerful, man who acts in this capacity, eaters the object of scorn? Colas, do not mistake THE PRINCE OF MADAGASCAR. my laughter; be assured that I am resolved on my adventure. Colas had barely time to press joyfully the hand of his young master, before the profes- sor made his appearance in the ante-chamber, and he was obliged to hasten and introduce the learned man. Professor Polyglott was a slender, meagre little man, with a large head, which from behind had the appearance of an angular cube. His weak little legs, his hectic-formed breast, the restless movement of the under jaw and the eyes, the penurious, but still clean and carefully arranged dress and linen, betrayed the poor scholar, who could only live by keeping up such an appearance as should not shock the people who .made use of his services, lie approached, with meas- ured politeness, and constant bowincr LI ip- polytus, who awaited him in silence. As far as I understand from my friend here, this old gentleman, began Polyglott, pointing to Colas, you wish, sir, to find a man who has made a study of all the lan- guages, civilized and savage, of the whole world. You see in me such a person, who has devoted half a century to this object. I have sought to discover the beginnings of the great families of language; I have devoted my whole life to itto comparing the unnum- bered affinities and connections, the ancestry of all tongues. Do you desire an explana- tion of the branches of the Judo-Germanic language, or would you try to study the anal- ogies of the Semitic tongues~ But, aIm! I see, you are a young hero of the school called romantic, a novel-writer, who wishes to make use of foreign words in bringing out his fan- cies. A good title would be, for example, The Patagonian Abrakaxahatakla. Am I mistaken, young gentleman? The professor uttered the last question with such a long-drawn, gentle confidence, that Ilippolytus corrected his error with a smile, and replied: No, Mr. Polyglott, there is no fiction in the case, but only an actual, romantic sub- ject, which I am to live out myself. I understand you perfectly, interrupted Polyglott. You are a young luau; you are an adventurer, you would go either to the East or the West Indies. What do you need farther? A little English, some practical exercises in Sanscrit, some Portuguese, if you go to Brazil; and if you ~ to Cuba, Spanish. These are things which you need only to name to me, when you will receive the necessary information. It is not that, said Hippolytus, with emnl)arrassment; we have nothing to do either with America or Asia, though you are right in imagining a transatlantic voyage. The young man paused: the professor im- mediately put his unwearied tongue in motion, ir~ order to show his quickness of apprehen- sion ; but Colas was not willing that this prattle, which led to nothin~ sh tinue. is ~, ould con- the use of this abundance of words? said he, with vexation ; I will tell you our business at once. My master wishes to learn African. Polyglott laughed aloud, and said, My dear old friend, what do you mean? My hearts father! what shaWl say? African how large do you imagine Africa is? Ha! ha! if you stand on your church-tower you will se& farther than the whole extent of A f- rica. What is Africa to Paris? The ocean cannot be compared to the SAne. Ah what joke are you making, old ma.n Colas exhibited his anger at this jeer. You teach me to know Africa! cried he vehemently to the professor. I am at home under the equator. I was, if you wish to know it, twenty years in Africa, and did not lose my left eye by the dust of the This de Boulogne, but by the suns h eat in the Island of Bourbon, where I could tell every blade of grass, even if I were wholly blind. Hippolytus, this professor would try to tell us what Africa is. Hippohytus soothed his faithful servant, and explained to the astonished Polyglott that he was interested in the language of ~ladagascar. Madagascar! that is pleasant, answered the latter; hut, apparently meditating. lie went on, while the other two watched hini closely; Madagascar, ah! now I will not say that this largest island of the earth,which is so favored by nature that, like Hayti and Cuba, it has no savage animals an island that was first discovered by the Portuguese particularly fruitful indeed, what shall I say? or, rather, I am unwilling to confess that this island in my table of languages, which I can show you in a moment, which is all ready for the press, which has met the approbation of the greatest linguists of our time that the only one wanting is the Madagascar language. On the contrary, it cannot be denied that Without circumlocution, sir, said the young man, seizing conyulsively the arm of the professor, do you understand the Mad- agascar language? The professor, taken by surprise, answered with a forced laugh, Indeed now I I once made an attempt upon it, though, I confess, that what may be called exclusively the language of Madagascar Sir indeed be assured I will not finish this confes- sion, for it might, perhaps, prove untrue. I have read carefully the Count Benjowskys voyage to Madagascar; I know whence the population of it draw their origin; that the Arabian and Abysinian elements are found 32 V THE PRINCE OF MADAGASCAR. 33 in their language; and all this is put down the tropical skies of Madaoascar lie be- lfl my comparative table of languages, a longed to the most noble famiTy of this island, work that has cost me incredible labor, and on which the French were just beginning to that I should have laid before the public, if settle, when the English had taken posses- ~ny often presented petition to the ministry sion of almost all their foreign colonies. An to cause it to be printed had received a favor- expedition fitted out by the imperial govern- able answer. If it is true that the Arabian ment, under the command of Sylvain Roux, is the foundation of the Madagascar language, had entirely failed, and the commander, then [understand it as well as Master Syl- either for the sake of having an excuse for vester de Lacy; only, if I give lessons in it, I some future expedition, or for some other shall be more moderate in my charges than reason, took back with him to France the he would be. two sons of a powerful chief. Mandi Tsara Hippolytus and Colas looked at each other was the name of the eldest, who, not being with concern. All their hopes seemed de- able to bear the climate, died on his passage stroved by this answer. The young man de- back to his native island. Verora, however, spairingly struck his forehead, and cried out, the younger brother, our Hippolytus, had bitterly: borne well the new climate, became entirely how little does the world gain from the accustomed to the manners and social life of respect it pays to learned men! This man the country which he might have called his calls himself educated, and maintains that home, since he had no recollection of the he blushes at no question; and yet he does land of his birth. He lived at first under the not understand the language of an island care of Sylvain Roux, and after his death, which you yourself, my good sir, say is which took place in a second expedition, he the largest island upon the earth! Your was taken care of by old Colas, who had been ignorance annihilates the hopes of an un- the servant of Roux, and for a long time had happy man, who has almost come to making taken care of the household of his ward. a fixed idea of his anxiety. flippolytus had entered the army, and held Polyglott might have excused himself in at present the place of lieutenant in a regi- reply to these reproaches, but he confined ment of the line. lie had never left Paris: himself to the repetition of his former opin- this savage appeared only to have been born ion. for Paris. He moved with the most refined Be assured, sir, said he, that we bearing in the circles which willingly opened should get along anywhere in Madagascar to the adventurous young stranger; he with Arabic. In the mouths of the natives thought of no trees but the beeches and aca- the original sound does not become deterio- ems of the environs of Paris; the news of the rated so soon as in Europe, where everything day in the saloons formed the world of his has a tendency to run into the old pronunci- thoughts, and the little meetings among ation. We shall always understand Arabic friends and acquaintances had been, till now, enough to say as much as is necessary to ask the only things which Qecupied his mind. for a piece of rice-cake, or a drink of water, The older he became, the less his income, to make a kind speech to a black fair one, which was derived from his subaltern post and, in an extreme case, to pray to be spared and the sacrificeR of Colas, seemed suited to ~ from scalping. the dignity which report and his own vanity Do you think this would be sufficient, gave his own person; and the recollection of said Ilippolytus, with a proud mien, for his parentage grew more disagreeable to him; the use of a king in Madagascar ~ the exhortations of his faithful servant were The professor started, stared with open insupportable. Colas had expected every- mouth, and listened passively while Colas thing from his young master when he ar- made his explanation, and requested him to rive a a certain age, and might lay claim think over the Arabic plan, and to return at to his rights in his native land. the same time the next morning. He took Hippolytus, as a child, had listened to the his leave with many bows, stopped awhile stories of Colas as to a nurses tales; but, at the door, shook his head, and disappeared as a stalwart, growing young man, he had in the anteroom. laughed at his servants fixed idea, when he [here are historical facts, which I will reminded himthe trained soldier, the favor- give as an explanation of this somewhat inex- ite of the ladies, the butterfly of all circles, plicable scene. All Paris had talked about the confidant of the literati of the day, the them, and would have bestowed unwearied rash frequenter of the Bois de Boulogne and interest on the person concerned, as they did the Roulette-table of the dark tropical for- on the Osages and the Giraffe, if he had not ests of his native island, and the throne of disappeared from the eyes of the inhabitants, twisted rushes which he was to take posses- very shortly after their attention had been sion of among naked, savage men. turned towards him. But suddenly this antipathy was changed. Hippolytus Verora was indeed born under Ilippolytus became thoughful; his friends CCcCLxxYI. LIVING AGE. VOL. II. 3 TIlE PRINCE OF MADAGASCAR. called him melancholy, and Colas hoped he had come to reason and judgment. In fact, his pupil resisted his urgency no longer with his former dislike and scorn, but he gathered up the thread of the stories of his home, which streamed so abundantly from the mouth of the old man, and soon fell into calculations of all the possibilities which might happen in vindication of his old rights. All the risk of making claims upon a throne, perhaps long since abolished appeared to him now small; and, what had formerly only busied hi3 fancy now occupied his ambition; and a combination which had proceeded en- tirely from the head of Colas, now entered his own. Whence this sudden change! It arose not at all from growing tired of the pleasures of Paris. It was no div~rsion which Hippo- lytus sought, but he had a fixed end in view. The slow advance in his military career, the insufficiency of his means for his wants, not to appear restricted in his living, the passion for pla~ when he had no longer a chance to which a laid the foundation of a reso- lution later circumstance made irrev- ocable. Spite of the exotic form of his face, and his almost bronze complexion, Hippolytus had had more than one affair of the heart; none of which had, however, affected him so deeply as a sec ret flirtation with the young and lovely Countess Cecca. It couh~ not, perhaps, be said that Hippolytus had at first anything more than a youthful partiality for the lady; yet he seemed to have been led to found upon this an expectation of receiving in return from the countess a strong, faith- ful, and perfect love. He found himself de- ceived; for the young countess, at the very moment he was pressing her last tender epistle to his lips, was led to the altar by his superior officer, Colonel Dartois. What would in others have awakened a disgust of life, spurred him on to enjoy the present, and draw every possible advantage from his situa- tion. His ambition was pained by the un- faithful choice of the countess; a singular confusion took place in his ideas; he began to look within himself, and while he neglect- ed everything his acquaintances, his friends and intimates, his dress he employed him- self constantly with the thought of taking advantage of the glories of his birth. Colas was perfectly happy, for Ilippolytus lived only for him entered into his plans, and was most zealous in carrying them into exe- cution. The young man resolved to make his future life depend upon his birth, and determined resolutely to make himself King of Madagas- car, at any price. We are, perhaps, prepa~red to find this ex- pedition a very pleasant one; but it had its tragic side. ilippolytus might possess all the advantages which the rights of a pre- tender gave him; but the greatest was want- ing, viz., the knowledge of his mother tongue. lie had forgotten the rude, harsh sounds in which, in his native land, he had expressed his feelings and wishes; he no longer knew how his unknown mother would express her joy if she saw him again, or how she had besought her life when she was murdered by a hostile family. He had never thought of this deficiency in his native credentials, and, for the first time, the more his soul was filled with the firm resolve to seek his native land and conquer it, he was alarmed at the thought that he was entirely ignorant of its language. Even Colas saw how necessary for the un- dertaking this knowledge was; he shared the grief which made his friend unspeakably mis- erable, and thought of the method and man- ner of helping him out of this difficulty. What was to be done! Some one must be found who could furnish the vacant memory of Hippolytus, and remind him of the tones with which nature, at his birth, had endowed his tongue. Colas exerted himself to find a teacher of languages, who would not be too expensive for his treasury. But who, in Paris, under- stood the language of Madagascar! hippo- lytus was on the border of despair his mel- ancholy uttered itself in speech when Colas heard of the talent of Professor Polyglott. He hastened to him, and the scene followed with which we are already acquainted. Remarkable as was the opinion of Poly- glott respecting the language of Madagascar, there was a portion of truth in it which recommended it, viz., the circumstance that no one was able to contradict it. This ex- cited hopes in the two friends, and in time led them to believe in it. The preparations for carrying out their design were already advancing with too much zeal and earnest- ness to allow them to be retarded by an un- certainty of this kind. Hi p polytus had already made up his mind to take lessons in Ar~~bic, when, on the fol- lowing day, Polyglott entered his room at the appointed hour, with a reverential, and over-polite air. Your royal highness, he began, showing that he had informed himself with regard to the personality of his new acquaintance, your royal highness will excuse the some- what improper manner in which I demeaned myself yesterday, and attribute it to the misfortune of a scholar who has spent the greatest portion of his life over his books, and knows as little of public characters in Paris, as a ministerial counsellor who has offices to dispose of. Now, I know, not only who your royal highness is, but also the plans in which you are interested. In Paris, every- thing can be known, and I confess, a young 34 THE PRINCE OF MADAGASCAR. man who desires to learn Madagascar, excited my curiosity in the highest degree. With regard to the desired language, the origin of it has not changed since yesterday afternoon. Sir, your highness, it is easy to prove, that the most excellent dialect of your native land has Semitic roots. We will, therefore, study Arabic, and we shall then understand the language of Madagascar. Cola~ placed all confidence in Polyglott because he was a scholar; but Hippolytus did so because his ambition was flattered by the homage of the man. The first began to fumble in his pockets for his savings the latter had the question obligato on his lips, of how much the professor charged for his lessons. Polyglott, however, seemed to have something else at heart than desire for mon- ey, and, after sundry embarrassed preambles, gained coura~e to say Say nothing of payment; for my services I should always receive too much, and, added he ironically, for a king always too little. Your highness must receive me as the second subject of your kingdom for I would not rob your old servant of the honor of being the first. I will follow you over the ocean like a rocket-dictionary, a porta- ble grammar, a living assistant. What have I in Paris I Nothing but my unsaleable manuscripts; nothing but long regrets that others have snapped away my desired offi- ces; nothing but this rusty-growing frock; but this ruffled shirt, which I wash myself every evening; but this old hat, which will soon have lost the little form it now has. The Republic took everything from me; the Consulate gave me nothing back; the Empire robbed me of the young relations who sup- ~rt ed me; and what the Restoration of the ourbons neglected with regard to me, you, prince, can make good on occasion of your own. I have depended for the last twenty- four hours on your taking me with you. Hippolytus could come to no conclusion without his prime minister. He looked at Colas; everything seemed to him so remark- able, so new, he could have embraced the professor, and yet he could hardly help laugh- ing. lie wished that all the world might witness this homage, and yet he looked anx- iously round to see if he was not compro- umising himself before some one. Colas, how- ever, was mentally reckoning whether the price of the lessons was equal to the passage- money, and favored the trembling, waiting Polyglott with the result, that if he would give the instruction gratis, they would take him with them. heaven forbid that I should receive any pay, exclaimed Polyglott. On the whole fiLce of the globe are two thousand spoken languages; fifteen of these I speak, thirty- seven 1 understand, and respecting four hun- dred I can make curious observations. You shall learn all that I know; all, to know which my whole life has not yet sufficed. I can become dragoman in Madagascar, I can carry on the correspondence with foreign courts, I can introduce our modern literature to the savages, and form a public for Balzac and Jacob Bibliophile, under the equator. I will translate the Bible, with Voltaires com- mentaries. I imagine, prince, that knowl- edge, religion, and the fine arts, will be the first care of your government; and you can for all these find no better instrument than myself. Ilippolytus swam in delight. Colas lis- tened attentively, and all three swore a bond of truth and devotion. The young pretender found himself, to he sure, in a similar situation with Don Pedro, of Portugal, in Paris, at the beginning of the thirty years war; yet he did not possess the means, like the latter, of taking advantage of his Parisian abode. How willingly wonid he as his cause became the talk of the city have received the offers of knights of for- tune and proscribed adventurers, who would have helped him contend for his rights! How willingly would he have beaten the recruit- ing-drum in the streets of Paris, and col- lected about his standard all the discontented, the constitutional fugitives from all nations! But he lacked money, and Polyglotts advice, to take up a three-and-a-half per cent. Mada- gascar loan from the Rothschilds, was not ollowed up. The government, to whom hip- polytus turned, advised the petitioner to be quiet, and warned him earnestly not to in- volve the world in unnecessary wars. All that he could get was his discTharge, which he received from Colonel Dartois, the husband of his faithless loved one, with a mixture of pleasure and anger. There remained, therefore, for the voyage and the landing the other side of the ocean, nothing but the savings of Colas, which he had been keeping for a lon~ time for this purpose, and now devoted to it with joy. On the loveliest spring morning, Hippolytus to?e himself from his dear Paris Colas, from the obstacles which had so long stood in the wuy of his fairest dreams Polyglott, from. hi~ attic and his book-shelves, from whivh the.- books had long since be en sold, amid whii~h. would doubtless have served him the next winter for fuel. All three weust & om4lasis on foot, without much baggage; and~. at Brest, took passage on board a. merchant- ship, which was to take them to the theatre of their after fate, as light and freeof heart, as they were in bodily clothing.. CHASTU TI.- After a tedious voyage of sevcral~ months, the sailors remarked at the north-east a long, 35 36 THE PRINCE OF MADAGASCAR. thin streak over the immeasurable and dark foss these natives look to me like negroes ; but waters. It was the coast of Madagascar, on I do not doubt they speak Arabic. which the Erench had no settlement. But the Colas had enough to do to carry the bag- voyage continued the whole length of the gage of the new court,which did not, in truth, island until it reached its termination at a contain a crown or sceptre, but merely linen little rocky island, the sharp outline of which enough to clothe decently the king, his rain- dipped into the mirror of the sea which sep- ister of finance, and his head interpreter. lIe arated it from the main island. This for- knew the only inn in Pandekey, the French saken spot, thus surrendered to the sea, settlement of St. Marie, to which he brought was the Isle St. Marie, where the French his companions, after they had taken leave had frequently made settlements, which had of the captain, the merchant, and the labor- been as often given up, on account of its situ- ers, who had been their follow-passengers. ation and its unfruitfulness. llere was it We shall have to introduce into this that the undertaking of our pretender was to country, said the professor, pointing to have its beginning, the poor huts of the place, we shah have No one could be so gay as Colas at the to introduce some proper models for architec- sight of the island. He had, with his two ture. Fools! what would you do in these companions, suffered much, while on board black clay huts, where a man must be stifled ship, from anxiety and want. In a quarter with smoke? of an hour after they lea Brcst, Polyglott Colas exclaimed dryly, that this was the fell into a fainting state, from which he inn, and pushed his friends into the low, hardly aroused during the whole voyage; the dark house, which was peopled by numerous old man, who only lived spasmodically, by rabbits, who had already undermined the much talking and active exercise, sunk into ground beneath it. the entire debility of a weak body, when he A woman entered the room, and appeared was silent from pain and obliged to stay in in the highest degree surprised at this free ~ne place. Hippolytus was almost in the quartering upon her. As Colas began to give same condition. He hung between the past his orders, she told them, in good French, and the future, like his soul, and needed the that her first husband had been long dead; help of Colas for every motion that he made that the inn had fallen into disuse, and had for eating or sleeping. Ah! this young say- been long since given up by her. But as age had become too much of a Parisian. Tor- they were Frenchmen, and her countrymen, teni and the Rocher de Caneale had civilized they would, perhaps, be so kind as to tell him, and his nerves had been strung up by her how her good aunt, in Canal-street, in French literature to the most sensitive pitch. Toulouse, did, and whether she was not likely The merchantman was bound for the Isle soon to die and leave her her property. of Bourbon, and stopped at St. Marie only to Colas would gladly cut short this tiresome land some passengers and deliver the royal speech, but Polyglott explained to the strong, despatches to the cc~lony. But few others active woman, that her good aunt Barbe, landed with our travellers, mechanics, who I think, is her name ? came here to seek their fortune; a merchant, No, Rosina, interposed the joyful host- that was already known in St. Marie, and the ess. eaptain of the ship, who stopped to execute You are right Rosina, said Polyglott; simne commissions. she is not gone she is a rich woman No curious gazers stood along the shore, her house on the canal e~xc~p a few natives, who had a somewhat What! has she sold one she had hungry aspect. There was no one to offer two, interrupted the niece. hi~ eervices, who would hate carried your Polyglott affected to be angry, end said pack r pointed out an inn. Everything had Do you think to tell me news l But she a 4ea~d, rocky, unfruitful physiognomy. But sold one for an enormous sum, which she has th~is did nat hinder the professor from feeling at interest. In short, things go well with re- himself again in a dry skin; the dreary past gard to money, but she is ailing. hesst4pped off as a dead covering; his talk- Is she ailing l repeated the heiress with ing-works were set in motion; he stepped ill-concealed pleasure. The good woman with ma firm foot, and turned again in his vol- used to suffer from the gout. uble manner to Hippohytus, who was stretch- Gout in the head, supplied Polyglott; i~g himself. and exercising his stiffened limbs, she will not hold omit much longer. with the se.lutaiiqn The hostess could not have heard more ~ Is it.pessilie that so glorious a country pleasant intelligence. She hastened to fulfil as is here immeasurably stretched out before the wishes of Colas, and accompanied her m.is, iashortly to eome under the dominion of goings out and in with increasing expressions yoei- Irighness~? It seemus to me still like a of her willingness to serve the gentlemen, dream-; but we have here the most incontro- even though her house had long since ceased vertible right to make it reality. I must con- to be an inn. 37 THE PRINCE OF MADAGASCAR. The three heroes of our story formed, to- ward evening, a group as picturesque as it was comic. Polyglott was sitting in his shirt- sleeves, his nightcap drawn low over his gray head, patching his only coat, which he had already worn a quarter of a century, and which on the voyage had done double duty. lie had begged from the hostess, whom he had won upon by his account of the illness of her aunt, some party-colored fragments of silk or woollen stuff, and he now, wit.h the equanimity of a philosopher, was sewing these over the holes of the black frock-coat. Colas sat upon the mud floor, in one part of which he had dug a hole, which was now filled with wood-shavings. Over the hole stood a tripod, upon which was an earthen dish, where a mixture of rice, honey, and meal was in preparation for a rice cake. Ilippolytus watched these two operations, as he lay stretched out upon a bench, and appeared to think of nothing more anxiously than the result of the baking, in which he was much interested. No, Colas, said he, laughing over and over again, you will not make so good a cake as we could buy in Paris for two sous. ~Ye shall see, muttered kindly the good Colas; and Hippolytus allowed his nostrils to be regaled by the noble flavor which ap- proached him. But this pleasure, and the hope of one still greater, was soon destroyed. For, after the three friends had been subjected to the curi- osity of the husband of the hostessa tall, muscular i\Iadagascar, with a knavish look there arose a violent knocking at the door, and a loud conversation was heard going on between the person who, at this late hour, desired an entrance, and the hostess. As she dre~v the bolt of the house-door, Ma- tois as the visitor was called explained. He must look for the three travellers, who had not reported themselves to the governor, and bring one of them, at least, alive to the office. You, Susanna, added he, will not be pardoned for taking in strang~rs, when you, for a long time after the somewhat mysterious death of your husband, gave up your inn. Tell me, now, however, are the three men stout and well armed! I would have brought some men with me, but I was the only one of the garrison in a movable state. If one of them does not come willingly, the coin- mandant says my wife shall beat the alarm- drum. With these words, a little man, in a mis- erable dress, yet wearing the military cocked hat, and provided with shoulder and side- arms, entered timidly and slowly the humble room. Matois, with his long queue, was not made to inspire much terror of the garrison of St. Marie. Even Polyglott showed at sight of him so much courage, that he, lion-heart- edly, threw away his needle, and stepped up to the soldier, who drew back in alarm, and, with many excuses, looked for the door. Hip- polytus rolled laughing upon his couch, and screamed out Exactly like Scribe. I have seen this in vaudevilles a hundred times~ splendid I shall die of laughter. 0, heavenly Scribe! Colas got up from his cooking, and, in the first place, pulled back the professor, who had placed himself in a belligerent posture, and, with the cry of Long live his highness! his highness forever ! was parrying the musket with a great stick of wood. hippo- lytus followed the soldier to the commander without any resistance. In a spacious apia~tment, and one furnished in a civilized manner, so far as was exhibited by the flickering flame from a fireplace, stood the commander, Culotte, leaning upon a small table, on which maps and charts lay spread out, and were made visible by the fire on the hearth. So far as his figure might be judged of from the prospect of his back, Mr. Culotte was a man of extraordinary size, and, us the cracking table bore witness, of great weight. lie is, as it were, plunged in the oceans, as they are laid down on the maps, which sigh under the weight of his heavy arm, and as if lost in the countries over which he wanders with his ring-adorned finger. Only at times he raises himself, and exchanges some words with another figure, veiled in darkness, but who, from the address of the commandant, can certainly be no one else but his adjutant, the Marquis Pepper. The marquis must be very careful of his commandant, for he con- stantly stretches out his hand upon the already bald head, and says, The heat of the room, my friend, will be injurious to you.~~ Culotte does not listen, but continues an endless strategetical explanation, which ends at last with a stentorian order to John, the servant, to bring lights. Economy and combination, Pepper that, you know, that is my motto ; and, with these words, Culotte took from the negro John the light. The Marquis Pepper was a tall, thin figure, with a dry expression, and measured move meats. As he spoke but seldom, his words had a tone of sarcasm, though they seldom were as bitter as they seemed. Culotte, who took everything that fell from the mouth of his adjutant for pure gold, had. in his life (and almost as long as he had lived had he known the marquis) never re- marked that the latter, by his assenting to his opinions, agreeing with him and his compli- ments, appeared to ridicule him rather than to do him honor. Peppers satire was so tame, that Culotte always took it for the v~I TILE PRINCE OF MADAGASCAR. warmest expression of friendship. Thus the adjutant, for example: It would be dread- ful, my friend, if the arrival of this young man, who, with his whole company, has en- tered the dwellings of the colonists, should be connected with any intrigue, that may have been got up in Paris against our plans. It disturbs me much. This remark Pepper now restored to the mouth of the commandant, who had more than once repeated it to him. Do you actually think so? said the other anxiously. You say at once what [have not dared to think. It is indeed remarkable. how dares a young man, wearing the undress uniform of an officer, as the captain of the ship says he did, neglect to pay proper re- spect to me 2 I do not know what keeps Matois so long. It would be altogether fatal, if we should beat the alarm drum, said Pepper, repeat- ing one of the commandants often spoken remarks; whereupon the other assented. Yes, you say now what I was just think- ing; it would certainly frighten my canary birds, so that I should be kept awake all night by their fluttering. Had we not better send John to look for Matois I That would be to surrender ourselves, Culotte; we should then have no one to take care of us. You are always right, Pepper, said the commander. Matois will not do any longer; the good fellow begins to grow old. I hear some one. Ah! here he comes. hhippolytus and Matois entered. While the latter presented himself somewhat awk- wardly, our young hero hesitated which of the two gentlemen he should make his ex- ~uses to, for having neglected to report him- self. The commander floated in ecstasy, when Hippolytus confounded him with his adjutant, and turned to address Pepper. He took it as a triumph of friendship when he received this mistake with philosophical smiles, and addressed Ilippolytus in the most friendly manner, as he begged his error might be pardoned. My adjutant and I are bosom friends: we would give our lives for each other, and I yield willingly to him the precedence, even when I am desirous of a distinction as flat- tering as your salutation is. Let the past go, sir. how are you pleased with us? Is it not truly a magnificent place splendid, picturesque views, charming climate? You must confess that St. Marie deserves to be called the Fortunate Island. hhippolytus made a sour face, but was too oivil not to assent to the praises of the com- mandant. Yc,u came here in company? asked the latter~ obligingly, without wishing to have fhe appearance of an examinei~. Ilippolytus answered, shortly, in the affirm- ative. Explorers of nature? Painters? Poets ?.~ added the adjutant, but received, in a wither- ing look from Culotte, a rebuke for this un- civil question. Ilippolytus had at last collected himself for a lonr explanation, and began a story so dark an~ peculiar, that the commander or- dered Matois, who was still waiting under arms, to bring a second light, that he might see more clearly into the case. Gentlemen, began Hippolytus, I wear truly at present the uniform of your king, but shall soon be in a state to give similar ones of my own. The waters and the land in whose circuit you find yourselves are my inheritance, which I have come here to take possession of. I am the unfortunate son of one of the first Madagascar princes, carried by an accident to France. I return back to my honie, trusting to the generosity and sup- port of the colony to reconquer the inherit- ance of my murdered father. Culotte did not know what to say to this speech.; and Pepper, ever responding to the feelings of the commandant, remarked, in his stead, What shall we say to these words? You put~ no faith in my words, said Hippolytus earnestly. All Paris speaks of the rights which are my own, and I should unquestionably have had the support of the court, if it had not just now been occupied with the domestic affairs of France. Whoever you may be, responded Cu- lotte hastily (this remark was cutting), the state of the colonies is truly not bad Of which St. Marie may convince you, interrupted the adjutant. But it might become more insupporta- ble, pursued the commandant. There is in Paris less want of gold and the means of living, than of attention to those things which the honor and advantage of France demand in the distant parts of the world. You need only think of your own plans, captain, said Pepper; how finely were they meditated! with what small means might they have been carried into execution! how earnestly were they recommended to the min- istry! and yet No, my dear friend, do not hesitate, said the commander, and resumed the broken-off speech; and yet the interest taken in them was not what they deserved. I was put off to a future day, despised, the spirit of my undertaking crippled, and I shall never again dare to return to France, because I am con- sidered a restless person, on account of my constantly repeated petitions for the good of the colony. But excuse me, sir, that I have interrupted your interesting communication with our own aiThirs. Hippolytus still possessed all those amia 33 39 THE PRINCE OF MADAGASCAR. ble rudenesses which people endeavor to break children of as soon as possible. He had no sooner taken a few observations in the room, which reminded him of Paris, than he left the two gentlemen who were heaping their civilities upon him, and turned to these ob~jects. What lovely arabesques! cried he, look- ing at the figures on the bronze curtain-holder, and what pretty ornaments upon this card- table! What wood is it? One rarely sees a table polished in Paris. You must have a hartz of your own here! These copperplates too! Heavens! here is a view of Paris from Montmartre. I have seen but few cities in my life; but is it not true that Paris is the city of cities Paris is the world? Come here; look where I point my ring-finger; there is the place where I lived, in the Capuchin street, the fourth story. If that old fool, Colas, was here, he would open his eyes, for I should show him the little yard where he every morning dusted my uniform and brushed my shoes.~~ The commandant, with his thick, heavy body, ran round after the young man, and rejoiced at the impression which his arrange- ments made upon this inexplicable stranger. But as Ilippolytus pointed with his finger to the picture on the wall, he cried out at the same time to his aid: Good heavens! I ought to know that ring ; and the hitter added, energetically, Who are you? Hippolytus looked at his ring. It was a gold snake with jewelled eyes. and he had long worn it as a talisman. The command- ant could not, however, restrain himself; he cried: This ring, I will risk my head upon it, Sylvain Roux wore it when he was at St. Marie the first time ; and the aid added that both gentlemen then served under him. You knew, then, my dear father, my protector and guardian ! cried Hippolytus,. with a joy and energy of manner that were l3ecoming to him. This ring, all, all that I have and am (and I am much, I am a Parisian, a lieutenant of the Royal army, a pretender to the throne of Madagascar), I thank Sylvain Roux for everything. He brought me over the sea, and gave the last cares to my poor brother, who could not en- dure the change of climate; he taught me the exercises, and gave me, when he again went to sea and kissed me as he bade ~re- well, this ring. He is dead the good Syl- vain Roux. The commandant sobbed aloud, when he heard the young man speak in this manner, and would have embraced him, because he took him for the son of the deceased. But Adjutant Pepper, less susceptible of strong emotions, had hastily run over in his mind Sylvain Rouxs relatives, and came to the very correct opinion that this might, per- haps, be one of the iiIadagascar princes whom Sylvain Roux, years ago, took with him from the colonies to France. He called aside, therefore, the sobbing commandant, who was running about the room, looking for his pocket-handkerchief, and whispered in his ear his opinion, upon ~vhich Culotte fell, as it were, from the clouds. Now it is clear to me ha! this may be possible, said he, looking now at his aid, and now at Hippo~ytus. The shadow of the light may deceive me, but I am almost certain that the color of his face is not Euro- pean. But, young man, where did you know Sylvain Roux? I tell you that I am a Madagascar prince, cried Hippolytus, almost indignant. Sylvain Roux took me, with my brother, who could not bear the climate, and died, to France, where I have risen to be a lieutenant, under the name of Hippolytus Verona. You may have heard it. Culotte now began to collect his ideas. A young native, said he, and yet so polite, full of taste, knows how to do homage to my ornaments well-built, characteris- tic expression in his face. He then turned to the stranger, who was examining the en- gravings, and asked him jokingly, Do we pierce the nose to put in a ring, my young friend? Do we speak a language like the turkey-cock? Do we feed on roots and raw flesh? God forbid ! answered Hippolytus; a reply which the commandant found so ludi- crous that he cried out to his aid, No, do you hear, Pepper, he says, God forbid! Do we believe in Moses and the Prophets? Here, Jean, Matois, where are you, throw your guns to the devil! Spread the table for three covers. The black and white servants hastened to fulfil their masters orders. The aid seated himself at the table, hip- polytus at the left, and Culotte handed him from the right the best of Cape wine. They put the young man between them, to assure him more entirely of the interest they took in him. The commandant could find no end to his inquiries about Sylvain Roux. Pepper was compelled sometimes to assist his mem- ory, or to strengthen interesting facts by his testimony. He did n~t take upon him to question the young prince upon his pres- ent plans, but he kept himself entirely at that epoch of time when he had seen the lit- tle Verora dressed in rabbit-skins; told how he could then stretch a good-sized bow, and often brought down a bird with his arrow. And as he advanced to the time when Hip- polytus was in France, and rose to be an officer, he began: TIlE PRINCE OF MXDAGASCAR. Is it not true? My little cousin, it is another thing to be one of the kings officers. I should like to see how you would look over there on the coast fishing for whales. A French lieutenant has his pay, a brilliant uniform, spirited comrades, admittance into the best houses, and, what is more, the pros- pec t of future advancement. When shall we bea captain? Ilippolytus was so much intercsted in watching the flight of a singular bird, that he made no answer; instead of which the aid stammered out, My friend, you do not observe. The commandant, however, had not ex- pected an answer. Captain, captain of the second rank How old was I when I reached that point? A glorious time when all is so fresh and young. One dreams him- self at the head of an army; he is aston- ished at the giant steps they take; he de- sires to earn his epaulettes. Yet, how was it with me? Pepper, will you not speak? Pardon me, my friend, if I disturb you. I know I bring constantly the motives of friendship before your eyes. You would share some goodsidea with me? The aid bowed smilingly the uppei part of his body, and said Nothing of importance, friend of my soul! But see, our young gentleman here, wears the uniform of one dismissed from the service. Have you received your discharge? Certainly, answered Hippolytus. As lieutenant have I nothing to lose, and, under my present relations, I could not lono-er re- main in the service. The commandant, whose congratulations were thus overthrown, appeared much as- tonished. lie laid down his fork and cried In the name of Heaven, have you then quitted the kings service? have you a rich marriage in your eye? Found a fortune Apropos, little man, what are you doing in Africa? You owe us an explanation of this. Hippolytus looked first at the commandaht and then at Pepper, with wide-open eyes, and said, with much feeling I do not know, gentlemen; the explana- tion of my coniing here has been so often given by me to you, that I might think you take what I say for a jest. Be assured that no resolution was ever more irrevocably made than mine. I am willing to sacrifice to it everythingmy life, my future prospects; and I begin this by giving up my gold-lace and my epaulettes. The two officers, who had either not heard rightly, or did not understand, his last expla- nation, looked at each other full of amaze- ment. The commandant, however, wished to avoid the appearance of inattention, and said me, sir; forgetfulness oftcn plays tri~ old people. But now I follow the train of the information which you have been so good as to give us. Yes, yes, this reso- lution he did not know which is very rash, but it does you honor. If you are first crowned with some fortunate success, your game is won. But, I must say, young as you are, not of European descentha! ha and such mature plans! It has been said that the great advantage of France over all states is, that there are so many institutions, which, by legacies and income of many kinds, are in a state to reward genius. The Acad- emy, the Monthyon Prizes, the Society for the advancement of Morality, the Christian Society for the example of the good and no- ble:No institution will refrain from recog- nizing your efforts, and bestowing on theia their most shining rewards. Hippolytus could not compare this comical contradiction with his plans, without break- ing out into laughter. He sprung from his chair, ran about the table, and could not speak a word for laughing. The commandant did not know what stupid thing he had said, but, excited by his young neighbor, began first gently to join in the laughter, and thinking that Hippolytus laughed because everything in the world was so foolish and so ludicrous he soon set his dwarf-like forai into such tremulous motion, that he was obliged to rise, and fell breathless into the arms of Hippolytus. Marquis Pepper could not help thinking that both these men were mad. He made no faces, drank off the one glass which he had been sipping all the evening,, and took his leave with a good-night, which was answered a hundred times by Culotte, with incessant laughter. Hippolytus had sunk exhausted upon the sofa, and, overcome by the fatigues of his voyage and the influence of the much supper, was soon asleep. The commandant felt him- self as in a great hall, where a thousand voices spoke at once; there was humming in his ears, and he knew not what had hap- pened to him. Good heavens! what shall I learn from all this? thought he, and uttered his thoughts aloud. My aid has left me in trouble, shaking his head. I have drank too much wine, and the wonderful man has fallen asleep. Shall I raise an alarm? No! what would be the use?. Fatal story if I only knew what he wanted. They may say what they please, he is not a real Euro~an~ the tamed animal never loses his wildness; and there are moments when such a native cannibal may return to his state of nature. I will just once Who spoke there? It was indeed as if some one had spoken 40 TUE PRINCE OF MADAGASCAR. The commandant listened, and beard dis- tinctly a whisper~ Royal highness! royal highness ! lie ran to the window, but saw no one from whom this sound could come. The whispering, moving, and calling continued, however, and Culotte heard a smothered voice say, Your royal highness,~ your rice- cake is ready ; and then again, The cake is getting very cold. he erspiration, caused by his terror, dropped from the commandants brow; he knew not what to think of the matter; and, as the talking from without did not cease, he shouted with all his strength, John, John ! but, in the same moment, as he grew more uneasy, the door was rushed open, and black John brought in Po yglott, who had been spying through the key-hole, and, after an imprecation from the negro, had been pushed by him into the room. ChAPTER III. Your pardon, began the professor, in his party-colored jacket, which he had at last finished patching, I only wish to speak to this gentleman. Your royal highness, what are you doing? Where are you staying? We are anxious to the death, and your cake will be cold. Ilippolytus had been wakened by the noise, and, half-asleep and half-intoxicated as he was, to the great mortification of Polyglott, he assented to the declaration which the deadly-pale commandant stuttered out, that, it pleased Mr. Verora to rest in his comforta- l)le bed, and to stay with him during his abode in St. Marie. When Polyglott, with many reverences, had taken his leave, the commandant asked, repeatedly, pointing to his forehead, Is this man really insane 1 No,~~ replied Hippolytus, half-conscious, he is only a scholar. Thereupon he took a light and followed the commandant, who had drawn his night-cap over his ears, and preceded our hero as he conducted him to a chamber. The next morning found Hippolytus, when the sun entered his room, still turning rest- lessly upon his bed. He could not but con- fess that from the commandant no better reception could have been expected, though his indifference to his undertaking, the jests, even, which both the gentlemen, the night before, had allowed thems& lves to indulge in upon the subject, pained him deeply. A sin- gular confusion or his ideas brought him at last to the conclusion to say nothing farther of his designs, until some advances were made to him for their fulfilment. He deter- mined, on his own part, and resolved to com- mand his companions, not to say a word about the ob,ject of their voyage, and their stay in this forsaken spot, neither to the in- habitants of the colony, nor to any of the officers; least of all, to the commandant. But this was such a heavy thought, that Hippolytus, to be ready to prepare them for it, sprung from his couch, and had just thrown himself into his clothes, when Colas and the professor entered. Colas made a wry face. No, said he, if our great Sylvain Roux could see his colony in this condition ! What do you mean? asked Hippolytus, in astonishment. We feed excellently here at the commandants. The old man had expected, answered Colas, that there would exist families on the island, who would lead a comfortable life. Rice-planters, whale-fishermen, that would either possess houses and property, or live under the roof with the higher officers. But these do not live here because the sight of the poverty in Pandekey gives them a headache. Nevertheless, urged Polyglott, if your royal highness appears before the, multitude if you will explain to them your designs you will find them, not only ready to pay you due reverence, but to offer you active assistance. I am surprised that no one knows of our course.~ Yes, that is well, Polyglott; you speak wisely, said Hippolytus; I wish to main- tain my incognito. The commandant has does not deserve in short, it is better to keep silent, and follow out our plan our- selves. Colas found this idea very sensible, and bestowed on his master the richest praises for his prudence. For, said he, we will not expend our information on people who would not respond to it; we will not appear helpless where no one is able to help us; we will go about everywhere shrouded in our mystery! Be assured we shall reach the goal at last I will take care of it. Hippolytus was charmed with this assent, which was in the highest degree convenient to him. And Polyglott entered zealously into everything which could increase the magical effect of the appearance of the prince, and assist his investigation of the lang uage. Culotte was not a little disturbed by his mysterious guest. He had in the morning nothing disturbed his sound slumbers placed before his mind all the possibilities which might rest on the person of Hippoly- tus. There remained one above all the rest, which his fears represented to his sharp-wit- tedness, as the most probable. This was the idea that Hippolytus was sent by the French government on a mission, to examine, under guise of a private citizen, the state of the colonies in the South Sea. Is he not well 41 THE PRINCE OF MADAGASCAR. fitted for this l he asked himself. He knows the places has not entirely forgot- ten his mother tongue and has a servant with him, who, as I hear from Matois, was here several years ago. What is more clear than that I ought to do everything in my power to please him l The more graciously I do this the less I press him to explain to me the causes of his voyage so much more favorable will be the impression which I make upon him. The government shall learn that I am not only a man that keeps pace with its sharp-sighted plans for the future of the colony, but also does, of his own ac- cord, everything which it is in his power to do. As Culotte and Hippolytus took a walk together, the former spoke jokingly, and en- deavored to put the best face upon the pov- erty of the colonies. These people, said he, as they saw men in rags, are still in neglig6. We have sur- prised them in the early hours of the ing. They have not yet washed their faces and stretched their limbs. Good-living makes people lazy. The people are too well offi Look, now, Mr. Verora, how that old woraan stares at us. Why is she not sitting behind ~~0~~ning-whee1; it is more than nine A dead man was brought out of a hut, and the fear of possible contagion drove the idle crowd, which was pressing around the walk- ers, to a little distance back. Another sacrifice, said the commandant with affected anger; these men are incor- rigible. When I warn them so often ; their hot drinks, their incessant eating of flesh. This comes of their evening meetings; the women draw lots who shall take care of the kitchen; they joke, they laugh, they dance; all well, but then these people eat to excess, go to bed with full stomachs, and nothing is more natural than that their corpulent bodies the next morning are struck with apo- plexy. They had reached the end of the village, and Hippolytus, who had as little desire as the commandant to go through it again, struck into a path that seemed somewhat steep, and might give a view of the sea. Culotte stopped, after advancing a few steps in this path, partly to rest himself, and partly to give his guests a favorable view of the island. In past times, my young friend, sidd he, the colony was of much greater extent, reaching almost to the borders of the little stream, which you can see plainly with your young eyes. But this spreading out injured us very much. The wind passed by the greater part of the colony. I had them all brought under my eyes. The houses were moved from there here, and so everything is more conveniently arranged, at the cost of the external appearance, which formerly promised better things. I often smile when I think that it looks almost as if Pandekey was in ruins. Little, but practical. They walked on a little higher, and the commandant pointed to a small green patch of ground which was visible in the midst of a barren wilderness and a stony plain. Ah! this is my favorite point, said he; here I overlook my creation most favorably. What fruitfulness! how smilingly do the meadows look upon the borders of the brook! how full and heavy hang the ears in the grain-field! They have everything in Paris, but they lack this prospect. Hippolytus wished to proceed still higher up the path, but the commandant found the farther extension of the walk insupportable to his heavy body, and, pointing breathless to the summit, Continue your wanderings, said he, and in a few minutes your eyes will behold the blue sea. You cannot miss the way, and my watchfulness has placed the island in a state of security that you have nothing to fear. Culotte, at the bottom, only wished that Hippolytus might not again be compelled to take his way back to the village. Calling out to him, We shall meet at table, lie parted from his guest, and descending the path carefully, he turned and sent back from a distance hand-kisses, and other marks of regard. }or Ilippolytus the swaggering and palpa- ble falsehoods of the commandant were en- tirely unnecessary. The lower classes were, for him, a sphere that he only knew by name, and considered everywhere a sacrifice to every kind of misfortune. Often as in Paris lie had felt great want, and had uttered curses when he lacked money for play, a party of pleasure, or the opera vexatious as it was to him, just before pay-day, to walk in vain before a reading-room and not have a sous to pay for entrance to ityet he had not taken any care about the matter; all this was undertaken by the faithful Colas. If we were only over there, said Colas; there everything is beautiful and fruitful; the woods full of sweet vegetables; flax, sugar-cane, rice, every variety of growth in the vnst fields; humming-bees, preparing the luscious honey; hills and plains in charming succession, and numerous hErds of cattle and sheep in the fragrant valleys. Polyglott hung so attentively on the won- der-proclaiming mouth of Colas, that he every moment stumbled over the rough path, and said, thereupon, mechanically: One may easily fall here have a care ! The words were hardly out of his mouth, when. he stumbled again, and repeated his warning, .42 TIlE PRINCE OF MADAGASCAR. without having his attention diverted from the wonderful narrations of Colas. They had at last reached the highest point, and the overpowering view of the proudly- moving waters met their eyes, which were unable to take in the great extent. In the distance, where the horizon seemed to unite with the watery mirror, a dark line stretched out, which marked the coast of Madagascar. If the soul of Ilippolytus had swelled with pri(le at this sight, Polyglotts words mi~ht have been a just expression of it. He cried out, with enthusiasm, 0, your royal high- ness! if I ever before doubted that kings have something peculiar in their tempers, their feelings, their blood, even, I have those doubts no longer! I may, with my subjected soul, he able to sympathize only in part with the feelings which must fill your mind, at sight of this blessed region, which stands waiting for your sceptre. The party clambered down the steep. A little grotto, which stood at the head of the inlet, was the most inviting thing possible at this noonday hour. The wanderers were in the best humor, and laid themselves down upon a smooth bed of coral and other little stones, which the waves had left behind them. Polyglott held this time of repose, and lack of conversation, as a most suitable occasion to proceed to lay open his ideas upon princely wisdom, the good of the state, and the propriety of the prince proclaiming himself immediately. He even had it in his mind to go back to the almost forgotten com- parison of the Arabic and Madagascar lan- guages; but Ilippolytus felt like laughing; he would have nothing serious from the pro. fessor; in short, he possessed all the caprices, the desire for amusement, the wish to make sport of others, in a degree that showed, more than anything, that he was born to be a ruler. lie put his hand up to Polyglotts iimouth, and asked him whether he knew how to swim. Polyglott looked up at this, with goo(l-humored eyes, and said he had truly neither learned nor tried to swim; but he had no doubt of his capability. If he thought how many years he had starved, and how light he must now be, he had no longer any doubt; and therefore he sprung, when hip- polytus threw a bit of bread from Colas pocket into the water, with the instinct of a dog after it. The mirror-like water was not deep, but yet in such motion that the professor had no footing. lie threw out his hands and feet, and struggled like a swim- mer, breathed hard with his weak lungs, but snapped luckily at the bread, which he bore out triumphantly. Your royal highness, only not again, said he. But Hippolytus wa,s cruel. The princely blood raged powerfully within him. He threw a new piece of bread (Polyglott had eaten the first) into the water. The former manoeuvre was repeated. Ah! your royal highness, enough; let this suffice, said I~olyglott. Suddenly Colas sprung up. A swimmer came in sight approached dived under the whole body rose again, and in a few minutes a half-naked being, with long gray hair, stood before them. It was with the glance of a fury that the savage figure (for its color betrayed its de- scent) looked at the three men. She expected to be seized upon by them; but when she saw the trembling, peaceful Polyglott, and the irresolution and surprise of the two others, she laid aside her threatenin~ aspect, her countenance became more quiet, and, with her arms crossed upon her breast, she offered them her humble salutation. The doubt of the mutual enigma would not have lasted so long, if Polyglott had been less exhausted from his bath. He would, per- haps, then have been able, by the use of some Arabic accents, to have brought the dumb creature, who had raised herself and fixed her eyes immovably upon Hippolyttis, to speak. But he hastened to the interior of the grotto, shaking his wet clothes, and calling out to his companions, I will dress myself first, which, as they knew the state of his wardrobe, sounded to them highly com- ical; for in what should he dress himself? hlippolytus was beginning to make himself merry upon the subject, when the savage it was a womansprung towards him, embrac- ing and kissing his feet, and shouting, again and again, in broken French, My son! my son ! Polyglott came forward, arranging his dress, and, springing from the grotto, ex- claimed, Time queen mother ! Ilippolytus endeavored to draw back, and get rid of the embraces of th~ savage, and Colas stepped between the two, to restrain the woman from continuing her demonstra- tions, for he knew that the mother of hippo- lytus was long since dead. But the stranger would not be put off from her attentions, and it soon appeared that she had chosen a false name for another relation. Her signs mind her broken French made it clear that after the death of his mother she had nursed Hip- polytus. She adjured Colas, whom she re- cognized by certain marks, to establish his claims, and again wound her long gray hair about the feet~ of Hippolytus. Colas col- lected his thoughts. He looked at the woman more closely, and, surprised and moved by her reiippearance, he began to think that her claims were not unfounded, and at last he felt no doubt. lie remembered the Madagas- car woman who accompanied the young Ve- rora to St. Marie, and, he being a weakly child, nursed him for two years. She was then young and blooming. She was much 43 THE PRINCE OF MADAGASCAR. of the time with Sylvain Roux, and learned so much of the language of the stranger that they could understand each other. She now began, with her immoderate dem- onstrations of joy, to tell long stories to Hippolytus of his native land, that were only so far wonderful to him, as she chose the most singular expressions, and addressed him in a new, excited, and animated manner. Thereupon she concluded that Hippolytus must be made acquainted with his earlier history, and that of his native land, and gave him news respecting these things, which were almost unintelligible to him. Ah ! said she, all those who deserve to be eaten by the crocodiles, I mean my ene- inies, have raised the throne of their power to the clouds. They have even conquered the gods, and forced them to bear with their wickedness. Since then, they show each other the teeth, tear each other with the rage of tigers and hyenas, and the other mon- sters who dwell in the sea. King Rhadama was murdered by his wife, Ranavolana, and with him all his brothers and cousins, to the number of a thousand, by which the wrongs they had done to you and your family were avenged, and the children and the grand- children were brought into bondage, and made to dance before the queen and her lover, Andremiaga, when she held her feasts. Ilippolytus asked the drying Polyglott if lie ever heard such a pathetic style. She speaks, said he, as Chateaubriand writes. Polyglott remarked that it was funny for the savage to say that the tigers and hyenas lived in the sea. But Colas, who did not join in making sport of the information of the woman, asked her about the state of things which prevailed in the island; and re- ceived from her, intelligence which might be made use of in carrying out the plans of his heart. All her talk came back, however, to her dear idol, the prince, himself, and he was obliged to guard himself against her caresses. My son, said she, the sun of your na- tive land will give again to your face that color which even the cold winter of the north has not entirely faded out of your cheeks. I know it with a prophets glance you will again become green. God forbid! cried Hippolytus, striving to free himself from the prophetess. She was not to be shaken off, however, and continued, very much excited, Truly, truly, a time will come, when I shall see thee sitting upon the stool of thy exaltation. My dreams were true I knew it; in the land of the whites I knew you could not find your Gods. You would turn back to the centre of the earth, and there will you raise new altars. A shot disturbed her vision, a second, and then a ball fell into the water, near the group. Hippolytus, who crossed himself, re- coiled before the idea of building new hea- thenish altars, and stepped, in alarm, upon the rock. Polyglott sprung into the grotto, and Colas hardly dared to look around him. The savage woman waited a third shot, which was aimed at her, turned, with gestures of terror, toward the border of the rock, and pluno~ed into the water. She again became visibTe at a considerable distance from the shore, then again vanished entirely from their sight. The companions could not explain to them- selves this scene. olyglott thought that a ball had been aimed at the princes head; and Hippolytus felt a sort of natural call to step forward as the protector of a woman who had so honored him, and to whom he was somewhat indebted. A noise, which reached them at the same time, from the top of the rock, at the foot of which they found themselves, gave them the knowledge of whom they had to blame. Hippolytus dis- covered the aid, Marquis Pepper, waving a white cloth, and making a number of gesticu- lations in the air, which seemed intended as an excuse. Whereupon, Pepper dealt right and left, on three or four armed men about him, smart cuffs on the ears, so that the sat- isfaction seemed to be perfect. Notwith- standing all this, Hippolytus prepared to climb the rock. Polyglott, nimble as a cat, followed him, and Colas later, because he was old and more interested in the Madagas- car woman. He looked after her still in the sea, till his companions had almost reached the summit of.the rock. Pardon, gentlemen, cried the marquis to the climbers, as he reached his hand to assist Hippolytus in his last spring upon the plateau, pardon the thoughtlessness of my people, who, in my absence, God knows, might have done you an injury. Unfortu- nately, I remained somewhat behind in their pursuit of that damned witch, and the haste ____ But what have you against this wo- man V interrupted Hippolytus. 0! she is the most dangerous woman in all Madagascar, said the embarrassed mar- quis. She has sworn death to all the whites; stands up for the defence of the opposition race upon the island there, and is constantly spying about our cc4ony. By some accident, she knows a little French, by means of which she glides in among indi- vidual colonists, and compels us to be upon the guard, so that I reconnoitre the coast two or three times a day. It is a shame to carry on war with women, but the French interest has much to fear from this fury. The zeal for action .arose again in Poly- glott, and, as he observed that some dis 44 THE PRINCE OF MADAGASCAR. pleasure hung over the features of Hippo- lytus, he said to him You see well, sir, of what use this lady may be to us. His master prevented him from saying more, bidding him to be silent, because ref- erence to his birth, in the presence of so re- fined and educated a man as the marquis, was always painful to him. Colas, who, in the mean time had come up to them, added that the too hasty answer of the professor might bring them into embarrassment. Poor Polyglott! he looked down to the ground with a mortified air, and said, in a low, stifled tone, His royal highness misappre- hends inc. Hippolytus now proceeded, in company with the adjutant, to the commandants ta- ble. On the way, Pepper continued to en- lirge upon the dangers to be dreaded from the island woman. He said she was known by every child in St. Marie, and everywhere feared as an enemy, who, by help of evil spirits, could do all sorts of harm to men and cattle, and property of all kinds. Who knows but she is preparing some wicked plot over on the island, yonder? her travelling about among the colonists seems to prove it. I must confess to you, added the marquis, that, under such circumstances, we wish for nothing more ardently than to attract the attention of the ministry in France. What- ever may be said in p raise of the colonies, so much is certain, that their preparations for war have suffered much from a time of peace. ~ It was vexatious enough to Hippolytus to be obliged to listen to all the~ explanations, the subject of which we have pointed out. lie looked upon the adjutant as a refined, ed- ucated officer, and wondered that he talked to him about things in which he took no sort of interest. He was glad, at last, to have reached the house of the commandant, parted from his somewhat grumbling companions who were to return to the inn of the rabbit- butcher and gave Polyglott, jokingly. the advice to cut off the other tail of his coat one of them having been lost when he climbed the rock because a short jacket would be more becoming to him. Your royal highness has only to com- mand, responded Polyglott, dryly. As hlippolytus entered the commandants room, Matois announced to him that Mr. Cochon had been twice there to pay his re- spects to Lieutenant Verora. Who is Mr. Cochon? asked Hippoly- tus. Have you already heard, answered Cu- lotte, meeting him at the door, Mr. Cochon has been twice 1 Mr. Cochon is a rich man; that is not saying much on an island like St. Marie. But what will interest you more, is his courtesy, his pleasant manners, the refined taste which prevails in his house, and, as he passed over to Pepper, he con- tinued, touching the latter gently on the cheek arid, as to the amiable qualities of his sister, I refer you to my friend, the mar- quis. A speech which he accompanied with a laugh, and which the marquis received kindly, but without much apparent excite- ment. Hippolytus understood little of these con- fidences, but declared, when he was invited by card to a party at the planters for that evening, that he was very anxious about them. We omit a detailed account of how hip- polytus passed his time till the hour for the beginning of Mr. Cochons soir~e, and only state, that a fricasse of tropical bats, which graced the commandants table, gave him so much nausea and disgust, that he was the most insupportable of men until the seventh hour. His two old friends, who, after hav- ing despatched their roasted rabbits, came again to visit him, could not get a word nor a sign out of him. He stretched himself, in boots and spurs, upon the sofa, which stood in his room, and grumbled constantly that everything in the world was a chimera and stupidity; that there ought to be a new world created; that God had reigned long enough, and that there was a hole in his boot. With such rhapsodical prating, he could pass whole hours. Do not some of my young readers recollect similar accidents hap- pening to themselves? The complaints that your friends made or you upon these occasions were not lacking here; for, after Ihippolytus had gone with the adjutant to Mr. Cochons sojr6e, Poly- glott heaved a sigh, and said There he goes, and leaves us in the lurch! How ill-humored he is! How heart- less! Nothing can please him. Even when one fulfils his commands, he has I will not say ,not a word of thanks he has not even a look for him. Did he see the change which has taken place in the skirts of my coat? He commands me to be dressed like a butler, a valet, a shopkeeper, and then he never has a word to say about it. Colas was as much disturbed as Polyglott, yet he consoled himself more easily. I do not yet give up all hope, said he; I know the young man is thoughtless, but he makes good plans, and does all things, when he has a mind to. We steer slowly God knows that is a fact but we shall reach the shore. The meeting with the nurse is more favorable to us than if the command- ant offered to stand by us with a hundred men. Come, Mr. Professor it is so pleas- ant here; the sun has set we will try to console ourselves about our friend. Polyglott embraced the old servant ten- 45 THE PRINCE OF MADAGASCAR. deny, and cried, with animation pointing to the evening-red Let us conclude a dem- ocratic friendship, Colas this hour was made for it ; and the two walked out in the cool twilight. Culotte had excused himsclf to Mr. Cochon, on account of his gout. Pepper accompanied our hero, and talked to him on the way about the persons he was to meet. Among others, he spoke of the planters sister, Heloise, whom he painted in the freshest colors; and added that the colony generally called him the favored of this lady. Nothing but scandal, said he, several times, with a smirk, and allowed Hippolytus thus a glance into his heart, where, perhaps, exactly the contrary to his words was to be seen. Mr. Cochons plantations lay on a side of the island which Hippolytus had not yet seen. lie found here, in fact, everything more fruitful and better arranged, and ask edhis conductor why the colony was placed in the most desolate part of the island. The latter was still in the midst of a long explanation of the reasons, when the two entered the planters tastefully-arranged dwelling, and were received with a luxury which did the former Parisian good. To be sure, all the attendants and servants were black, but they were in livery, skilful, and accustomed to serve. Mr. Cochon himself was a surprising ap- parition. A man of small stature, refined manners, and a grace in his motions that was not im~eded even by his remarkable cor- pulence. e wore his hair powdered, buckles in his shoes; in short, he was amiable. There were six or eight persons old gentlemen and old ladies assembled yet Mr. Cochon led his young guest first up to his sister He- loise. Heloise was a faded form, who, for a long time, had known how to replace the loss of youth by a varnish of enthusiasm and poetical resignation. She had a tall, stately figure, the style of a goddess, a Grecian formed head; all showed that she must have been very beautiful in her youth. Now, there was a fantastic charm that prolonged her fascination. Heloise was one of those per- sons whom a young man does not really love, but always finds interesting; and, who, on that account because they cannot tell one from the other appear destined always to be contending with an unfortunate passion. Tea, a piece upon the piano, played by Ileloise, a second song by her, accompanied by the adjutant, some bravissitnos, people grouped together, and at last, whist and 13 oston parties formed themselves instinct- ively; for, during a long series of years, one day followed another undisturbed, always the same hours, always the same persons. A few remained behind in the saloon; among these were Heloise and Hippolytus. Persons who are but slightly acquainted with the class of ladies to which Mr. Cochons sister belongs, know, I am certain, without my tell- ing them, that she, this evening, lived only for Hippolytus. All her thoughts trembled towardh im. Since she had heard of his ar- rival in St. Marie, and now saw him for the first time, it can easily be imagined how her curiosity had risen to anxiety. A thousand questions lingered in her mind. how is he What is he thinking of! How does he feel at sunset? Ho~v does my playing please him? Does he think I sing well Is he so cruel as to count my yearst What author does he like best! Can he be tender? Has he noticed my white teeth? Is he odd2 has he ever been in love? Is he a believer in religion? Will he hate me, if I dance ill! Is he capable of anything higher? Ah! how countless are the doubts which beset a wounded heart! Hippolytus, who should have chosen lie- loise for the future queen of Madagascar, was not altogether the thoughtless time-waster that we have painted him. It is true, he loved riding, dancing, the endless hunting, over everything; he could stand, for hours long, at the counter of a jeweller, gazing at his newest manufactures; he would go out in wind and storm, to live in the caprices of a young lady; he would remain for whole evenings in the tedious circles of old ladies, if he could only reckon on gaining some fa- cilities for intimacy with their daughters. But he interested himself, also, in the ideal, and knew of literature as much as was neces- sary, not to sOem ignorant of it. And so he was soon engaged in an esthetical, perfumed conversation with Heloise. You call me unhappy, said the enthu- siast of six-and-thirty, that I am forced to pass my days on this solitary island. If so, you do not know me you do not honor the movements of my soul. Pardon, interrupted Hippolytus, if I, by a pity which would have been welcome to another lady, have committed an impolite- ness towards you He stammered. It may be seen how hard it was to him to put himself in tune with Heloise. She drew her ring from her finger, and said, as she was playing with it An impoliteness? 0, no! but a confu- sion. Nature breathes into human souls different feelings; seldom can one find his happiness in another. I thank my fortune, that my good brother withdrew me from the bustle of~ife in Bourdeaux, and came with me into this strange country; and I have ~et never had a longing for my native land. r he native land is an earthly thing; but there are things which are higher than time or space. 46 THE PRINCE OF MADAGASCAR. And among these you reckon rightly sis- tony love, remarked Hippolytus, pathetic- ally, who now imagined that he had said something in sympathy with her ideas. Sisterly love What makes you think of that? asked lieloise, in surprise. The good Hippolytus could not get into the course she was steering. He excused him- self, if he had not rigl~tly followed her train of thought. I imagined that you were happy anywhere with your brother, when you, perhaps, meant to express an opposite opinion. 0, you are not jesting, then, Mr. Ye- rora? replied Heloise, and put her ring be- tween her lips, to display her white teeth. Why, love to my brother has little to do with it. One does not always think the con- trary of an opinion if he holds another. And so she fell back again into her feeble, languishing manner, and continued: No, it is the love of solitude, that, above all, chains me to these rocks. Here I c~n undis- turbedly indulge myself in my dreams. Here I live, in silent communion with the speech- less surroundings of nature, to which secrets may be more safely trusted than to flattering friends. how, cried Ilippolytus. so young, and yet distrusting friendship? She sighed, looked at him with a long, inquiring look, and went away to fulfil a request of her brother. Heloise, in the mean time, might have scolded a maid in the kitchen, have cut some cold meat, might have given her brother a handkerchief, or something else that ivas under her charge. Whatever she had been doing, the strings, the tones of which might have echoed in the soul of Hippolytus, were broken. She resumed the conversation again, and advanced from friendship to love, from love to truth, from truth to passion, from passion to its wanderings, and from its wan- derings to the latest French literature, its superabundance, and ended with the chilling questions of Have you read this? Do you know that book, I mean? Are you fond of that authors style? and the like. Both carried on the conversation admirably, and while Heloise hoped everything from the feelings of Hippolytus, he placed all his future anticipations of pleasure in her enter- taining conversation, her manner of judging, and the general satisfaction which he should find in her neighborhood. In short, this was the only circumstance which could make his abode on that side of the equator, which had thus far been so disagreeable, in any degree supportable. Yet this very evening Hippolytus felt, more forcibly than ever, the impossibility of spend- ing, at present, on his plans of conquest, either hopes or efforts. While he was on the one hand surprised that he heard nothing of his claim at Mr. Cochons, he became ac- customed, in so reasonable and polished a company, to consider it mis a chimera, and wished, as he left the dwelling of their host with Marquis Pepper, for nothing more ar- dently, than that his foot might stumble over a Paris stone; that all his early life were an illusion; that every tree was a house, and the whole island, the Rue de Richelieu in Paris. A second meeting was not unwelcome to him under these circumstances. When they came to a branch in the road, the marquis pointed out ~o him plainly the commandants house, and, leaving Ilippolytus to find his way alone, parted from him. The young pretender, with all his indifference, his weary, confused plans, proceeded on his solitary way; but, with a certain feeling which hears and sees with closed eyes and ears, he was aware that a second person had joined coin- pany with him. One may be excused, if, under such circumstances, he have a sad heart, even if he does not stand in fear of his tailor. Hippolytus had read a transla- tion of the German hoffman, and believed in the blue wine spirits of the Prussian counsel- lors chamber of justice. lie stood still, and questioned the next tree whether any person was hidden behind it. But, as he neither heard nor saw anything, he went farther, and thought, as the myste- rious parallel did not cease to keep near him, that it might be Colas or Polyglott, who came to accompany him from his soir6e, like a young girl from a childs ball. With this idea, he called out, in a cheerful tone, with- out seeing any one in the darkness, I am here, Colas ! and to his terror felt himself embraced by a dark figure, who pressed him so closely that he at first found it hard to extricate himself from the caress. It was only, however, an expression of pleasure; the unknown changed into a wo- man, and this could be no other than the savage of the grotto on the shore, Hippoly- tus nurse, the female, and fearful emmmissary from Madagascar. her broken speech flowed in the tenderest salutations. I will not be far from you, said she, for you are the apple of my eye. I was blind when I knew your feet were wandering by distant streams. Now you will never again leave the valleys of your birth. Come over to the throne of your fathers. Hippolytus, to whom this outbreak of tenderness was in the highest degree pain- ful, tore himself from her embraces ; he told her he had no time for her now, and begged she would spare him this kind of romance. The savage, who did not understand him, continued her declarations. In all the kingdoms of the great island, acid she, 47 48 THE PRINCE OF MADAGASCAR. you will find no arm which can part the tant, when he pointed his gun at her. The waves of the ocean so boldly as mine. I woman did not understand much of this; will carry you over there on my back; I will thought it was all Yes ; and, impatient to make all the side motions which are neces- hear him say Yes again, she parted from sary to avoid the whales, and I will lay you the object of her reverence, after she had down in the bosom of the countless people, secured him from the power of evil spirits by who await you. many mystical signs and forms. Heavenly powers, I call that fine! If The vexation of Hippolytus rose to the Eugene Sue had written this, I should like to highest when lie had reached home. Ilor- read it; but I do not want to try it. Hip- rible ! cried he. This Mcg Merrilies, this polytus was, in fact, troubled. The woman Norna, this Witch of Endor, who can knock might be the devil might take him on her at my window every evening. It seems as shoulders and spring with him into the South if I was destined to become a sacrifice to the Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. He repeated, romantic. I shall cry Murderif the wo- therefore, to her, incessantly, that it was man comes thus in my way another evening. already late, and she might go home, and The sweat of anguish pours from my brow. take care of the commandants dogs, whose And what may she not do l Good God, if I teeth were sharper than the eyes of the adju- were only in Paris with a whole skin ! From Taits Magazine. SUN AND SHADOW. NEARER still bend oer me, Nay, embrace me, I implore Ab, my pride is dead before me, And its ghost has gone before. And now leave your locks to wander With the tresses of my hair, And leave your soul to ponder, How your love was left to wander In the gloaming of despair. Not in anger, scarce in sorrow, For its fires are spent and past, Glowing idly on the embers Of consum6d life at last: But unvexed and unrepining, And to close the sad arrear Of my dreaming and divining With your presence round me shining, I besought your presence here. T is Yesterday no more, When To-morrow is arrayed; And the beautiful o4orning Of the everlasting morning Stills my spirit in its shade A golden, sijimberous shadow, Where it slumbers unafraid. But talk with me of yesterday, Till all you loved is sleep: My yesterday, t is present Lt is sobbing while you weep. Till all you loved is sleep; For t was not the hoarded treasure Of a womans trust and truth, Stored by innocence and youth, And bestowed In boundless measure But a countenance love-lighted And accidently fair To this your truth was plighted, And soon again was plighted, To loveliness more rare. Yet fain I would believe That you truly loved me, still. 0, assure me ! reiissure me! I believe it, and I will Whether fortune, fault, or folly Loosed the floods of melancholy It is all too late to care: But you loved me always, wholly And t is not too late to care. Then you, too, know the story Of a spirit poised forever, Sick and reeling, oer the darkness Of the stolid Stygian river. And your eyes have been a-weary, And your arms have been a-weary, Strained through unrelenting blackness, Stretched upon the vacance dreary. And, indeed, I do remember, Now that memory is to cease, How some ghostly presence sought me, Subtle as my soul, and brought me Uninterpretable peace. But, rejoicing, now I know That, creating wings to flee Of its own intensity, And impelled of bitter woe T was your love, escaped and trembling, Seeking respite in my breast Bringing, seeking consolation, Refuge with my love, and rest; And they slept and dreamed together In the chill and harried nest. No more! I must be still There are many things to ponder In the sad and solemn umbrage Of the Valley where I wander: For the distant hills are golden, In the golden Morning yonder. And now, good night, and bless you! Give, oh give your lips to mine, That my latest breath caress you, And the last of life be thine. Quell them, dearest, these alarms Hold me fast, nor now forsake me, That when angels stoop to take me, They may take me from your arms. LADY LEES WIDOWHOOD. 49 PART V. ~IIAPTER XVII. see to it. Did anybody see her come in that morning? Think not, replied Jim, who seemed of a laconic turn of speech. Bagot was standing in the stall looking at the animal, from whose loins he had thro~vn back the clothing. Bless my soul, what a quarter! said Bagot; and a stifle you might hang your hat on ! Then, walking forward, he passed his hand slowly down both forelegs, and, pausing on the fetlock of the near one, muttered, A little heat here. Take her out Jim, said Seager. Jim led her out into the yard in front of the stable, and walked her up and down. There was no sign of lameness. All right so far, said Seager. Trot her down. The mare trotted as sound as she walked. Jim, said Seager, you were either drunk or dreaming last Wednesday. Put her in the trap; the colonel and I want to time her. We II walk on, and you can drive after us. DAY WR5 just breaking on a wide common, distant from London about three hours by the rail. The spirit of improvement had left this heath unenclosed, because, barren as it was, it was more profitable in its present form than if it had waved with golden harvests, for it contained a second-rate race-course; so that enclosures, stealing up as near as they dared, had been made to keep their distance in time to secure ample space for trial ground, morn- ing gallops, and spectators, besides the course itself; though cultivation bad come so nigh that the plover, once familiar denizen of the heath, had almost forsaken it, and whistled his wild tune elsewhere. On the skirts of this common, and connected with it by a row of pollards, stood a small village; and to- wards a stable, situated af~ the end of the vil- lage nearest the common, Bagot and Seager wended their way in the gray of the morn- ing. They had come to prove the mare Gos- hawk. The stable-door was padlocked when they You seem to keep her pretty quiet, re- reached it, and would have appeared unten- marked Bagot, as they left the stable and anted but for an occasional snort and rustle walked out upon the common. of the straw within. Seager tapt on the door I m forced to, said Seager. She s with his stick, when a small wooden window done a match or two already, and she s get-. was opened in the wall above, and a groom ting a name. They tried to physic her the who slept in the loft within put his head out, first time, when she was stabled down at Not a handsome head indeed, rather villan- but ,Jim was too sharp for cm, and the ous in expression naturally, and by no means second time I was on my guard; and hearing improved by the small-pox. some fellows had been looking after her Oil T is me, Jim, said Seager. Look the sly, and inquiring about her, I sold them alive open the door. a splendid bargain. All right, Mr. Se ager, responded Jim, How was that ? inquired the colonel. who forthwith descended the ladder to the I 11 tell you, returned Seager, chuck- ground-floor, and unbarred the door with such ling: I sent Jim to the vet (Anglice, vet- promptitude as to lead inevitably to the con- erinary surgeon) a couple of nights before clusion that he slept in his clothes, for, the the match, when I knew some friends of the door being opened, there he stood in long other party would be with him, for a lot of gray stable-jacket, blue spotted neckerchief; cough medicine. Cough medicine for Seager! and wide corduroy breeches and gaiters. this made em prick up their ears; and Jim low s the mare ? was Mr. Seagers first made such a confounded mystery about getting question. it into the stable as set em all on the look-out. The groom looked at Ba~ot chewing a Sure enough, that night a fellow was seen straw the while. ~~Friendnof~ yours, Mr. lurking about the stable, trying to listen at Seager? the door. I knew he d be back again next All right, said Seager. Speak up, you night, so what dye think I did, Lee? got a beggar how s the mare? horse with the most infernal tough you ever The groom, thus pleasingly exhorted, drew heard, and popt him quietly into the stable him aside into the stall next to that in which without any one seein~ him. Back comes the mare stood. Why, she seems right my friend again that night to listen; hears enough now, but she s been queerish, Misr coughing enough to satisfy him, and carries Seager, and that s the truth. She pulled up back the report to his employers that the a little lame o Wednesday after exercise mare was in a bad way, and no mistake. howsever, as I say, she seems right enough Next morning they were ready, of course, since.~~ with any odds against her; my friends were Seager uttered a long Haa! Which on the look-out to take em up for me; the leg? asked he. mare came to the post in splendid condition, Near fore, replied Jim. won easy, and I made a very pretty thing of Take her out, said Seager. We must it. CeceLlIvI. LIVING AGE. VOL. ix. 4 LADY LEE S WIDOWHOOD. 50 As he concluded this anecdote, Jim, mount- Seager, after a volley of curses on his ill-luck. ed in a light vehicle like a tea-tray on taIl One thing you may take your oath of, and wheels, drove the mare gently past them. that is, that if she s got legs to pull her Pull her up this side of the stone, Jim, through it, do it she shall, if I have to shoot cried Seager. Now, Lee, you time her from her next day. Mind, Jim, not a word ! the white stone there. She shall turn at the Jim winked intelligence, and drove slowly half-mile. ofF to the stable. Seager walked up and gave the word to the Bagot looked very grave. But if she groom, who moved gently to the white stone; cant do it if you have to pay up why, and Scager, warning Bagot to be ready, God bless me, fifteen hundred pounds is no called out, Off! as she came abreast of it. joke. At the word, Jim gave a peculiar whistle, Time enough to think about it when the hauling tight on the reins, and the mare, like time comes, said Mr. Seager, who was not some engine set going, started at a surprising prone to anticipate misfortune, nor to be pace, while Bagot, watch in hand, stood depressed by presentiments of evil. In the marking her. True as a line she went; no mean time, I shall stay here for a while to wavering or swaying from side to side; hardly look after her, and get a vet to see her any motion of back or head; all steady, ex- quietly. You can go home; and if she gets cept the four legs and feet that struck out all right in a few a s, I 11 come and look at like regular and powerful machinery. Round you again. went Jim at the half-mile, coming by a small So they returned to the village, which was circuit into his old tracks; down the course now beginning to be astir. After comfortin again at unfaltering speed, and, by another himself with a little breakfast, Bagot departe small circuit, passing again between Bagot by the next train on his way to the Ileronry, and the starting-point, while Mr. Seager remained at the inn to look Three seventeen ! cried the colonel, after the welfare of Goshawk. as she came abreast of him, Jim leaning back at a tremendous angle, with his feet planted CHAPTER XVIII. against the footboard in front, and his arms What with playing billiards by day and drawn by the tight reins to their full extent. whist by night, and making betting-woks She can do niore than that, said Seager. with the dragoons, and watching what pro. Speak to her, Jim. gress Sloperton might make with Lady Lee, Jim shouted, and there was a manifest in- and studying that young mans character, crease in the rapidity with which the four with a view to turning him to future account, horse-shoes glittered between the retiring Bagots hands were full of business. And wheels, like the balls which a juggler sends therefore, though lie took, as we have seen, round his head. the liveliest interest in the mare Goshawk, Three ten ! called Bagot, as she came yet he would not allow even that considera- round again. tion to separate him long from his friends at That II do, said Seager. Keep to that, the Heronry. Nevertheless, that interest, as Jim. aforesaid, was of the liveliest not so much At the fourth mile Senger called to Jim to on account of any abstract sympathy with the pull up. gains and losses of his friend Seager, as for Twelve minutes, fifty-eight seconds, the following reason viz., That he had lost mid Bagot. No mistake about her pace, if more of late to Mr. Seager than he could she can hold it. conveniently pay, and he had a shrewd idea Just look at her, said Seager, walking that the degree of pressure for prompt pay- to the spot where she had pulled up, and now ment of this would depend altogether on the stood with her respiration scarcely accelerated state of his creditors exchequer. For Seager s by her performance. There s a pair of friendship extended thus far, that he would bellows for you.. Splendid wind, sir. Take not dun a particular friend so long as he her in quietly, Jim. What d ye think now, did nt want the money if he did, why, of colonel booked to win, eh ? course, the friend must pay up. As she trotted gently away, Bagots quick Life at the Heronry now began to assume eye detected a perceptible alteration in her an aspect somewhat similar to that which it gait. He directed Seagers attention to it. had borne in Sir Josephs bachelor days. Bring her back, Jim. Yes, it was so. Stalls that of late stood empty were now She was slightly lame on the leg Jim had generally occupied by officers chargers; the indicated, though it could not be detected clicking of billiard-balls was incessant in the when she was going full speed. hall; and there were more riding parties. Unlucky business ! said Bagot, as Seager The colonel was of course always charmed to felt the ailing fetlock. see the dragoons, and they were equally Well, there 11 be time enough to see delighted to escape from Doddington. And about curing it, that s one comfort, returned though these visits were ostensibly made for LADY LEE S WIDOWHOOD. the most part to Bagot, yet what could be more natural than that, once in the house, they should wish to pay their respects to the fairer portion of its inhabitants? Thus it happened that there were few mornings when the military visitors did not, on some pretence or other, find their way to the drawing-room. In the evening Bagot would either go over to dine at their mess at the Bush, or some of them would stay and share his bachelors cheer in the snug apartments he tenanted in the Ileronry, on which occasions Orelia and Rosa and Lady Lee, traversing distant corri- dors on their way to bed, would sometimes be startled by a sound of revelry by night, and, pausing, flat candlestick in hand, would listen for a moment to a wild chorus led probably by Mr. Gates, and wherein Bagots bass took a prominent part, to which distance and reverberation gave a somewhat unearthly character, like the chorus with which Don Juan descends to his infernal destination. But, notwithstanding these nocturnal orgies, by day all was decorum. Even Mr. Gates lost all his boisterous confidence as he entered the presence of the ladies, growing quite tame, almost bashful, and sometimes, when suddenly addressed, blushing to deep pinkness between his extensive shirt-collars. And he would envy Bruce for the flowing ease and openness with which he conversed with Rosa, as well as for the interest and friendliness with which she returned it; for Mr. Gates himself, when he had with great effort and manceuvring obtained a place at Rosas side, and saw her face turned towards him with the best-humored smile in the world, would find himself quite unable to enjoy the advantage of the position he had taken such pains to secure, and would wonder why on earth he was nt able to chat away with her like Bruce. The consequence of this was, that at length the friendship which had subsisted between him and Bruce was threatened with dissolution; Gates becoming rude and some- times sarcastic towards his associate, and thus rendering the joint occupancy of the grocers lodgings less smooth and pleasant than before. Tindal could not flatter himself that he made any great progress with Grelia; on the contrary, she received all his attempts to propitiate her with a coldness amounting to in- civility, and would sometimes be not at home when he called. Bagot, perceiving this, would good-naturedly decoy Grelia down to the hall, to get a lesson in billiards, whenever he knew Tindal was coming; and the major, entering unexpectedly, and receiving a stately and frosty greeting from the young lady, would look on, admiring her attitude as she bent over the table, applauding her skill when she cannoned or made a hazard, and sometimes venturing to instruct her how to form a better bridge, by elevating her knuckles and stretching out her thumb, while the contact into which his fingers were necessarily brought with that soft hand gave the grim, undemonstrative major very considerable pleasure. Come and finish this game for me, Tindal, the friendly colonel would then say; I must be off to the stables. And the major, with grim alacrity, would seize Bagots abandoned cue; and nobody could possibly have recognized the stern martinet, whose glance had made the whole parade thrill, or had caused the heart of some hard- drinking dragoon culprit to quail within him in the orderly room an hour before, in the alert, courteous, somewhat subdued cavalier, who now hovered round the queenly Grelia. Allow me, Miss Payne if you strike your ball so as to hit this one on the side just where the light f~d1s and gently, if you please, very gently you will go into that middle pocket. Excellently done ! he would resume, as Grelia made the hazard he recommended. Now you have an easy cannon on the balls. hit the red hard and full, and strike your own a little on the side so as to screw, and you 11 come off that top cushion and cannon. Why, there now beautiful! Really, Miss Payne, if you go on in this way, you must give me points. Notwithstanding all this, the major did not make much progress with her imperial highness. I m afraid I ye offinded Miss Payne, he said to Bagot I dont seem to get on with her. Gad, sir, a strange girl that ! responded Bagot; deuced high and noli me tangere when she likes. But that makes her the more enchanting when she does unbend ha, Tindal B To which the major unhesitatingly assented. Cant you get up some show with your men B suggested Bagot presently: girls like that sort of thing. The very thing, said Tindal. A re- view in the grounds eh? Full dress re- view, with manceuvres? By Jove, I 11 pro- pose it to her at once. Accordingly he did so; said the grounJ was exactly what he wanted for a good more- ings drill; was sure the men would acqinkit themselves better than usual under the infin- ence of the ladies bright eyes; and, if Grelia. would promise to sanction the display with her presence, he would forthwith entreat per-. mission of Lady Lee to carry the prqjeck into execution. He was delighted to hear Orelia express her approval in a more cordial tone than he was accustomed to; and, secretly applauding the generalship of Bagot,.he made~ arrangements for the review to take~p1ace in a few days. 51 LADY LEES WIDOWHOOD. The more Sloperton saw of his new-found relation, Lady Lee, the more he became con- firmed in the opinion that she would, when- ever he should think proper to make his pro- posals, do credit to his taste in the eyes of all the world. Her ladyship always received him hospitably, and sometimes seemed amused at his conversation; and he had bestowed so much attention in attiring his person to the best advantage, on the occasions of his visits, and displayed such inexhaustible varieties of harmonies and contrast of cut and colors, in the selection of cravats, waistcoats, trou- sers, and topics of discourse, that he felt assured of always appearing to the very best advantage which, in the opinion of the conquering captain himself, was synonymous with being irresistible. The only thing he did nt altogether approve of was, that Fane who seldom troubled himself to pay visits, and, when he did, still seldomer crossed Sloperton s path had once or twice come into the drawing-room at the Heronry, and interfered with him sadly, by turning the conversation to matters which the handsome exquisite knew nothing about, and took no interest in, though Lady Lee had immediately brightened up to a degree of animation which he had never seen her dis- play before. There was also a parson a fellow with no manner, and not the slightest idea of dress who came sometimes with Fane, sometimes alone, and bored one with talk about books and philosophy. On the last occasion, indeed, when those two had come there together, Sloperton, who was also present, and in full flow when they entered, had never, from the moment of their appear- ance, been able to command the least atten- tion, but had sat like a handsome, well-dressed figure by Madame Tussaud. And he might possibly have felt uneasy about this, had he not luckily received next morning a parcel of clothes from his tailor in town, and immedi- ately rode over to the Heronry in such an ex- quisite waistcoat as, he felt assured, must place him at once beyond all rivalry. To many ardent young assertors of the su- premacy of intellect, the divinity of the female sex, and the like doctrines, these ex- pectations of Captain Sloperton may seem presumptuous, and impossible to be gratified. The habitual romance-reader, too, knowing that Lady Lee is of more value than many Slopertons, and that poetical justice must be done though the heavens totter, growls in- credulity. But if we look at the sources whence romances should in their essence be drawn if we look at life and reality where, then, is the improbability of a culti- vated, imaginative, nay, gifted woman, link- ing herself with joy, revel, and applause, as Cassio has it, to some half-souled lump of hu- manity, who, perchance, shall not even possess the perfections that please the eye? Contented, nay proud, in the possession of her most filthy bargains seemingly unconscious that all who are capable of appreciating her are wondering at her choice a choice made apparently for no better reason than because she would not say no she flings away, without any audible sigh, all hope of marital congeniality, letting her affection hang on the object of it, like a rich garment ona rusty nail. It each of those who form the natural aristocracy of the sex were resolved to uphold the dignity of her order, choosing rather to live abarren sister all her life than to wed one whom she could not honestly, and in her soul, acknowledge for her lord and master taking for her motto palmam qui meruit ferat am or him who deserves ~ what a lure were here for emulative men! How would blue ribbons, peerages, thanks of both Houses, fade into insignificance before this Legion of Honor, apparently instituted by Nature herself! What were droves of oxen, and brazen armor, and long-haired captives, to Achilles, while his Briseis was yet in the tent of dog-faced, deer-hearteds Agamem- non? And, perhaps, the emulative man aforesaid figures to himself such a fair prize feels that he will try to deserve it dreams of it, and is cheered by the vision at length sees his ideal but sees it only to find this Titania, queen of the fi~iries, enamored of some Bully Bottom, whom, while kissing his fiUr large ears, and decking his sleek head with musk roses, she lovingly apostrophizes as her gentle joy. Therefore, let no am- bitious, amorous numskull despair merely because he is a numskull; he may yet live envied of the gifted of the earth, and pass from this world never suspecting that he has, through life, at bed and board, entertained an angel unawares. And yet, Lady Lee, if you, untaught by experience, should twice profane that hand and heart of yours what hope or sympathy were then for you? What word could you say in arrest of judgment, crc the fates decree, either that such marriage-bed shall be to yota a Procrustes-bed, whereon your mind and tastes and sympathies shall be clipped to the level of those of your companion; or else, that you shall wear away your life, filled with a contempt which must never be spoken? But the proverb says a cat may look at a queen; and animals, not much higher in the scale of creation than cats, and lower than the Slopertons, may aspire to the Lady Lees. This truth the reader may find illustrated in the next chapter, where we shall see who this wooer is who now comes riding to the Heronry ,and whom we have lost sight of for many chapters. 52 LADY LEES WIDOWHOOD. 53 ~ ~. slipt jovially away from him; whenever he met with a piece of good fortune, he seemed Squire Dubbley was sitting all alone in to mistake it for care, for he immediately Monkstone, after breakfast, trying to wile drowned it in the bowl till he had been away the time till a suitable hour should employed as an usher in the grammar-school arrive for mounting his steed and cantering at Doddington; and this post, also, he had over to the Heronry to prosecute his suit with forfeited, having twice profaned that temple Lady Lee. of Minerva by entering it in a state of Since his conversation with Bagot, the inebriety. Subsequently he supported him- squires intentions, heretofore very vague and self by giving private lessons in classics and uncertain, bad taken shape and substance, mathematics, and reading up with university So long as the idea of making love in that men who wanted to cram in the vacations, quarter had been confined to his own breast and spent the money thus procured in the and brain, it had floated there in a misty, conipany of some congenial acquaintances, in desultory fashion, sometimes more distinct, his favorite taproom at the GrapCs. sometimes fading almost to nothing, but So, at certain hours of the day and night, always appearing rather as something that there might have been seen in the little room might be than as what certainly would be. at Monkstone, which the squire called his But now that Bagot had talked over the sub- study, the curious spectacle of a gentleman, ject with him in a business-like manner, and of considerable property and mature years, had, moreover, brought it fluirly within the taking lessons in the rudiments of education limits of plain matter-of-fact by the little from a seedy, snuffy individual, in a rusty, pecuniary transaction between them, the musty suit of black. squire, with the facility of a weak brain, The squire looked out of his window and considered the matter as settled, all but a few whistled. It wanted yet two hours of noon necessary preliminaries.. These he had re- two mortal hours lay in dreary desert ex- solved to complete forthwith, chuckling to panse before him, with a glimpse of green himself, with a sort of imbecile exultation, country beyond. He knew it was in vain to at the thought of making his declaration of attempt to study by himself, having tried it love, and being accepted without the media- once or twice, and found his attention wan- tion of Bagot, who fancied himself so essential dering off beyond recall every half minute, in an auxiliary. So he tried; somewhat im- spite of mdl his efforts to fix it; for the squire patiently, to wile away the time, till the hour could not govern his own mind in the least, of his visit should be at hand. notwithstanding it was such a weak one. This operation of wiling away the time was He would have liked to amuse himself by a task of peculiar difficulty to the squire in cleaning his gun, and oiling the locks; but fact, perfectly herculean. The poor squire, then that was his servants business, and he when lie could not shoot or hunt, had no did not choose to pay servants for doing noth- more resources within himself than a kitten ing. One little green spot in the desert had deprived of its tail. Books he looked upon offered itself since breakfast and that was not merely with indifference, but with positive when he ~vent to his cellar, and drew himself dis~ust, as if they had been sentient and su- a foaming tumbler of strong October; but the permor beings, personally hostile to himn, and flavor of this had died away, and he dared repelling his advances with calm disdain, not drink another, for fear of muddling him- This he had resented in early life by filling self before the interview with Lady Lee. such as were thrust upon him with blots and With more complacency than usual, there- dogs-ears, and tearing them up to make paper fore, the squire beheld time portly, debauched kites with; and, later, by using them for figure of Mr. Randy approaching the house gun-wadding and cigar-lights. But since his a tall figure, with thin arms and legs, a large advancement in life had caused him to feel paunch, over which was buttoned, with diffi- his deficiencies, he had begun to look on culty, a threadbare black surtout, and wear- learning with a secret respect, as being imme- ing a black stock, worn at the edges, beneath diately and constantly connected with his which was visible a portion of what was interests. At first he was ashamed to make probably a flannel waistcoat, and which was his ignorance public by applying for instruc- overhung by his brown, flabby cheeks. Dig- tion, but at last he bethought himself of hay- nity and growing infirmity struggled together ing recourse to a person whose poverty would in his gait, which was at once mm~jestic and render the purchase of his secrecy eas~i, while tremulous. he possessed the necessary qualifications for The squire tapt on the window-pane to at- the office of preceptor. tract Mr. Randys attention, and put his fin- This person, Mr. Randy, was clever, and ger on his lips, to intimate that he wished his had been well educated, but had not flourished approach to be silent and secret; and Mr. in the world, owing to his incurable habits Randy, with a nod of intelligence, exchanged of conviviality. Situation after situation had his crunching walk over the gravel for a LADY LEE S WIDOWHOOD. stealthy, tripping pace, like a corpulent fairy, and came warily up the steps of the porch, as if there were a herd of deer in the lobby which he intended to stalk. The squire was behind the door, holding it softly ajar for him af- fording him so little space for entering, that his portly person was somewhat jammed and crushed before he effected his ingress, the lower button of his black surtout, long in- jured at the roots, being torn right out of the cloth Softly, said Mr. Dubbley, motioning him towards the study; dont let these con- founded servants hear you. If any of them should come in, we 11 talk about the same business as before. Mr. Dubbley felt so much shame at being engaged, at his time of life, and with his property, on the business of his education, that he kept the ol~ject of Randys visits a profound secret from the household, and when interrupted by any of the domestics during his studies, had, with great ingenuity, feigned to be conversing on some matter of an entirely different nature. I wont offer you anything to drink after your walk, said the squire, as they sat down at the table; because, if I see you drink- ing, I shall drink myself, and I ye reasons for keeping clear this morning; but when I m gone, 1 11 leave out the spirit-bottles for you.~~ Mr. Randy bowed gravely in token of his acquiescence. What shall we study to- day ? he inquired, putting on a pair of brass- mounted spectacles. / That s just what I pay you to settle, said the squire; is nt it! here I am in want of teaching here you are in want of money; we 11 make a fair exchange, and you can t cxpect me to do any of your work for you. Randy colored at the coarseness of the squir& s speech ; he would have resented it, as he ~vas frequently tempted to do, only he could not afford resentment, but was accus- tomed to revenge himself privately at night with his companions of the taproom, by show- ing the squire up for their entertainment, and pouring forth floods of eloquent invective on the ignorant upstart, who, by virtue of his dirty acres, dared to insult a scholar and a gentleman. Our object, began Mr. Randy, lowering his head, and looking at the squire through the space between the tops of his spectacles and the points of his bushy eyebrows, and rattling his r~s very much our object is, to inipart as much general information as we can, without going into the tedious rudiments of scholastic learning. We wish to be con- versant with the topics of the day to bear our part in general conversation with credit to form and deliver an opinion on points of public interest, without falling into any grievous or ridiculous blunders. The squire nodded. Havino therefore, in our previous studies, run through the geography of the most prom- inent and important countries, with slight sketches of their previous histories, we will now recall and apply our recollections to some of the leading topics of the day. Hang me, if I havent forgotten every word of it, muttered the poor squire. Patience, ray good sir, patience. Rome was not built in a day; nor can Squire Dub- bley be qualified to shine in society in a week or a month. Many centuries ago, a philoso- pher and man of science, with whom we shall, by and by, I hope, become acquainted, told a great monarch who, like other great men, was somewhat impatient (here Mr. Randy chuckled facetiously), that there was no royal road to geometry. Learning is one of those things, said Mr. Randy, with the conscious dignity of a possessor, that no power can command, nor wealth pu~r- chase. Then what the deuce am I throwing away my money for with you B asked the squire. Perhaps I should get on faster with some other instructor. Patience, my good sir, again urged the preceptor; money may do much, though not all; it may provide us with the means, if we only make a right and diligent use of them. here, now, is the newspaper of the lastest date; we will see what the world is talking about, and we will apply what we have already acquired to the matters thus brought under our notice. So Mr. Randy sat and read the newspaper an occupation he took great pleasure in and expounded portions of it to the squire. After the latter had listened for some little time attentively he rose, and, saying it was dry work, produced a case of bottles from a cupboard, and a couple of tumblers; and these latter being filled with a refreshing compound of rum, water, lemon-juice ,and sugar, Mr. Randys countenance, after a long pull at the samne, brightened perceptibly, and he read mdl the columans of Foreign Intelli- gence, and descanted on our foreign relations as if he had been the private and confidential friend of Lord Palmerston. The squire, how- ever, began to relax in his attention he was thinking about his approaching visit to the Heronry, and how he should deport himself there. You re a sort of fellow that knows every- thing, observed the squire presently. What should you say, now, was the kind of conver- sation to take a fine lady I an accomplished person, you know. Mr. Randy always answered every question 54 LADY LEE S WIDOWHOOD. the squire thought proper to propound (some of them nonsensical enough) with a composed and grave promptitude, as if it had long em- ployed his thoughts. He laid the newspaper across his knees, took off and wiped his spec- tacles, and hemmed thrice before answering. That, said Mr. Randy, would depend on circumstances: first, on the degree of im- pression I wished to produce; secondly, on the age, character, and disposition of the lady, and the degree of intimacy I was favored with. Well, suppose you were regularly in love, said the squire, and the lady was young and handsome, and deuced clever and all that I In that case, returned Mr. Randy, I should evince my partiality by glances, sighs, pressure of the hand, and all those under- stood tokens of passion and, by ~vay of illustration, Mr. Randy leered at the squire from undcr his shaggy brows, with a pair of eyes so muddy and watery that it was difficult to say where the pupils ended, and the whites, or rather the yellows, began; emitting at the same time a sigh that filled the npartment with many cubic feet of vaporized alcohol. Having thus established an understanding, I should gradually, and by delicate degrees, approach the subject of love, by broaching collateral and kindred topics. Kindred topics! repeated the squire. What! praise her relations, eh? Not at all, said Mr. Randy, inwardly making a note of the squires mistake for the benefit of his friends at the Urapes that night, to whom he ~vould serve it up with some sauce piquant of his own. I should become by degrees sentimental converse of poetry, of romances, of which love ~vas the subject. But I dont know a line of poetry, mut- tered the squire, except some songs.. I know some capital songs Old Towler, and Nan- cy Dawson, and A-hunting we will go; but perhaps she would nt care about them. Never mind, said Mr. Randy; talk of nuptial felicity paint to her the delights of a union where But suppose she knows all about that better than me, interrupted the squire, in consequence of having been married before 1 0, indeed a widow ! said Randy; that simplifies the matter immensely. In that case, I should be much more direct in my approaches, and, after a few short indica- tions of partiality, should propose at once. Its very clear, Randy, said the squire, that, though you talk so glibly about it, you never tried it yourselfat least, not with the kind of person I m speaking of; if you had, youd know, that, for all it seems so easy, yet, when it comes to the point, there s a kind of cursed feeling comes all over one as if you were going to be hanged, and drives every- thing you had to say out of your head; and she, instead of helping you out of the mess, looks all the while so cool and innocent that it makes you worse than ever. Mr. Randy considered for a minute. If I found my powers of speech desert me, from bashfulness, said he, I should convey my wishes in a letter.4 Capital ! thought the squire ; I never thought of that. 1 would nt be half so nervous a thing to slip a letter into her hand as to sputter it all out by word of mouth. Come now, said the squire, putting a sheet of paper and a pen before his adviser, lets see what you can make of it just out of curiosity, added the cunning squire, not that I want anything of the sort for myself. So Mr. Randy refilled his tumbler, and by its assistance concocted such an e istle as Dr. Johnson might be supposed to indite if he had fallen in love with an empress, and having read it aloud to the squire, the latter seized upon it, and, saying it might be useful some time or other, put it away in his desk. lie now affected to be particularly busy, in order to get rid of Randy, whose departure he further facilitated by locking up the spirits; and that gentleman, seeing no prospect of getting any more punch, having at length de- parted, the squire sat down, and, having made a fair copy of the love-letter, posted away to ~he Heroury. CHAPTER XX. Lady Lee was seated in the drawing-room in company with Julius, who was in disgrace, and undergoing punishment at the hands of Dr. Watts, one of whose pious poems he had been condemned to commit to heart. The offence which had called down this visitation on his head was a personal assault upon Miss Fillett. Julius, on seeing Rosa and Orelia prepare to set forth on their ride, became per- fectly outrageous to accompany them, and, having rushed down stairs in defiance of or- ders, had been captured by Kitty just as he was in the act of pulling Sergeant Comber. mares horse by the tail; but, far from feeling gratitude to her for saving his brains from being kicke4 out, he at once proceeded (as she expressed it) to make his teeth all but meet in the back of her hand, and to kick her shins into all the colors of the rainbow. This description of her wrongs, far from melting Julius, as she intended, only excited his curi- osity, and, being partial to rainbows, hepri- vately resolved to watch her when she pulled off her stockings. So, having obstinately de- clined to apologize, he was now seated on a low stool near his parent, with Dr. Watts in his lap, swelling with indignation, and glanc- ing furtively at his cat Pick, who was polish- ing his face with his paw on the hearth-rug; and instead of committing to memory the masterly distinction drawn by the amiable 55 LADY LEES WIDOWHOOD. doctor between the line of conduct to be pursued by Christian children, and that ex- cXi sable in dogs and bears and lions, he was thinking how pleasant it would be to steal behind Pick, and, clasping him round the neck, to draw him into his lap, and kiss him l)ehind his whisker, ax~ on the top of his head, and subsequently tickle him into fury, till he growled and bit ax~d clawed with his fore-legs, and spurred with his hind ones. Lady Lee was reading Pope. Her taste in poetry had, of late years, undergone an entire revolution and whereas, in her spinster days, nothing was too romantic, high-flown, and enthusiastic for her, she had now begun to condemn everything not capable of being brought within the strict rules of plain com- mon-sense. And the best of it was, that she really persuaded herself she enjoyed the melo- dious ~vorldly wisdom of the little Queen Annes man; though, between you and me, reader, she had no more taste for wordly wis- dom than she had for playing at leap-frog. However, she ivent on reading, sometimes pausing to repeat a terse couplet to herself and wondering how the man could manage to pack all that sense so neatly into two lines, and fancying she liked it, till she was roused by Julius poking her on the elbow with his book. Can you repeat it, you shocking child? Julius nodded, putting out his lip at the epithet. Go on, then. Julius commenced, casting a wistful glance at Pick. Let eats delight to bark and bite __ Cats, sir! said Lady Lee, returning the book to him, after tapping his cheek with it. Go back to your stool, whither he accord- ingly retired; and his mamma was resuming her study of Pope, when Miss Fillett, walking into the room on her prismatic legs, announced Mr. Dubbley. Mr. Dubbley came in rubbing his forehead and very nervous, lie had started for the Heronry in a state of great elevation; exhil- arated by punch, and the letter he had in his pocket, proposing seemed to him the easiest thin~ in the world; he laughed as he thought of his previous failures. But his spirits had gradually evaporated as he approached the house they ~vent off more and more rapidly as he followed Kitty up-stairs and when he entered Lady Lee s presence, not even the dregs remained. Charming day, said Mr. Dubbley, pol- ishing his temples till the small tufts that grew thereon threatened to disappear altogether; and, nothing else occurring to him, he then said, Splendid day! and at last grew quite enthusiastic about the day. Never saw such a fine day, said Mr. Dubbley. The squire, not having any other remark at hand, took to his old resource of polishing his skull, and looked round the room. There was a refinement and luxury about its arrange- ments that caused him to feel as if in a for- eign country. Pieces of unfinished embroidery and crochet-work were scattered about; books, that he did not understand the names of in rich bindings; little mysterious articles of papier-mach6, and ivory and filigree, whose use he could by no means conjecture; and Lady Lee herself, as she rustled to her chair in a dress revealing masses of rich lace at the bosom and sleeves, while amid the latter glit- tering bracelets peeped out, tended to strengthen the idea, which now began to transmit itself through the squires somewhat obtuse perceptions, that she lived in quite a different atmosphere, and at immeasurable distance, from him. Pray, take this chair, Mr. Dubbley, said Lady Lee ; you will be more comfortable than in that for Mr. Dubbley, having put his hat in a low chair usually appropriated to Rosa as a lounging-chair, had, in his confusion, sat down on the top of it, and, it being a pretty stiff and solid beaver, remained unconsciously perched thereon till it suddenly gave way, and the squires knees came rather violently in contact with his nose as he leant forward in a courteous posture. Bless my soul ! cried Mr. Dubbley, starting up and looking ruefully at the crushed hat; there s quite a fate about my hats; this is the second I ye sat upon this year. However, that s of no consequence, said the squire, recollecting himself; lots more hats to be bought. T would have been worse if it had been may head. This was indisputable, though it was not easy to see how Mr. Dub- bley could crush his own head by sitting down on it. Do you find Monkstone solitary? asked Lady Lee presently, to divert his thoughts from the calamity. Monstrous solitary, pon my life, said Mr. Dubbley ; it gets worse every day. ( Now why should she ask that, he thought, if she did mit mean something by it?) If there was somebody else there, he added, it wouldnt be half so solitary. And will nobody come to see you, then, Mr. Dubbley? Yes, yes, said the squire; a good many might like to come if I asked em; but it is nt every one I would ask. If sonie people that I know would come for better for worse, and the svjuire looked wonderfully arch as he repeated, for better for worse, you know I ~d rather than a thousand pounds. Dear me, thought Lady Lee, Mr. Dub. bley has certainly fallen in love with some- body; who can it be? Then why dont you ask them, said she, smiling, and ascertain their wishes on the subject? 56 LADY LEES WIDOWHOOD. Why, so Twill, said the delighted squire, who, feeling certain that he had made his meaning perfectly obvious, and that he was meeting with the most charming encourage- ment, began to fumble in his pocket for the letter. Faint heart never won fair lady, he muttered to himself. Take time by the fetlock, you know. I wish you all success in your wooing, Mr. Dubbley, said Lady Lee, and hope shortly to congratulate you on the result. Now, what can she mean by that? thought the squire, letting the letter slip back into his pocket. I mustnt be rashhang it, no; I must feel my way. And the squire~s warm feelings, suddenly condensed by the chill, broke out over his forehead in little beads like morning dew. Delightful thing the married state, said the squire presently, remembering Mr. Ran- dys instructions. Charming state of things, when two hearts that have long beat for one another are joined together in holy matri- mony, and nothing to cut their love in two. Mr. Dubbley paused, rather breathless after this eloquent flight, in which he had mingled the form of publishing the banns of marriage with his recollections of a valentine he had once written to a brick-layers daughter. Why, you speak like one inspired by his subject, said her ladyship. But take care, Mr. Dubbley! if you indulge such bright visions before marrying, you may be disap- pointed afterwards. Not the lcast afraid of that, said the squire; we understand one another too well for that. What should prevent me and and her that I m talking of, from being as happy as the days long ? Nothing that I know of, returned her ladyship, provided there is no striking dis- parity of any kind. Au, shes thinking about my income,now, thought the squire; Im all right there. I ought to have mentioned something about it in my letter. And again the squire dived up to his elbow in his breast-pocket. No ob- jection on that score, said he; no mistake about my property; all safe and sure, and rents regularly paid. Tiresome, absurd man ! thought Lady Lee; what does he suppose I care about his property, or his rents, or his love-affairs? But there are other disparities, she said, more fatal to nuptial felicity than that of income disposition for instance age tastes pur- suits intellect. At the mention of this last item, the squire once more let the letter & ll back into his pocket. She s got cleverness enough for both, said the squire. Perhaps she s a very ac- complished person, and perhaps I may be the same too in time who knowst I daresay 57 you dont know that Ive been getting up a good deal of general information lately 1 Lady Lee had not heard of his process of mental culture, she said. Wait a bit ! said the squire, with a knowing look; perhaps I may disappoint those who think me a f4 yet. I in rubbing up my learning all for your I mean her sake, too. She s the only person in the world I d take the trouble for. What a devoted attachment yours appears to be! said her ladyship. It certainly merits success. And she smiled so pleas- antly and encouragingly that the squire dived once more into his pocket, and this time brought the letter fairly out, and put it in the crown of his hat, ready for delivery at the next favorable moment. He was several times on the point of going down on his knees and presenting it, and as often baffled by some chilling remark from the unconscious object of his admiration, and by his increasing sense of her unapproachable- ness. The quick alternations of hot and cold fits that he experienced were so trying, that he made up his mind to yield next time to the impulse, and declare himself like a man. But the impulse came, and was nipt like its prede- cessors; and the poor despairing squire felt a load taken off his mind when the door opened, and Rosa and Orelia entered, full of conver- sation for Lady Lee. So he rose; and, mut- tering to himself that his chance was over for that day, took his leave, with the impression that he had left his intentions as profound a secret as ever. The squire was riding off in some small agitation of spirits, when Miss Fillett sud- denly popt out from behind a laurel bush in the shrubbery, and beckoned him to ride aside from the path; and, an interview with Kitty being more to his taste than one with her mistress, and one in which he played his part with far more ease, he obeyed with alacrity. Well, sir, and how have you got on with my lady? asked Kitty, pertly enough. Eh, what? said Mr. Dubbley. What have I to do with your lady ? Ho! you think a person has no eyes, I suppose; as if I could nt read in a minute when a gentleman s in love or a lady either, for that matter, added Miss Fillett, mean- ingly. Or a lady either! repeated the squire. What! has your mistress been showing any any testimonials of affection? any partial- ity for anybody, my girl? Perhaps she has, perhaps she has nt, said Kitty. But I 11 defy her to like m~ny- body without me knowing. Bless you, sir, she could nt keep her parshalities from me if she wished ever so. And what d ye think about my chance, eh? Come, dont be tormenting! Amazing LADY LEES WIDOWHOoD. pretty girl, upon my life, muttered the squire in a stage whisper, intended to melt Kittys heart. Miss Fillett pursed up her mouth into a round aperture, and, glancing sideways at the squire, shook her head till the lappets of her smart cap vibrated intending thereby to express that she could unfold a tale if she chose. 0, hang it! if you re so fond of your secrets, you may keep em said the squire. I II find out for myself. I was very near finding out this morning. Take care ! said Kitty, holding up her finger with a warning look; take care what you do, sir! Dont be precipitous. What! you thiuk I ye no chance, then? said Mr. Dubbley, hastily. I did nt say so, said Miss Fillett. Then, what the deuce do you mean? asked the squire, with great impatience. Just this dont fou be rash, sir. Leave me to tell you how my lady s disposed to you; and when I say wait, wait and when I say propose, propose. What a dear girl you are ! said the squire, gallantly stooping from the saddle to bestow a salute upon Miss Fillett; but she eluded him, and desired him to behave himself. Take care, sir, or I shall let my lady know. The squire making a second attempt, his hat fell off, and the letter which he had placed therein dropt on the ground. Miss Fillett immediately picked it up, and, looking at the superscriptioz~, at once divined its nature. Ho, ho! a love-letter, she said, looking at the squire. Mr. Dubbley nodded. T was a providence, she continued, solemnly, that you did nt give it yourself to-day. I would nt no, sir I would nt have answered for the consequences. I ii take care of it now, and when I see the right time s come, I II deliver it. Mr. Dubbley perceived that this would save him an infinity of embarrassment and trouble. Pon my life, said he, you re a great deal cleverer than inc at these matters. I Il leave it to you, then. Good-by; shake hands, you know ; and Kitty bestowing hers, the cunning squire drew her towards him. But Kitty struggled, and pinched him on the aria, and then saying, There ~s my ladys bell; come to the white gate to-morrow evening, broke away, and vanished, holding up her finger once before disappearing, to im- press on the squire the necessity of attending to her advice. By George, what a jolly girl she is ! said the squire before he rode off. I m not sure I dont like her best after all. Kitty saw the squires admiring glance as she turned to look back for the last time, and her wily head was forthwith furnished with an ambitious idea, which she put by for future consideration. This idea she did not think it necessary to communicate to Bagot that even- ing, when she reported progress to that chief conspirator; nor did she tell him that she had been unable to resist the temptation of read- ing Mr. Dubbleys love-letter before putting it in the fire; but so much as she did confide to the colonel called forth his warm approba- tion. CHAPTER EEl. It was on a bright sunshiiny morning in June that the dragoons, three abreast, their helmets and accoutrements ~littering, their red coats in brilliant relief against the verdure and foliage around, passed through the lodge- gate of the Ileronry, and formed on the ground which was to be the scene of their manceuvres. A row of carriages, containing most of the ladies of the neighborhood, was drawn up in a favorable position, and there were also plenty of spectators on fiot. There was Lady Lee drivii~g a small double pony carriage, with Orelia seated by her side, and Rosa and Julius behind. There was Sir Christopher Clumber in a great lumbering coach as big as a diligence, with his two daughters and a maiden aunt. There was the little old Earl of Castle-comical, with his brown wig curled in the Prince-regent fashion, up to a peak on the top of his head, with Bruinmellian crav~t and coat, and with opera-glass ready for ob- servation. There was Mr. Ilobbes, a neigh- boring mill-owner, with his fat wife, who had fed herself to such a size that Orelia christened her Hobbes Leviathan. There ~vas Squire Dubbley, mounted on his best hunter, talking to Bagot, who paid very little attention to him. There was the curate, ambling easily along on Diana, not the most graceful seat in the world. There was Mr. Seager, who, growing tired of his lonely supervision of Goshnwk, had run down to refresh his mind by contact with Bagots for a day or two. And in the back- ground appeared a long row of tables at which the warriors might, like Homers heroes, re- fresh themselves after their toils and dangers, and a tent containing similar arrangements for the behoof of the officers and ladies. Leaving his officers and men drawn up in order, the major galloped up to pay his respects to Lady Lee. And the little earl got out of h15 carriage, and, requesting to be introduced to Major Tindal, courteously presented a view of the curious arrangement of the curls on the top of his wig to the major, who bowed his plumed head over the saddle. And the popu- lace looked on with great admiration at this meeting of nobility and war. Then, after a little preliminary chat, the major requested Lady Lees permission to be- gin, and straightway galloping to the front, called his men to attention, and prepared to 58 LADY LEE S WIDOWHOOD. march past. No Roman consul, marching in triumph with captive generals following him, ever felt prouder than the grim major, in front of his ~vell-drilled detachment. There was a little red flag planted at a small distance, in front of the row of carriages, close to which the major, after saluting, took up his position, while the troops went past at a walk, the officers likewise salutin~ as they passed the flagstaff. And as Captain Sloperton gracefully lowered his sword, Letitia Clumber was heard to exclaim that he, the captain, was a di- vine man ; and many other young females, as also fat Mrs. ilobbes, quite agreed with her on the divinity question. They came round, then, at a trot and at a gallop hits, stirrups, and scabbards jingling, swords flashing, plumes waving, and horses champing and tossing their heads all very martial and imposing at least all except Cornet Suckling, whose charger, becoming unruly, manifested a desire to dash through the ranks in front of him ; his afflicted rider, with his helmet l)anging down his back, the chin-scales nearly strangling him, while his plumes, like Lord Cranstouns after Deloraine had charged him, went scattering on the gale, looking dread- fully unhappy and undragoon-like, to the great wrath of his choleric commander, who growled soi~e improper expressions between his ground teeth at the sight of him. In spite of the popular sympathy which Slopertons appearance elicited, Rosa, in a whisper to Ore- ha over the back oh the carriage asked, If she did nt think Mr. Bruce looked better than any of them? Then they charged in troops, and in divis- ions, and in line and threw out skirmishers, who fired their carbines and galloped in upon the main body and they changed their front, and wheeled, and deployed, and formed close column, and opened out again, all to the great delight of the uninitiated. And then, the re- view being over, they dismounted and pick- eted their horses, while the tables were being spread for the gallant riders. A beautiful sight you have afforded us, said the little earl, as the major rode up. The ladies are enchanted. Why, I think the men were tolerably steady, said Tindal, taking off his helmet, and resting it on the pommel of his saddle, while he wiped his forehead. The major, while he spoke thus indifferently, secretly thought they had been preeminently smart, and wished Lord Cardigan could have been there to see. One group of chargers, picketed beneath an oak, looked so very picturesque, that Orelia was desirous of sketching them, and sent in- to the house for drawing materials. Seated in a chair in front of them, she began her sketch; and, during its progress, she called to the dra- goon Onslow, who happened, quite unaccount ably, to be standing near the horses, to come and look at it. Now, it happened that Mr. Seager had just stepped up, in his usual familiar, not-to-be- snubbed kind of fashion, to speak to Orelia, whom he always took particular pleasure in addressing, because he saw she could nt endure him. Casting his eyes on Onslow as he drew near, Seager stared for a moment in his face, and called out, Ha! the devil! why, it s The dragoon looked up at the sound of his voice, and instantly put his finger to his lips. Are you not mistaken ? he said; and then, going up to Seager, drew him a short distance apart. Orelia, witnessing this strange encoun ter with great amazement and curiosity, no- ticed that Seager had suddenly grown very pale. What brought you back? I thought you were out of this long ago, Seager said. Dont trouble yourself to ask questions, replied Onslow. You see what Ive come to many,thanks to you for it. Now, listen. Nobody knows me here but you, nor do I wish to be known; therefore do you be si- lent. If you are not, why, you know me of old; and, be assured, I shall, if you disre- gard my warning, settle all scores with you at once without hesitation. If that s all, dont be afraid, said Sea- ger, apparently relieved at hearing this, and drawing a long breath, 1 11 keep it quiet; and more, if you ever want money to get away, you 11 find me good for a twenty-pound note. Many thanks, my generous friend, re- turned the dragoon, smiling ironically. In the mean time, I shall only trouble you to hold your tongue. So saying, he passed on; and Seager, muttering to himself, while his face resumed its natural bronze, Dd unlucky! I never thought he would have turned up again, turned away in the opposite direction, which led him past Orelia, who was sitting on the pins of curiosity, as a Persian poet might express it. Do you know Mr. Onslow? she asked, with a look that inquired deeper than her words. Not at all, returned the brazen Seager, who was never more at home than when tell- ing a lie ; never saw him before, though he s very like a friend of mine, for whom I mistook him. Quite a mistake. And Orehia, altogether disbelieving him, but afraid of betraying too much interest in the dragoon, was obliged, sorely against her will, to for- bear further questions. Lee, said Tiudal presently, walking up to the carriage containing her ladyship and Rosa, beside which Bagot was stationed, there s a pretty bit of ground there for a small steeple-chase dont you think some- thing of the kind might amuse the ladies? 59 LADY LEE S WIDOWHOOD. A deuced good idea ! returned l3agot; and you might ride in your unifi)rms, which would be a novelty in the annals of steeple- chasin~. T will have a good effect eh? You might start on that hit of turf, over the ditch and rail, down the slope to the hedge, cross the meadow, and charge the brook (t is nt over twelve feet there), round through the quickset, then over those low fences and that rasper (the only nasty jump of the lot), down the meadow, and across the brook agnin~, back over the rail and ditch, and finish with a straight run in to the oak tree yonder. Capital could nt be better, assented the major, impatient to show his merits as a jockey, which, as before stated, were of a high order. Now for the riders. Ontes, you 11 make one, and Bruce another l Both assented willingly. Fane, you re wanted for a steeple-chase, shouted the major. Come here. Fane was cantering past at a little dis- tance, with Julius seated on the holsters, which he had been clamorous to attain, while Lady Lee watched him with secret anxiety. As he turned and came towards them, Seager whispered to Bagot. I say, colonel, what would you give him now to let the boy drop2 He d be the best friend you ever had ! and Mr. Seager grinned. But Bagot did not seem to relish the joke, frowning, and mut- tering something, which sounded like a curse for Seager. I shall be happy to form another leaf in your chaplet, Tindal, Pane said, when the plan was communicated to him. Major Lindal, said Pane, turning to the ladies, is sure to win. One, two, three, four, of you, said Bagot counting. Who else ? Sloperton excused himself, on the plea of his horse Bouquet being engaged for the match with Goshawk; and Suckling said his horse was a bad jumper, never could get him over the second fence which was quite true, for Mr. Suckling invari- ably tumbled off at the first. I II tell you what, said the colonel; I ye got an old horse up there in the stable, which I should nt mind backing for a trifle, if there was anybody to ride him. But he s a difficult horse, and Noble s got no head, th& ugh he sits well enough. By the by, theres that rough-rider of yours, Onslow; let him ride for me, and the thing shall come off after lunch. And without waiting for the majors approbation of the arrangement, Bagot immediately set off to speak to Onslow on the subject. All right, Tindal, he said presently, coming back again; he says he 11 ride him. I II have the ground marked out di- rectly. Bagot was not long about this congenial employment; and when he came back, they went into the tent to lunch, which went off very successfully. After it, the Earl of Cas- tle-comical, seated beside Lady Lee, rose and proposed the British army, with some re- marks about its valor, loyalty, and achieve- ments, which, if not entirely novel and origi- nal, were quite as much applauded as if they had been. And the major, returning thanks in a short, grim, determined sort of speech, begged to propose the ladies, which called up Captain Sloperton, by universal acclamation, to return thanks, who proved himself a doughty champion of the sex. And as, when that sort of thing once begins, nobody kno~vs where it will end, they might have gone on proposing toasts till nightfall, if Bagot, anx- ious for the steeple-chase, had not seized an opp6rtunity of adjourning to the scene of ac- tion. Thither, accordingly, the company repaired, and it was not long before the jockeys were ready. Then the major, com~laining of the want of a prize, begged Bagot to procure one of Orelins gloves, which he did, and hung it on a branch of the oak which officiated as winning-post, to incite the competitors to deeds of high emprise. Bagot had privately backed the Doctor, his own horse, pretty heavily, being readily taken up by Oates and the major. Win if you can,~ said he to Onslow. Thedragoon nodded. AllreadyV inquired Bagot, standing in front of the line of horsemen, handkerchief in hand. Yes ! answered all. Off! and away they went. Mr. Oates, determined to earn distinction, however short-lived, led off at score. Overthe ditch and rail he went at a tremendous pace, blundering somewhat at the latter, but right- ing on the other side; and he succeeded in overcoming the obstacle which Suckling al- ways found so insuperable, viz., the second fence. But his hopes of victory were swal- lowed up in the brook, in the midst of which he disappeared ~vith a great splash, and from which a pair of heels, with long spurs, were presently seen to emerge, subsequently re- placed by a helmet; and when he and his steed struggled through to the bank, the rest were hopelessly ahead. Victory was still doubtful, as they went over the low fences in the meadows. All kept well together; but Fane and Bruce, both large men, had little chance with their lighter opponents. At the rasper, the latter got a rattling fall, and, though he went on again like a good one, yet his chance was gone. Panes weight, too, began to tell as they came up the slope towards home, and he grad ually dropt behind. Drive down to the fence~ and see em come over, cried Begot, in great excitement, to Lady Lee; and accordingly the pony car- riage, with its fair occupants seated therein 60 61 LADY LEES WIDOWHOOD. s before, took up a position near the last ~ap in the race. Tindal and Onslow were very close together, oth lifting their horses along. The in ajor iw with despair that the Doctor was still ,oing strong, while he felt his own horse :sing ground. A ten-pound note if you let me win ! aid the major, forgetting he had a bet on be race, in his eagerness to avoid the shame .f defeat. The dragoon smiled and shook his head. he Doctor gained a few inches every stride. Ah, Lady Lee! why did you drive down to lie fence! For now the horses are nearing t, and the major, his soul wrapped in the truggle, does not look at the fair trio, nor nows they are there. But Onslow glances side at the carriage. Was it that momentary listraction from the business in hand that natched victory from him! Perhaps so; at nv rate the Doctor, taking the fence in ad- .ance, caught the rail with his hind legs, and ~ame down on the opposite side of the ditch m his head, throwing the dragoon beyond Am, and then rolling over him, horse and an mixed up for a moment in frightful con- usion, during which Onslow cast one glance it Orelia, and then lay still. In a second, Orelia was out of the carriage, and while Rosa and Lady Lee shrieked for aid cast herself on her knees, and, picking up the head of the prostrate and senseless dra- goon, placed it in her lap. It was a pleasant ~iight for Tindal, who, having snatched down the glove, emblem of victory, was now riding up, all flushed, to receive her congratulations. What is that she is saying to his defeated opponent! Why doesnt he speak to her! only one word ! Tindal reined sharply up, crumpled the glove in his hand, and cast it under his horses feet, then, pale as a grim statue, sat looking at the colonel. help was speedily brought, and the dra- goon carried away to the lodge, which was close at hand. And this accident,joined to a shower that was beginning to fall, dispersed the assembly. CHAPTER xxir. The carriages had driven off; the spectators on foot had followed, such provident and for- tunate ones as had brought umbrellas rejoic- ing underneath the shelter of them. The dragoons, unstrapping their long red cloaks from their saddles, had filed off the grounds and down the road with their officers. Only the major lingered behind to speak a word to Bagot. Taking him aside, he elutehed his arm with a trip like a vices. Did you see I lie muttered between his teeth, not looking at Bagot, but straight forward into vacancy Did you see!did you hear her! Bagot was frightened at his manner and the whiteness of his face. Poh ! said he, a girls fancy, if anything, nothing more; a bit of silly romance. The hero of it seems pretty well settled for the time, at any rate (glancing at Onslow as lie ~vas borne away towards the lodge), and that ought to be some comfort. She 11 forget him in a week, old fellow, and you shall cut in. And the disgrace of it, too, continued Tindal, more attentive to his own thoughts than to Bagots words cut out! not by ones equal, but by No, I never could forget that in any case never never Then forget her, my boy, said Bagot, and that, perhaps, after all, will be the simplest plan. I wish to Heaven I could, said Tindal. Ill tryI willI will ! (the words coming ground to fragments from between his teeth, while the grasp on Bagots arm had tightened to such an extent that he was rather anxious to be rid of it.) Walk a little slower, said Bagot, out of breath from being hurried along at something over five miles an hour. I 11 talk to her, and find how the land lies. Pluck up your spirits, and dont be cut up till you hear from me. 1 11 talk to her myself, and so shall Hester. When the major had taken his horse from the orderly who held him, and ridden hira off, Bagot, in fulfilment of his promise, went into the house to talk to Orelia. He found her in the drawing-room, alone her bonnet and walking-dress still on. Bagot put on a pleasant, propitiatory look as he accosted her, for he felt, in some slight degree, in awe of the imperious young lady. My dear Miss Payne, said Bagot, assum- ing a manner combining the paternal with the gallant, you 11 excuse an old fellow like me, who takes an interest in you, for saying that your conduct was a little what shall we call it! imprudent. No answer from Orelia, except a down- ward tendency of the corners of the mouth. The time is past, my dear girl, con- tinued Bagot, waxing confidentially affection- ate, for putting wayward young ladies under lock and key, or really I should almost feel inclined to recommend a few days soli- tary confinement in your case. What d ye think, now, of your own room, bread and water, and a volume of sermons for a week! and Bagot smiled in a way at once facetious and conciliatory, to show that he was not inclined to take a harsh view of the matter, but had plenty of indulgence for frailty, especially when its name was young woman. However, the only answer he got was an in- creased downward curve of the mouth and projection of the under lip. One thing is particularly fortunate, he 62 LADY LEES WIDOWHOOD. went on, and that is, that nobody observed Her ladyship did not come into the room i anything of the affair, except what I may her ordinary composed way, but with call our own family for Rosa Young we hurried step, while her usually pale face wa~ may consider one of us and one other slightly flushed. person, who certainly wont talk of it. I am sure, she said quickly I am Really, all things considered, I hardly regret sure that Orelia needs no talking to bring he~ its having happened, for we shall now be to a sense of her misconduct. My dear, what able to reason you out of your folly. could you mean? you must have been in- What folly? asked Orelia, turning fatuated. sharply round, with a steady glance of the At this address Orelia turned impatiently black eyes. away, with a slight stamp of her foot, and Why, what name would you have me walked towards the window. give to the extraordinary display of interest I am hurt, surprised, confounded ! con- you have made for this dragoon ? quoth tinued Lady Lee. Of all my acquaintance, Bagot, impatiently. You are about the the last whom I should have suspected of last young lady I should have suspected of forgetting her own self-respect was my friend such want of pride as to feel, far less to Orelia Payne. betray, a partiality for a low-born, low-bred Exactly what I ye just told her, said fellow like that. the colonel, nodding assent from the h~arth- Low-bred! cried the indignant Orelia. rug exactly. Have you no eyes or ears? Cant you see I in really at my wits end, her lady- in every look and word his infinite superiority ship went on; between surprise and die- to those whom chance has set over him? tress, I hardly know what to say. If you And I believe you are equally mistaken in would condescend, Orelia, to give me some calling him low-born. answer to repose in me some confidence Bless my soul, what extraordinary in- to say what could have induced you to lower fatuation !~ said the colonel. Why, deuce yourself so or, best of all, to say you are take it, I knew that girls were apt to take grieved and, ashamed then my course would absurd fancies, but I never did suspect you of be clearer. being one of that sort, or of being ca .able of Vouchsafing no answer, Orelia swept ma- persisting in such nonsense. I 11 admit the jestically round and marched out of the room, fellow s good-looking, and that he rides well; and up-stairs to her own chamber. From it now, will you have the goodness to tell me she did not again emerge that day. Dinner- if you think these sufficient reasons for a time came, but she did not appear. Fillett young lady of beauty, education, and good went to tell her they were waiting for her, expectations, to fall in love with him? and found the door locked; and the only reply I ought to have known, said Orelia, she got froia Orelia was, that she did at with great scorn, that you were incapable want dinner. Rosa Young was dreadfully dis- of perceiving his merits. To do that requires, quieted, and could nt eat anything for sym- possibly, some refinement of taste. pathy. She selected a plate of what she Ah, that s right, said Bagot, redden- thought Orelia would like best (if the reader lag, pitch into me! Well, take your own is anxious to know what, we will tell him ; way it s no business of mine but you 11 it was three slices of the breast of a young find out soon what other people think of it. I duck, with green pease and butter, and new only hope your conduct has nt quite lost you potatoes; which I mention just to show that the good opinion of a man who did admire my heroines dont live on air like most hero- you, and whose admiration was worth hay- ines, but are nourished by their victuals), ing. and, carrying it up-stairs herself, whispered You mean your friend, Major Tindal ? through the keyhole Reley, tis me, said Orelia. Rosa wont you open the ~1oor? I ye And if I did, returned Bagot, isnt brought you some dinner No answer. it worth while to think twi~e before losing Dear Reley, how can you distress me so? such a man? Good family, rood fellow, and Please open the door, like a dear good Re- heir of three thousand a-year gad, young ley. Still no answer. Reley (sob), you lady, I dont know what more you expect. make me so unhappy! (sob, sob); only And do you suppose that, with a these speak one word. Go away,and dont plague advantages, and the friendship of Colonel Lee me, was the reply from within; and Rosa, besides, he is worthy to be compared with sorely distressed, slowly carried heaplate down this unfortunate Mr. Onslow? stairs again, stopping now and then on her Oh, by Jove !muttered Bagot, she must way to wipe her eyes with her frock. be mad, you know stark, staring Hes- Julius, too, paid her a visit of condoleiice. ter, he continued, as Lady Lee entered, That any one should voluntarily go without come and talk to this headstrong young their dinner, and decline green pease such as lady I can make nothing of her. he had seen Rosa put on the plate, was in- 63 LADY LEES WIDOWHOOD. credible to him, except on the supposition that Orelia was very ill. So, by way of showing his interest in her health, he drummed and kicked at the door, and, afterwards going down on his hands and knees, tried to peep underneath, when it was suddenly opened, and Orelia, taking him up and kissing him, drew him inside. He staid with her some time, and after he came out, went and told Rosa that Miss Payne had been crying which Rosa was, on the whole, glad to hear, considering it a symptom that she was becom- ing more tractable. However, when she went up-stairs to bed, she did not find her friend much softened. Rosa crept to the chair, where she was seated in her dressing-gown, and put her arm round her neck. Very few people, I should hope, could have felt Rosas soft cheek rubbing against theirs, and heard her gentle whispers o~condolence, without returning the caress; but the patient was obdurate. The only sign of emotion was when Rosa whispered that he was not so much hurt as had at first been thought the doctor thought he would soon get over it, when there was a tumultuous heaving of the upper folds of the dressing- gown. So Rosa, finding her consolations re- jected, at length undressed sorrowfully and went te bed. She did not go to sleep, however, though she pretended to do so, but all the time two soft blue lines might be seen between the eye- lashes. Thus she continued to watch Orelia, till the latter suddenly and unexpectedly turned round and fixed her two piercing eyes on the pretended slumberer, who, thereupon, coloring up to the edge of her nightcap, feigned to sleep harder than ever, and even got up a little snore. Presently Orelia extin- guished the light, and Rosa thought she was going to bed, but instead of that she came suddenly to Rosas bedside, threw herself down there, and, clasping her round the neck, began to rain warm tears down upon her cheek. It would be something entirely new, in fe- male hydrostatics, if one woman could cry over another without meeting with a copious supply of fluid in return. Accordingly, there straightway ensued such a pluviose duet of sobbing, murmuring, sighing, and blowing of noses, that nobody hearing this meeting of the waters would have ventured into the room SONG. BY BARRY CORNWALL. SING a low song! A tender cradling measure, soft and low, Not sad, not long, But such as we remember long ago, When Time, now old, was flying Over the sunny seasons, bright and fleet, without a waterproof cloak and goloshes except, perhaps, a Deal boatman or a New- foundland dog. I dont mind talking to you about it, Rosa, whispered the stately penitent in a lull of the tempest, because you dont lec- ture me like a great schoA-girl, nor look hor- rified at me, as if I had committed a crime. And Im sorry I was sullen to you, for you re a good little thing. Yes, indeed, I m not a bad little thing, sobbed Rosa; and I d comfort you if I could. So Orelia, after a fitful, gusty fashion, pro- ceeded, after this little preamble, to unbosom herself half-confessing that she loved this bold dragoon ; that she was sure he was, as Rosa also must well know, a high-bred gentle- man in reality; that he loved her, as she firmly believed, in return, but was deterred from saying so by an honorable scruple of en- tangling her with one ostensibly so far below her station in society; that she expected, with his talents, he could not long remain in his obscure position, but ~vouId emerge again into the world in his proper character; when she should be proud to acknowledge him; but that, if this expectation proved false, she should still prefer him to all men, being con- vinced that ft was by no fault of his he had fallen so far below himself. But you must wait till he does appear in his own character, said Rosa, before you have anything more to say to him. And you 11 not offend [lester and the rest, will you, by showing any interest in him in the nieanwhile I and I 11 take care to let you know how he s getting on. On this point, however, Orelia was stub- born. She should neither unnecessarily show an interest in him, nor conceal it it was nothing to be ashamed of; if people thought it so, it was nothing to her, for she paid very little regard to what people might think of her. And some day you 11 be married to him, perhaps, said Rosa. Orelia Onslow ! 0, 0! Heavens, said Rosa, to think I should have a friend whose initials will be like a pair of spectacles ! This made Orelia laugh and, relieved by her confessionJ she now kissed Rosa, wished her good-aig~mt~ and withdrew to her own bed. And the red rose was lying Amongst a crowd of flowers all too sweet. Sing oer the bier! The bell is swinging in the time-worn tower; He s gone who late was here, As fresh as manhood in its lustiest hour. A song to each brief season, Winter and shining summer, doth belong, For some sweet human reason Oer cradle or the coffin still a song. On the 15th inst., at St. Mathews, Brixton, by the Rev. , assisted by the Rev. , and the Rev. , the Rev. , of St. Peters College, Cambridge, chaplain of , to Eliza, youngest daughter of. 64 HINTS AS TO MANURES.MIRAGE IN AUSTRALIA, ETC. HINTS AS TO MANURES. Hoofs, hairs, feath- MARRIAGES UNDER DIFFICULTIES. The cere- ers, skins, wool, contain more than 60 per cent. mony of marriage seenis to be getting more of carbon, and from 13 to 18 per cent. of nitro- difficult than it used to be ; for we seldom find gen, besides sulphur, salts of lime, of soda, and of that it can be performed in these days by one magnesia. These snbstances hold, therefore, the clergyman, without his being assisted by first rank, as it were, amongst manures; and as another. A recent advertisement seems to show a long time is required for their decomposition, a rather unusual amount of difficulty in tying a their action may often last for seven or eight nuptial knot, which might have beeis a porters years. They yield excellent results, especially knot, to judge by the quantity of parson-power when made into a compost for potatoes, turnips, employed in bearing the weight of it. We give hops, hay, and generally on meadow-land. Hairs the advertisement merely omitting the names spread upon meadows are said to augment the though we shall perhaps offend the parties by crop threefold; and the Chinese, we are told, suppressing what they have been so ready to are so well aware of the very great value of that publish. manure, that they carefully collect the hair every time they have their heads shaved and the operation is performed every fortnight and sell it to their farmers. Now, the crop of hair which every individual leaves at the hair- cutters yearly, amounts to about half a pound; reckoning, therefore, at 13,000,000, the number of individuals who in Great Britain and Ireland are undergoing the process of shaving and hair- cutting, we have a productiop of about 3000 tons of hair. that is, of manure of the most valuable kind since it represents, at least, 160,000 tons of ordinary farm-yard manure which might be collected almost without trouble, but which, on the contrary, such is our carelessness or in- dolence in these matters, is, I believe, invariably swept away in our streets or sewerj and utterly wasted. Farmers Manual of Agricultural (~hem.istry. TuE MIRAGE IN AUSTRALIA. That curious optical illusion, the mirage, may be occasionally witnessed on the plains of Australia. I first beheld this singular phenomenon one hot sum- mer s morning ; the sun was shining, the wind hushed, and the sky cloudless, when the plain I was journeying over appeared suddenly trans- formed into lakes of glistening silver. I rubbed my dazzled eyes, gazed again and again, stamped the ground, and peered at the sky, in order to be convinced that I was indeed on terra firma, so beautiful, so strange, and so fairy-like, was the prospect. The idea of a mirage did not im- mediately cross my mind, as I had neither read nor heard that the phenomenon had been wit- nessed in the Australian colonies. Travellers in the East had recorded that mirages in those parts have all the appearance of water; those I witnessed in the Australian colonies had a some- what different aspect; for though they reflected images as distinctly as water, they looked so hard and metallic, that no one would take them for that element. I could learn nothing satis- factory from the colonists as to when or under what circumstances these illusions take place. I myself have seen them only when the weather was hot and calm; they are probably induced by the mass of atmosphere on the plains remain- ing at rest, while the stratum in contact with the soil becomes heated by caloric disengagedfrom the parched earth. I remember, on one occasion, a breeze sprang up, when the silvery scene presented a series of undulations, and then suddenly van- ished. .dustralia as it is. Here are three Reverend Gentlemen engaged in the task of uniting in matrimony a solitary couple a fact that offers to the ill-natured the temptation to remark that the young lady must have been rather difficult to get off, since it took no less than three clergymen to marry her. As the price of advertisements is about to be reduced, we shall expect to see the names of the clerks, sextons, beadles, pew-openers, and others, included as assisting the parson by whom the marriage ceremony is performed; and indeed there are frequently so many names brought in to the announcement of a marriage, that we often give the lady to one of the two or thee Reverends concerned in the affair, instead of the bride- groom. We constantly experience great difficulty in sorting the couple really married; and when the underlings are dragged in, as we expect they speedily will be, we shall now and then, by mis- take, find ourselves congratulating a young lady of our acquaintance on her marriage with a beadle, or some other party named in the nuptial announcement. Punch. SOUND SENSE IN SINGING. Professor Aytoun, in one of his lectures the other day, alluding to the circumstance that Italian was the language exclusively used by modern fashionable Syrens to sing in, appeared to hint that English lyrical poetry might rather advantageously be substi- tuted. The suggestion provoked a genteel smile from the professors titulary and ornamental audience. Of course. In English song more is meant than meets the ear; in Italian present Italian precisely nothing more than just that. Nothing else is meant; nor is it desirable, to the Syrens in point, that there should be meant any- thing else. The end in view is simply to give the greatest possible effect to the Syrens notes every adjunct to her singing is accordingly ob- jectionable that in the least tends to distract attention from the mere tone of her voice. The less sense, therefore, in proportion to the sound, the better; not to think even of the expression of earnest feeling or emotion, to which, besides, all well-instructed young females of the superior class ought, of course, to be superior. Punch..

LITTELLS LIVING AGE. No. 477. 9 JULY, 1853. CONTENTS. 1. Manners and Miseries of the French Clergy Frasers Magazine, . . 67 2. American Clocks for China ChanThers Journal, . . 77 3. Guarded Secrets . . 78 4. Traits of the Trappists Gentlemans Magazine,. 81 5. The Turkish Question United & rvice Magazine, 88, 6. The Prince of Madagascar Part II. 97 7. Lady Lees Widowhood Blackwoods Magazine, 107 8. Poems of Goethe Examiner 123 POETRY: The Shadow on the Way, 65; Kilimandjaro, 66; Choosing a Field Flower, 128. SnoRT ARTICLES: Famine in India, 87; Choice of Evils, 96; The Waists of American Ladies, 122; English Law on Railway Deaths Dog out of Place, 125; De Quinceys Autobiographic Sketches Celestial Love, 126; Penny Postage to the Colonies, 127; Tween Decks of the Frozen Ships, 128. Nzw Booxs, 87. From Blackwoods Magazine. THE SHADOW ON THE WAY. The angel of the Lord stood in the way. LIGaTED by daylight mild and fair, I see my path a little way; There is no fairy brightness there, But the blue skies of quiet day The morning light, the common air, Are over it aiway. I have my griefs. I have my fears Share of the storms that come to all; But the strong arm of love upbears My heart, whateer befall. My soul is prodigal of hope, My life doth sit and watch intent To see some special blessings drop, Whence all good things are sent. Yea, of such wishes, giantstrong, Some one or two lay hands on me; Hard would the combat be, and long, My heart from their close grasp to free, Even though Gods voice, the strife among, Sent its last call to me. 0 quiet days, 0 gentle life, 0 love, most dear a~nd kind of all! Mercy and hope, and blessings rife, Make shadows slow to fall. Yet sometimes clouds, a frowning line, Will steal across those kindly skies; And now and then some tears of mine, Under this fair and soft sunshine, Make rainbows to mine eyes. I see my path a little way, Unburdene~ upon any hand, And smiles of Aprils coming day Steal, gleaming, oer the land. What is it, then, amid this light, That stands upon the road afar, CCCCLXXVJI. LIVING AGE. VOL. II. 5 Both in the day and through the night, Outwatching every star? A thing of dimness and of shade, The hidden face I cannot see But only feel my steps waylaid, And know he waits for me. Nor voice, nor speech, nor any sound, Comes through this softening air of spring, No forward footsteps oer the ground On the still echoes ring. No haste 0 heaven! faint grows my heart, To see the calm of this sure fate; We haste on our uncertain part, But Gods fixed will can wait. Morning and night, and joyous noon, Unchanging here his place he holds, Hiding his form from sun and moon, In these great mantle folds. My thoughts have failed in every wile No choice is mine; faint as I may, I cannot scape one lingering mile, I must not bate one timid day; My path is on, till, frown or smile, I meet him in the way. Death has neer crossed our household gate, Nor ever once come near to me Methinks it were a happy fate To know him first, if this were he. While yet no vacant place is here, While yet no hope is hopeless grown, Shadow, if this be thou, appear In thine own shape I will not fear To go with thee alone. O ye who know his mien of old, Who have looked in, with bated breath, Within his mantles solemn fold! Tell me if this be Death? KILIMANDJARO. I see thee in the evening glooms, 0 shadow of my onward way! Clouding these quiet household rooms Through many an undawned day; There is weeping on some dearest faces, Some hearts are sad and silent grown And out from these familiar places Myself am past and gone. Yet are my thoughts not always thus; I see thee in another time, Thy veiled hands full of flowers for us, Gifts of lifes flush and prime. Sometimes, while one may draw a breath, An angel, gliding on the way, Holds back thy veil, and, lo! beneath Thou art not grief, thou art not death, But in thy mantle gray Post only shroud and hoard awhile Such gifts of price, most sweet and bright, As make thee fain to veil with guile, Through many a lingering day and night, The beaming of the conscious smile With which thy face is bright. O shadowed form! 0 hidden face! Thou makst no haste approaching me, But day by day, with steady pace, Nearer I draw to thee And whatsoeer thy name may be, Whithersoeer thy coming tends Or if my pathway passes thee, Or at thy fated station ends Thou knowst what t is thou bringst to me, I know who t is that sends. M. W. 0. KILIMANDJARG.~ IBm to thee, Monarch of African mountains! Remote, inaccessible, silent, and lone, Who, from the heart of the tropical fervors, Liftest to heaven thine alien snows, Feeding forever the fountains that make thee Father of Nile and Creator of Egypt! II. The years of the world are engraved on thy fore- head Times morning blushed red on thy first-fallen snows; Yet lost in the wilderness, nameless, unnoted, Of man unbeholden, thou wert not till now. Knowledge alone is the being of Nature, Giving a soul to her manifold features, Lighting through paths of the primitive darkness The footsteps of Truth and the vision of Song. Knowledge has horn thee anew to Creation, And long-baffled Time at thy baptism rejoices. Take, then, a name, and be filled with existence, Yea, be exultant in sovereign glory, While from the hand of the wandering poet Props the first garland of song at thy feet. ~ Kilimandjaro is the name of the great snow- mountain discovered in Central Africa in 1850, by Dr. Krapf. It is in 1st. 30 5., and is supposed by geographers to contain the sources of the White Nile. III. Floating alone on the flood of thy making, Through Africas mystery, silence, and fire, Lo! in my palm, like the Eastern enchanter, I dip from the waters a magical mirror, And thou art revealed to my purified vision. I see thee supreme, in the midst of thy co-mates, Stauding alone twixt the Earth and the Heavens, Heir of the Sunset and Herald of Morn. Upheld on thy knees and thy shoulders of granite, Zone above zone, like the steps of a temple, The climates of Earth are displayed, as an index Giving the scope of the Book of Creation. There, in the gorges that widen, descending From cloud and from cold into summer eternal, Gather the threads of the ice-gendered fountains, Gather to riotous torrents of crystal, And giving each shelvy recess where they dally The blooms of the North and its evergreen turfage, Leap to the land of the lion and lotus There, in the wondering airs of the Tropics, Shivers the aspen, still dreaming of cold There stretches the oak, from the loftiest ledges, His arms to the far-away lands of his brothers, And the pine-tree looks down on his rival, the palm. Iv. Bathed in the tenderest purple of distance, Tinted and shadowed by pencils of air, Thy battlements hang oer the slopes and the forests, Seats of the gods in the limitless ether, Looming sublimely aloft and afar. Above them, like folds of imperial ermine, Sparkle the snow-fields that furrow thy fore- head Desolate realms, inaccessible, silent, Chasms and caverns, where Day is a stranger, Garners where storeth his treasures the Thunder, The Lightning his falohion, his arrows the hail. V. Sovereign mountain! thy brothers give wel- come They, the baptized and the crown6dof ages, Watch-towers of Continents, altars of Earth Welcome thee now to their mighty assembly. Mont Blanc, in the roar of his mad avalanches, Hails thy accession ; superb Orizava, Belted with beech and ensandaled with palm Chimborazo, the lord of the regions of noonday, Mingle their sounds, in magnificent chorus, With greeting august from the pillars of Heaven, Who in the urns of the Indian Ganges, Filter the snows of their sacred dominions, Unmarked with a footprint, unseen but of God. VI. Lo! unto each is the seal of his lordship, Nor questioned the right that his majesty giveth Each in his awful supremacy forces Worship and reverence, wonder and joy. Absolute all, yet in dignity varied, None has a claim to the honors of story, Or the superior splendors of song, Greater than thou, in thy mystery mantled Thou, the sole Monarch of African mountains, Father of Nile and Creator of Egypt! BAYAUD TAvaoR. On the White Nile, Central Africa, Jan. 1852. 66 MANNERS AND MISERIES OF THE FRENCH CLERGY. From Frasers Magazine. MANNERS AND MISERIES OF THE FRENCH CLERGY. ~ SOMEBODY has rather irreverently said of the Roman Breviary, that it must be vastly pleasant to have ones Prayer-Book and ones Arabian Nights all in the same volume. A like agreeable combination may he found in the Abb6 R~aumes Guide du Jeune Pr& re. it is a mixture of Pastoral Care with Hints on Etiquette of George Herbert or Bishop Wilson with Lord Chesterfield. M. Dubois, too, although he does not profess to be a master of manners so distinctly as his brother abb6. finds it expedient to descend pretty often from lofty lessons of ecclesiastical zeal to the humbler details of behavior in society; and both the works which we have named at the beginning of our article throw a very curious light on the character and position of the class for whose instruction they are meant. The writers are sensible men, not- withstanding the strangeness of the stuff which circumstances have obliged them to indite. M. Dubois, a priest of five-and-twenty years standing, and now an honorary canon of Coutances, has had large and various experi- ence (p. 6); M. R~aunme appears to have seen much of clerical life us it exists within the influence of the capital. They write for their brethren; M. Dubois expresses an expecta- tion that his book will not find readers among the laity, even of his own communion (p. 7); and no doubt, ~vhen Fraser reaches Coutanees and Mitry, both authors will wonder to find themselves so famous. The evidence of these little volumes, therefore, may be received as a faithful picture of the French priest equally unlike though it be to the bright ideal of Littleinore and to the monstrous imagina- tions of Exeter Hall. The most surprising thing is, that it should be thought necessary to give at all such di- rectiQns as those which compose a large part of the books before us; or, at least, to print them for the use of grown-up ecelesiastics. What a very superfluous person would any one be considered who should set himself to teach English clergymen personal cleanliness, or civility, or the Turveydropian science of Deportment, or how to eat or to give dinners, or ho~v to write a letter, and how to fold and seal it Yet all these matters are most solemnly treated by our abbds, and it is 1. Pratique du Zdo Eccl6siastique ; ou, Moyens Infaillibles pour tout Prdtre do rendro son Mm- istere fructuoux. Par M. lAbb~ II. Dubois. Paris : Lecoifre. 1852. 2. Le Guide du Jeune Prdtre dans une Partie do sa Vie Privde et dana sea differents Rapporta avee le Monde. Second Edition. Par M. lAbbe A. Reaume, Cure de Mitry. Paris: Lecoifre. 1550. abundantly clear that their instructions are sorely needed. Sydney Smith, girding at the English universities, in the character of an Edinburgh reviewer, says that our young lords and gentry are educated as if they were to be country curates. The reverse would have been a truer view of the matter that the educa- tion of the English clergy in his day ~vas very little difl~rent from that of the laity. Twenty years ago the special theological education of. young men at Cambridge consisted in sit- ting twenty times, for three quarters of an hour at a time, while a very amiable-looking old gentleman read select passages from Pear- son on the C~rced, interspersing here, and there some observations of his own. The professor read extremely well ; but the Pearson was unheeded, because it could be read at home, and the good mans own additions ~vere in- volved in the fate of the text. The defects of such a system are palpable enough, and we rejoice to know that at both the old univer- sities, through the labors of an ample staff of active professors, and with the stimulus~ of new examinations, the theological students of the present day enjoy advantages unknown to their elders. But yet it must not be forgotten that there are dangers on the other side also. Where much is done for us, there is a temp- tation to do little for ourselves; the knowl- edge which is picked up from lectures and got up for examination is apt to be macre cram, without breadth, or depth, or substance. Now this appears to be very much the case with the education of the Romish clergy in general. They get up their text-books, with verses of Scripture, scraps from the fathers and later divines all carefully twisted so as to favor the views of their church; but it is without any acquaintance with the spirit of the books from which the extracts are taken; and unless any argument into which they may be drawn take the particular line for which they have been prepared, they are in a condition much like that of Ducrow, the equestrian, when he declined an invitation to join a certain hunt, on the ground that he never rode off his saw-dust. This may he il- lustrated by a story which Dr. Wolff tells of an encounter with a Latin missionary in Syria. The two got into controversy, and the Prot- estant polemic soon became aware that his opponent was walking in the steps prescribed by some book with which he had himself been familiar while an inmate of a Roman Catho- lic seminary. So lie humored the thing, and said precisely what was set down for the part of the heretic who was to be confuted. The other, with visible delight, pushed him with argument after argument from the part of the Catholic disputant; but when at last the heretic was supposed to be hopelessly pinned up in a corner, and the conqueror was rush~. ing forward to give him the final blow, the 67 68 MANNERS AND MISERIES OF TIlE FRENCH CLERGY. doctor, instead of receiving it, burst into a loud laugh, and exclaimed, Ah, brother, I have read Father So-and-So, as well as you ! But, besides its defectiveness as a profes- sional education, the training of French sem- inaries has the great defect of being merely professional. It affords nothing answering to the out-of-lecture influence which the life and intercourse of our own universities so bene- ficially exercise on their members. And un- happily, as we shall see hereafter, the French clergy are commonly taken from such a class of society that they bring nothing with them from home to supply this want, even in the smallest degree. The consequence is, that a young priest, when started in a parish, is in need of such instructions as those given by our authors, and of these ~ve shall now pro- duce some specimens. Cleanliness, according to the English prov- erb, is next to godliness; but M. R~aume feels himself obliged to give it precedence. First, he discusses the spirit of order in gen- eral, and then comes a chapter, De la Pro- prieh~. Men of the world, he says, are gen- erally clean, and, like a schoolboy in his theme, he illustrates by examples of the virtue and its opposite Napoleon and Louis XLV. for good; slovenly Jean Jacques Rousseau for evil. Once on a time, indeed, filthiness was privileged to style itself humility, self-denial and contempt for earthly things; but now-a- days nobody will look at it in any such light. Nothing more repulsive in this nineteenth century than an unkempt and nasty priest. Wherefore, my reverend young brother (is the burden of the abb~s exhortation), do you keep yQmlr hair in good order, neither too long nor too short; and superstitious as such care may seem comb and brush it every day (p. 12). Wash nil such parts of your body as are exposed without a covering all, I say, mark that; for what good would it do you to have clean hands, if your nails are dirty, as is very common; if your neck, your ears, or some part of your face, bear the marks of your negligence I Whether the parts which are not exposed need ever make acquaintance with soap and water, our au- thor does not inform us. Clean your teeth (continues the abbm~); a soft brush, some bark, charcoal, and sugar, mixed in equal quanti- ties, are all that you need, and these dont cost much. And, finally (to complete this subject by a direction given in another place), shave once in two days (p. 148). We pass over the directions as to study, only noting two matters connected with Eng- lish literature; first, that M. R~aume recom- mends Cobbets History of the Reformation a book which, we imagine, no English Ro- manist would venture to quote, but which is the standard authority on the subject among I foreign Romanists ;* and, secondly, that he thinks it necessary to warn his readers against mistaking the Waverley novels for authentic history (p. 94). After this follow two chapters on polite- ness, which appears to be something less than universal among the modern French clergy; and then comes one, Dc Maintien. Iii general, says the Reverend Turveydrop, you ought to keep your body upright, your head straight, the eyes modestly cast down, and to look straight before you (p. 133). But on the management of the eyes M. Du- bois is more explicit You must not throw your eyes this way and that way, with a curious and distracted air, nor fix them on persons whom you meet, especially if of the other sex. Ought they, then, to be kept downcast, in such a way as to be almost shut? No; that would seem rtfected. The wisest rule that can be given is, to look habitually towards the ground, but four or five steps in advance of you. If, from time to time, it should be thought proper to raise the eyes, you umust then try to give them that expression of gentleness, good- ness, candor, and modesty, which pleases every- body, because it is like the reflection of the se- renity of a well-regulated mind. pp. 32, 33. This is part of the abbCs directions for impressing a new parish with the notion that a saintly priest has fallen to its lot; and there is much more in the same style. It does not seem to have occurred to M. Dubois that it might be better to begin with the reg- ulation of the mind, and to leave it to find its own expression through the eyes. But we return to M. R6aume. hands, says he, are difficult things to man- age, and are very apt to get into odd posi- tions. When standing drop them by your sides, or cross them in such a way that the right may support the left at the height of your belt. You may also cross your arms if you remain long standing. To put the hands behind your back is familiar; to thrust them into your cassock, on your stomach, is not over decent. Above all things avoid putting them into your pockets, holding them on your head, or continually carrying them to your face; neither must you rub them too viva- ciously. Next, of sitting. Our bourgeois man- ners,, it seems, have now sanctioned the practice of crossing the legs, which was for- mnerly proscribed; yet it may be well not to make too much use of the privilege acquired by so many revolutions. Dont lean too far For instance, it is implicitly relied on by the Abbd Rohrbacher, in the lumbering and ignorant compilation which the ultra-montane party in France now regards as the Church-history super- seding excellent old Fleury. MANNERS AND MISERIES OF THE FRENCH CLERGY. 69 forward on a chair; for you may lose your do well to be on your guard you should for balance, and a capsize might raise a malicious the present seem not to have heard of it. laugh at your reverences expense. When Some incumbents, it appears (very much to any one hands you anything, get up and make the surprise of Euglish clergymen, we should a slight bow. suppose), are apt to be jealous if their curates The use of the pocket-handkerchief is elab- visit the parishioners. If the curate is seca orately discussed; but we dare not venture even to enter a house, the senior cannot sleep into the detail~ (pp. 1345). The evils of for fear of parish mutinies, and all sorts Ok excessive snuff-taking are then illustrated, underininings and explosions. It appears to somewhat after the manner of La~vs Serious be taken for granted that in every parish there tall, by the misdeeds of a personage who is is a party eager to enlist the curate against styled Salvian. Snuff, it appears, was for- his superior; and that the accession of the merly inadmissible in the pulpit, but now not curate to such a league is not regarded as even the altar-cloths are safe from it. anything unnatural or unlikely. And then Chapter xxiii. treats of walking. On this there are personal jealousies. The incumbent subject M. Dubois, too, has much to say, and. may not like to let his curate preach, tbr fear it is quite curious how entirely anxiety for the of being out-preached by him; and this the videri seems to thrust out all thoughts about curate will probably not relish. Whereas, the esse. Chapter xxiv. relates to dress; how says M. Dubois (p. 122), a well-conditioned to button the cassock; how much shirt-coihir priest will rejoice in granting the humble and ought to be shown ; what constitutes full- modest request of his subordinate, that he, dress, and what half-dress; whether trousers too, may now and then be allowed to wag may or may not be worn; the casuistry of his head in the pulpit, and will even re- boots, half-boots, and shoes; the size of hats, joice if he preaches effectively. Some incum- and how to wear them; how to choose a bents, again, keep all tIme massing to thema- clerical stick, and how to carry it with den- selves. Sunday after Sunday, there they are cal propriety, at the altar; or, if not they, the substjtute We then enter on a new division of the is not the curate, but a stranger (p. 123). work, which treats of the priests relations to The parish cannot but have its gossip about various sorts of people. First of these is the these things. TIme curate is disparaged; peo. relation between incumbent and curate.* But ple get about him, and ask hima why he bears on this subject we pass to the fuller and more such slights; and he, poor fellow, unless curious details which are given by Al. Dubois, endued with more than usual discretion, will although how ecclesiastical zeal can be let out the secrets of the parsonmige, and fall said to enter into such matters as those which into the hands of the malcontent faction. we are about to mention is more than we are But there is a yet worse misery than this able to understand. the jealousy as to confession. The young, In France; the curate is not chosen by the and tender curate may be preferred to the incumbent, but is appointed by the bishop; elderly, stiffened, high-and-dry incumbent; and this may sound very delightful to people and this is gall and wormwood to an ill-con- who take the ideal view of ecclesiastical sub- ditioned priest. Lie peeps about, and tries mission; but the working is anything rather by all manner of little vexatious to annoy the than delightful. The incmmmbent feels that popular youth. Sometimes he finds fault the curate is inflicted on him ; and this is of with his confessional morality; it is either itself enough to establish a jealousy, which is too strict or too loose. A penitent whommi the not held in check by any gentlemanly feeling senior considered unfit for tIme sacrament is oa qither side. As soon a~ the name of a new seen sneaking to the curate; and thereupon curate is heard, the incumbent tries to find down falls a teumpest a hail of biting epi- out his previous history, and all thmit he hears grains, and even of severe reproaches. Then is turned into matter of suspicion ; so that, a close watch is kept to see which of the in- by the time the youth reaches the parsonage, cumbents penitents desert to the curate; and the seniors face has gathered quite a wolfish woful mischief may ensue, not only between expression. But, my good frietmd, says M. the clerical pair, but to the burdened hearts Dubois, with his usual prudent morality, which the senior ~vill not allow to discharge you ought to look kind and civil, even if themselves into the more sympathizing bosom ~ou have reason to feel otherwise. Perhaps of his assistant. it may [lot be true that in the last parish There is a class and by no means a small your curate got up a cabal against his supe- one of priests, who are known as curates nor. But, even if he didalthoughyon will scourges. Whenever one of these worthies is in want of help, all the young clergy and ~ We need hardly remind our readers that the candidates for ordination tremble lest they French use of the words cmmr~ and vicaire are ex- should be assigned to him ; they go down on aetly the reverse of our own ; vicar meaning with us the substitute of the impropriator, while caire their knees to the bishop, or to the head of means the substitute of the cuvi, or incumbent, the seminary, entreating that they may not 70 MANNERS AND MISERIES OF THE FRENCH CLERGY. be made over to the ecclesiastical Legree. Other incumbents, again, are not brutal, but silent and ungenial, so that the poor curate never knows whether he is in favor or in dis- grace. Or the incumbent will affect mystery, and keep the curate in the dark as to all that goes on; and the youth unless, as before, of extraordinary discretionas he receives no confidence, will fish out what he can for himself, and publish it all over the parish. The jolly priest is another troublesome variety, lie has a turn for dining out four or five days in the week, and, for the appear- ance of serious company, likes to take his curate with him. The senior is in rude health, can eat and drink without limit, and be never the worse ; the junior is quiet bookish, devout, finds a great dinner bad for his health, and yet worse for his prayers and his studies. What is to be done between such an ill-assorted couple Then there are squabbles as to fees. The senior may be stingythe junior, greedy; but the abbd, like a kind soul as he is, ad- vises an incumbent if he find that, after all charges, and after allowing a fair share fir charity, he has a good round sum over at the years end to give his ill-paid assistant a handsome present, rather than to put it all up in a bag. Apropos of that same bag, let us say a word on the subject of clerical avarice. Experience bears out the conclusion of common sense, that by cutting down the incomes of the clergy to a low rate, you will not do away vith the temptation to secularity, but will only transfer it to a lower class of persons. Still, it might be supposed that the French clergy being without wives or children to provide for, and coming from such a class that they cannot have any apprehension of seeing their near relations sink below their position in society would not be likely to hoard up savings from their slender income. But Messieurs Rdaume and Dubois prove that the case is far otherwise; their warnings a~ainst avarice are repeated with a frequency and earnestness which show that, in the ab- sence of more reasonable mdtives for savinr, the French clergy are too often possessed by the diseased love of mere accumulation, after the fashion of Dancer or Mathiurin Carr6. There reuaains a great and serious cause of disagreement the board-and-lodging ques- tion. The curate is quartered in the parson- age an arrangement which sounds very natural and proper, especially as both the clergymen are unniarried. But let us hear M. Dubois as to the practical effects of this It is certain that, in general, the most com- modious and pleasantest room, after the incum- bents own, ought to be assigned to the curate. The only exceptions which we can admit are in favor of the incumbents aged father or mother, if they should happen to live with him. But if the room in question be given to a more distant relation, especially if this relation be of no very distiiiguished condition, and unused to any great delicacy of treatnient in respect of lodging, is not this to expose oneself to deserved reproaches on the part of the curate? & c., & c. As for the diet, it is painful to speak of such a thing ; but, nevertheless, it is too true that there are some incumbents so parsimonious that they hardly allow their curates so much as is strictly necessary. Perhaps the curates may have been delicately brought up ; perhaps they need some substantial articles of food for their support; their health may be weak, their stomach delicate no matter to the incumbents. Their cookery has always been what it is ; never will they make the slightest change in it for the sake of any curate in Christendom. These young priests, they will say, are nice and sensual beyond all conception; they know mortification only in theory, and turn away their heads when it comes to a question of practice. Why, after all, shall the curate be harder to please than the incumbent? Why? retorts M. Dubois Because this incumbent, by our supposition, is himself not so hard to please as he ought to be. One word on the disgusting want of cleanliness which is sometimes to be noticed in the cookery of certain parsonages. Why entrust the prepara- tion of the food to that person of threescore and more than ten? She does what she can, doubt- less; but, unhappily, she cannot be clean. But it is my motherit is my sisterit is my old aunt I No matter ; all these relatives are not in their place at least, as cooks. But they still do their work well ; I find no fault with their service. Perhaps not ; but is your curate of the same mind ? He is too vir- tuous to tell you ; but if you knew the violence lie does himself at every meal, and the strong desire which he feels to be connected with a supe- rior who would no~ put him to so severe a trial, you would probably feel how grievous it is to make all your curates successively discontented, and for such a cause to check the operations of their zeal. pp. 182135. When there are two or more curates, the evil becomes complicated. If the priest give more of his society to one than to another, then jealousies spring up among the curates themselves, and all but the favored one bear a bitter grudge against their superior. (pp. 138, 139.) But the picture has another side: Rela- tions of the curate to the incumbent (p. 140). The youth is supposed to have read the preceding chapter, and to triumph in the thought that the iniquities of his own par- ticular incumbent have been put into black and white by the penetrating Dubois. Wait a little, my young friend, cries the ahb~ I have a word for you too. But as the purport 71 MANNERS AND MISERIES OF THE FRENCh CLERGY. of this may be guessed from the extracts which we have already given, and is iudeed nothing more than the old lesson Do as you would be done by we pass on to a fresher subject the Housai~xxpxa. One argument for the celibacy of the clergy is, that by it they are set free from the temporal cares which press on husbands and fathers; but the details given in these books show that this result is by no means a neces- sary consequence. In short, the housekeeper is the grand pest of priestly life. Instead of beneficially connecting the priest with society instead of aiding him to carry out his mis- sion of mediating between the richer and the poorer classes, like the wife of the clergyman in other communions she appears to be purely a source of trouble and mischief. Both our abb~s complain of the tendency of house- keepers to gossip, to rudeness and insolence, to vulgar pride, to compromising the charac- ter of the priest by misbehavior. Very often the housekeeper is such a dragon, that the parishioners dare not go near the parsonage. Very often she holds the master under a tyr- anny which the unhappy man feels every moment of his life, yet has not the vigor to shake off. Many of the clergy, we find, are in the habit of taking their meals in the kitchen, with the servant seated opposite to them. If the curate or a neighboring priest happen to be of the party, Perpetua is sure to overhear things which ought not to be di- vulged to laic ears, and she forthwith makes herself busy in raising all the mischief she can out of them; for (says the experienced Dubois) nothing gives a parsonage servant such delight as to let her gossips suppose that she is in all her masters professional secrets. (p. 186.) But here M. Rdaume becomes the more im- portant authority. After alluding to the Jacinta of Gil Bias as a type of the servant- mistress, he thus goes on: In an instant she has penetrated her employer, she has found out all his weak points, and, be- fore long, she will have succeeded in bending him to her ways of acting and thinking. Many people detest her, but she will know well how to get vengeance of them. She is acquainted with everything that takes place, with everything that is thought, in the parish. She has her little friendships, her confidantes, her newsmongers, and she keeps M. le Curd well informed as to all the news, and even as to what is thought of him. Some (she represents) always speak of her mas- ter with esteem and tenderness, consider that he preaches admirably, and perhaps better than any one else in the world ; these are her friends. With regard to her enemies she takes a different line ; by the help of reticences, of half-words, and (when necessary) of sighs, she excites her masters curiosity, and finds the means of vent- ing her gall. If it penetrate, she presses on and urges him to vengeance, especially if those against whom she has pointed her batteries be females. M. le Curd is lost in the estimation of his par- ishioners if he do not break with, or reform, Such-a-one ; and he foolishly credulous gets into a passion, explodes, and does not see that he becomes the laughing-stock of the public which does not always stop at lau~hing. p. 197. These ladies are usually very rapacious, and their presumption goes beyond all bounds. M. R~aume knew one who used to go into the church at dinner-time, and scold the peni- tents at the confessional for detaining his rev- erence from his meal. Another, when some parishioners were very desirous to see her master, asked them what difference it could make whether they saw M. le Cur6 or herself. And when there is a curate, the housekeeper makes it her especial business to bring him into contempt, and to exasperate his superior against him. (p. 199.) It is bad enough anywhere even in quiet Coutances, as M. Dubois shows, to be tied to the misery of a housekeeper; but in the neighborhood of Paris, says M. R6aume, it is infinitely worse. There the housekeepers are mere mercenaries, without an atom of piety, attachment, or zeal for the credit of the house. And then the fearful expense! . . So, by way of escaping from a part at least of these troubles, some clergymen instal their near relations in the parsonage kitchen. But, exclaims the abbe, a perfect sister or niece! ! ! Rara est avis ista! (p. 201.) The kinswomen take it upon themselves to treat M. le Cur6 as their kinsman not ac- cording to his official dignity. Here is a pretty sketch of one : Mademoiselle Lucille was formerly apprenticed to a dressmaker, but since she entered her broth- ers establishment she has mounted a bonnet. This is what her brother calls dignity. From that moment her small vanity persuades her that she has become a person of importance, and she makes all who come near her aware of it. In speaking of the villagers, she calls them Those coarse rustics her words are caught up, and cannot be forgiven. The brother is a sort of machine, which she moves and directs as she pleases. In order to save herself the trouble of cleaning, she keeps the parlor-door locked, and does not open it except on solemn occasions ; it is in the kitchen that the curd receives visits, and discusses parish affairs ; and his sister is so much identified with these, that she takes the largest share in them, and speaks in the plural WE are not the people to sing mass for such a price as that! La other respects, Lucille has entire liberty, and uses it without any reserve; she pokes everywhere about the village, meddles in all its business, goes to fairs and markets, keeps up certain connexions in short, she scandalizes by the levity of her conduct no less than by her thoughtless chatter. The curate 72 MANNERS AND MISERIES OF THE FRENCH CLERGY. responsible for himself and his dependants, in no the books themselves, and proceed to the leng time has to pay for his weakness by losing parish-clerk-and-singers misery. Our own the esteem and affection of his whole parish. clerks are rather apt to be in arrear of the R& iume, p. 202. age; but the murapsirnus of their French brethren has a sway very difihrent from any- Valerius, seeing the unhappy result of this thing known on this side of the Channel. case, establishes in his parsonage, not a sister, In addition to the schoolmaster (says M. but a niece; her he thinks he can keep in order, and in her proper place. But very Rdaume), the cur6 has also clerks servants her childish attached to his church ; and this part of his soon the young Agnes displays flock is not the easiest to manage, especially in tastes by filling the house with litter; she the nei~hborhood of Paris. In the first place, has a host of winged and four-footed pets, these men are usually destitute of faith and of which give it quite the smell of a wild-beast real feelings of religion ; in the second place, show. Worse and worse she grows fond They are slenderly paid, and fancy, in conse- of dress, and the neighbors discover why; quence, that they have at least the right to be there are stolen interviews, and scandalous insolent. Add to this, that, like all ignorant consequences. Poor Valerius receives a letter people, they are obstinate, very much attached from his bishop, which startles him like a to old practices, and that the smallest reform. clap of thunder; he is removed to another the slighest novelty, stirs them up to revolt. parish; but the misconduct of his niece cleaves Many curds fail, as to this article, in two essen- to the walls of the old parsonage, and affects tial points; first, in allowing, through indolence the estimatjon of his successors. All this is or incapacity, these encroaching gentry to take spoken of as an every-day case ; and ~ the command ; secondly, in treating them with too little address and politeness. It is, there- R~aume spends a page or two in showing fore very important that the curd should be a that nothing else could have been expected! man of order, exact in his duties, and well up in (pp. 2036.) the rubrics; otherwise the old clerk who al- Ga no account must a cur6 treat his rein- ready fancies himself a sort of marvel will not tions as his relations introduce them, ask fail to laugh maliciously at every blunder, to them to dinner, or anything of the sort (p. catch it up, and to give out that he is in the 207). And, for the sake of appearances, he habit of directing the curd, who does not know must never be seen walking with a sister or his business hose who think to carry a niece, unless their age be such as to put themselves with dignity by assuming a haughty them beyond suspicion; for who is to know tone, majestic airs, harsh and imperious lan- the relationship? (p. 207.) guage towards the servants of their church, do This brings us to a somewhat curious point, not keep theni at a distance, but hurt and pro- voke them. Then they desert the church, and French writers of the High Church school are fond of talking about the prodigious impres- conceive an implacable hatred against the cler- sions supposed to have been made on the gyman. Why not manage their self-conceit? Adroit curates contrive to get rid of the n~ost English mind by the virtues of the emigrant mutinous by making sacrifices of minor impor- clergy in the end of the last century; indeed, tance to them, mana~ing them, even petting it is now quite a settled belief with such them, until they can provide for themselves else writers, that the spectacle of those clergy was where. It is very disgraceful to see sometimes a main cause of the conversions to Romanisra flunkey quarrels (querelies de laquais) between which began in England fifty years later! the curd and the servants of the church, to see M. R6aume lays this down at page 22; and discussions proceed to violence and fisticuffs. if asked in what the impressiveness of the Can the curd ever be excusable in such scenes? ernigr6s consisted, he would, no doubt (like pp. 215217. Joseph he Maistre, in his treatise Du Pape), M. R6aumne is decidedly against the clergy- ~ut their celibacy prominently forward. But mans asking his clerks or singers to his he and M. Dubois prove only too clearly table. Rather give them money, he says; or, that in France itself the celibacy of the clergy if the custom of feeding them be too strong to is not generally respected that popular bear abolition, try to draw the schoolmaster opinion will not give them credit for innocence into your plans ; let the banquet, although at in any sort of intercourse with the other sex. your expense, be at his house; and do not ap- Where the fault may lie we do not pretend to pear at it except in order to drop a few patron- say; but the fact deserves notice. izing and friendly words. (p. 216.) From housekeepers, both our authors go on Next follow the relations with the~ civil to treat of schoolmasters and schoolmistresses. authorities. The English parson may some- The relation of the clergy to teachers appointed times find his squire rather troiThiesome; but aa~l paid by the state is, however, a subject the territorial potentate is, at the very worst, which at present can hardly be mentioned nothing to the French misery of the official among ourselves without danger of a tempest. maire. The mayor and the curd, says We therefore refer such of our readers as may M. R~aume, are the two great powers of wish to know how things work in France to the parish. They are, in short, emperor MANNERS AND MISERIES OF TIlE FRENCH CLERGY. and pope in little; and of the average minia- ture emperors a class numbering 44,000 in France we have the following engaging picture: In some parishes around Paris and elsewhere, the mayor belongs to the intermediate class i. e., to that which, now-a-days, is styled, with a sort of comic emphasis, the middle class, or small bourgeoisie. This class is one of the most unmanageable which can be met with. Usually independent as to circumstances, it neither has real manners nor the open simplicity of the vil- lager; people of half-knowledge, puffed up with pride and pretensions, surly, haughty, full of self, led by the nose by bad newspapers, and, moreover, quite unbelieving, stuffed with spite and deceit, the very tail-tip of that low and worn-out Voltairianism whose antiquated and stupid tinsel they pompously trail along. Riaume, pp. 218, 219. Some cur6s toady these gentry! The more natural and easy line is to quarrel with thena; but the earnestness with which both our abh~s implore their friends to avoid a quarrel with the mayor gives a sorrowful glimpse into the too common state of parish matters. The only remedy, in case of a quarrel, is, that the cur6 may apply to the bishop, and he may apply to the mayors superiors. But if (as is very possible) inon- seignen r, in his degree, should meet with a functionary of similar character to the mayor, it does not appear how the troubles are to be appeased. Let us descend among the people, and see how they are to be treated. Dont give yourself airs towards them, says M. R6aume; but dont be too familiar. Be profuse of monszeur, madame, mademoiselle; it costs nothing, and smooths down vanity. All that you may say is sure to be taken in the worst sense ; therefore be careful what you say. Dont talk Greek and Latin to your rustics: but neither must you think to do any good by giving in to their provincialisms. Dont slap them on the shoulder, or shake hands too promiscuously. It is wiser not to go and dine with artisans even on Shrove Tuesday except with the mayor and the adjunct. If there be a chateau in your parish, with a large establishment of servants, dont grow intimate with them. Dont dine in the servants hall, nor ask its inmates to dine with you. And beware of accepting any presents from them more especially as such presents usually come out of the masters property. (pp. 229, 239.) Of higher society (we are told) there are three kinds (1) the pious, who are hardly to be met with; (2) the decent, church- going people, whose religion goes no further; and (3) the irreligious. The second kind must be managed with care. There are in it a great number of retired traders purse- proud, selfish, ignorant, calculating, heartless; they are sure to take advantage of the clergy- man if he put himself under obligations to them ; wherefore he must keep theta .at their distance, and, most especially, he must beware of tutoring their children. (R6cume, chap. xxxvii. xxxviii.) Now comes a chapter Des Rapports avec Les Femmes and, as we have already hinted, very perilous rapports these are. Too little, says M. R6aume is known of theta in clerical education ; but, considering that women are one half oP the species, and are now three fourths of the believers, it might (he thinks) be well if the young ecclesiastic learnt a little more about them before being launched on a world in which they play so large a part. There are the clever women; and the only way to manage such of these as have any religion for the others are beyond all management is, to take a lofty tone with them, and to speak as by the authority of Heaven (p. 256). Be on your guard against having too much to do with the female sex jeunes, on comprend pourquoi; plus avcnc6es en age, parce quelles oat une merveilleuse addresse pour imposer leur volontt~. Frivolity, inconstancy, caprice, love of nov- elty, of pastimes, and of pleasures, ambition, coquetry, the fondness for dress which is innate in women, the spirit of evil-speaking, of jealousy, and ill-natured criticism, form a circle of little passions in which almost all the women of this world revolve, and from which even religious women do not always emancipate themselves. p. 257. Women are more acute than men. There are dangers from which even celibacy ~vill not exempt you. The religious connexion maybe but a temptation to terrible and fatal passion (R6aurne, 260; Dubois, pp. 3756) ; there- fore watch yourself, and remember that the world is watching you. Rivalry is the great moving principle among women, even as in- terest is among men, and Christian women are no exception. Take care, therefore (dear brother), not to show one of your female charges any attention beyond another, or to employ her more than another as your assist- ant in good works. The devotee class of women are generally sad busybodies, and their busy propensities are exasperated and rendered mischievous in a higher degree at Mitry M~man at Cheltenham or Frome by the enforce~celibacy of the clergy. (pp. 2645.) M. Dubois, too, has a good deal to say as to the manner in which ladies are apt to take up the time of their pastors under pretence of spiritual things What is it that we do in our conversations with them? The truth must be owned ; for the most part, there is nothing in these long communica 73 74 MANNERS AND MISERIES OF THE FRENCH CLERGY. tions but an exchange of childish and trifling chit-chat ; we tell each other the small news of the place ; we let certain railleries of this and that person more or less highly seasoned escape us; we allow ourselves pleasantries and out-pourings of gayet.y which suit but ill with priestly gravity; in short, we pass an hour, or perhaps two, in hearing, or in uttering, a multi- tude of little nothings. If, sometimes, a pious conference is set on foot, then there are long lamentations, piteous jererniads, which a good soul pours into her directors ears, in order to tell him what he knows so well, since she says nothing else to him at confession to wit, that she is overwhelmed with distractions that she cannot pray, that she knows not how to escape from the spiritual dryness which causes her to groan so much, & c. So many useless complaints, or, rather, so many pious pretexts for allowing her- self the satisfaction of talking an hour or two, about herself to her director Dubois, pp. 266, 266. One favorite snare is to draw the priest into a spiritual correspondence: Must we, then, absolutely refuse to females the advantage of direction by means of corre- spondence? Experience has so often shown the uselessness of it, that we should be at first tempted to answer in the affirmative. As, how- ever, every rule has its exception, we shall say that it is well, as a general principle, not to keep up such correspondences with females, and that, in order to establish an exception (1) they must no longer be young ; (2) they must not be under the power of a husband, unless, indeed, he be aware of this direction, and sanc- tion it ; (3) they must be very prudent and dis- creet; (4) they must~ have sound sense and good judgment ; (5) they must not be fussy, punctilious, and of inexhaustible verbosity ; (6, and finally,) they must sincerely desire to convert their defects, to acquire virtues, and to go on without abate- ment unto perfection. Dubois, pp. 370, 371. But these conditions are seldom united, and where they are the director must take care not to let his fair penitents draw him into a labyrinth of letters. He must beg them to be short; he must set them the example; and if they grow copious, his brevity must increase as their length. After months and years (M. Dubois supposes) after floods of correspond- ence there will most likely be no discern- ible improvement in the penitent. Would it not, therefore, he asks, have been vastly better for the priest if he had spent his time in making sermons, or in some other pastoral occupations? (pp. 3713.) Often, too, these persons wish to make them- selves interesting; their self-esteem is flattered by the thought, that a priest, one whom, more- over, they soinetieies see sought after in rather high quarters, thinks of them in the Divine pres- ence, actively busies himself in the sanctification of their souls, and does for them what he would not do for a multitude of others. All this feeds vanity, does no good, swallow8 up precious time, and ought not to have any place among the works of a saintly priest. Dubois, pp. 373, 374. Thus far the abh~ has been speaking of letters which he classes as useless; but be- yond this there is a class of dangerous letters. Some of the circumstances which make them dangerous may readily be conceived, and M. Dubois is very explicit on the manmnvres by which young women draw the clergy into cor- respondence, the vanity which prompts such attempts, and the ruinous consequences which sometimes ensue. There is, however, one of his dangers which we should hardly have ex- pected to find set down as such by an ecclesi- astic of Cardinal Wisemans communion the risk that a priest, after directing a rich and elderly lady, should find himself hand- somnely remembered in her will! (p. 377.) Returning to M. R6aume, we pass over his discourse on behavior to children, and find him resume the Chesterfield in those chapters which relate to VssITs (xlii., xliv.). A cur6, on reaching his parish, must call on all the notable persons in it; first on the mayor, then on the master manufacturer (if there be one, we presume). Calls may be made from twelve to four or five oclock. You must be in full costume; if people are out, leave your name if on a card, so much the better. But some people are pertinaciously not at home to the poor curd; and others, if they let him in, behave rudely to him, and do not give him the place of honor to sit down in; of such cross-grained customers you must make the best you can. When you enter a drawin& room, perform a modest and easy salutation, or half-bow, gracefully holding your hat in your left hand, while your right is laid on your breast after the manner of the eagle protesting to Daniel ORourke, pon the honor of a gentlemnan ,or, at the least, bend your arm into a right angle. In speaking to ladies of condition, prefitee your How dye do? with 1 have the honor to present to you my respectful hom- ages. Ifold your hat on your knees while sitting. At the end of the call replace your chair where it stood when you entered; bow to the ladies; make a second reverence at the door of the room, and a third to the last person who is concerned in seeing you out. The rules for calling are succeeded by a code for receiving calls. To us dull islanders, who tax ourselves with stupidity for drawing our topics of conversation so largely from the weather, it is truly a comfort to find the abb6 recommending the rain, the fine weather, the heat, the cold, and other such- like nothings, as a great resource. (p. 300.) Never yawn on your visitors, how- ever wearisome they may he. Embrace your intimates in the priesthood, but you need not extend this to the whole fraternity. MANNERS AND MISERIES OF TIlE FRENCH CLERGY. You, Maximus, entertain a tender friendship for me, and I am obliged to you for it ; but might it not be less expansive? Should L believe in it less if you were to cease from throttling me at every meeting, from hugging me, from all but suffocating me by the excess of your delight? As I do not positively exact that you should wash your face every morning, and should deprive yourself of your beloved dust, of which the effects are often unpleasant, pray oblige me as little as possible to submit to the petty inconven- jeuces which arise from this state of things. R~aume, pp. 302, 303. Chapters xlv. and xlvi. of the Guide treat of Dining-out. Invitations are either verbal or written. If you feel that you are not asked with that amount of ceremony which is due to your dignity, make an evasive answer You are very kind I will do all I can and dont ~,o. Some young people, inex- perienced in the hollowness of the world, are fresh enough to take literally such phrases as You will always find a knife and fork ; but the readers of R~aume will know better than to fall into this trap. (p. 310.) Din- ing in the country is not so ceremonious as in towns. In towns you go to the house a quar- ter of an hour before the time named, arrayed in your very best. Your hands must be cleaner than usual, and nevertheless must be gloved as you enter the drawing-room. Your dress and shoes ought also to be very clean; although in the country a little mud may be excused. Places at table are assigned ac- cording to the quality of the guests; and a cure is bound to stickle for his dignity. He may give way to the mayor, if his worship be the elder, and anything like a gentleman; but if he find himself thrust down below his proper place, he may do like an ecclesiastic who, in such circumstances, sat do~vn, and talked to the delight of all around him, but did not taste bit or drop, or even unfold his napkin. If the lady of the house be old, nnd have difficulty in walking, a priest may offer her his arm in going to the dining-room ; but in other cases he would raise a general titter by attempting to act the cavalier. It is no longer the fashion to tuck the end of your napkin under your neckeloth or through your button-hole. Soup is eaten with a spoon alone; dont blow on it by way of cooling it (A~sop might teach you thus much); dont swill it from your plate, nor pour the last drops into your spoon. Dont throw your broken scraps of meat and vege- tables on the floor. Dont sponge up your gravy with bread at a grand dinner (you may, we presume, on less solemn occasions). If a lady offer you anything, say, I have the honor to thank you. Take care to sit in such a way as not to drop soup or sauce on your cassock. Cut your meat neatly, with- out splashing your neighbors, and use your fork as a Frenchman ought to use it. Dont put your knife into your mouth. If you havc to cut bread for your neighbors or yourself, wipe your knife on your napkin, not on the bread itself; and take care not to cut the napkin. It is not good manners to take up a bone with your fingers and pick it. You,must not ask to be helped a second time from any dish, nor even accept the offer of a second plateful, unless where you are quite at home. Dont crack nuts with your teeth, nor eat too much dessert. Toothpicks, once proscribed, are now in common use; but do not, on any account, pick your teeth with your knife or your nails. Avoid dinners at which there is singing, for who can tell wh~mt the words may be Eschew also those which wind up with a ball: Do not the Councils of Agde and Lao- dicea condemn such things? But now comes the curates own dinner. Our Chesterfield is transformed into a Soyer, or an Original Walker. Elegance combined with economy is to be the rule. Personages (we hear with more regret than surprise) have no good name for cleanliness (p. 336) let it be otherwise in yours. Dont ask your betters to dine unless you can afford to enter- tain them well. Here is a sketch of the din- ner which Perpetua may get up (we leave it in the original language, since even the Lord Mayor has his certe in French) Hors d~muvre bceuf, avec un on deux plats dentrde, un roti, avec un on deux plats den- tremets, salade et enfin dessert, selon la saison et les ressources du pays, de quatre on cinq assiettes. p. 334. When we go to Mitry, we shall be very happy to eat such a dinner, accompanied by the good wines which our friend promises; but we trust that he will not think it ne~cs- sary to do us the honor of asking the worship- ful the mayor, or even the unwashed and odorous confreres, Salvian and Maximus, to meet us. We omit, with regret, the directions for carving (p. 377), and, skipping over some other matters, we come to a chapter Of In- discretions (liv.). it is indiscreet to take a dog to call with you; to let dogs or other animals run about your own house, and annoy your visitors; to touch ornaments in a draw- ing-room, or flowers in a garden. An eccle- siastic ought not to offer nosegays to young ladies, nor to hold such vanities in his hand. It is dan~erous to be familiar with children, for there is no knowing what things they may say to compromise your dignity. Do~not touch or pull about the person with whom you are talking. Dont ask people what their income is what their kin nor what kind of house they have. If they are deformed, squinting, blind, or dwarfish, do not tell them so; neither, in speaking to mnaminas, remark such defects in their offspring. On the subject of Games and Diversions, 75 MANNERS AND MISERIES OF THE FRENCH CLERGY. M. R6aume is perhaps somewhat more toler- ant than our own writers De & cerdotio. Games suitable for the clergy, he says, are cards, dominos, billiards, chess, draughts. A clergyman ought not to play for large stakes; most of the order are, indeed, ex- cluded from the temptation of high play by a cause which may easily be divined. Neither must he play with low people, such as gar- deners, vine-dressers, and the like, although priests have, cre now, been known to do so. Our author does not hesitafe to say, that play is one of the occasions on which men show themselves with least disguise, even as the future gentle Archbishop of Canter- bury knocked the future wit of St. Pauls down with the chess-board at Winchester school. I suppose, concludes the abb6, that it is superfluous to recommend the most scrupulous honesty and delicacy. (p. 417.) But if it were so entirely superflu- ous, why say even one word about it? Lastly, M. Rdaume treats of Letters, and lays down curious etiquettes as to the right sorts of paper to be used in addressing the different orders of men the right way of folding and sealing it the right manner of address, and the proprieties of matter and style. Our readers will probably, by this time agree with us, that if any French Eachard should undertake to inquire into The Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy, some of them would, be nowise difficult to discover. In truth, Messrs. Dubois and R~aumne carry us back considerably be- yond the state of things which Mr. Macaulay has represented in his well-known picture of English clerical life under Charles IL. Of the faithfulness of that picture we do not wish at present to speak. But if our own clergy of the seventeenth century were all that Mr. Macaulay has represented, the French clergy of the nineteenth have no rea- son to court a comparison with them. Even marriage with Abigail might 1)0 less intolera- ble than slavery under Perpetua. We shall not recapitulate the evidence ~vhich has been given in the preceding pages; but we wish, in conclusion, to point out the illustration thrown by these deplorable details on the conduct of the French clergy during the last five years. We have seen them flat- tering every power which these years of agita- tion have in turn thrown uppermost; one day capering around trees of liberty and blessing them ; another day hailing, in language equally fulsome and profane, the suppressor, not only of revolutionary disorder, but of real liberty itself. And, fond as the French ul- tramontane party is of bespattering the Eng- lish church with ignorant and absurd expres- sions of scorp, derived from such witnesses as Cobbett and The Tablet, its own late political conduct has, we believe, been generally re garded by En~lish churchmen, not with any reciprocal unkindness, but with a mixture of astonishment and sorrow. From these books, however, we learn things which go far to ex- plain the behavior which appeared so unac- countable and some way to excuse it. We trace it to the insecurity of position which the clergy of France have felt to their con- sciousness that, except by flattering the mania of the hour, they had no chance of holding their ground for their state of subjection to public opinion, and the unmercifulness of that opinion, are things of which we in England could have no idea. We trace it to the nar- row education which unfits the mass of the clergy for seeing anything beyond that which seems to be the immediate advantage of their church ; to the absence of that spirit of inde- pendence and sturdy uprightness which gives respectability even to the crotchets and to the sulks of some whom we could name among ourselves. And that spirit, we conceive, is something that is not to be learnt from the pages of Messrs. R6aume and Dubois val- uable as these may be for the direction of the French clergy in washing their faces, dispos- ing of their hands, behaving at meals, and managing their glances. One of the books before us was published only last year; but already, within the first three months of the p resent year, we read of great changes as to re~l igion in France. Never, it is said, were the Holy Week and Easter kept with such exhibitions of devotion; the infidel parish schoolmaster has given way to thc Frire Chr~tien; and already people arc sentenced to six months imprisonment for presenting themselves at the altar without previous confirmation and confession.* We think, however, that the evidence of Messrs. Dubois and Rdaume proves the existence of disorders too deep to be healed by a devotion so recent and so showy as to have very much the appearance of a passing fashion. But ~f the French clergy are really becoming power- ful, this same evidence would be enough, even without the significant bit of discipline which we have just mentioned, to warrant very serious uneasiness as to the probable effect of entrusting power to such hands. Since this paper was written, we have seen an article in the Edinburgh Review for April, on The Church of England in the Moun- tains. In so far as the position of the Welsh and Cambrian clergy resembles that of the French, the reviewers statements and opinions run parallel with our own; but there is this important difference between the cases that the degradation of the clergy in France is recent, while in our own mountain districts things have never been any better, and an im- provement is now in progress. Guardian newspaper, March 23 and 31. 18~3. 76 77 AMERICAN CLOCKS FOR CHINA. From Chambers Journal. AMERICAN CLOCKS FOR CHINA. WITH all their ingenuity and industry, the Chinese appear to employ themselves but little in the art of clock-making; auditinay be safely declared that Geneva turns out more time-keepers in a year than are produced in the whole of the Celestial Empire. In the large city of Nankin there are not more than forty Clock-makers; Sn-chew has thirty, and Niug-po not more than seven; while, until recently, the value of the clocks and watches imported into China from Europe, amounted to about half a million dollars yearly. It is said that the number of clocks really manu- factured in the country in a twelvemonth does not exceed 1500 a fleet the more remarkable when contrasted with the state of the case in other countries. The ~vatch and clock makers in London, including those who manufacture portions of the mechanism only, amount to more than 1000; and, as is well known, the enterprising horologists of N9w England make and export clocks every year by teas of thou- sands. These latter, with that keen spirit of trade which characterizes them, have lately been turning their attention to China as a profitable market for their handicraft; and a request was despatched some time since from the United States Patent Office, to such American citizens as were resident in the flowery land, for any information that might promise to benefit the branch of industry in question. From one of the replies which this re- quest elicited, we gather that the Chinese have always been too deficient in their acquaintance with astronomy and mathe- matics to construct proper sun-dials; and that their knowledge of these instruments was ob- tained from Europeans; while hour-glasses are known only as a contrivance employed in Western countries to measure time. Many Celestial gentlemen make it a siae qua non to carry two watches; among these, specimens of very ancient workmanship are sometimes met with, as rotund as Nurem- berg eggs ; and the wearers are too often anxious to make the pair go well together. The trouble they gave in consequence, in former days, to some of the Jesuit Fathers who were skilled in clock-making, will be found mentioned in the Lettrcs Edifiantes et Curzeuses. A Chinese day comprises twelve periods, each equivalent to two hours, and they are represented by twelve characters on the clock- face, being those used also to designate the months. The first in the list (meaning Son) is employed at the commencement of cvery cycle, and to the first of every period of twelve years, and also to the commencement of the civil day at eleven I. II. comnpre- hending the period between this and one A. M. The month which is signified by this term is not the first of the Chinese year, but singularly enough coincides with January. Each of the twelve hours is divided into eight kih, corresponding to quarter-hours. This diurnal division of time does not appear to have been in use in the time of Confucius, as mention is made in the spring and autumn annals of the ten hours of the day. The writer whose remarks we quote, recommends his countrymen, in manufactur- ing clocks for the Chinese, to adopt the clock- face commonly used in China with some ha- provements, one of which would be to surround the twelve horary characters with a ring of numerals from one to t~vcnty-four, every alternate one of which would he opposite the half-hour mark of the inner circle, correspond- ing with a whole hour of our time, and to continue the use of the four signs which now stand near the centre of the face to indicate midnight, dawn, noon, and evening. The pendulum is to vibrate seconds; the minut*K hand to make half a revolution at every sixty seconds; and the hour-hand is to go but once round the face in the whole diurnal period. As the result of this arrangement At one oclock P.M., our reckoning, the hour-hand will be half-way between the large character at the top and the next one to the right; and the minute-hand, having made half a revolution, will point perpendicularly downwards, and the clock strike one. At the expiration of another of our hours, a whole Chinese hour will have expired, when the former hand will have reached the first large character to the right, and the latter will be directed to the zenith the clock striking two. The minute-hand is, therefore, to make twelve revolutions in the twenty-four hours. The clocks are to be constructed with lines and weights, as those with springs are not liked in China; and, as a Celestial always likes to see what he is buying, it is suggested that the works be made as visible as possible, and of good q~mhity, to avoid the loss that would be sure to follow attempts to palm off clocks made to sell merely. To gratify the Chinese wish for utility, the lower part of the door is to contain a looking-glass, or if not this, something very ornamental; and inside, instructions in the native character for fixing, winding, regulating, & c. Such clocks as are here described can be manufactured in Connec- ticut for two dollars and a half each; and, as they can be sold in China at from five to six dol- lars each, we may shortly expect to see a great and profitable trade in American time-keepers between the two countries. 78 GUARDED SECRETS. From Chambers Journal. GUARDED SECRETS. WHAT woman is there that confesses not to the possession of a guarded secret? School- girls have their cherished mysteries; but these pass from mouth to mouth till, like the witches at seventh hand, all their magic dies out. It is not of such we would speak, hut of that sterner and more stubborn secrct which is the life in life, which occupies the souls inner and most secret chamber, and is the hearts holy of holies; a joy, or a dread, or a pang most commonly the last through life; a thing that weaves itself, with more or less intensity, into every act of our daily struggle on earth; is with us when we rise to a new sun, and lies down with us in the darkness ; our accompanying shadow, go where we may, and do what we will; that mocks us when we smile, counterfeits all our agonies; and to lose which would be something like that loss of soul pictured in the well-known German legend. That the constant presence of our secret within us and around us has its meaning for good, who shall doubt? Our human woes would not be allotted to us ny, even as our daily bread were they not necessary to the nourish- ment of a higher life than that which per- plexes as here. Our wandering spirits, ever lost and restless, must, like the fabled chil- dren in the wood, gather their food from off the thorns. There is, in truth, no teaching like the teaching of a great and master sor- row. There are few places filled with more startling materials for the romancist than the much-neglected secret drawer. Secret pas- sages, hidden vaults, tapestry-veiled doors, . traps leading downwards through the floor, and escapes opening upward through the sky-light, we have in abundance; but the narrow and apparently insignificant recep- tacle that holds within it, unseen by vulgar eyes, the hoarded secret of a heart and of a lifetime nay, perhaps more the darkening presence of a household, the skeleton behind the door, seems altogether t~ have escaped the vigilant research of the curious. Relics some sainted, some profane enough hang visibly about our very doors. We are all familiar with relics of various kinds, from the sentimental lovers hair-filled locket down to the religiously~guarded heart of Mon- trose. Soi~ne people are essentially relic- lovers, and will ilgrimages for nake far-off p the bare sight of an iron belt or a knotted cord vouched for as the castigatory badge of some mouldered monk, and feel a strange gratification in being permitted to kiss the dust from the worn stones trodden by the feet of those whose once unhonored grave centu- ries have since hallowed into something akin to the divine. From the mystic to the real is a wide bound, and few care to take the leap. But, leaving to the star-gazer his more dazzling horizon, let us gather round us for a brief space the lowlier interests of humanity; let us look with reverent eyes into the secret drawer. My grandmother had an old-fashioned cab- inet, portioned out, as was the method of constructing such commodities in her day, into sundry small shelves, drawers, and odd- covered boxes. The centre compartment of this same old chest opened like a door, having lock and key, and within was a long sliding- drawer, occupying the entire depth of the cabinet. That in this drawer something very precious was stored, all her children knew. None, however, dared to pry into their mothers guarded secret. Her husband, it was more than suspected, could have thrown some light on the matter; but he was never known to do so, and silence rested upon the unknown occupant of the drawer; the inys. tery remaining a mystery up to the day of my good grandmothers death. But when the cold hand can no more unlock a cabinet than it can unlock the door through which the warm, conscious life has passed; and when the palsied foot, lying stark in its dusty dwelling, no more mounts the stair to the guarded treasure-house of all that was once so dear then comes the revealer; comes, perhaps in the form of a prying sick-nurse, one of those death-watches at the sight of whom the living quake. Or it may be, that hands more tender deal in greater reverence with the departed spirits cast-off apparel, holding sacred for the sleepers sake those forsaken relics wept and prayed over by the waking eyes that are never more to weep and pray on this earth again. In the present case, it was so. The con- tents of the secret dra~ver were committed to the flames, in accordance with the expressed wish of the dying. But somehow or other the secret oozed out. It would appear that, like most other grandmothers, mine had early in life had a love-affair as that deepest-striking of all womans experiences is somewhat irreverently termed. It was the old story: the man she loved went abroad without having spoken just that one word for which her soul thirsted, and which, neverthe- less, had found a thousand other utterances scarcely to be mistaken. For years there was a dreary silence between the two. Then caine my grandfather, with his earnest ~ourt- ship. Under the feeling that she was not justified in cherishing a predilection so appar- ently unresponded to by the earliest object of her affection, she yielded, after a prolonged struggle, to my grandfathers suit. No sooner, however, was she formally engaged to him, than there came a letter in the old, GUARDED SECRETS. unforgotten handwriting! 0, you who have ever listened with beating hearts for the postmans knock, fully prepared for all it might bring, think for one moment how the coming of this letter, long even unhoped for, and now too late, knocked at the heart of her who received it! Now, my grandmother had a conscience, and a more than commonly tender one. Her first impulse, of course, was to tear open the letter but a second thought stayed her hand. She had long ago made the fact of this early attachment kno~vn to my grandfather. What she now did, then, was at once to tell him she had received such a letter, and that, as his affianced wife, she could not and would not read it. Was she fantastic in her notions of right and wrong? I do not believe so; I do not think she could have done a better or a wiser thing. Out of her act, no suffering could possibly fall upon the man to whom she was pledged, and whose happiness was henceforth in her kecping, though much of pain bore heavily upon her. That letter, with its unbroken seal, lay, all her life, shut up in the old musty cabinet, where it stood revealed at last. That, acting up to the truest spirit of her intention, she fought long and victoriously against the desire to fathom what those hidden charac- ters contained whether or not they bore that assurance of love which would once have been joy unutterable we are bound to be- lieve. Upon one solitary occasion alone was she ever seen to wrestle with her temptation. After a meek endurance of one of my grand- fathers fits of passion for he had a stormy temper she was found seated, weeping bitterly, before the open door of that guarded chest wherein lay the unbroken seal. Solemn as such subjects must be and are, there is a blessed comfort in the thought of them. It is a gracious thing to feel that there is something, be it what it may, of real truth of lastin~, good; something which neither time, nor trial, nor the common wear and tear of actual, dull, every-day life can crush out of a man. But, soft! let me pause. I said that nothing can crush out of a man. Do men know anything of such relics as I speak of? I am ignorant: I cannot say; but I should fancy they do not. The steady, un- faltering devotion of a long life to one thought and one remembrance I own I never found, m~ave in woman. I myself confess to a few hoarded relics heaven forbid that any woman should be with- out them! But these are yet under the seal that lies so heavily on all living lips. Some day, perhaps but we, none of us, like to think of that strange hands may overhaul them. Pity it is that so few of us have strength oi~ soul enough, or, it may be, warrnng-time enough, ere the Great Revealer steals upon us, to enable us to put beyond the reach of sacrilegious eyes our most darling secrets! 0, could we but summon the nerve to place them with our own moving fingers upon seine funeral pyre! Could we but watch them slo~vly consuming! But no; we cannot do this. While we have life, they are ours. It would seem like bidding an eternal farewell to our protecting genius, to put away the guardian spectresof lost hypes, dead loves, and mystic memories No~Let us treasure them while we yet walk am6n~ the living. But, 0, may some kind ana pitying hand, when we lie silenced, bury them with us, unprofaned by a single look! A singular instance of this silent treasuring up of one solitary thought, and in the breast of a child, fell under my knowledge not long ago, while staying by the sea-side, at the house of some old friends. They were at the same time visited by a little girl of about seven years of age, who had been confided to their care, in order that she might have the benefit of the sea-bathing, recommended for some weakness of the spine, under which the child suffered. She was the loveliest little creature I ever beheldquiet and shy, too, though least so with me, for whom she at once took a strong liking. Our hostess, who every night made a point of seeing her young charge Jut comfortably to bed, always re- mained in the room until the child had said her prayers. When her ordinary devotions had been gone throu~h aloud, the child in- variably bent down her head upon the bed, at the side of which she knelt, and offered up some prayer silently within herself. What this prayer was, nothing could induce her to reveal. her parents were questioned about it; but though perfectly aware of the fact, they were unable to solve the question. It was of course a thing altogether too sacred to be intpuded on by any forceful appeal, and all parties remained in their ignorance. I own that when first I was told of it, the secret appeared to me to be of so strange and un- earthly a character, that I trembled as one who suddenly stands faced by a spirit. ft seemed like a silent communing with angels. Feeling very anxious to witness with my own eyes what interested me so deeply in the telling, I one night, with may little friends consent, accompanied her to her room. As usual, the prayers were repeated aloud, and then followed the silent offering up of that pure young heart. So holy was the hour, that I held my breath for very reverence, the tears springing tomy eyes with sudden emotion. Surely angelic hosts hovered above that small bowed-down head, on whose golden locks a halo seemed to rest! Whatever was that silent, guarded, and mysterious prayer and sometimes it struck me that it might possibly have relation to either a dread of dying, or to her anticipations of her near 79 GUARDED SECRETS. heaven, as she was at the time out of health whatever that prayer might be, that it was a beautiful and a pure one, I am sure the purest and the best, perhaps, in all the long catalogue of guarded secrets. One secret, which in every age has been most carefully and religiously guarded guarded in terror and dismay, through incon- ceivable wrong and suffering, through life and up to the graves brink, not perhaps even then to be rendered up to those who stand around scattering their last tears with the dust to dust is the secret of birth. In- stances of the kind alluded to are so numerous and so startling, that it would be difficult to invent any story surpassing in interest the already ~vritten and attested records of that most dangerous secret. There are few fami- lies who cannot recount, from the oral tradi- tions of their house, some legend touching on this subject strange glimpses of some half- developed tragedy, if not so terrible as that of the Family of Montorio, yet sufficiently suggestive to people the dreams of their hear- ers for nights to come. Such tales I remem- ber to have heard in Scotland. One, in par- ticular, struck me as most singular, because, though generations have been born, and have passed out of being since the occurrences nar- rated took place, no clue was ever found to the secret so cautiously and mysteriously guarded. The following is an outline of the tradition A couple, coming whence no man knew, arrived one sharp winter night amid the smoke of Edinburgh. The wife was younger than her husband by some years, and, possi- bly from the fact of this disparity of age, looked up to him with a feeling of reverential devotion belonging rather to a daughter than to a wife. It was noticed, indeed, by all who knew them, that she had, even thus early in her wedded life, laid down for herself a law of more strict and unquestioning obedience than is usually practised by even the best of wives. The result of this blind submission, as will be seen, must have borne hard upon a pure heart and tender conscience, such as hers were represented to have been, though not perhaps until added years bad brought home the lesson, rightly understood by few, that no mortal, even though he be a husband, has a right over any other human soul, authoriz- ing him to rule its obedience contrary to Gods higher law. The married pair, it would seem, had been united for some years; yet no offspring had been granted to their prayers. It was now that, while living in the utmost retirement, in an obscure street, the husband introduced to his wife an old Scotch nurse, bearing in her arms a new-born child. This child, said by him to be the posthumous son of a dear friend recently deceased, he repre- sented it was his interest to adopt, and pro- duce to the world as his own. To insure his wifes aid in the project, he carefully con- cealed from her whatever deep-laid schemes were wor~dng in his own mind made very light of the affair asserted that it was but to serve a temporary purpose, and that, the object in furtherance of which this singular deception was to be carried on once attained, the whole thing should be revealed. A quick instinct of wrong, in the mind of the young wife, made her at first hesitate but the recollection of that strict abuegation of her own will to which she had vowed her- self, at last prevailed over her scruples, and the pleading looks of the helpless little or- phan, lying safe and warm within her arms, melting her soul, she took the forlorn babe to her bosom, and bestowed upon it heartily a mothers care. The child proved sickly, a weary burden to any but a real mother; yet its foster-parent, though young and unused t: such a charge, never for a moment shrunk from the responsibility she had incurred. The consequence naturally was, that the boy learned to love her strongly and entirely. But towards his reputed father he at all times evinced a most strange and unaccountable aversion, amounting to an instinctive horror and shrinking from his presence. When the child had grown to he about a year old, Mr. Ag, the gentleman in question, his plans now apparently matured, resolved at once to introduce his prot6g~ to his family, as his own legitimately born son and heir. Mr. Ag was a descendant of one of the old border families, renowned in history for many a raid and many a foray across the English frontier, and, judging from his deeds, the un- scrupulous character and adventurous spirit of the early freebooter would seeih to have been tran~nitted down through many gener- ations, little modified by the march of centu- ries. And now caine the poor wifes trial. In her husbands home, and under the eyes of his kindred and household, she was soon doomed to feel bitterly how a single deception inevitably leads to numerous others, and how one falsehood entails the necessity of a thou- sand more to follow in its wake. A mother in seeming, yet no mother in truth, her entire ignorance concerning all that related to the birth of her supposed child became a subject of ridicule with the female members of the family. Sooner or later betrayal seemed inevitable. Nor was this all: the worst was to come. No sooner had the im- posture been carried out successfully, than the young wife found herself about to become a mother. Here was a new involvement. She had, then, given up the birthright of her own child in favor of a stranger! It was true that the fact of the imposition of the adopted child could be proved, but what hu- miliation must accompany such a confession 80 TRAITS OF THE TRAPPISTS. what a heart-wearing tissue of law-pro- ceedings might not be entailed by the admis- sion! To the married pair, years of tortur- ing anxiety and strange discord followed. Heart-burnings of many kinds unavoidably arose out of a state of things so unnatural. The real son became a secondary consideration an the household, the very servants seeking favor with the presumed heir, and looking down on the younger brother. All this time the mystery was still main- tained. Whence the adopted had come, and to whom he belonged of right, was throughout kept a guarded secret from the wife her husbands solitary admission to her being to the effect, that the boys mother was a lady of noble birth of the father he never spoke. Meanwhile, Mr. Ag made frequent and sudden journeys from home, no one knew ~vhither or for what purpose, always returning as unexpectedly as he had departed. After these absences he was observed to be gloomy, nay, almost fierce in his temper, his irritation showing itself especially towards the child of his adoption, between whom and himself a mortal antipathy appeared to exist, and to increase with the boys years. What might have beeu the issue in after-years, it is need- less to surmise, The Gordian-knot of all this evil was suddenly and unaccountably cut by that unseen hand, which has undone many another coil of mischief in the world. One (lay the adopted child was found drowned in the Tyne, which rolled its waters through Mr. A gs estate. There was a hurried and unsatisfactory inquest held on the body, and all was done. Through one breast that of the wife a secret shudder ran. A sickness as of death fell upon the heart of her who alone knew what hidden temptation might have lain in wait, like the weird sisters of Macbeth, urging on the man with whom her fate was bound up to the commission of a deed without a name. From that hour a blight fell over the fated house. The very rooks, so my informant told me, disappeared from their customary haunts. Mysterious sights and sounds visited at eerie-hours the old border mansion. Nay, report even went so far as to say, that the phantom of a ghastly child rose up from time to time before the eyes of Mr. Ags descendants, as if the soul of the departed refused to rest until the secret of its birth, or perhaps of its death, was revealed. But to this day all is enveloped in mystery. It is true that the bare fact of the imposition of such a child in place of a real heir, in course of time, and after the death of Mr. Ag, got rumored abroad; but the actual parentage of the ill-fated victim of the imposture remained, and will now doubtless forever remain, among the catalogue of those guarded secrets which the grave refuses to render up. ccccLxxviz. LIYIHG AGE. VOL. II. 6 81 From the Gentlemans Magazine TRAITS OF THE TRAPPISTS. THE Cardinal de Richelieu and the Mar..~ quise dEfflat (whose son, Cinq Mars, his eminence soon after judicially murdered), on the 9th Jan., 1626, met to hold as sponsors at the baptismal font the young heir to the almost ducal house of Bouthilier de Ranc& The infant received tIme Christian names of his illustrious godfather, and the little Jean Armand was endowed by the cardinal with the sponsorial gift of the Abbey de Ia Trappe, to be holden by him in command, that is, to take its profits and neglect its duties. Let me here state, by way of parenthe- sis, that of all the abuses in the Church of France, there was none so outrageous as that of the commendams. In old times, when war or pillage threatened an ecclesiastical property or institution, it was the custom to make over the same, recommended (commend- atum) to some noble powerful enough to pro- tect it. This was a provisional arrangement with the election of the titulary; but the commendatory drew the revenues, and ~erm became proud of being commendato,i They were ready to pay for the office by signing to the nominators a portion of the income; and, moreover, the papal sanction always made an ultramontanist of him who profited by the bargain. The commeadams increased daily, and that niost in times when they ceased to be needed. If an Indian were to visit us, remarks Montesquieu, it would take more than half a year, as he walked over the trotloirs of Paris, to make him comprehend what a conmendam is. An abb6 en commande was in orders, without being a priest, and might take a wife unto himself, on condition of surrendering his commande. If he did worse than marry, such sacrifice was not required of him. At all times the office might be retained by a liberal payment. Inde~d, the nobles who had the power of appointing, derived a considera- ble fortune from them. In the reign of Louis XIII. the Count de Soissons heaped a dozen of these offices on a single abb6, who retained but a poor thousand crowns for his pay, and returned many hundred thousand into the coffers of his very religious patron. But to return to De Ranc6. I-Ic was a marvellous boy that Jean Armand Bouthihier de Ranc6! Ho was yet in short clothes when he puzzled the kings confessor by asking him questions on homer in Greek; and he published an edition of Anacreon, with notes, at the same age (twelve years) as Campbell made the translation of the Clouds of Aristophanes, which was given to the world by a two-penny subscription of his school-fellows. The cardinal gave his godson some valuable church preferment for this 82 TRAITS OF THE TRAPPISTS. piece of scholarship. Marie de Medicis pre- Mephistopheles could not have been more sentedhim with greatness in the form of empty devilishly complaisant. titles, and church and crown vied with each The guilty duchess suddenly died of an other in showering down upon him ecclesias- attack of measles. There is a leg end which tical privileges with much profit attached, tells of De Ranc6 having unexpectedly beheld and sufficient to satisfy the ambition of the her in her coffin; it is somewhat apocryphal. most unconscionable of aspirants. It is fact, however, that he rushed through He was a marvel of a priest was this same his own woods, screaming her name, and nun- Jean Aruiand! For once that he preached, ing imprecations, like Ajax when defying a thousand times did he conter fleurettes in Heaven. He was shocked, but it was after the willing ears of noble lady or village the fashion of Lady Jane Grays husband in maid. -He dressed in fine linen a.nd a world Dr. Youngs poem. He bewailed his lost of lace, wore red heels to his shoes, talked delights rather than his mistress destiny, euphuistic nonsense in the circle at Madame and his thoughts in presence of her body de Rambouillets, carried a sword on his hip, rested upon incidents that had better have and was ever ready to run it through the been forgotten. He seriously tried to raise body of the first man who dared but to bite the devil in order to procure the restoration his thumb as he passed. He drank hard, of the duchess to life. Failing in this, he danced gracefully, swore round oaths, and became half insane, and in one of his wildest made love irresistibly. He ~vas grand master fits betook himself to a cast-off mistress of in the court of folly, and was per a s scarcely Gaston of Gileans for ghostly advice. The out of his character when he espoused the deposed concubine was sick of the world, and widow of Scarron to the grand monarque. she speedily made De Ranc6 share in her Compared with the orgies which scared the sentiments. He ~vent about with points un- good people on his estate at Veretz, those at trussed, doublet unbuttoned, beard untrim- Medenham Abbey ~vere puritanic righteous- med, and cruelly loose-gartered, lie began ness. The only symptom of seriousness given in this guise to excite admiration, and his by the master of the revel was in his addic- fanaticism assumed such an aspect that his tion to the study of astrology. If beneath the ecclesiastical superiors deemed him a fitting shadowy splendor of the stars he registered missionary to explore the wilds of the Hima- many a perjured vow, he was as credulous as laya. He deeply declined the office, and the maids whom he deceived in the promises hinted to the Bishop of Aleth that he thought he read in the constellations; and, if he was his vocation was to turn hermit. The good ardent in the pursuit of maids ~vho love the bishop said Satan himself had often done that, moon, he was not less so in the study and impelled others to do the like, but that of the moon itself. At this time he was not, if he were a man with a manly heart there indeed, in full orders, and therein he saw was other work for him in the world than the ample apology for his debauchery, his duel- toil of eternally doing nothing. De IRanc6 hug, his love offield-sports, and his murderous took six years to make up his mind. At the cruelty to all who stood for a moment between end of that time he defrauded his natural him and his inclinations. - heirs by selling his estates. The produce he In 1651, soon after his full ordination, he invested for the benefit of the abbey of La refused the bishopric of Leon, in Brittany, for Trappe, and, having obtained the consent of the twofold reason that its revenues were the king and the authorization of the pope to small, and that its distance from the gay enter upon the regular administration of capital lent anything but enchantment to its the institution of which he had hitherto been episcopal prospect. He walked abroad in a only the titular superior, he proceeded to the perfect blaze of glory, such as tailors alone godless locality, restored the old, or rather can create for man. The summary of his created an original, rigidity of rule, and very character may be found in an expression of much disgusted the few monks who still lin- his own: I preached this morning, said gered behind the dilapidated walls, and who he on one occasion, like an angel, and now were given to sip ratafia rather than read I am going to hunt like the very devil ! their breviaries. When De Ranc6 entered This demoniacal incarnation set the climax upon his new duties at La Trappe he received to his crimes by seducing the Duchess de episcopal benediction at the hands of no less Montbazon no very difficult task; but the a person than the Irish Bishop of Arda~h. duke had been his benefactor. He was so There were but seven monks in residence gentlemanhike in his vices that he might have at the monastery when De Ranc6 assumed pleased that very nice man of the world, Lord authority there. He at once stopped their Chesterfield himself. If he lived tea years playing at bowls, and they threatened to in close intimacy with the duchess, he did all horsewhip him. They were got rid of by a he could not to shock the duke by forcing the pension of four hundred livres each; and the intimacy on his knowledge. Excellent man! new abb6 added example to precept by soon TRAITS OF THE TRAPPISTS. after burning all the love-letters he had received from the Duchess de Montbazon, and distrib- uting daily alms and food to no less than four thousand beggars! lie opened the in- stitution to all corners, and without much questioning. Occasionally some, who after admission repeated of their course, and be- came desirous of entering the world again, were detained against their will; and I can- not help thinking that the abb6 himself, who maintained a heavy correspondence and re- paired not unfrequently to the capital, was employed by the government to carry out its vengeance against political offenders. The regulations of the monastery would have made a Sybarite faint at hearing them only read. The hour for rising was the second after mid- night. Silence was seldom broken, and the brother who ventured to raise his eyes from the ground, except when bidden, was guilty of a great offence. Hard labor, hard fare, and hard beds were allotted to the monks, whose only hope of escape from them was by death. The abbot himself lived simply, and was no doubt a sincere man; but he had in his household a cellarer, and what that official served at the abbots own table is a matter upon which I confess to be exceedingly curious. If De Ranc6 had a table and flask of his own, so also had he a will and a de- termination. He professed Jansenism in other words, he believed that man of his own resolution could not walk in righteousness, but that he needed the prevenient grace of God to put him in that path, and enable him thereon to make progress. The Jesuits and Jesuitically-inclined popes held that where man had a will to be righteous the grace would follow to help him, and that such divine grace could not well be efficacious without the human will. No wonder that Dc Ranc6 was only considered half a saint by many of his co-religionists. It did not assist him to better his reputation that he quoted horace and Aristophanes in his letters, and that he corresponded with Bossuet, the Eagle of Meaux. What merit was there in his de- nunciation of all classical learning (which he decried with a rabid earnestness that is imi- tated in our days by the Abb6 Gaume),while he cited the erotic and irreli~ious poets of antiquity What was the worth of his works to Rome when he sided with Bossuet in advo- cating the liberties of the Gallican church l Recluse he was, and austere; but in his se- clusion, and amid the practices of his self- discipline, he wrote to and was visited by some very gay people. The Duchess of Guiche enlivened his cell by many a visit, St. Simon amused him with his court-gossip, nnd Pelisson, the ex-Protestant, exhibited on his table the accomplished spider which that ex- emplary convert had laboriously educated. When alone he wrote diatribes against the learned Benedictines, and after~ these had shamed him into silence he. penned lengthy apologies in support of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The work he most ardently pursued was one that has been taken up ~y the Veuillots and Cahills of these later times and he was the first who qualified as a glo- rious idea the union of all Romish powers to annihilate the Satanic kingdom of Eng- land! He hated marriage, even in laics, and denounced it sarcastically as a more severe penance than any he had enjoined at La Trappe. This was among his capital errors; yet he was rich in capital virtues too ; but the contradictions in his character ~vere very many. His latter years were years of dignity and perhaps usefulness, and he finally Thed, in the quality of a simple brother of the order, in the year 1700. Of the seventy-four years of his life exactly one-half was spent in the world, the other half in the cloister. They ~vho would become more fully ac- quainted with the details of the life of this singular man may consult Chateaubriands last and dullest work, published during the viscounts lifetime. Of the companions and followers of De Ranc6 many interesting inci- dents may be found, by those who have pa- tience to dig for them, in the five weary vol- umes, entitled Relations de la Vie et de lit Mort de quelques Religieux de lAbbaye de la Trappe, published in Paris at the begin- ning of the last century. In these volumes we find that the brethren were sworn to im- part even their thoughts to the abbot. They who did so most abundantly appear to have been most commended in very bad Latin; and this and other acts of obedience were so dear to Heaven that when the authors of them stood at the altar their less eager brothers beheld their persons surrounded with a glory that they could hardly dare to gaze upon. The candidates for admission included, doubt- less, many sincerely pious men; but with them were degraded priests, haunted murder- ers, run-away soldiers, robbers, and defraud- ers, who could find no other refuge, and on whose heels the sharply-pointed toe of the law was most painfully pressing. All that was asked of these was obedience. Where this failed, it was compelled. Where it abounded, it was praised. Next to it was humility. One brother, an ex-trooper, reeking with blood, is lauded because he lived on baked apples, when his throat was too sore to admit~ of his swallowing more substantial food ~ Another brother is compared most gravely. with Moses, because he was never bold enough to enter even the pantry with his sandal& on his feet. Still, obedience was the first ~irtue eulogizedso eulogized, that I almost suspect it to have been rare. It was made of so much. importance that the community were informed that all their faith and all their worka,. with.. 83 TRAITS OF THE TRAPPISTS. out blind obedience to the superior, would fail in securing their salvation. Practical blindness was as strongly enjoined, and he who used his eyes to least purpose was ac- counted as the better man. One brother did this in so praiseworthy a way that in eight years he had never seen a fault in any of his brethren. It was not this sort of blindness that De Ranc6 required, for he encouraged the brethren in the accusation of one another. More praise is given to the brother who in many years had never beheld the ceiling of his own cell; and vast laudation is poured upon another who was so little accustomed to raise his4eyes from the ground that he was not aware that a new chapel had been erected in the garden until he broke his head against the wall. On one occasion the Duchess de Guiche and a prelate visited the monastery; after they had left, a monk flung himself at the abbots feet, and confessed that he had during the visit ventured to look at the face Not of the lady, thou reprobate ! said De Ranc6 ; Of the aged bishop ! gasped the monk. A course of bread and water compensated for the crime. Some of the brethren illustrated what they understood by obedience and humility after a strange fash- ion. For example, there was a rude basket- maker who had been received, and who was detained against his will, after he had ex- pressed an inclination to withdraw. his p lace was in the kitchen. The devastation he committed amongst the crockery was something stupendous, and not, I suspect, altogether unintentional. however this may be, he was not only continually fracturing the Delft earthenware dishes, but incessantly running to the abbot, and from him to the prior, from the prior to the sub-prior, and from the sub-prior to the master of the nov- ices, to confess his fault; and then to his kitchen again, once more to smash whole crates of plates, followed by his abundant confessions, and deriving evident enjoyment alike in destroying the property and assailing with noisy apologies the officers of an institu- tion which he was resolved to inspire with a desire of getting rid of him. In spite of forced detention there was a mock appearance of lib- erality, and at monthly assemblies the brethren were asked if there were anything in the ar- rangementof the institution and its rules which they would desire to have changed. They had only to speak. True, but, as they knew what would follow upon expressed ob- jection, every brother held his peace. If death were the suicidal object of many, the end appears to have been generally at- tained with speedy certainty. The superiors and a few monks reached an advanced age, but few of the brethren died old men. Con- sumption, inflammation of the lungs, and abscesses at memory of the minute descrip tion of which the very heart turns sick car- ried off their victims with terrible rapidity. Men entered, voluntarily or otherwise, in good health. if they did so, determined to achieve suicide, or ~vere driven in by the gov- ernment with a view of putting them to death, the end soon came, and was, if we may believe what we read, welcomed with alacrity. After gradual, painful, and unre- sisted decay, the sufferer saw, as his last hour approached, the cinders strewn on the ground in the shape of a cross, a thin scatter- ing of straw was made upon the cinders, and that was the death-bed upon which every Trappist expired. The body was buried in the habit of the order, without coffin or shroud, and was borne to the grave in a cloth upheld by a few brothers. If it fell into its last reception with huddled-up limbs, De Ranc6 would leap in and dispose the unconscious members so as to make them assume an atti- tude of repose. Every man, at least every man whose life is narrated in the volumes I have named above, changed his worldly appellation, on turning Trappist, for one more becoming a Christian vocation. A good deal of confusion appears to have distinguished the rule of nomenclature. In many instances when the original names had impure or ridiculous sig- nifications the change was advisable; but I cannot see how a brother became more cog- nizable as a Christian by assuming the names of Palemon, Achilles, Moses even, or Dorothy! Theodore I can understand, but Dorothy, though it bears the same meaning, seems to me but an indifferent name for a monk, even in a country where the male Montmorencies delighted in the baptismal prefix of Anne. None of the monks were distinguished by superfluous flesh. Some of them were so thin- skinned that sitting on hard chairs their bones fairly rubbed through their very thin epider- mis. They who so suffered, and joyfully, were held up as bright examples of godliness. This reminds me of Voltaires famous Faquir, Bababec, who walked the world naked, car- ried sixty pounds of chain round his neck, and never sat down but upon a wooden chair, covered with nails, the points upwards The dialogue between the Faquir and Omri is really not widely discordant from the senti- ments in the old Trappist biographies. Omri asks if he has any chance of ever reaching the blessed abode of Brahmna. Well, answers Bababec (I am quoting from memory), that depends very much upon circumstances; how do you live 3 I try, answers Omri, to be a good citizen, father, husband, and friend. I lend my money without usury, I give of my substance to the poor, and I maintain peace among my neighbors. Do you ever sit upon nails with the points upwards ? Never. Well, then, I am sorry for 84 TRAITS OF THE TRAPPISTS. you, answers the Faquir, for till you do, you have no chance of getting beyond the nineteenth heaven. Do not let us he too hasty either to censure or to 4dicule. Where there is gross error, great sincerity may abound. Faquir and Trappist thought as they had been taught to think; and Mr. Thompson, who has barely concluded the Bampton Lectures at Oxford for 1853, has told us in one of them, that even the sincere worshippers of Baal may have been more tol- erable in the sight of God than intellectual Christians who, having a right understanding of the truth, neglect the duties which that truth enjoins theta. There is, however, matter for many a sigh in these saffron-leaved and worm-eaten tomes whose pages I am now turning over. I find a monk who has passed a sleepless night, from pain. To test his obedience, he is or- dered to confess that he has slept well and suffered nothing. He tells the lie, and is commended. Another confesses his readi- ness, as Dr. Newman has so recently done, to surrender any of his own deliberately made convictions at the bidding of his superior. I am wax, he says, for you to mould me as you will ; and his utter surrender of self is commended with ranch windiness of phrase. A third, involuntarily as it were, remarking that his scalding broth is ove~- salted, bursts into tears at the enormity of the crime involved in such a complaint; and praise falls upon him more thickly than the salt did in his broth. Yes, says the abbot, it is not praying, nor ~vatching, nor repentance, that is alone asked of you by God, but humility and obedience therewith, and first obedience. To test the fidelity of those professing to have this humility and obedi- ence, the most outrageous insults were in- flicted on such as in the world had been reck- oned the most high-spirited; and it is averred that these never failed. They kissed the sandal raised to kick, blessed the hand lifted to smite them. A proud young officer of Mousquetaires, of whom I have strong suspi- cions that he had embezzled a good deal of his majestys money, acknowledged that he was the greatest criminal that ever lived, but he stoutly denied the same when the officers of the la~v visited the ~monastery and accused him of fraudulent practices. This erst young nobleman, in his character of Trappist, had no greater delight than in being allowed to, clean the spittoons in the chapel, and provide them with fresh saw-dust! Another, a young marquis, performed with delight a servile office of a still more offensive charac- ter. The monk was the flower of the frater- nity. lie was given to accuse himself, we are told, of all sorts of crimes, not one of which he had committed or was capable of committing. I-Ic represented matters so ingeniously, says Do Ranc6,who on this oc- casion is the biographer, that ~vithout ly- ing he made himself pass for the vile wretch which in truth he was not. He must have been a clever individual ! Lie lied like truth. When I say that he wns the flower of the fraternity, I probably do some wrong to the Count de Santim, who, under the name of Brother Palemon, was undoubtedly the chief pride of La Trappe. He had been an officer in the army, without love for God, regard for man, respect for ~voman, or reverence for law. By a rupture between Savoy and France, lie lost the annuity by which he lived; and, as his constitution was hopelessly shattered at the same time, he took to reading, was partially converted by perusing the history of Joseph, and was finally perfected in the half-worked conversion by seeing the dead body of a very old and very ugly monk assume the guise and beauty of that of a young man. These were good grounds ; but the count had been so~ thorough a miscreant in the world, that they who lived in the latter declined to believe in the godliness of Brother Palemon; thereupon he was exhibited to nil corners, and he an- swered every question put to him by pious visitors. All France, grave and gay, gentle and simple, flocked to the spectacle. At the head of them were our James the Second and his illegitiniate son. The replies of Palemon to his questioners edified countless crowds and be shared admiration with a guileless brother who told the laughing ladies, who flocked to behold him, that he had sought refuge in the monastery because his sire had wished him to marry a certain lady, but that his soul revolted at the thought of touching even the finger-tips of one of a sex by the first of whom the world was lost! The monk was as ungallant to Eve and her daughters as Adam was unjust to her ~vho dwelt with him in Paradise.* ~ Farindon, the old royalist divine in the days of King Charles, says, on the subject of Adam put- ting the blame of his disobedience on the shoulders of Eve, thus quaintly Behold here the first sin ever committed, and behold our first father Adam ready with an excuse as soon as it was committed. He doth not deny, but in plain terms doth confess., that he did eat; and comedi, I have eaten, by itself had been a wise answer ; but it is cossmedi with mulies dedit, I did eat, but the woman gave it; a confession with an extenuation, and such a confession as is worse than a fiat denial. The woman gave it me, was a deep aggravation of the~ mans transgression. It is but dedit, she gave it him, but he was willing to receive it. And that which maketh his apology worse than a lie (I),. and rendereth his exonse inexcusable, is, that he removeth the fault from the woman on God him-~ self. Not the woman alone is brought in, but msdier quam Tu dedisti. God indeed gave Adama the woman, but lie gave him not the woman to give him the apple. Dedit socirsm a~u teatctriceem. 85 TRAITS OF THE TRAPPISTS. I cannot close these brief sketches without remarking that among the professed brethren of La Trappe was a certain Robert Graham, whose father, Colonel Graham, was cousin to Montrose. Robert was born in the Chateau de Rostourne, a short league (it is added, by way of help, I suppose, to perplexed travel- lers) from Edinburgh. By his mothers side, he was related to the Earl of Perth, of whom the Trappi8t biographer says, that he was even moreillustrious for his piety, and through what he suffered for the sake of religion, than by his dignities of Viceroy, High Chan- cellor of Scotland, and Governor of the Prince of Wales, now (1716) rightful King of Great Britain. The mother of Robert, a zealous Protestant, is spoken of as having as much piety as one can have in a false religion. In spite of her teaching, however, the young Robert early exhibited an inclination for the Romish religion; and at ten years of age the precocious boy attended the celebration of mass in the chapel at Jiolyrood, to the great displeasure of his mother. On his repeating his visits, she had him soundly whipped by his tutor; but the young gentleman declared that the process was unsuccessful in persuad- ing him to embrace Presbyterianism. He ac- cordingly rushed to the house of Lord Perth, himself a recent convert from the Anglican Church, and claimed his protection. After some family arrangements had been concluded, the youthful protdg6 was formally surrendered to the keeping of Lord Perth by his mother, with reluctance; by his father, with the facil- ity of those Gallios who care little about ques- tions of religion. After Lord Perth was com- pelled to leave Scotland, Robert sojourned with his mother, in the house of her brother, a godly Protestant minister. Here he showed the value he put upon the instructions he had received at the hands of Lord Perth and his Romish chaplain, by a conduct which dis- gusted every honest man and terrified every honest maiden in all the country round. His worthy biographer is candid enough to say that Robert, in falling off from popery, did not become a Protestant, but an atheist. The uncle turned him out of his house. The prod- igal repaired to London and rioted prodigally; and thence he betook himself to France, and even startled Paris with the bad renown of his misdoings. On his way thither through Flanders he had had a moment or two of mis- giving as to the wisdom of his career, and he hesitated, while he could count twenty, between the counsel of some good priests atid the bad example of some Jacobite soldiers. The latter prevailed, and when Robert ap- peared at the Court of St. Gerniaias Lord Perth presented to the fugitive king and queen there as accomplished a scoundrel as any in Christendom. There was a show of decency at the cx- iled court, and respect for religion. YouRg Graham ada p ted himself to the consequent influences. He studied French, read the Lives of the Saints, entered the seminary at Meaux, and finally re-professed the Romish religion. He was now seized with a desire to turn hermit, but, accident having taken him to La Trappe, the blas6 libertine felt reproved by the stern virtue exhibited there, and in a moment of enthusiasm he enrolled himself ~ postulant, bade farewell to the world, and de- voted himself to silence, obedience, humility, and austerity, with a perfectness that sur- prised alike those who sav and those who heard it. Lord Perth opposed the reception of Rob- ert in the monastery. Thereon aroso serious difficulty, and therewith the postulant relapsed into sin, lie blasphemed, reviled his kins- man, swore oaths that set the whole brother- hood in speechless terror, and finally wrote a letter to his old guardian so crammed with fierce and unclean epithets, that the abbot refused permission to have it forwarded. The excitement which followed brought on illness; with the latter came reflection and sorrow; at length all difficulties vanished, and ultimately, on the Eve of All-Saints, 1699, Robert Graham became a monk, and changed his name for that of Brother Alexis. King James visited him, and was much edified by the spiritual idstruction vouchsafed him by the second cousin of the gallant Montrose. The new monk was so perfect in obedience that he would not in winter throw a crumb to a half-starved sparrow, without first applying for leave from his immediate superior. Indeed, says his biographer, I could tell you a thousand veritable stories about him ; but they are so extraordinary that I do not suppose the world would believe one of them. The biogra- pher adds, that Alexis, after digging and cut- ting wood all day, eating little, drinking less, praying incessantly, and neither washing nor unclothing himself, lay down hut to pass the night ~vithout closing his eyes in sleep! He was truly a brother Vigilantius! The renown of this conversion had many influences. The father of Alexis, Colonel Graham, embraced Romanism, and with an elder brother of the former, who was already a Capuchin friar, betook themselves to La Trappe, where the reception of the former into the church was marked by a double solemnity De Ranc6 dyin~ as the ceremony was proceeding. The wife of Colonel Graham is said to have left Scotland on receipt of the above intelligence, to have repaired to France, and there embraced the form of faith followed by her somewhat facile husband. There is, however, great doubt on this point. The fate of young Robert Graham was similar to that of most of the Trappists. The deadly air, the hard work, the watchings, the scanty food, and the uncleanliness which 86 87 FACTS AND FACES.FAMINE IN INDIA. prevailed, soon slew a man who was as useless I to his fellow-man in the convent As ever he had been when resident in the world. His confinement in fact was a swift suicide. Consumption seized on this poor boy, for he was still bet a boy, and his rigid adherence to the severe discipline of the place only aided to develop what a little care might easily have checked. his serge gown clove to the carious bones which pierced through his diseased skin. The portions of the body on which he immovably lay became gangrened, and nothing appears to have been done by way of remedy. He endured all with patience, and looked forward to death with a not unaccountable longing. The infirmnier bade him be less eager in pressing forward to the grave. I will now pray God, said the nursing brother, that He will be pleased to save you. And I, said Alexis, will ask him not to heed you. Further detail is hardly necessary; suffice it to say, that Robert Graham died on the 21st May, 1701, little niore than six months after he had entered the monastery, and at the early age of twenty-two years. The father and brother also died in France and so ended the Cousins of Montrose. 1he great virtue inculcated at La Trappe was obedience. The only means whereby to escape Satan was bodily suffering. Salvation was iuost surely promised to hiui who suffered niost. Of the one great hope common to all Christians the Trappists of course were not destitute; but that hope seemed not to relieve them of their terrible dread of the Prince of Evil, and his power. There is a good moral in Cuviers dream, which might have profited these poor men had they but known it. Cuvier once saw, in his sleep, the popular representation of Satan advancing towards lmiiu, and threatening to eat him. Eat me ! exclaimed the philosopher, as he ex- amuined the fiend with the eye of a naturalist, and then added Horns! hoofs! gram- inimorous ! ! need nt be afraid of him ! Jou~ DoIIAN. Facts and Faces; or, the Mutual Connexion between Linear and Mental Portraiture Morally Considered, and Pictorially Illustrated by a Series of Twenty-four Graphic Heads of all the Disposi- tions of the Mind, & c. By Thomas Woolnoth, Esq., Engraver in Ordinary to the Queen, & c. Mr. Woolnoth the engraver has been deliver- ing a series of lectures on physiognomy at various institutions, and has published their substance in this volume. The expense, however, has un- fortunately limited his specimens to one repre- sentation of each quality, instead of the varied illustrations that accompanied the oral exposi- tion. The selection of the niost graphic heads, to exhibit all the dispositions of the mind, has compelled the artist to take the most extreme or striking examples; and this has given an exaggerated or forced expression to the faces. Poetical people talk of the soul shining through the eyes; in Mr. Woolnotlis specimens the soul is thrusting itself into every feature. In aiming at exhibiting actual life, the artist has perhaps fallen too much into the specialty of common life. Pride is exhibited in the head of a dandy- looking player, or man upon town; Tyranny is the bald and rather bloated-looking head of the principal of some establishment. The artists gallantry may also seem to suffer from this necessity of selecting units ; it is doubtless owing to this that the ladies represent so many ill qualities. Obstinacy, Cunning, I)e ceit, Envy, Spite, Sauciness, Af- fectation, and Irritability, all have female representatives ; and Vanity probably would also he feminine, but the head is wanting in our copy unless it is supplied by the frontispiece, which allegorically attributes vanity to all the world. One good quality alone is embodied in a female face, and that Amiability is rather a temperament than a virtue. Fie, Mr. Woolnoth! and engraver to her majesty too! The faces and the explanations are accom- panied by a species of discourse somewhat after the style of Stevens Lectures on Heads. These discourses are not very scientific, but they ex- hibit shrewd con ainore observation. Spectator. FAMINE IN INDIA. We have famines occur- ring almost decennially, some of which, within our time, have swept their millions away. In 1838, 50,000 persons perished in the month of September in Lucknow ; at Khanpoor, 1200 died of want; and 500,0001. sterling were subscribed by the bountiful to relieve the destitute. In Guntoor, 150,000 human beings, 74,000 bullocks, 159,000 much cattle, and 300,000 sheep and goats, died of starvation. Fifty thousand people perished in Marwar ; nnd in the North-west Provinces, 500,000 human lives are supposed to have been lost. The living preyed upon the dead ; mothers devoured their children ; and the human imagination could scarcely picture the scenes of horror that pervaded the land. In twenty nmonths time, 1,500,000 persons must have died of hunger or of its immediate conse- quences. The direct pecuniary loss occasioned to government by this single visitation exceeded 5,000,0001. sterling a sum which would have gone far to avert the calamity from which it arose, had it been expended in constructing thorough- fares to connect the interior with the sea-coast, or districts where scarcity prevailed with those where human food was to be had in abundance; or on canals to bear forth to the soil, thirsty and barren for want of moisture, the unbounded supplies our rivers carry to the ocean. Born- bal,m Times. Tnu same people who can deny others every- thing are famous for denying themselves nothing. THE TURKISH QUESTION. BY CAPTAIN SPENCER. From the Erited Service Magazine. what is termed, in the language of diplomacy, THE TURKISH QUESTION, AND ITS CON- a protectorate, when it has for its chief a Czar, or a Kaiser; we also know how fre- NEXION WITH EUROPEAN POLITICS. quently the peace of the world has been dis- turbed in consequence of the unjust partition of Poland, and the equally unjust decree of a THE Turkish question, which has so long Vienna Congress, which transferred Italy and occupied the attention of the political world, various other countries to the rule of foreign seems to have at length resolved itself into despots with whom the people had no symn- one of those entangled difficulties that appear pathy of race or tradition. to defy every attenipt to unravel; mixed up As it has ever been our aim neither to dis- as it is in a greater or less degree with the rel- tort nor exaggerate such facts as may be ateve position of every country in Europe, in involved in the subjects we discuss, we regret diplomatic parlance, the equitable adjustment that we cannot coincide with sonic of our of the balance of power is involved in the de- contemporaries in holding up the government cision. Up to the present time, whatever of the Sultan as an example of liberality and promised to renew the spirit of vitality tolerance to the civilized sovereign.s of Europe. to revive the decaying embers of Turkish It is true a material change for tl)e better rule has been tried and failed; and now an has taken place in the administrative system, announcement so startling, and so full of per- and the condition of the Rayah has been tentous meaning, as the impending dissoin. ameliorated wherever the executive possessed tion of the Turkish Empire, has excited no the power of enforcing its measures of reform; inconsiderable degree of alarm. This, how- but, unfortunately for the regeneration of the ever, cannot surprise us, when we remember country, there still exists the same impassa- that every government interested in the re- ble gulf between the ruler and the ruled, the sult must see, with undisguised apprehension same hereditary, never-dying hatred between for the future peace of the world, some of the the Christian and the Mahometan, while the most favored countries of our hemisphere majority of the Turks, even the most civilized, lying open to the grasp of the first invader exhibit the same determined hostility to re- who mi~lit have the hardihood to seize the form and all industrial progress, as their tempting prize. Yet, in the ordinary course barbarous ancestors, the shepherd warriors of things, this event might have been antici- of Othman. How hopeless, then, is it to pated, as the certain fate of every state too expect that such a people will lead tIme way feeble to maintain its own independence in the reformnation of a country! and it is of every ruler whose principles of governing equally improbThle that Christian and Ma- itre antagonistic to the wants and wishes of hometan will ever blend together in peaceful the people over whom he is called to reign. concord. We all know the bitterness of sec- A great deal has been already written upon tarian prejudice, and the evils resulting from the Turkish question, and many different it even in the most civilized countries; hut opinions expressed by politicians of every how aggravated is the feeling when igno- party; some recommending a continuance rance and superstitious zeal combine to fun of the old system of propping up the decayed its fury! With so many obstacles to contend fabric others advising the more plausible, against, the Sultan may issue hatti-sheriff and, as we believe, the safer way of encour- after hatti-sherifi, he may invest Christian aging the development of civilization the and Mahometan with equal rights, lie may desire for free institutions among the numer- build churches and endow schools ; still time ous races of Christians that now constitute evil remnains the prejudices of creed arid the great majority of the subjects of the caste to frustrate the intentions of the most Ottoman Portewith a view that they may just and equitable government that ever ex~ be prepared to take their place among the isted. In addition to all this, it must be nations when the imbecile empire of the remembered that, to increase still further thee Osmanhi shall fall a prey to its own internal difficulty, the whole machinery of the govern- weakness. Whatever may be the final issue ment is conducted by Mahometans, while thee of events, it gives us the greatest satisfaction position allowed to thee Christians is that (if to know that no scheme of spohiation or parti- mere helots. Hence it only requires the tion in favor of any foreign power will receive slightest change in the spirit of thee govern- the sanction of Great Britain; her govern- ment a return of the reactionary party to ment, at least, has pronounced this decision; their former power in the councils of thee and we hope, when the hour of trial is come, Divan to see the entire order of things re- that no temporizing influences of a Peace versed; the Christians again trodden to the Congress will be found to prevail over a res- earth, their churches again in flames, and the olution of such paramount importance to the savage fury of Mahometan bigotry let loose best interests of the empire. We have been against theema; for they have no other pro- taught by experience the true meaning of tection than a weak executive that rules by 88 THE TURKISH QUESTION. expedients, and depends for existence on the animosity between creeds and races. We regret that we cannot give a more fa- vorable picture of the state of the Turkish Empire. The crisis may be postponed for a few years, but it must surely come; and, as we have long known this, it would have been a dereliction of duty to our readers, if we did not state what is already familiar to the ene- mies of Turkey, who, for many years, by means of their agents, have been seeking its overthrow. We therefore trust that the governments of Western Europe, who must be well acquainted with its perils and difficulties, will be prepared to take such active measures as may be deemed necessary to meet the im- pending evil. We alluded, in our last number, to the increasing and multiplied difficulties of the Ottoman government, when endeavoring to carry out any salutary work of reform; to the rapid and extraordinary decrease of the Turk- ish race; to the want of integrity and moral principle in too many of the public employ~s; to the exhausted state of the treasury; and to the necessity of maintaining large standing armies and garrisons for the fortresses, in a country where an insurrection may break out at any time, either among the non-reforming Mahometans, or the oppressed Christians. All this is most deplorable; the inevitable consequences, as ~ve before observed, of the perpetual hostility of creeds and races of the decrees of former Sultans, which invested every believer in Mahomet with the power and dignity of a noble, and compelled the unhappy Christian to remain a helot, obliged to submit to spoliation and tyranny, perhaps death, or insure the safety of his head by the payment of a poll-tax. In any other country, or under any other governument than this, provided the inhabi- tants were all of the same race, and spoke the same language, it is possible, in about a cen- tury, now that a disposition has been shown to reform abuses, that these barbarisms of a former age might be remedied ; but when we remember that every office, civil or military, down to the common soldier, is tilled by Ma- hometans either the half-wild tribes of Asia, or the equally savage mountaineers of Bosnia and Albania we must confess, that we see no hope for the consolidation of the Turkish Empire, unless the Mahometan is con- verted to Christianity! or the Rayah becomes a renegade! Even when the Mahometan has received a. European education, it is said that it only tends to sharpen his intellect, without improving his morality, and, when he returns to office, he exhibits a more than ordinary degree of rapacity, at the expense of his mas- ter and the people committed to his charge. We cannot be surprised at this, as every appointment, from that of Pacha down to a Kodji-bachis, is sold to the highest bidder, who, from the moment lie is installed in office, has no other thought but how, or by what means, he can enrich himself. Perhaps it was the difficulty of finding men of incorruptible integrity among the ranks of these travelled Csmanlis, that induced the. Sultan to call to his councils the old Mussul- man party, prejudiced and ignorant as they are of everything beyond their own contracted world of Islamism, to whose gaucheries in the art of governing may be atmributed, in a great measure, the present embarrassments of the Porte; for, however unprincipled and corrupt their predecessors might have been, when money was in the way, they exhibited both tact and skill in their negotiations with the wary politicians of the West. Of this we have convincing proofs in the recent acts of, the wilful, ill-judging cainarilla now in power, who, after dcstroying the credit of the coun- try, by ignoring the Turkish loan, despatched an armed force against Montonegro, and that at a time when a spark would have sufficed to arouse the whole Christian population to rebellion. In the one case they excited the ennmity of the moneyed interest of Europe (a most dangerous proceeding!), and in the other exposed the nakedness and feebleness of the Turkish Empire to the contemptuous gaze of the whole of Western Europe. Everything cousidered, whatever may be the terms upon which the Austro-Montenegro question is settled, we must not delude our- selves with the belief that the storm will be succeeded by a calm ; greater perils, we may be assured, will follow, and to provide against them, requires all the sagacity and watchful- ness the English statesman can exercise. At the same time, however unwilling we may be to admit the fact, it cannot be denied that Turkey, to all intents and purposes, is politi- cally and morally dead; or at least has only so much vitality remaining as may serve to render her a victim to her powerful and over- bearing neighbors, who might, in her present hdpless state, extort concessions inconsistent with international law and justice, and there- by compromise the peace of the world. We cannot have forgotten that, only a few years ago, we were on the eve of a war with France, respecting Egypt and the Syrian question; nor that, during the latter years of the reign of Louis Philippe, we were kept in continual alarm by the incessant intrigues of that lover of crooked policy; his aim in Greece being to carry out his great scheme the foundation of a modern Byzantine empire, and the con- version of the Mediterranean, the Dardanelles, the Bosphorus, and the Adriatic into French lakes! A scheme which nearly turned the heads of tIme Greeks, and made them, at the time, the most bitter enemies of England. France has at all times proved herself & 89 THE TURKISH QUESTION. slippery ally, where her own advantage is concerned; and were it not for so many opposing interests in Eastern Europe, we would rather rely, for the preservation of peace, on the prudence and good faith of the Emperor of Russia; knowing, as we do, that in virtue of his character of Slavonian Prince, and Protector of the Greek religion, he could at any time, by encouraging a revolt among the Christians, sweep away the Turks and their Koran from the whole of Eastern Europe, during the course of a summers campaign. Perhaps he bides his time, knowing that if this indolent, incorrigible race are left undis- turbed, they will allo~v him to win his game without opposition; at all events, whatever fate may be reserved for the Christian popu- lation of Turkey, no form of government, or ruler, can be worse than that which has for so many centuries oppressed them. But whether it is probable that so many millions of think- ing men, with all their prejudices of race, religion, and tradition, will tamely submit to be transferred, like a bale of goods, to the rule of a foreign prince, even though that prince should be the Czar of all the Russias, is a question ~ve shall discuss hereafter. The truth is, Turkey has been long suffer- ing under the protracted agonies of impend- ing dissolution, and although, in a political point or view, we may regret the vast acquisi- t~ns of territory obtained by Russia, in con- sequence of her various disputes with the Ottoman Porte, humanity compels us to acknowledge that it was a happy change for the pe9ple. The same observation is appli- cable to the other tribes and races, either Servians, Greeks, Moldavians, Wallachians, or Egyptians; who, since their emancipation from the rule of the Porte, have all, whether well or ill governed, made rapid advances in civilization, industry, and commercial pros- perity. Ilow impossible is it to fathom the ways of Providence! England, when she destroyed the naval force of Turkey, at Navarino, and France, when she seized possession of Algeria, were equally instrumental, with Russia, in hastening the dowufitil of a power that had so long been one of the greatest scourges ever inflicted upon a Christian people. Notwith- standing that, in the one case, the act was most impolitic, with reference to our interests iu the Levant, and, in the other, contrary to all justice and international law; subsequent events have proved that the world has been benefited, as new states have been called into existence, whose industry, and the growing wants of the inhabitants, have added to the general welfare of every other country, by giving an impulse to trade and commerce, thosc great levers of civilization and enlighten- ment. Besides, young and vigorous commu- pities have been reared up, to take their place among the nations, and preserve, each in their p roper sphere, the equilibrium of power, in~ dieatincr to the statesman interested in the result, the line of policy to be pursued in those provinces of Turkey in Europe, where the inhabitants are united by race, religion, and language, and who, were it not for the jealousy of foreign powers, and rival interests, would be certain to work out their redemption from the thraldom of a Mahomnetan ruler; whereas these powers, in the vain attempt to preserve the integrity of the Turkish Thupire, became accessory to the ruin and depopulation of some of the finest countries in Europe. Perhaps the world never before witnessed an age in which so many cross purposes and conflicting interests were attempted to be rec- onciled as the present; as if we had entered into a ne~v state of existence, that was to have nothing in common with the past. At what other epoch did the rulers of men pursue a retrograde movement, while the people were, at the same time, voluntarily and vigorously rushing forward, breaking down those barriers that oppose their advance the institutions of the past and trampling alike on their hered- itary chiefs, their priests, and their church, when adverse to their wishes for a more en- lightened form of government~ The same spirit of innovation on the customs and tradi- tions of former ages, now so active among the inhabitants of the civilized West, has at length found an entrance into the benighted East, where we find tribes and races, who, little inure than half a century ago, were living iii a state of semi-barbarism, now pushing res- olutely onward in the great march of improve- ment, everywhere affording unmistakable evidence that the crumbling edifice of time- worn absolutism is approaching its downfall; and if princes will not lead the movement, they roust be prepared to meet the violence of the torrent when it has once burst the bounds that confine it. The multitude of political refugees, from every part of Europe, seeking concealment on the mountain-top, or in the secluded glen, detailing their misfortunes, and enlisting the sympathy of their hearers, has been, in a great measure, the cause of this change of feeling; to which may be added the multiplied facilities of railway communication, and the increased intelligence of travellers of all classes, everywhere disseminating their ideas, and rendering the simple villager still more discontented with his lot, and which must increase each succeeding year. We have a practical illustration of this in the sudden change that has so recently taken place in the minds of the inhabitants of those vast countries of Eastern Europe, peopled by the Slavonian race, so long held in leading- strings by the Emperor of Russia, who, after spending millions of money in moulding them, as he thought, to his exclusive interests, finds 90 THE TURKISH QUESTION. 91 himself, at the moment he expected to realize I visions, should ever unite, and be lcd by an his ambitious projects, in the same position as ambitious chieftain, no power either in Eu.. the German philosopher that created the demon, rope or Asia could effectually oppose them. trembling before the work of his own hands. Surel~r Peter I. must have been acquainted This unexpected result has been produced by with tius opinion of the learned Greek, when the circumstance, that Panslavisii has become he conceived the project of uniting the whole divided into two hostile (amps, the one Rus- race under the banner of Russia; and how sian and dcspotic in its tendencies, and the well his successors have followed the counsel other federal and democratic ; in consequence given to them by their great ancestor, is of which, the balance of power among this shown by the fact that, at the present moment, numerous and energetic race is now oscillating upwards of fifty millions of this race acknowl- between despoti& m and civil and religious free- edge the Czar as their only spiritual and tern- dom; one of those singular and unexpected poral chief. events, which sometimes occur in the political Previous to the French revolution of 1830, life of a people, and baffle the calculations of the agents of Russia, however active they might the most astute and sagacious politician. have been in performing their Panslavistie Thanks, therefore, to the provident care of missions among their brethren of Austria and Austria and Russia, here we have a people Turkey, while pretending to seek for mate- fully and politically educated, to fill up the rials to complete the history of the Slavonian void which the Turk will indubitably leave in race, made but little progress except among Eastern Europe. the inhabitants of towns and cities. But at In order to make our readers acquainted a later period, when the republicanism of with this political movement of young Slavonia, France and Germany threatened the subver- we must conduct them to the home of that sion of monarchy, and the discontent of the section of the Slavonian race subject to the Italians and the Poles broke forth into insur- rule of Austria and Turkey, and slightly glance rection, and the Hungarians agitated for a at their political and social condition ; and, more liberal system of government ; as a although the vision of our Western politicians safety-valve from such imminent danger, does not usually extend so far, yet, of all the recommended, we presume, by Russia, the great families of Europe, there is none in the Slavonians were suddenly elevated to great present day more deserving the attention of favor with the cabinet of Vienna a people the diplomatist and the statesman; because, who form more than one half of the numneric~ let it he remembered, this race is bound by strength of the Austrian empire; and, tosho~ the same ties of kindred tradition, and, for the paternal care of the emperor for theirwel- the most part, religion, fare, elementary schools and universities were According to the accounts of well-informed everywhere established for the education of German Russian writers, the various nation- this long-neglected race, to which was added alities of the Slavonian race may be computed, an intellectual and scientific press, also fos- at a moderate calculation, to be about a hun- tered by imperial care. dred million., in different stages of civiliza- Thus flattered and encouraged above every tion ; and to unite these under the sceptre of other nationality in the Austrian Empire, tIme Russia has been the unceasing effrt of every Slavonians made rapid strides in civilization, Czar, from the time of the first Peter down to and were not only promoted to some of the the present day. To describe the social life most important offices, both civil amid military, of a people who occupy such an immense ex- but, as professors at their universities, became tent of territory, from the Frozen Ocean to famous for their learning, eloquence, and the central Asia, and subject to different princes, deep research they displayed in elucidating ~vould be scarcely possible; still, however ig- their own early history, which had been norant, however divided from each other, or hitherto little known or cared for by their domiciliated among other nations, the differ- rulers, the Germans and the Hungarians. A emit tribes may be, they preserve their lan- host of these fiery zealots, after having been guage, traditions, customs, and manners in tutored and paid by the state, and animated short, their national characteristics so that with all the animosities and jealousies of race, a Slavonian of Turkey or China immediately were despatched to all the Slavonian provinces recognizes his brother Slavonian, even though of Hungary, where they might be heard preach- a native of the far-distant regions of the North. ing Panslavism, and exciting the hatred of Robust and vigorous, brave and enterprising, their brethren against their old tyrants and timey form, in the present day, the best sol- conquerors, the Huns. However much we diers in the armies of Austria, Prussia, and may feel inclined to condemn the iniquitous Turkey. policy of the cabinet of Vienna, in exciting If this mighty and numerous people, the prejudices of race among nationalities, said Thucydides, possessing in themselves which for so many centuries had lived in all the elements of greatness and conquest, peace, still we must rejoice in the intellectual but now powerless through their mutual di- and moral improvement of to large a portiom THE TURKISH QUESTION. of mankind. We are also indebted to the Panslavistic mania for bringing us acquainted with much that is interesting in the early history of a race which, it would appear, were ruled over the greatest part of Europe before Rome existed; and how highly flattering to a people, so long the bondsmen of the Tartar, the Turk, the German and the Hun, to be told, in their own language, and in their own journals, after centuries of slavery, that they were the descendants of those illustrious II- lyrians who won by their valor the glorious epithet of Slavon (men of renown), from the great Macedonian chief, the conqueror of the world! It cannot be denied that there is a great deal fanciful, and even fabulous, in the early history of the Slavonians, but it suited the views of Russia and Austria to have it eluci- dated. It was necessary to inspirit, and to awaken i~ pride of race among a people who had been long sunk in abject slavery, before they could be encouraged to measure their swords with the fiery valor of a Hungarian. it is unnecessary to say how sanguinary was the contest that followed, how bitter the ani- inosities of race, when, in conjunction with the German, and their brethren of Russia, they succeeded in striking down the thousand years monarchy of their ancient enemy, the hungarians. When victory had declared for Austria, how she must have exulted to see the proud ~1agyar at her feet, to see all his boasted rights and liberties trampled in the mire of the battle-field! Russia must have been even more pleased when she beheld the sword wrested from the hand, aud broken in pieces, of the only people in the Austrian Empire who could oppose her progress. Feeble Aus- tria, like Turkey on a former occasion, no doubt fancied her sceptre had been supported by Russian bayonets; in reality she had transferred it to the hand of her deceitful ally, and become, like Turkey, an empire having only the shadow of majesty and might a thing of shreds and patches, at the. mercy of a people, and they her own subjects, who had been long and artfully schooled to look up to the Czar as the saviour of their race, the protector of their creed, the man that was sent from God to deliver them from the bond- age of the German, the Turk, and the Hun. But how uncertain are all human calcula- tions! The consequences which may yet arise out of the fall of Hungary will perhaps prove as fatal to the peace and security of the house of Romanow as to that of Hapsburg; and truly there are too many portentous signs of civil discord not to warrant the conclusion that these countries of Eastern Europe are on the eve of some important change of some tremendous struggledestined to have a pow- erful influence on the political relations of every country in Europe. The fanaticism and ho3- tile feeling between creeds and races is happily giving way wherever the people have become sufficiently intelligent to comprehend that their only chance of emancipation from the despotism of their foreign tyrants arises from a union of interests. Acting upon this con- viction, the democrats of Hungary and also the Roumani of Moldavia and ~Yallachia, hitherto so antagonistic in race and language to their fellow-countrymen, the Slavonians, have joined the Illyrian Panslavists, and now form a gigantic association, advocating a General Confederation (similar to that of the United States of America) of all the tribes and races subject to the rule of Austria and Turkey. The ramifications of this brother- hood, it is said, extend through Poland and the Slavonian provinces of Prussia, and even among the Cossacks of the Ukrain and Bes- sarabia. And now, propelled as it is by the fiery spirits of Hungary, Poland, and Italy, and the agents of the Great European Demo- cratic Propaganda, it must be adiaitted that we have here a most extraordinary combina- tion heralding a conflagration, and only re- quiring another Magyar Hunyadi, or a Slavo- nian Tzerni George, to light it up in a blaze. That such a man will come at the hour app9inted by fate, and rally around him mil- lions of brave and vigorous warriors, no man can doubt who is well acquainted with the political and social state of the inhabitants of those long-neglected countries of Eastern Europe. In other great and wealthy states of the more civilized West, where so much property is at stake, and so many clashing interests bound up in the general welfare, the very name of liberty, disgraced as it has been by the socialist theories of visionary demagogues and political empirics, has partially fallen in- to disrepute; here, however, there are no great capitalists, no millionnaire manufac- turers, no moneyed interests, always inimical to change, and opposing the mighty influence of wealth to the e florts of the people for social amelioration; but a brave and vigorous popu- lation, just arrived at that state of civilization and love of freedom that produced a Cromwell and a Hampden in England, and a Washing- ton in America. The gigantic military force of Russia and Austria, which must now be regarded as one, may for a time coerce and keep down the movement; but the system of patriarchal self-government so warmly cherished by Lhe Slavonians, and the principles of civil liberty and tolerance introduced into the land or despotism by the Hungarians, and which foreign rulers have been unable to destroy, would be certain, were there no other cause, to prevent these races from submitting for any lengthened period to an absolute govern- 92 THE TURKISH QUESTION. 93 ment, even though it should be the enlight- frontier. Perhaps the Hungarian and Slavo- ened paternal despotism of the Czar. nian refugees in the service of the Porte in- We are not alarmists, but no man w