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BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

THE DRAMAS OF HENRY TAYLOR.

There is no living writer whose rank in literature appears to be more accurately determined, or more permanently secured to him, than the author of Philip Van Artevelde.1 Not gifted with the ardent temperament, the very vivid imagination, or the warmth of passion which are supposed necessary to carry a poet to the highest eminences of his art, he has, nevertheless, that intense reflection, that large insight into human life, that severe taste, binding him always to a most select, accurate, and admirable style, which must secure him a lofty and impregnable position amongst the class of writers who come next in order to the very highest.

There have been greater poems, but in modern times we do not think there has appeared any dramatic composition which can be pronounced superior to the masterpiece of Henry Taylor. Neither of the Sardanapalus of Lord Byron, nor the Remorse of Coleridge, nor the Cenci of Shelley, could this be said. We are far from asserting that Taylor is a greater poet than Byron, or Coleridge, or Shelley; but we say that no dramatic composition of these poets surpasses, as a whole, Philip Van Artevelde. These writers have displayed, on various occasions, more passion and more pathos, and a command of more beautiful imagery, but they have none of them produced a more complete dramatic work; nor do any of them manifest a profounder insight, or a wider view of human nature, or more frequently enunciate that pathetic wisdom, that mixture of feeling and sagacity, which we look upon as holding the highest place in eloquence of every description, whether prose or verse. The last act of Shelley's drama of the Cenci has left a more vivid impression upon our mind than any single portion of the modern drama; but one act does not constitute a play, and this drama of the Cenci is so odious from its plot, and the chief character portrayed in it is, in every sense of the word, so utterly monstrous, (for Shelley has combined, for purposes of his own, a spirit of piety with the other ingredients of that diabolical character, which could not have co-existed with them,) that, notwithstanding all its beauty, we would willingly efface this poem from English literature. If one of those creatures, half beautiful woman and half scaly fish, which artists seem, with a traditional depravity of taste, to delight in, were really to be alive, and to present 506 itself before us, it would hardly excite greater disgust than this beautifully foul drama of the Cenci.

The very fact of our author having won so distinct and undisputed a place in public estimation, must be accepted as an excuse for our prolonged delay in noticing his writings. The public very rapidly passed its verdict upon them: it was a sound one. The voice of encouragement was not needed to the author; nor did the reading world require to be informed of the fresh accession made to its stores. If we now propose to ourselves some critical observations on the dramas of Mr Taylor, we enter upon the task in exactly the same spirit that we should bring to the examination of any old writer, any veritable ancient, of established celebrity. We are too late to assist in creating a reputation for these dramas, but we may possibly throw out some critical suggestions which may contribute to their more accurate appreciation.

In Philip Van Artevelde, the great object of the author appears to have been to exhibit, in perfect union, the man of thought and the man of action. The hero is meditative as Hamlet, and as swift to act as Coriolanus. He is pensive as the Dane, and with something of the like cause for his melancholy; but so far from wasting all his energies in moody reflection, he has an equal share for a most enterprising career of real life. He throws his glance as freely and as widely over all this perplexing world, but every footstep of his own is planted with a sure and certain knowledge, and with a firm will. His thoughts may seem to play as loose as the air above him, but his standing-place is always stable as the rock. Such a character, we need not say, could hardly have been selected, and certainly could not have been portrayed with success, by any but a deeply meditative mind.

It is often remarked that the hero is the reflection of the writer. This could not be very correctly said in instances like the present. A writer still lives only in his writings, lives only in his thoughts, whatever martial feats or bold enterprises he may depict. We could not prophesy how the poet himself would act if he had been the citizen of Ghent. It is more accurate to content ourselves with saying that the delineation of his hero has given full scope to the intellectual character of the author, and to his own peculiar habits of thought. For if the great citizen of Ghent combines in an extraordinary degree the reflective and the energetic character, our author unites, in a manner almost as peculiar, two modes of thinking which at first appear to be opposed: he unites that practical sagacity which gives grave, and serious, and useful counsels upon human conduct, with that sad and profound irony—that reasoned despondency—which so generally besets the speculative mind. All life is—vanity. Yet it will not do to resign ourselves to this general conclusion, from which so little, it is plain, can be extracted. From nothing, nothing comes. We must go back, and estimate by comparison each form and department of this human life—which, as a whole, is so nugatory. Thus, practical sagacity is reinstated in full vigour, and has its fair scope of action, though ever and anon a philosophic despondency will throw its shadow over the scene.

As it is a complete man, so it is a whole life, that we have portrayed in the drama of Philip Van Artevelde. The second part is not what is understood by a "continuation" of the first, but an essential portion of the work. In the one we watch the hero rise to his culminating point; in the other we see him sink—not in crime, and not in glory, but in a sort of dim and disastrous twilight. We take up the hero from his student days; we take him from his philosophy and his fishing-line, and that obstinate pondering on unsolvable problems, which is as much a characteristic of youth as the ardent passions with which it is more generally accredited; we take him from the quiet stream which he torments, far more by the thoughts he throws upon it, than by his rod and line. "He is a man of singular address
In catching river-fish,"
says a sarcastic enemy, who knew nothing of the trains of thought for 507 which that angling was often a convenient disguise. A hint given in the drama will go far to explain what their hue and complexion must have been. The father of Philip had headed the patriotic cause of the citizens of Ghent; it had triumphed in his person; the same citizens of Ghent had murdered him on the threshold of his door. When he was a boy, the stains of his father's blood were still visible on that threshold: the widowed mother would not suffer them to be removed, and, nursing her revenge, loved to show them to the child. There was something here to colour the thoughts of the young fisherman.

But passion and the world are now knocking at the heart of the meditative student. Love and ambition are there, and, moreover, the turbulent condition of the city of Ghent seems to forbid the continuance of this life of quietude. The passions of the world crave admittance. Shall he admit them? The great theatre of life claims its new actor. Shall he go? Shall he commit himself once and for ever to the turmoil and delusions of that scene—delusions that will not delude, but which will exercise as great a tyranny over him as if they did? Yes; he will go. As well do battle with the world without, as eternally with his own thoughts; for this is the only alternative youth presents to us. Yes, he will go; but deliberately: he will not be borne along, he will govern his own footsteps, and, come what may, will be always master of himself.

Launoy, one of Ghent's bravest patriots, has been killed. The first reflection we hear from the lips of Artevelde is called forth by this intelligence. It does not surprise him.

If ambition wears this ambiguous aspect to his mind, it is not because he is disposed to regard the love of woman too enthusiastically.

Yet Artevelde is at this time on his way to Adriana to make that declaration which the Lady Adriana is so solicitous to hear. This a lover! Yes; only one of that order who hang over and count the beatings of their own heart.

Launoy being destroyed, and the people of Ghent having lost others of their leaders, and growing discontented with the stern rule of Van Den Bosch, some new captain or ruler of the town is looked for. The eyes of men are turned to Philip Van Artevelde. He shall be captain of the Whitehoods, and come to the rescue of the falling cause; for, of late, the Earl of Flanders has been everywhere victorious. Van Den Bosch himself makes the proposal. It is evident, from hints that follow, that Artevelde had already made his choice; he saw that the time was come when, even if he desired it, there was no maintaining a peaceful neutrality. But Van Den Bosch meets with no eager spirit ready to snatch at the perilous prize held out to him. He is no dupe to the nature of the offer, nor very willing that others should fancy him to be one—

It is worth noticing how the passion of revenge, like the others, is 508 admitted to its post; admitted, yet coldly looked upon. He will revenge his father. Two knights, Sir Guisebert Grutt and Simon Bette, (we wish they had better names,) were mainly instrumental in his murder. These men have been playing false, by making treacherous overtures to the Earl of Flanders; they will be in his power. But they cannot, he reflects, render back the life they have destroyed—

Still less does the patriotic harangue of Van Den Bosch find an enthusiastic response. He was already too much a statesman to be a demagogue; not to mention that his father's career had taught him a bitter estimate of popularity, and of all tumultuary enthusiasm:—

He had already resolved. Such a man would not have suffered himself to be hemmed in within the space of two hours to make so great a decision; but he would not rush precipitately forward; he would feel his own will at each step. He had already resolved; but his love to Adriana troubles him at heart: he must first make all plain and intelligible there, before he becomes captain of the Whitehoods. From this interview he goes to Adriana; and then follows a dialogue, every sentence of which, if we were looking out for admirable passages for quotation, would offer itself as a candidate. We quote only, from a drama so well known, for the purpose of illustrating the analytic view we would present of its chief hero; but the passages selected for this purpose can hardly fail of being also amongst the most beautiful in themselves. Artevelde is alone, waiting for the appearance of Adriana—

Adriana appears, and in the course of the dialogue he addresses her thus:—

And now he is open to hear Van Den Bosch. That veteran in war and insurrection brings him news that the people are ready to elect him for their captain or ruler.

The time of action is at hand. We now see Van Artevelde in a suit of armour; he is reclining on a window-seat in his own house, looking out upon the street. There is treason in the town; of those who flock to the market-place, some have already deserted his cause.

They join the assembly; they take their stand each by one of the traitor knights; the debate on the proposal of the Earl proceeds; three hundred citizens are to be given up to him, and on this, and other conditions, peace is to be granted. Artevelde addresses the assembly, and then turning to these knights, he continues:—

He can do "what is needful." It is admirable; everything that is said and done is admirable; but an involuntary suspicion at times creeps into the mind, that such a man as Philip Van Artevelde never lived, or could live. No man could move along such a line of enterprise with such a weight of reflection on all the springs of action. We see the calm statesman at the head of a tumultuary movement; and the meditative man, to whom revenge is the poorest of our passions, striking a blow from which an old warrior might shrink. Could a man be really impelled along a path 510 of life like this by passions that are admitted, indeed, into the bosom, but watched like prisoners? The suspicion, we say, creeps involuntarily into the mind; but we will not entertain it—we will not yield to it. That the reflective and energetic characters are, in certain degrees, combined together, we all know; and who shall say within what degrees only this is possible? And why may not an ideal perfection of this kind be portrayed as well as an ideal patriot, or an ideal monk, or an ideal warrior? We throw the suspicion aside, and continue our analysis.

There is a passage which is often quoted for its great beauty: we quote it also for its great appropriateness. Philip Van Artevelde is master of the city; he is contemplating it at night-time from the tower of St Nicholas. The reflection here put into the mouth of the anxious captain brings back to us, in the midst of war and the cares of government, the meditative man:—

The famous scene, which has for its place the summit of this tower, between Artevelde and Van Den Bosch, is fresh in the recollection of every reader: we must pass it by, and the admirable and pathetic description of the famine that is raging in Ghent, and proceed to the last act of this part of the drama. Artevelde has stimulated the citizens to make one brave effort more—to sally from the walls, and meet the Earl in battle before Bruges. He has arranged in order of battle his lean and famine-stricken, but desperate little army. He knows the extreme peril in which they stand: no food in the camp; fearful odds to be encountered; yet the only hope lying in immediate battle. He does not delude himself for a moment; he sees the danger clear, and entertains it with a certain sarcastic levity. He does not hope, but he acts as if he did. He is not a man given to hope, but he has a tempered despondency, which sits with him at the council-board, and rides with him to the field, and which he compels to do the services of hope.

We like this last expression. What in another man would have been a mere petulance, is in Artevelde an assumed confidence—consciously assumed, as the only tone of mind in which to pass through the present crisis. Nor can we omit to notice the following passage, which, to our apprehension, is very characteristic of our contemplative politician and warrior; it shows the sardonic vein running through his grave and serious thoughts:—

The battle is fought and a victory won. Justice is executed with stern and considerate resolve on the villains of the piece, and we leave Van Artevelde triumphant in his great contest, and happy in the love of Adriana.

The subordinate characters who are introduced into this first part of the drama, we have no space to examine minutely. The canvass is well filled, though the chief figure stands forward with due prominence. Adriana is all that an amiable and loving woman should be. The lighter-hearted Clara is intended as a sort of contrast and relief. Her levity and wit are not always graceful; they are not so in the early scene where she jests with the page: afterwards, when in presence of her lover, she has a fitter and more genial subject 511 for her playful wit, and succeeds much better. In the course of the drama, when the famine is raging in Ghent, she appears as the true sister of Philip Van Artevelde. At her first introduction she is somewhat too hoydenish for the mistress of the noble D'Arlon. D'Arlon is all that a knight should be, and Gilbert Matthew is a consummate villain.

Between the first and second parts is a poem in rhyme, called "The Lay of Elena." This introduces us to the lady who is to be the heroine of the second part of the drama. All the information it gives, might, we think, have been better conveyed in a few lines of blank verse, added to that vindication of herself which Elena pours forth in the first act, when Sir Fleureant of Heurlée comes to reclaim her on the part of the Duke of Bourbon. This poem is no favourite of ours; but the worst compliment we would pay it implies, in one point of view, a certain fitness and propriety—we were glad to return to the blank verse of our author, in which we find both more music and more pathos than in these rhymes.

If we are tempted to suspect, whilst reading the first part of this drama, that the character of Philip Van Artevelde combines in a quite ideal perfection the man of thought with the man of action, we, at all events, cannot accuse the author, in this second part, of representing an ideal or superhuman happiness as the result of this perfect combination. It is a very truthful sad-coloured destiny that he portrays. The gloomy passionate sunset of life has been a favourite subject with poets; but what other author has chosen the clouded afternoon of life, the cheerless twilight, and the sun setting behind cold and dark clouds? It was a bold attempt. It has been successfully achieved. But no amount of talent legitimately expended on it could make this second part as attractive as the first. When the heroic man has accomplished his heroic action, life assumes to him, more than to any other, a most ordinary aspect: his later years bring dwarfish hopes and projects, or none at all; they bring desires no longer "gay," and welcomed only for such poor life as they may have in them. Philip Van Artevelde is now the Regent of Flanders, and, like other regents, has to hold his own: Adriana he has lost; her place is supplied by one still fair but faded, and who, though she deserved a better fate, must still be described as lately the mistress of the Duke of Bourbon. It is the hero still, but he has descended into the commonplace of courts and politics.

That it is the same Philip Van Artevelde we are in company with, the manner in which he enters into this new love will abundantly testify. He has been describing to Elena his former wife, Adriana. The description is very beautiful and touching. He then proceeds with his wooing thus:—

In fine, Elena is conquered, or rather led to confess a conquest already achieved.

It is worth noticing, as a characteristic trait, that Philip Van Artevelde speaks more like the patriot, harangues more on the cause of freedom, now that he is Regent of Flanders, opposed to the feudal nobility, and to the monarchy of France, and soliciting aid from England, than when he headed the people of Ghent, strong only in their own love of independence. "Bear in mind," he says, answering the herald who brings a hostile message from France and Burgundy—

We regret to be compelled to garble in our extract so fine a passage of writing. Meanwhile our patriot Regent sends Father John to England to solicit aid—most assuredly not to overthrow feudalism, but to support the Regent against France. His ambition is dragging, willingly or unwillingly, in the old rut of politics. When Father John returns from this embassy, he is scandalised at the union formed between Artevelde and Elena. Here, too, is another sad descent. Our hero has to hear rebuke, and, with a half-confession, submit to be told by the good friar of his "sins." He answers bravely, yet with a consciousness that he stands not where he did, and cannot challenge the same respect from the friar that he could formerly have done.

And now disaster follows disaster; town after town manifests symptoms of treachery to his cause. His temper no longer retains its wonted calmness, and the quick glance and rapid government of affairs seems about to desert him. Note this little trait:— "Artev. Whither away, Vauclaire?
Vauclaire. You'll wish, my lord, to have the scouts, and others
That are informed, before you.
Artev. 'Twere well."
513 It is something new that another should anticipate the necessary orders to be given. The decisive battle approaches, and is fought. This time it is lost. Our hero does not even fall in the field; an assassin stabs him in the back. The career of Artevelde ends thus; and that public cause with which his life was connected has at the same time an inglorious termination: "the wheel has come full circle."

The catastrophe is brought about by Sir Fleureant of Heurlée. This man's character undergoes, in the course of the drama, a complete transformation. We do not say that the change is unnatural, or that it is not accounted for; but the circumstances which bring it about are only vaguely and incidentally narrated, so that the reader is not prepared for this change. A gay, thoughtless, reckless young, knight, who rather gains upon us at his first introduction, is converted into a dark, revengeful assassin. It would, we think, have improved the effect of the plot, if we had been able to trace out more distinctly the workings of the mind of one who was destined to take so prominent a part in the drama.

The character of Lestovet is admirably sustained, and is manifestly a favourite with the author. But we must now break away from Philip Van Artevelde, to notice the other dramas of Mr Taylor. Edwin the Fair next claims our attention. Here also we shall make no quotations merely for the sake of their beauty; and we shall limit ourselves to an analysis of the principal character, Dunstan, on which, perhaps, a word or two of explanation may not be superfluous.

Let us suppose a dramatic writer sitting down before such a character as this of Dunstan, and contemplating the various aspects it assumes, with the view of selecting one for the subject of his portraiture. In the first place, he is aware that, although, as a historical student, he may, and perhaps must, continue to doubt as to the real character of this man—how much is to be given to pride, to folly, to fanaticism, to genuine piety, or to the love of power—yet that, the moment he assumes the office of dramatic poet, he must throw all doubt entirely aside. The student of history may hesitate to the last; the poet is presumed to have from the beginning the clearest insight into the recesses of the mind, and the most unquestionable authority for all that he asserts. A sort of mimic omniscience is ascribed to the poet. Has he not been gifted, from of old, with an inspiration, by means of which he sees the whole character and every thought of his hero, and depicts and reveals them to the world? To him doubt would be fatal. If he carries into his drama the spirit of historical criticism, he will raise the same spirit in his reader, and all faith in the imaginary creation he offers them is gone for ever. Manifest an error as this may be, we think we could mention some instances, both in the drama and the novel, in which it has been committed.

But such a character as Dunstan's is left uncertain in the light of history, and our dramatist has to choose between uncertainties. He will be guided in his selection partly by what he esteems the preponderating weight of evidence, and partly, and perhaps still more, by the superior fitness of any one phase of the character for the purpose he has in view, or the development of his own peculiar powers. In this case, three interpretations present themselves. The first, which has little historical or moral probability, and offers little attraction to the artist, is, that Dunstan was a hypocrite, seeking by show of piety to compass some ambitious end, or win the applause of the vulgar. Undoubted hypocrites history assuredly presents us with—as where the ecclesiastical magnate degenerates into the merely secular prince. There have been luxurious and criminal popes and cardinals, intriguing bishops and lordly abbots, whom the most charitable of men, and the most pious of Catholics, must pronounce to have been utterly insincere in their professions of piety. But a hypocrite who starves and scourges himself—who digs a damp hole in the earth, and lives in it—seems to us a mere creature of the imagination. Such men, at all events, either begin or end with fanaticism. The second and 514 more usual interpretation is, that Dunstan was a veritable enthusiast, and a genuine churchman after the order of Hildebrand, capable, perhaps, of practising deceit or cruelty for his great purpose, but entirely devoted to that purpose—one of those men who sincerely believe that the salvation of the world and the predominance of their order are inseparably combined. There would be no error in supposing a certain mixture of pride and ambition. Nor, in following this interpretation, would there be any great violation of probability in attributing to Dunstan, though he lived in so rude an age, all those arguments by which the philosopher-priest is accustomed to uphold the domination of his order. The thinking men of every age more nearly resemble each other in these great lines of thought and argument, than is generally supposed. The third interpretation is that which the historical student would probably favour. It is that Dunstan was, in truth, partially insane—a man of fervent zeal, and of great natural powers, but of diseased mind. The very ability and knowledge which he possessed, combined with the strange forms which his asceticism took, lead to this supposition. Such men, we know, exist, and sometimes pass through a long career before they are accurately understood. Exhibiting itself in the form of fanaticism, and in a most ignorant and superstitious age, a partial insanity might easily escape detection, or even add to the reputation of the saint.

This last is the rendering of the character which Mr Taylor has selected. It is evidently the most difficult to treat. Perhaps the difficulty and novelty of the task it presented, as well as its greater fidelity to history, induced him to accept this interpretation. That second and more popular one which we have mentioned would appear, to a mind like Mr Taylor's, too facile and too trite. Any high-churchman of almost any age—any bishop, if you inflate the lawn sleeves, or even any young curate, whose mind dwells too intensely on the power of the keys—would present the rudiments of the character. However that may be, Mr Taylor undertook the bold and difficult task of depicting the strong, shrewd, fervent mind, saint and politician both, but acting with the wild and irregular force of insanity. How, we may ask ourselves, would such a mind display itself? Not, we way be sure, in a tissue of weakness or of wildness. We should often see the ingenious reasoner, more cunning than wise, the subtle politician, or even the deep moraliser upon human life; but whenever the fatal chords were touched—the priestly power, the priestly mission, the intercourse with the world of spirits—there we should see symptoms of insanity and delusion. Such is the character which Mr Taylor has portrayed.

Earl Leolf, calm and intelligent, and the perfect gentleman (those who remember the play will feel the truth of this last expression,) gives us at the very commencement the necessary explanation—

No justice, it is plain, can be done to Mr Taylor's drama, unless the intimation here given us be kept in view. Yet we suspect, from the remarks sometimes made upon this play, that it has been overlooked, or not sufficiently attended to. Passages have been censured as crude or extravagant which, in themselves, could be no otherwise, since they were intended to portray this half-latent and half-revealed insanity. The arrogance of Dunstan, and his communings with the spiritual world, not often have the air of sublimity, for they arise from the disorder and hallucination of his mind. When he tells the Queen Mother not to sit in 515 his presence, as well as when he boasts of his intercourse with angels and demons, we see the workings of a perturbed spirit:—

How skilfully the last passage awakes in the reader a feeling of sympathy with Dunstan! When he has given his instructions to the Queen Mother, the scene closes thus:—

Dunstan believes all along that he is marked out from the ordinary roll of men—that he has a peculiar intercourse with, and a peculiar mission from, Heaven; but he nevertheless practises on the credulity of others. This mixture of superstition and cunning does not need insanity to explain, but it is seen here in very appropriate company. He says to Grumo—

With the same crafty spirit, and by a trick as gross, he imposes on the Synod, contriving that a voice shall appear to issue from the crucifix. These frauds, however, would have availed nothing of themselves; it is the spirit of fanaticism bearing down all opposition by which he works his way. This spirit sustains him in his solitude— "I hear your call!
A radiance and a resonance from Heaven
Surrounds me, and my soul is breaking forth
In strength, as did the new-created Sun
When Earth beheld it first on the fourth day.
God spake not then more plainly to that orb
Than to my spirit now."
It sustains him in his solitude, and mark how triumphantly it carries him through in the hour of action. Odo the archbishop, Ricola the king's chaplain, as well as king and courtiers, all give way before this inexorable, unreasoning fanaticism, a fanaticism which is as complete a stranger to fear as it is to reason—

And forthwith Elgiva, in spite of the king's resistance, is carried out a captive. The king, too, is imprisoned in the Tower, and here ensues a scene which brings out another aspect of the mind of Dunstan. It was the object of the crafty priest to induce Edwin to resign the crown; he had, therefore, made his imprisonment as painful as possible. He now visits 516 him in the Tower, and in this interview we see, underneath the mad zealot and the subtle politician, something of the genuine man. Dunstan had not been always, and only, the priest; he understood the human life he trampled on—

These feelings of humanity, in part indeed simulated, do not long keep at bay the cruelty and insane rage or the priest. Edwin persists in his refusal; Dunstan leaves him for a moment, but shortly after returns holding the deed in his hand, and followed by his tool Grumo.

We believe we have done justice to all the aspects in which the character of Dunstan is here represented to us, but it would require a much larger space than we have at command to do justice to the whole drama of Edwin the Fair. The canvass is crowded with figures, almost every one of which has been a careful study, and will repay the study of a critical reader; and if the passages of eloquent writing are not so numerous as in his previous work, there is no deficiency of them, and many are the 517 pungent, if not witty sayings, that might be extracted. The chief fault which seems to us to pervade this drama, is, indeed, that there is too much apparent study—that too much is seen of the artist. Speaking generally of Mr Taylor, and regarding him as a dramatic poet, we could desire more life and passion, more abandonment of himself to the characters he is portraying. But we feel this more particularly in Edwin the Fair. We seem to see the artist sorting and putting together again the elements of human nature. His Wulfstan, the ever absent sage, his tricksy Emma, and her very silly lover, Ernway, are dramatic creations which may probably be defended point by point; but, for all that, they do not look like real men and women. As to his monks, the satellites of Dunstan, it may be said that they could not have been correctly drawn if they had borne the appearance of being real men. We do not like them notwithstanding.

In the edition which lies before us, bound up with Edwin the Fair is the republication of an early drama, Isaac Comnenus. It excited, we are told in the preface, little attention in its first appearance. We ourselves never saw it till very lately. Though inferior to his subsequent productions, it is not without considerable merit, but it will probably gather its chief interest as the forerunner of Philip Van Artevelde, and from the place it will occupy in the history of the author's mind. A first performance, which was allowed to pass unnoticed by the public, might be expected to be altogether different in kind from its fortunate successors. The author, in his advance out of obscurity into the full light of success, might be supposed to have thrown aside his first habits of thought and expression. It is not so here. We have much the same style, and there is the same combination of shrewd observation with a philosophic melancholy, the same gravity, and the same sarcasm. It is curious to notice how plainly there is the germ of Philip Van Artevelde in Isaac Comnenus. The hero of Ghent is far more sagacious, more serious, and more tender; but he looks on life with a lingering irony, and a calm cynicism: to him it is a sad and disenchanted vision. In Isaac Comnenus the same elements are combined in a somewhat different proportion: there is more of the irony and a more bitter cynicism; less of the grave tenderness and the practical sagacity. Artevelde is Isaac Comnenus living over life again—the same man, but with the advantage of a life's experience. Indeed Artevelde, if we may venture to jest with so grave a personage, has something of the air of one who had been in the world before, who was not walking along its paths for the first time: he treads with so sure a footstep, and seems to have no questions to ask, and nothing to learn of experience.

Happily it has not been necessary hitherto to say a word about the plot of Mr Taylor's dramas. This of Isaac Comnenus, being less known, may require a word of preliminary introduction. The scene is laid at Constantinople, at the close of the eleventh century; Nicephorus is the reigning emperor. We may call to mind that the government of the Byzantine monarchy, for a long time, maintained this honourable peculiarity, that, though in form a despotism, the emperor was expected to administer the law as it had descended to it from the genius of Rome. Dynasties changed, but the government remained substantially the same. It was an Oriental despotism with a European administration. Whilst, therefore, we have in the play before us a prince dethroned, and a revolution accomplished, we hear nothing of liberty and oppression, the cause of freedom, and the usual topics of patriotic conspiracy. The brothers Isaac and Alexius Comnenus are simply too powerful to be trusted as subjects; an attempt has been already made to poison the elder brother Isaac, the hero of the drama. He finds himself in a manner constrained to push forward to the throne, as his only place of safety. This ambitious course is thrust upon him. Meanwhile he enters on it with no soft-heartedness. He takes up his part, and goes bravely through with it; bravely, but coldly—with a sneer ever on his lip. With the church, too, he has contrived to make himself extremely unpopular, 518 and the Patriarch is still more rancorously opposed to him than the Emperor.

Before we become acquainted with him, he has loved and lost by death his gentle Irene. This renders the game of ambition still more contemptible in his eyes. It renders him cold also to the love of a certain fair cousin, Anna Comnena. Love, or ambition, approaches him also in the person of Theodora, the daughter of the emperor. She is willing to desert her father's cause, and ally herself and all her hopes to Isaac Comnenus. Comnenus declines her love. The rejected Theodora brings about the catastrophe of the piece. The Emperor Nicephorus is deposed; Isaac is conqueror in the strife, but he gives over the crown he has won to his brother Alexius. Then does Theodora present herself disguised as some humble petitioner to Isaac Comnenus. Armed with a dagger, she forces her way into an inner chamber where he is; a groan is heard, and the following stage direction closes the play—

"All rush into the inner chamber, whilst Theodora, passing out from it, crosses the stage, holding in her hand a dagger covered with blood. The curtain falls."

This scanty outline will be sufficient to make the following characteristic quotations intelligible to those who may not have read the play. Eudocia, his sister, thus describes Comnenus:—

Comnenus, we have said, is on ill terms with the church. Speaking of the sanctuary he says:—

On quitting his cousin Anna, she says:—

It is plain that we have no dutiful son of the Church here; and that her hostility, in this instance, is not altogether without cause. We find that his scepticism has gone farther than to dispute the miraculous virtues of the holy image of St Basil, the eye of which he is reputed to have knocked out with his lance:— "Just as you came
I moralised the matter of that change
Which theologians call—how aptly, say—
The quitting of a tenement."
And his moralising is overcast with the shadow of doubt. The addresses, for such they are, of Theodora, the daughter of the emperor, he receives and declines with the greatest calmness, though they are of that order which it is manifestly as dangerous to reject as to accept.

With speed, however, he does not go, nor makes a better excuse for his delay than that he was "sleeping out the noontide." In the first interview he escapes from her confidence, and when subsequently she will not be misunderstood, he says—

In a dialogue with his brother Alexius, his temper and way of thinking, and the circumstance which has mainly produced them, are more fully developed. We make a few extracts without attempting very closely to connect them. Alexius has been 519 remarking the change in Comnenus since they last met.

Comnenus has wandered with his brother unawares to a spot which of all others on earth was the most dear or the most painful to him—the spot where his Irene had been buried. He recognises it whilst he is in the full tide of his cynicism:—

Comnenus parries the question of his brother, contrives to dismiss him, and remains alone upon the spot.

Whilst reading this play of Isaac Comnenus we seemed to perceive a certain Byronian vein, which came upon us rather unexpectedly. Not that there is any very close resemblance between Comnenus and the heroes of Lord Byron; but there is a desperate wilfulness, a tone of scepticism, and a caustic view of human life, which occasionally recall them to mind. We turned to the preface to Philip Van Artevelde, where there is a criticism upon the poetry of Byron, not unjust in the faults it detects, but cold and severe, as it seems to us, in the praise that it awards; and we found there an intimation which confirmed our suspicion that Isaac Comnenus had been written whilst still partially under the influence of that poetry—written in what we may describe as a transition state. He says there of Lord Byron's poetry, "It will always produce a powerful impression upon very young readers, and I scarcely think that it can have been more admired by any than myself, when I was included in that category." And have we not here some explanation of the severity and coldness of that criticism itself? Did not the maturer intellect a little resent in that critical judgment the hallucinations of the youth? 520

Perhaps we are hardly correct in calling the temper and spirit we have here alluded to Byronian; they are common to all ages and to many minds, though signally developed by that poet, and in our own epoch. Probably the future historian of this period of our literature will attribute much of this peculiar exhibition of bitterness and despondency to the sanguine hopes first excited and then disappointed by the French Revolution. He will probably say of certain regions of our literature, that the whole bears manifest traces of volcanic origin. Pointing to some noble eminence, which seems to have been eternally calm, he will conjecture that it owed its elevation to the same force which raised the neighbouring Ætna. Applying the not very happy language of geology, he may describe it as "a crater of elevation;" which, being interpreted, means no crater at all, but an elevation produced by the like volcanic agency: the crater itself is higher up in the same mountain range.

There still remains one other small volume of Mr Taylor's poetry, which we must not pass over entirely without mentioning. The Eve of the Conquest, and other Poems. The chief piece here is of the nature of a dramatic scene. Harold, the night before the battle of Hastings, converses with his daughter, unfolds some passages of his past life, and vindicates himself in his quarrel with that William the Norman who, on the morrow, was to add the title of Conqueror to his name. But as it will be more agreeable to vary the nature of our quotations, we shall make the few extracts we have space for from the lyric poems which follow.

The "Lago Varese" will be, we suspect, the favourite with most readers. The image of the Italian girl is almost as distinctly reflected in the verse as it would have been in her own native lake.

The "Lago Lugano" is a companion picture, written "sixteen summers" after, and on a second visit to Italy. One thing we notice, that in this second poem almost all that is beautiful is brought from the social or political reflections of the writer: it is not the outward scene that lies reflected in the verse. He is thinking more of England than of Italy.

And the best stanza in the poem is that which is directly devoted to his own country:—

With some verses from a poem called "St Helen's-Auckland" we close our extracts. The author revisits the home of his boyhood:— 521

Poetry is no longer the most popular form of literature amongst us, and the drama is understood to be the least popular form of poetry. If this be the case, Mr Taylor has the additional merit of having won his way to celebrity under singular disadvantages. But, in truth, such poetry as Mr Taylor's could never appeal to the multitude. Literature of any kind which requires of the reader himself to think in order to enjoy, can never be popular. It is impossible to deny that the dramas we have been reviewing demand an effort, in the first instance, on the part of the reader: he must sit down to them with something of the spirit of the student. But, having done this, he will find himself amply repaid. As he advances in the work, he will read with increased pleasure; he will read it the second time with greater delight than the first; and if he were to live twenty years, and were to read such a drama as Philip Van Artevelde every year of his life, he would find in it some fresh source of interest to the last.

As we have not contented ourselves with selecting beautiful passages of writing from Mr Taylor's dramas, but have attempted such an analysis of the three principal characters they portray as may send the reader to their reperusal with additional zest, so neither have we paused to dispute the propriety of particular parts, or to notice blemishes and defects. We would not have it understood that we admire all that Mr Taylor has written. Of whom could we say this? We think, for instance, that, throughout his dramas, from the first to the last, he treats the monks too coarsely. His portraiture borders upon farce. His Father John shows that he can do justice to the character of the intelligent and pious monk. Admitting that this character is rare, we believe that the extremely gross portraiture which we have elsewhere is almost equally rare. This last, however, is so frequently introduced, that it will pass with the reader as Mr Taylor's type of the monkish order. The monks could never have been more ignorant than the surrounding laity, and they were always something better in morals and in true piety. We are quite at a loss, too, to understand Mr Taylor's fondness for the introduction into his dramas of certain songs or ballads, which are not even intended to be poetical. To have made them so, he would probably contend, would have been a dramatic impropriety. Very well; but let us have as few of such things as may be, and as short as possible. In Edwin the Fair they are very numerous; and those which are introduced in Philip Van Artevelde we could gladly dispense with. We could also very willingly have dispensed with the conversation of those burgesses of Bruges who entertained the Earl of Flanders with some of these ballads. We agree with the Earl, that their hospitalities are a sore affliction. Tediousness may be very dramatic, but it is tediousness still—a truth which our writer, intent on the delineations of his character, sometimes forgets. But defects like these it is sufficient merely to have hinted at. That criticism must be very long and ample indeed, of the dramas of Mr Taylor, in which they ought to occupy any considerable space. 522

A LEGEND OF GIBRALTAR.

CHAPTER I.

The Governor's residence at Gibraltar was, in days of Spanish domination, a religious house, and still retains the name of the Convent. Two sides of a long quadrangular gallery, traversing the interior of the building, are hung with portraits of officers present at the great siege in 1779-83, executed in a style which proves that Pre-Raphaelite painters existed in those days. One of these portraits represents my grandfather. To judge from a painting of him by Sir Joshua, and a small miniature likeness, both still in possession of the family, he must have been rather a good-looking old gentleman, with an affable, soldierlike air, and very respectable features. The portrait at the Convent is doubtless a strong likeness, but by no means so flattering; it represents him much as he might have appeared in life, if looked at through a cheap opera-glass. A full inch has been abstracted from his forehead, and added to his chin; the bold nose has become a great promontory in the midst of the level countenance; the eyes have gained in ferocity what they have lost in speculation, and would, indeed, go far to convey a disagreeable impression of my ancestor's character, but for the inflexible smile of the mouth. Altogether, the grimness of the air, the buckram rigidity of figure, and the uncompromising hardness of his shirt-frill and the curls of his wig, are such as are to be met with in few works of art, besides the figure-heads of vessels, the signboards of country inns, and the happiest efforts of Messrs Millais and Hunt.

However, my grandfather is no worse off than his compeers. Not far from this one is another larger painting, representing a council of officers held during the siege, where, notwithstanding the gravity of the occasion and the imminence of the danger, not a single face in the intrepid assembly wears the slightest expression of anxiety or fear, or, indeed, of anything else; and though my progenitor, in addition to the graces of the other portrait, is here depicted with a squint, yet he is by no means the most ill-looking individual present. But the illustrious governor, Eliott, has suffered more than anybody at the hands of the artist. Besides figuring in the production aforesaid, a statue of him stands in the Alameda, carved in some sort of wood, unluckily for him, of a durable nature. The features are of a very elevated cast, especially the nose; the little legs seem by no means equal to the task of sustaining the enormous cocked-hat; and the bearing is so excessively military, that it has been found necessary to prop the great commander from behind to prevent him from falling backwards.

My grandfather, John Flinders, joined the garrison of Gibraltar as a major of infantry a few years before the siege. He was then forty-seven years of age, and up to that time had remained one of the most determined old bachelors that ever existed. Not that he ever declaimed against matrimony in the style of some of our young moderns, who fancy themselves too strong-minded to marry; the truth being that they remain single either because they have not been gifted by nature with tastes sufficiently strong to like one woman better than another, or else, because no woman ever took the trouble to lay siege to them. My grandfather had never married, simply, I believe, because matrimony had never entered his head. He seldom ventured, of his own choice, into ladies' society, but, when he did, no man was more emphatically gallant to the sex. One after one, he saw his old friends abandoning the irresponsible ease of bachelorhood for the cares of wedded life; but while he duly congratulated them on their felicity, and officiated as godfather to their progeny, he never seemed to anticipate a similar destiny for himself. All his habits showed that he had been too long 523 accustomed to single harness to go cleverly as one of a pair. He had particular hours of rising, and going to bed; of riding out and returning; of settling himself down for the evening to a book and pipe, which the presence of a helpmate would have materially deranged. And therefore, without holding any Malthusian tenets, without pitying his Benedick acquaintances, or entertaining a thought of the sex which would have been in the least decree derogatory to the character of a De Coverley, his castles in the air were never tenanted by any of his own posterity.

It was fortunate for my grandfather that in his time people did not suffer so much as now from that chronic inflammation of the conscience, which renders them perfectly miserable unless they are engaged in some tangible pursuit—"improving their minds," or "adding to the general stock of information." A more useless, contented person never existed. He never made even a show of employing himself profitably, and never complained of weariness in maintaining the monotonous jog-trot of his simple daily life. He read a good deal, certainly, but it was not to improve his mind, only to amuse himself. Strong-minded books, to stimulate his thinking faculties, would have had no charms for him; he would as soon have thought of getting galvanised for the pleasure of looking at his muscles. And I don't know whether it was not just as well. In systematically cultivating his mind, he would merely have been laying a top-dressing on a thin soil—manuring where there would never have been a crop—and some pleasant old weeds would have been pulled up in the process. A green thistly common, even though a goose could hardly find sustenance there, is nature still, which can hardly be said of a patch of earth covered with guano.

So my grandfather went on enjoying himself without remorse after his own fashion, and never troubled himself to think—an operation that would have been inconvenient to himself, and productive of no great results to the world. He transplanted his English habits to Gibraltar; and, after being two years there, knew nothing more of Spain or Spaniards than the view of the Andaluçian hills from the Rock, and a short constitutional daily ride along the beach beyond the Spanish lines, to promote appetite and digestion, afforded him. And so he might have continued to vegetate during the remainder of his service there, but for a new acquaintance that he made about this time.

Frank Owen, commonly called Garry Owen by his familiars, was one of those joyous spirits whose pleasant faces and engaging manners serve as a perpetual act of indemnity for all breaches of decorum, and trespasses over social and conventional fences, committed by them in the gaiety of their hearts. In reproving his many derelictions of military duty, the grim colonel of the regiment would insensibly exchange his habitual tone of severe displeasure for one of mild remonstrance—influenced, probably, quite as much, in secret, by the popularity of the unrepentant offender, as by any personal regard for him. Captain Hedgehog, who had shot a man through the heart for corking his face one night when he was drunk, and all contact with whose detonating points of honour was as carefully avoided by his acquaintance as if they had been the wires of a spring-gun, sustained Garry's reckless personalities with a sort of warning growl utterly thrown away upon the imperturbable wag, who would still persist, in the innocence of his heart, in playing round the den of this military cockatrice. And three months after his arrival in Gibraltar, being one day detected by a fierce old Spanish lady in the very act of kissing her daughter behind the little señorita's great painted fan, his good-humoured impudence converted the impending storm into a mild drizzle of reproof, ending in his complete restoration to favour.

This youth had brought with him from England a letter from his mother, a widow lady, an old friend of my grandfather, who had some thirty years before held with her a juvenile flirtation. It recommended to his protection her son Frank, about to join the regiment as an ensign, pathetically enlarging on the various excellencies, domestic and religious, which 524 shone forth conspicuously in the youth's character, and of the comfort of contemplating and superintending which she was about to be deprived. In fact, it had led my grandfather to expect a youth of extreme docility and modesty, requiring a protector rather to embolden than to restrain him. After in vain attempting to espy in his young acquaintance any of the characteristics ascribed to him in his mother's letter, the Major, naturally good-natured and accessible to his youthful comrades, very soon suffered himself to be influenced by the good-humour, vigorous vitality, and careless cleverness of the Ensign, to an extent that caused him sometimes to wonder secretly at his own transformation. His retired habits were broken in upon, one after the other, till he had scarcely a secluded hour in his sixteen waking ones to enjoy alone his book and his pipe. His peaceful quarters, silent, in general, as a monk's cell, would now be invaded at all sorts of hours by the jovial Garry, followed by the admiring satellites who usually revolved around him; and the Major, with a sound between a groan and a chuckle, would close his well-beloved volume to listen to the facetious details of, and sometimes to participate in, the uncongenial freaks of the humorous subaltern. Once he had actually consented, at about the hour he usually went to bed, to accompany the youth to a Carnival ball—one of a series of entertainments at which the Catholic youth of the city are wont to idemnify themselves for the mortifications of Lent, and where masks, dominoes, and fancy dresses lend their aid to defeat the vigilance of the lynx-eyed duennas and mammas who look anxiously on, perfectly aware, in general, that their own watchfulness is more to be relied on for nipping in the bud an indiscreet amour, than any innate iciness of temperament or austere propriety in the objects of their care. Not only did the Major mingle in the scene, but he actually, about midnight, found himself figuring in a cotillon with a well-developed señorita of thirteen years, whose glances and deportment showed a precocious proficiency in the arts of flirtation. At this ball Garry had become enamoured beyond all former passions (and they were numerous and inconstant, in general, as if he had been a Grand Turk) of one of his partners, a young Spanish lady. Her graceful figure and motions in the dance had at first captivated him—and when, after dancing with her himself, his eloquent entreaties, delivered in indifferent Spanish, had prevailed on her to lift her mask for one coy moment, the vision of eyes and eyebrows, the common beauties of a Spanish countenance, and the clear rosy complexion, a much more rare perfection, then revealed, had accomplished the utter subjugation of his errant fancy. She had vanished from the ball silently and irremediably, as a houri of Paradise from the awakening eyes of an opium-eating Pacha; and all his attempts to trace her, continued unceasingly for a couple of months afterwards, had proved in vain.

One morning my grandfather was seated at breakfast in the verandah of his quarters, situated high up the rock above the town. Below him lay the roofs, terraced and balconied, and populous with cats, for whose convenience the little flat stone squares at the top of most of the houses appeared to have been devised. Tall towers called mirandas shot up at intervals, from whose summits the half-baked inhabitants, pent within close walls and streets, might catch refreshing glimpses of the blue sea and the hills of Spain—conveniences destined soon afterwards to be ruined by the enemy's fire, or pulled down to avoid attracting it, and never rebuilt. Beyond the white sunny ridge of the line wall came the sharp edge of the bay, rising in high perspective to the purple coast of Spain opposite, which was sprinkled with buildings white as the sails that dotted the water. My grandfather was in a state of great sensual enjoyment, sniffing up the odour of the large geranium bushes that grew in clumps in the little garden in front, and the roses that twined thickly round the trellis of the vine-roofed verandah; sipping thick creamy Spanish chocolate between the mouthfuls of red mullet, broiled in white paper, the flavour of which he was diligently comparing with that of some specimens of the same fish which 525 he remembered to have eaten in his youth in Devonshire; and glancing sideways over the cup at an open volume of Shakspeare, leaned slopingly on the edge of a plate of black figs bursting with ripeness, like trunk hose slashed with crimson. The Major was none of your skimming readers, who glance through a work of art as if it were a newspaper—measure, weigh it, and deliver a critical opinion on it, before the more reverential student has extricated himself from the toils of the first act or opening chapter: not he; he read every word, and affixed a meaning, right or wrong, to all the hard, obsolete ones. The dramatic fitness of the characters was not to be questioned by him, any more than that of the authentic personages of history. He would reason on their acts and proceedings as on those of his own intimate acquaintances. He never could account for Hamlet's madness otherwise than by supposing the Prince must have, some time or other, got an ugly rap on the head—let fall, perhaps, when a baby, by a gin-drinking nurse—producing, as in some persons he had himself from time to time been acquainted with, a temporary aberration of the wits; a piece of original criticism that has not occurred to any of the other commentators on this much-discussed point. Of Iago he has recorded an opinion in an old note-book still extant, where his observations appear in indifferent orthography, and ink yellow with age, that he was a cursed scoundrel—an opinion delivered with all the emphasis of an original detector of crime, anxious that full though tardy justice should be done to the delinquent's memory. But his great favourite was Falstaff: "A wonderful clever fellow, sir," he would say, "and no more a coward than you or I, sir."

My grandfather proceeded slowly with his meal, holding the cup to his lips with one hand and turning a leaf with the other—an operation which he was delaying till a great mosquito-hawk, (a beautiful brown moth mottled like a pheasant,) that had settled on the page, should think proper to take flight. He had lately come from a parade, as was evidenced by his regimental leather breeches and laced red waistcoat; but a chintz dressing-gown and a pair of yellow Moorish slippers softened down the warlike tone of these garments to one more congenial with his peaceable and festive pursuits. Presently the garden door opened, and a well-known step ascended to the verandah. Frank Owen, dressed in a cool Spanish costume, advanced, and stopping three paces from the Major, took off his tufted sombrero and made a low bow.

"You are the picture, my dear sir," he said, "of serene enjoyment slightly tinged with sensuality. But how long, may I ask, have you taken to breakfasting on spiders?"—pointing, as he took a chair opposite the Major, at an immense red-spotted one that had dropt from the ceiling on the morsel my grandfather was in the act of conveying to his mouth.

The Major tenderly removed the insect by a leg.

"'Tis the worst of these al-fresco meals, Frank," said he. "Yesterday I cut a green lizard in two that had got on my plate, mistaking him for a bit of salad—being, as usual, more intent on my book than my food—and had very near swallowed the tail-half of the unfortunate animal."

"There are worse things than lizards in the world," quoth Garry. "Ants, I should say, were certainly less wholesome"—and he directed the Major's attention to a long black line of those interesting creatures issuing from a hole in the pavement, passing in an unbroken series up my ancestor's left leg, the foot of which rested on the ground, then traversing the cloth, and terminating at the loaf, the object of their expedition.

"Bless me," said the Major, as he rose and shook his breeches gently free from the marauders, "I must be more careful, or I shall chance to do myself a mischief. But they're worst at night. I've been obliged to leave off reading here in the evenings, for it went to my heart to see the moths scorching their pretty gauzy wings in the candle till the wicks were half-choked with them."

"Do you know, Major," said Owen, gravely, "that either this insect diet, or the sedentary life you lead, is making you quite fat, and utterly destroying the symmetry of your figure? In another week there will be one 526 unbroken line of rotundity from your chin to your knees."

My grandfather glanced downward at his waistcoat. "No, my boy, no," said he; "if there had been any difference, I should have known it by my clothes. I don't think I've gained a pound this twelvemonth."

"More than a stone," quoth Garry. "We all remarked it on parade to-day—and remarked it with sorrow. Now, look you, a sea voyage is the very thing to restore your true proportions, and I propose that we shall take a short one together."

"A sea voyage!" quoth my grandfather; "the boy is mad! Not if all the wonders seen by Sinbad the Sailor lay within a day's sail. Did I not suffer enough coming here from England? I don't think," said my grandfather with considerable pathos, "that my digestion has ever been quite right to this day."

"'Sick of a calm,' eh?—Like your friend Mistress Tearsheet," said the youngster. "But I've settled it all, and count on you. Look here," he continued, drawing from his pocket a large printed bill, and unfolding it before my ancestor. At the top appeared in large capitals the words, "Plaza de Toros;" and underneath was a woodcut representing a bull, of whose sex there could be no doubt, gazing, with his tail in the air, and an approving smile on his countenance, on the matadore about to transfix him. Then followed a glowing account in Spanish of the delights of a great bull-fight shortly to take place at Cadiz, setting forth the ferocity of the bulls, the number of horses that might be expected to die in the arena, and the fame of the picadores and espadas who were then and there to exhibit.

The Major shook his head—the captivating prospectus had no charms for him: he had not, as I have before said, an inquiring mind, and habit was so strong in him that a change was like the dislocation of a joint. The Ensign proceeded to paint the delights of the excursion in the brightest colours he could command. They were to go to Cadiz in a boat which he had lately bought—she was a capital sailer—there was a half-deck forward, under which the Major might sleep as comfortably as in his own bed—a cooking apparatus, (and here, as he expatiated on the grills and stews and devils that were to be cooked and eaten, with the additional stimulus to appetite afforded by sea air, there was a spark of relenting in my grandfather's eye.) "You shall return," said the tempter, "with a digestion so completely renovated, that my name shall rise to your tongue at each meal as a grace before meat, and a thanksgiving after it; and as to sea-sickness, why, this Levanter will take us there in twelve hours, so smoothly that you may balance a straw upon your nose the whole way." Finally, the cunning Ensign laid before him an application for leave already made out, and only awaiting his signature.

My grandfather made some feeble, objections, which Owen pooh-poohed in his usual off-hand fashion. There was no standing against the youngster's strong will, that, like Aaron's rod, swallowed up all opposition, and at five o'clock that same evening the Major found himself proceeding through the town towards the Waterport for embarkation, by no means fully reconciled to the abandonment of his beloved Lares. My luckless grandfather! did no presentiment warn you of a consequence then hanging in the clouds, that was to change utterly for you the untroubled aspect of those household gods?

Owen had attired himself for the trip in a half-nautical costume—a shirt of light-blue flannel, fastened at the collar with a smart bandana, a bluejacket, loose duck trousers, and a montero cap, which costume became the puppy well enough. He seemed of this opinion himself, as he walked gaily along beside the Major: so did the black-eyed occupants of many houses on each side, who peeped forth smilingly from behind their green lattices, sometimes nodding and kissing their hands—for the Ensign had an incredible acquaintance with the budding and full-blown portion of the population of Gibraltar. The Major had stuck to his buckskins, (which stuck to him in return,) over which he had drawn a pair of jack-boots, and wore his red-laced coat and regimental hat—for in those days that passion for mufti, now so 527 prevalent in the army, did not exist. Whenever he caught sight of any of the greetings bestowed from the windows, he would take off his laced hat, and, fixing his eyes on the tittering señorita, who generally let fall the lattice with a slam, would make her a low bow—and, after each of these acts of courtesy, my grandfather walked on more elated than before.

They passed the drawbridge at Waterport, and, struggling through the crowd of Turks, Jews, infidels, and heretics, who usually throng the quay, entered a shore-boat that was to row them out to where Owen's vessel—the Fair Unknown, as he had christened her, in memory of his unforgotten partner at the Carnival ball—lay moored. In her they found a sailor who was to accompany them on their voyage—a noted contrabandista, called Francisco, whose friendship Owen had lately acquired, and who acted as his lieutenant on his marine excursions. The boat was a neat affair—a small cutter, smartly painted, well found, and capable of holding several persons comfortably; and Francisco was a ruddy, portly, dark-skinned, large-whiskered son of the sea, the picture of good-humour. My grandfather stept in, in his jack-boots. There was much settling of carpet-bags and stowing of provisions in the lockers, and then they hoisted sail, and glided smoothly out from among the shipping into the bay.

The breeze was light and fair, and they went on, as Frank had promised, pleasantly enough. My grandfather for the first time surveyed the scene of his two years' residence from the sea. The grey old rock looked mellow in the evening light, as an elderly gentleman over his wine—the window-panes glanced ruddily, the walls gleamed whitely, and the trees were tinted with a yellower green; behind, in the eastern sky, floated one single purple cloud. As the objects became confused in the distance, the sharp rugged outline of the rock assumed the appearance that has caused the Spaniards to call it El Cuerpo—the appearance of a vast human body laid out on its back, and covered with a winding-sheet, like a dead Titan on his funeral pile—the head towards Spain, the chest arched at Middle Hill, the legs rising gently upward to the knees at O'Hara's Tower, and then sloping down till the feet rest on Europa. The sun went down as they rounded Cabrita Point, and the breeze, freshening, took them swiftly along under the huge hills that rise abruptly upward from the Spanish coast. Then Francisco, lighting a charcoal fire, placed thereon, in a frying-pan, tender steaks thickly strewn with sliced tomatas and onions, from whence arose a steam that brought tears of gratitude and delight into my grandfather's eyes. He anxiously watched the cooking—even threw out slight suggestions, such as another pinch of pepper, an additional onion, a slight dash of cayenne, and the like; and then, settling a plate firmly on the knees of his jack-boots, with a piece of bread and a cup by his side, and a knife and fork pointing upwards in his hands like lightning conductors, gazed cheerfully around him. And when Francisco, rising from his knees, where he had been blowing the charcoal fire, removed the hissing pan towards my grandfather's plate, transferring to it a liberal portion of the contents, the good man, gazing on the white and red streaks of vegetable relieved by the brown background of steak, and the whole picture swimming in a juicy atmosphere of gravy, felt sentiments of positive friendship towards that lawless individual, and, filling a bumper of Xerez, drank success to the voyage.

Three times was my grandfather's plate replenished from the thrice-filled pan. Afterwards he dallied a little with a cold pie, followed by a bit of cheese for digestion. Then, folding his hands across his stomach, he expressed his sincere opinion, that he had never tasted anything so good as that steak; and when Owen placed in his hand a smoking can of grog, he looked on the young man with a truly paternal eye. He talked complacently and benevolently, as men do who have dined well—praised the weather, the boat, the scene—and wondered where a man was going who rode slowly along a mountain-path above them, within hail, following him, in imagination, to his home, in a sort of dreamy contentment. 528 After a second can he began to grow drowsy, and, just aware that Owen said the breeze was still freshening, retired to the soft mattress spread for him under the half-deck, and replacing his cocked hat by a red nightcap, slept till morning.

It was broad daylight when he woke, conscious that for an hour or two past he had been sleeping most uneasily. There was a violent swinging motion, a rushing of wind and of water, that confused him extremely; and, forgetting where he was, he nearly fractured his skull by rising suddenly into a sitting posture. Steadying himself on his hands, in the posture of the Dying Gladiator, he slewed himself round on the pivot of his stern, and protruded his powdered head, like an old beaver, out of his hole. Owen and Francisco were sitting in a pool of water, trying to shelter themselves under the weather-side of the boat—dripping wet, and breakfasting on cold potatoes and fragments of meat left from last night's meal. My grandfather did not like the appearance of things at all. Rent in twain by horrible qualms, he inquired feebly of Owen if they were near Cadiz? Frank, in reply, shook his head, and said they were at anchor. Then my grandfather, making a vigorous effort, emerged completely from his place of repose, and, rising to his feet, looked over the gunwale. The scene he beheld was in dreary contrast to that of the evening before. Ridges of white foam were all around—ahead was a long low line of sandy coast, terminating in a point of rock whereon stood a lighthouse; and to leeward the bay was enclosed by steep hills. Over the low coast-line the wind blew with steady violence. A bright sun rather increased the dreariness of the prospect, which was suddenly closed to my grandfather by a shower of spray, that blinded him, and drenched him to the skin, converting his jack-boots into buckets. The wind had increased to a gale during the night, and they had been forced to take precarious shelter in the harbour of Tarifa. The Major did not venture on a second peep, but sat, dismally wet and sea-sick, the whole morning, trying to shelter himself as he best could. Once, a man came down to the beach, and gesticulated like a scaramouch, screaming also at the same time; but what his gestures and screams signified nobody on board could tell. At length, as the gale did not moderate, while their position increased in discomfort, and was also becoming precarious, (for one of their anchors was gone, and great fears were entertained for the other,) Owen and Francisco decided to weigh, and stand in for the shore, trusting to the smuggler's seamanship for a safe run. The Major, in spite of his sickness, stood up and pulled gallantly at the cable, the wind blowing his pigtail and skirts perpendicularly out from his person. At last, after tremendous tugging, the anchor came up. The jib was hoisted with a reef in it, Owen holding the sheet, while the smuggler ran aft and took the helm. They bent over to the gale, till the Major stood almost perpendicularly on the lee gunwale, with his back against the weather-side, and ran in till he thought they were going to bump ashore; then tacking, they stood up along the coast, close to the wind, till Francisco gave the word. Owen let go the sheet, and the jib fluttered loosely out as they ran through a narrow passage into smooth water behind the sea-wall, and made fast to a flight of steps.

Presently some functionary appertaining to the harbour appeared, and with him an emissary from the Governor of the place, who, aware of their plight, had civilly sent to offer assistance. The messenger was the same man who had made signals to them from the beach in the morning; and he seemed to think it advisable that they should wait on the Governor in person, saying that he was always disposed to be civil to British officers. This advice they resolved to act upon at once, before it should grow dark, foreseeing that, in case of their detention from bad weather in Tarifa, the Governor might prove a potent auxiliary. The Major would have wished to make some little alterations in his toilette, after his late disasters; but, after trying in vain to pull off his jack-boots, which clung to him like his skin, he was obliged to abandon the idea, and contented himself with standing on his head to let the water run out of them. As they advanced 529 along the causeway leading to the town, (the point where they landed is connected with the town by a long narrow sandy isthmus,) the gale swept over them volumes of sand, which, sticking to my grandfather's wet uniform, gave him somewhat the appearance of a brick-wall partially roughcast. His beard was of two days' growth—his hair-powder was converted into green paste by the sea-water—and his whole appearance travel-stained and deplorable. Nevertheless his dignity by no means forsook him, as they traversed the narrow alleys of the ancient town of Tarifa, on their way to the approaching interview.

His excellency Don Pablo Dotto, a wonderfully fat little man, received them very courteously. He was a Spaniard of the old school, and returned the stately greeting of my grandfather, and the easy one of the Ensign, with such a profusion of bows, that for the space of a minute they saw little more of his person than the shining baldness on the top of his head. Then they were presented to his wife, a good-natured, motherly sort of old lady, who seemed to compassionate them much. But, while Owen was explaining to her the object of their trip, and its disastrous interruption, he suddenly stopped, open-mouthed, and blushing violently, with his gaze directed towards the open door of a neighbouring apartment. There he beheld, advancing towards him, the Beauty of the Carnival ball.

The Governor's lady named her as "her daughter, the Señorita Juana." Spite of the different dress and circumstances, she, too, recognised Frank, and coloured slightly as she came forward to receive his greeting. The Ensign, an impudent scamp enough in general, was, however, the more confused of the two; and his embarrassed salutation was entirely thrown into the shade by the magnificence of my grandfather's bow. However, he presently recovered his assurance, and explained to the elder lady how he had previously enjoyed the pleasure (with a great stress upon the word) of making her daughter's acquaintance. Then he recounted to Juana the manner in which they had been driven in here, when on their way to Cadiz to see the bull-fight.

"We also are going to ride thither to-morrow," said the Señorita, softly.

"Ah, then, we shall meet there," said Frank, who presently after was seized with a fit of absence, and made incoherent replies. He was considering how they might travel together, and had almost resolved to offer to take the whole family to Cadiz in his boat—a proposal that would probably have somewhat astonished the little Governor, especially if he had seen the dimensions of the craft thus destined to accommodate himself and retinue. But Garry was an adept in manœuvring, and marched skilfully upon the point he had in view. He drew such a pathetic picture of the hardships they had endured on the voyage—their probable detention here for most of their short leave—their friendless condition, and their desire to see something of the country—that the little Governor was in a manner impelled (fancying all the time that the impulse sprung altogether from his own native benevolence,) to desire that the two forlorn Englishmen would travel to Cadiz under his escort. So it being settled entirely to Garry's satisfaction that they were to start next morning at break of day on horseback—an arrangement which my grandfather's total ignorance of Spanish prevented him from knowing anything about—they retired to the principal fonda, where the Major speedily forgot, over a tolerable dinner, the toils and perils of the voyage.

CHAPTER II.

Daybreak the next morning found them issuing forth from the ancient city of Tarifa on a couple of respectable-looking hacks, hired from the innkeeper. Frank had, with his accustomed generalship, managed to secure a position at the off-rein of the Señorita Juana, who was mounted on a beautiful little white barb. Under her side-saddle, of green velvet studded with gilt nails, was a Moorish saddle-cloth, striped with vivid red and white, and fringed 530 deeply. From the throat-lash of the bridle hung a long tassel, as an artificial auxiliary to the barb's tail in the task of keeping the flies off, further assisted by a tuft of white horse-hair attached to the butt of her whip. She wore a looped hat and white plume, a riding-skirt, and an embroidered jacket of blue cloth, fastened, as was the wrought bosom of her chemise, with small gold buttons. Frank could not keep his eyes off her, now riding off to the further side of the road to take in at once the whole of the beauteous vision, now coming close up to study it in its delightful details.

In front of the pair rode the little Governor, side by side with a Spaniard of about thirty, the long-betrothed lover of Juana—so long, in fact, that he did not trouble himself to secure his authority in a territory so undeniably his own, but smoked his cigar as coolly as if there were no good-looking Englishman within fifty miles of his mistress. He wore garments of the Spanish cut, made of nankeen—the jacket frogged with silver cords, tagged with little silver fishes—the latter appended, perhaps, as suitable companions to the frogs. A hundred yards ahead was an escort of four horse-soldiers with carbines on their thighs, their steel accoutrements flashing ruddily in the level sunlight. Behind Frank came Major Flinders, clean shaved, and with jack-boots and regimental coat restored to something like their pristine splendour; by his side rode another lady, the Señorita Carlota, Juana's aunt, somewhere about thirty years old, plump and merry, her upper lip fringed at the corners with a line of dark down, quite decided enough for a cornet of eighteen to be proud of—a feminine embellishment too common for remark in these southern regions, and, in the opinion of some connoisseurs, rather enhancing the beauty of the fair wearers. She talked incessantly, at first, to my grandfather, who did not understand a word she said, but whose native politeness prompted him to say, "Si, Señorita," to everything—sometimes laying at the same moment his hand on his heart, and bowing with considerable grace. Behind this pair came another interesting couple—viz., two servants on mules, with great saddle-bags stuffed to extreme corpulence with provisions.

It was a glorious morning—a gentle breeze sweeping on their faces as they mounted the hills, but dying into silence in the deep valleys, fresh, and glistening with dew. Sometimes they rode along a rocky common, yellowed with a flowering shrub like furze—sometimes through unfenced fields—sometimes along broad plains, where patches of blossoming beans made the air rich with scent, and along which they galloped full speed, the Governor standing high in the stirrups of his demi-pique, the Señorita's white barb arching his neck till his muzzle touched his chest under the pressure of the long bit, and my grandfather prancing somewhat uneasily on his hard-mouthed Spanish entero, whose nose was, for the most part, projected horizontally in the air. The Major was not a first-rate seat—he rode with a long stirrup, his heel well down, his leg straight, and slanting a little forward, body upright, and elbows back, as may be seen in the plates to ancient works on equitation—a posture imposing enough, but not safe across country: galloping deranged it materially, for the steed was hard-mouthed, and required a long, strong pull, with the body back, and a good purchase on the stirrups. The animal had a most voracious appetite, quite overcoming his sense of what was due to his rider; and, on seeing a tuft of juicy grass, down went his nose, drawing my grandfather, by means of the tight reins, well over the pummel. On these occasions, the Major, feeling resistance to be in vain, would sit looking easily about him, feigning to be absorbed in admiration of the prospect—which was all very well, where there was a prospect to look at, but wore a less plausible appearance when the animal paused in a hollow between two hedges, or ran his nose into a barn-door. But whenever this happened, Carlota, instead of half-smothering a laugh, as a mischievous English girl would, ten to one, have done, sat most patiently till the Major and his steed came to an understanding, and would greet him, as they moved on again, with a good-natured smile, that won her, each time, a higher place in his estimation. 531

Thus they proceeded till the sun rose high in the heavens, when, on reaching a grove on the edge of one of the plains, they halted under a huge cork-tree, near which ran a rivulet. The cavalcade dismounted—the horses were tethered, the mules disburthened of the saddle-bags, and the contents displayed under the tree; horse-cloths and cloaks were spread around on the ground and a fire of dry sticks was lit on the edge of the stream with such marvellous celerity that, before my grandfather had time to take more than a hasty survey of the eatables, after seating himself on the root of a tree, a cup of steaming chocolate was placed in his hand.

"Confess, Major," said Garry, speaking with his mouth full of sausage, "that a man may lose some of the pleasures of existence by leading the life of a hermit. Don't you feel grateful to me for dragging you out of your cobweb to such a pleasant place as this?"

"'Tis an excellent breakfast," said my grandfather, who had just assisted the Señorita Carlota to a slice of turkey's breast, and himself to an entire leg and thigh—dividing with her, at the same time, a crisp white loaf, having a handle like a teapot or smoothing-iron—"and my appetite is really very good. I should be perfectly easy if I could only understand the remarks of this very agreeable lady, and make suitable replies."

"Let me interpret your sentiments," said Garry; "and though I may not succeed in conveying them in their original force and poetry, yet they shall lose as little as possible in transmission. Just try me—what would you wish to say?"

"Why, really," said my grandfather, pondering, "I had a great many things to say as we came along, but they've gone out of my head. Do you think she ever read Shakspeare?"

"Not a chance of it," said Owen.

Here the Señorita laughingly appealed to Frank to know what my grandfather was saying about her.

"Ah," quoth my grandfather, quoting his friend Shakspeare— "'I understand thy looks—the pretty Spanish
Which thou pourest down from these swelling heavens
I am not perfect in ——'
She's an extremely agreeable woman, Frank, I'll be sworn, if one only understood her," quoth my grandfather, casting on her a glance full of gallantry.

The Ensign was not so entirely occupied in prosecuting his own love affair as to be insensible to the facilities afforded him for amusing himself at the Major's expense. Accordingly, he made a speech in Spanish to Carlota, purporting to be a faithful translation of my grandfather's, but teeming, in fact, with the most romantic expressions of chivalrous admiration, as was apparent from the frequent recurrence of the words "ojos," (eyes,) "corazon," (heart,) and the like amatory currency.

"There, Major," said the interpreter, as he finished; "I've told her what you said of her."

The Major endorsed the compliments by laying his hand upon his heart, and bowing with a tender air. Whereupon Carlota, laughing, and blushing a deeper red, made her acknowledgments.

"She says," quoth Frank, "that she knew the English before to be a gallant nation; but that if all the caballéros (that's gentlemen) of that favoured race are equal to the present specimen, her own countrymen must be thrown entirely into the shade."

"Delightful!" cried my grandfather; but it is doubtful whether this expression of pleasure was called forth by the sentiments attributed to the Señorita, or by the crisp succulent tenderness of a mouthful of sucking-pig which was at that moment spreading itself over his palate.

Following up his idea, the mischievous Ensign continued to diversify the graver pursuit of prosecuting his own suit with Juana, by impressing Carlota and the Major with the idea that each was favourably impressed with the other. In this he was tolerably successful—the speeches he made to Carlota, supposed to originate with my grandfather, had a very genuine warmth about them, being, in fact, very often identical with those he had just been making, under immediate inspiration, to his own divinity; while as for the Major, it would have been an insult to the simplicity of that worthy man's nature to exert any 532 great ingenuity in deceiving him; it would have been like setting a trap for a snail. So they journeyed on, highly pleased with each other, and occasionally, in the absence of their faithful interpreter, conversed by means of smiles and courteous gesticulations, till my grandfather felt entirely at his ease, and was almost sorry when on the evening of the second day they got to Cadiz.

CHAPTER III.

A whole city full of people condensed into one broad amphitheatre, all bearing a national resemblance to each other in countenance and costume, all apparently animated by the same spirit—for nothing could be more unanimous than the applause which greeted a favourite smilingly crossing the arena, the abuse which overwhelmed an object offensive to the eye of the many-headed, or the ridicule which descended in a joyous uproarious flood on the hapless individual in whose appearance, dress, or manner, anything was detected calculated to appeal to the highly-sensitive risible faculty of a Spanish assembly;—a gay and picturesque mixture of colours, waving and tossing like a garden in a breeze, as the masses of white mantillas, heads black as coal, decorated with flowers and green leaves, red sashes, tufted sombreros, and yellow gaiters, with here and there a blue-and-white soldier standing stiffly up, were agitated by each new emotion—such was the scene that met the eyes of our travellers on entering the bull-ring at Cadiz before the sport commenced.

My grandfather had made his entry in spectacles—appendages highly provocative of the public mirth—and had looked wonderingly for a minute or two through the obnoxious glasses on a sea of faces upturned, sideturned, and downturned, all looking at him, and all shouting some indistinguishable chorus; while the men beat time, each with the long, forked, painted stick, without which no Spaniard possessing sentiments of propriety ever comes to a bull-fight, in a manner most embarrassing to a somewhat bashful stranger, till their attention was luckily diverted to an unhappy man in a white hat, in derision of whom they immediately sang a song, the burden of which was "El de sombrero blanco," (he of the white hat,) the multitude conducting itself throughout like one man.

My grandfather and his friends occupied a distinguished position in a box high above the multitude, and near that of the alcalde. The Señorita Juana looked more lovely than ever in a white dress, over which flowed a white gauzy mantilla, giving a kind of misty indistinctness to the wavy outlines of her figure, and the warm tint of her neck and arms. From her masses of black hair peeped one spot of vivid white, a rosebud; and a green plumy leaf, a favourite ornament with Spanish girls, drooped, bending, and soft as a feather, on one side of her gold-and-tortoiseshell comb. The Major sat beside Carlota, who, naturally frank, and looking upon him now as an old acquaintance, would tap his arm most bewitchingly with her fan, when she wanted to direct his attention to any object of interest. So the Major sat by her, all gallantry and smiles, gazing about him with wonder through the double gold eyeglass, which still, in spite of the late expression of popular feeling, bestrid his nose. He looked with the interest of a child at everything—at the faces and dresses around him, distinct in their proximity, and at those, confused in their details by distance, on the opposite side of the arena. He shared in the distress of an unfortunate person (a contractor for bulls, who had palmed some bad ones on the public) who tried, as he walked conspicuously across the ring, to smile off a torrent of popular execration about as successfully as a lady might attempt to ward off Niagara with her parasol, and who was, as it were, washed out at an opposite door, drenched and sodden with jeers. And when the folding-gates were opened, and the gay procession entered, my grandfather gazed on it with delight, and shouted 533 "Bravo!" as enthusiastically as if he had been a habitual frequenter of bull-rings from his earliest youth. First came the espadas or matadores, their hair clubbed behind like a woman's, dressed in bright-coloured jackets, and breeches seamed with broad silver lace, white stockings, shoes fastened with immense rosettes, and having their waists girt with silk sashes, bearing on their arms the blood-coloured cloaks that were to lure the bull upon the sword-point. Next followed the chulos, similarly attired; then the picadores, riding stiffly, with padded legs, on their doomed steeds; and mules, whose office it was to drag off the dead bulls and horses, harnessed three abreast as in classic chariots, and almost hidden under a mass of gay housings, closed the procession. Marching across the middle of the ring to the alcalde's box, they requested permission to begin, and, it being granted, the picadores stationed themselves at equal distances from each other round the circumference of the arena. Then, at a signal from the alcalde, two trumpeters in scarlet, behind him, stood up and sounded—a man, standing with his hand ready on a bolt in a door underneath, drew it, and pulled the door swiftly back, shutting himself into a niche, as the dark space thus opened was filled by the formidable figure of a bull, who, with glancing horns and tail erect, bounded out, and, looking around during one fierce brief pause, made straight at the first picador. The cavalier, standing straight in his stirrups, his lance tucked firmly under his arm, fixed the point fairly in the shoulder of the brute, who, never pausing for that, straightway upset man and horse. Then my grandfather might be seen stretching far over the front of his box, his eyes staring on the prostrate picador, and his hands clenched above his head, while he shouted, "By the Lord, sir, he'll be killed!" And when a chulo, darting alongside, waved his cloak before the bull's eyes and lured him away, the Major, drawing a long breath, turned to a calm Spaniard beside him, and said, "By heaven, sir, 'twas the mercy of Providence!"—but the Spaniard, taking his cigar from his mouth, and expelling the smoke through his nostrils, merely said, "Bien está," ('tis very well.) Meanwhile, the bull (who, like his predecessor in the china-shop, seemed to have it all his own way) had run his horn into the heart of a second horse, and the picador, perceiving from the shivering of the wounded creature that the hurt was mortal, dismounted in all haste, while the horse, giving one long, blundering stagger, fell over and died, and was immediately stript of his accoutrements. This my grandfather didn't like at all; but, seeing no kindred disgust in the faces round him, he nerved himself, considering that it was a soldier's business to look on wounds and death. He even beheld, with tolerable firmness, the spectacle of a horse dashing blindfold and riderless, and mad with fear and pain, against the barrier—rebounding whence to the earth with a broken shoulder, it was forced again on its three legs, and led stumbling from the ring. But when he saw another horse raised to its feet, and, all ript open as it was, spurred to a second assault, the Major, who hadn't the heart himself to hurt a fly, could stand it no longer, but, feeling unwell, retired precipitately from the scene. On reaching the door, he wrote over the same, with a bit of chalk, part of the speech of Henry V., "the royal imp of fame," to his soldiers at Agincourt:— "He that hath not stomach for the fight,
Let him depart——"
to the great astonishment of the two Spanish sentries, who gazed on the words as if they contained a magical spell.

Frank sat till it was over—"played out the play." Not that he saw much of the fight, however; he had eyes and speech for nothing but Juana, and was able to indulge his penchant without interruption, as the little Governor took great interest in the fight, and the lover with the silver fishes was a connoisseur in the sport, and laid bets on the number of horses that each particular bull would kill with great accuracy. So the Ensign had it all his own way, and, being by no means the sort of person to throw away this or any other opportunity with which fortune might favour him, 534 got on quite as well, probably, as you or I might have done in his place.

Leaving Cadiz next morning, they resumed the order of march they had adopted in coming—Don Pablo riding, as before, in front with the knight of the silver fishes, discussing with him the incidents of the bull-ring. The old gentleman, though very courteous when addressing the two Englishmen, had but little to say to them—neither did he trouble himself to talk much to the ladies; and when he did, a sharp expression would sometimes slip out, convincing Owen that he was something of a domestic tyrant in private—a character by no means inconsistent with the blandest demeanour in public. The Ensign was at great pains to encourage the Major to be gracious to Carlota. "Get a little more tropical in your looks, Major," he would say; "these Spanish ladies are not accustomed to frigid glances. She's desperately in love with you—pity she can't express what she feels; and she mightn't like to trust an interpreter with her sentiments."

"Pooh, nonsense, boy," said the Major, colouring with pleasure, "she doesn't care for an old fellow like me."

"Doesn't she?—see what her eyes say—that's what I call ocular demonstration," quoth the Ensign. "If you don't return it, you're a stock, a stone." Then he would say something to Carlota, causing her eyes to sparkle, and canter on to rejoin Juana.

It was genial summer-time with Carlota—she had passed the age of maiden diffidence, without having attained that of soured and faded spinsterhood. She had a sort of jovial confidence in herself, and an easy demeanour towards the male sex, such as is seen in widows. These supposed advances of the Major were accordingly met by her rather more than half-way. None but the Major was permitted to assist her into the saddle, or to receive her plump form descending from it. None but the Major was beckoned to her rein when the path was broken and perilous, or caught on his protecting arm the pressure of her outstretched hand, when her steed stumbled over the loose pebbles. None was repaid for a slight courtesy by so many warm, confiding smiles as he. These, following fast one on another, began to penetrate the rusty casing of the Major's heart. On his own ground—that is, in his own quarters—he could have given battle, successfully, to a score of such insidious enemies: his books, his flowers, his pipe, his slippers, and a hundred other Penates would have encircled him; but here, with all his strong palisading of habit torn up and scattered, all his wonted trains of ideas upset and routed by the novelty of situation and scenery, he lay totally defenceless, and open to attack. The circumstance of himself and Carlota being ignorant of each other's language, far from being an obstacle to their mutual good-will, rather favoured its progress. In company with an Englishwoman, in similar circumstances, my grandfather would have considered himself bound to entertain her with his conversation, and, perhaps, have spoiled all by trying to make himself agreeable—it would have been a tax on the patience of both: but being absolved from any such duty in the present instance, he could without awkwardness ride onward in full and silent communion with his own thoughts, and enjoy the pleasure of being smiled upon without being at any pains to earn it.

His note-book, containing an account of the expedition, which I have seen—and whence, indeed, the greater part of this chronicle is gathered—exhibits, at this period of the journey, sufficient proof that the Major enjoyed this new state of being extremely, and felt his intellect, his heart, and his stomach at once stimulated.

"Spain," says my grandfather, in a compendious descriptive sentence, "is a country of garlicky odours, of dirty contentment, of overburthened donkeys, and of excellent pork; but a fine air in the hills, and the country much sweeter than the towns. The people don't seem to know what comfort is, or cleanliness, but are nevertheless very contented in their ignorance. My saddle is bad, I think, for I dismounted very sore to-day. The Señorita mighty pleasant and gracious. I entertain a great regard for her—no doubt a sensible woman, as well as a handsome. A pig to-day at breakfast, the best I have tasted in Spain." 535

The desultory style of the composition of these notes prevents me from quoting largely from them. Statistics, incidents of travel, philosophic reflections, and the state of his digestive organs, are all chronicled indiscriminately. But, from the above mixture of sentiments, it will be perceived that the Major's admiration for Carlota was of a sober nature, by no means ardent or Quixotic, and pretty much on a par with his passion for pig.

This was far from being the case with Garry, who became more and more enamoured every hour. The Spanish lover continued to conduct himself as if he had been married to Juana for twenty years, never troubling himself to be particularly agreeable or attentive, for which obliging conduct Garry felt very grateful to him. The Major had been too long accustomed to witness Owen's philanderings to see anything peculiar in the present case, till his attention was attracted by a little incident he accidentally witnessed. After the last halt they made before reaching Tarifa, Garry was, as usual, at hand, to assist Juana to her saddle. The strings of her hat were untied, and he volunteered to fasten them; and, having done so, still retaining his hold of the strings, he glanced quickly around, and then drew her blooming face towards his own till their lips met—for which piece of impudence he only suffered the slight penalty of a gentle tap with her whip. My grandfather discreetly and modestly withdrew his eyes, but he was not the only observer. He of the silver fishes was regarding them with a fixed look from among some neighbouring trees, where he had tethered his horse. Probably the Spaniard, with all his indifference, thought this was carrying matters a little too far, for, after conversing a moment with the Governor, he took his place at Juana's side, and did not again quit it till they arrived at Tarifa. Then both he and the Governor took leave of our travellers with a cold civility, defying all Garry's attempts to thaw it, and seeming to forbid all prospect of a speedy renewal of the acquaintance.

CHAPTER IV.

At the inn, that night, the Major betook himself to rest early, that he might be ready to start for Gibraltar betimes in the morning, for on the following day their leave was to expire.

He had slept soundly for several hours, when he was awoke by Owen, who entered with a candle in his hand. The Major sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes.

"Time's up, my boy, eh?" said he, with a cavernous yawn. "I should have liked another hour of it, but it can't be helped," (preparing to turn out.)

"I didn't want to spoil your rest last night," said Owen, seating himself on the edge of the bed, "so I said nothing about a mishap that has occurred. That smuggling villain, Francisco, took advantage of our absence to fetch a contraband cargo in the boat from Gibraltar, and has been caught in attempting to run it here."

"God bless me," said my grandfather, "who would have thought it!—and he such a capital cook! But what's to be done? where's the boat?"

"The boat is, for the present, confiscated," said Garry; "but I daresay the Governor would let us have it in the morning, on explaining, and perhaps release Francisco, with the loss of his cargo; but—but—in fact, Major, I don't want the Governor to know anything about our departure."

My grandfather stared at him, awaiting further explanation.

"Juana looked pale last night," said the Ensign after a pause.

The Major did not dispute the fact, though he could not, for the life of him, see what it had to do with the subject.

"She never liked that dingy Spanish lover of hers," said the Ensign, "and her father intends she shall marry him in a month. 'Twould make her miserable for life."

"Dear me," said my grandfather, "how do you know that?"

"She told me so. You see," said Owen, shading the candle with his hand, so that my grandfather couldn't see his face, and speaking hurriedly, 536 "I didn't intend we should start alone—in fact—that is—Juana has agreed to fly with me to Gibraltar."

"Agreed!—fly!"—gasped my grandsire: "what an extraordinary young fellow!"

"She's waiting for us now," resumed Garry, gathering courage after the first plunge into the subject; "we ought to be off before daylight. Oblige me, my dear sir," (smiling irresistibly,) "by getting up immediately."

"And how are we to get away," asked my grandfather, "supposing this insane scheme of yours to be attempted?"

"I've bribed the sentry at Francisco's place of durance," returned the Ensign. "We shall get out of the town the instant the gates are opened; and the boat is tied to the steps, as before, only under the charge of a sentry whom we can easily evade. Every guarda costa in the place was sent out last night to blockade a noted smuggler who has taken refuge in Tangier; so, once out, we are safe from pursuit: I found it all out after you had gone to bed."

The disposition of Major Flinders, as the reader knows, was the reverse of enterprising—he wouldn't have given a straw to be concerned in the finest adventure that ever happened in romance. He paused with one stocking on, inclined, like the little woman whose garments had been curtailed by the licentious shears of the pedlar, to doubt his own identity, and wondering if it could be really he, John Flinders, to whom such a proposition was broached, requiring him to assist in invading the peace of a family. As soon as he recovered his powers of speech, of which astonishment had for a moment deprived him, he began earnestly to dissuade the Ensign from the enterprise; but Owen knew his man too well, and had too much youthful vivacity of will to allow much time for remonstrance.

"Look you, Major," said he, "I'm positive I can't live without Juana. I'll make a bold stroke for a wife. The thing's settled—no going back now for me; and I shall go through with it with or without you. But you're not the man, I'm sure, to desert a fellow in extremity, at a time, too, when the advantages of your experience and coolness are so peculiarly needed. 'Call you that backing of your friends?'"

The compliment, or the quotation, or both, softened the Major. "'Would it were night, Hal, and all well,'" said he, half mechanically following the Falstaffian train of ideas Owen had artfully conjured up, and at the same time drawing on the breeches which that astute youth obsequiously handed to him.

It was still dark when they issued forth into the narrow and dingy streets of Tarifa. My grandfather, totally unaccustomed to visit the glimpses of the moon in this adventurous fashion, was full of strange fears—heard as many imaginary suspicious noises and voices as Bunyan's Pilgrim in the dark valley—and once or twice stopt abruptly and grasped Owen's arm, while he pointed to a spy dogging them in the distant gloom, who turned out to be a door-post. But Owen was now in his element; no tom-cat in Tarifa was more familiar with housetops and balconies at the witching hour than he, and he stepped gaily on. Presently they were challenged by a sentry, to whom Owen promptly advanced and slipped into his itching palm a doubloon, when the trustworthy warrior immediately turned upon his heel, and, walking to the extremity of his post, looked with great vigilance in the opposite direction.

Owen advanced to a grated window and tapped. Immediately the burly face of Francisco showed itself thereat, his white teeth glancing merrily in a glimmer of moonshine. A bar, previously filed through, was removed from the window, and Owen, taking him by the collar to assist his egress, drew him through as far as the third button of his waistcoat, where he stuck for a moment; but the substance was elastic, and a lusty tug landed him in the middle of the narrow street. Receiving Frank's instructions, given in a hurried whisper, to go at once to where the boat lay, and cast her off, ready to shove off on the instant, he nodded and disappeared in the darkness, while Owen and the Major made for the Governor's house.

Arrived near it, Owen gave a low whistle—a peculiar one, that my grandfather remembered to have 537 heard him practising to Juana on the previous day—when, to the unutterable surprise of the Major, two veiled figures appeared on the balcony.

"Why, Owen, boy, d'ye see!" quoth the Major, stuttering with anxiety, "who can the other be?—her maid, eh?"—indistinct stage recollections of intriguing waiting-women dawning on him.

"Ahem!—why, you see, Major," whispered Owen, "she wouldn't come alone—couldn't manage it at all, in fact, without the knowledge of her aunt, who sleeps in the next room; so I persuaded Carlota to come too, and gave her a sort of half promise that you would take care of her." Here, wishing to cut short a rather awkward explanation, he ran under the balcony—one of the ladies dropped a cord—and Owen producing from under his coat a rope ladder, (he had sat up all night making it,) attached it, and, as soon as it was drawn up, ascended, motioning to my astounded grandfather to keep it steady below. The Major, after a moment's desperate half-resolve to make a hasty retreat from the perilous incidents which seemed momentarily to thicken round him, and leave his reckless friend to his fate, yielded to the force of circumstances, and did what was required of him. Then Owen lifted the ladies, one after the other, over the railing of the balcony, and they swiftly descended. First came Juana, who, scarcely touching the Major's offered hand, lit on the pavement like gossamer; then Carlota descended, and making, in her trepidation, a false step near the bottom, came so heavily on the Major, that they rolled together on the stones. By the time they were on their feet again, Owen had slipped down the ladder, and, taking Juana under his arm, set off rapidly towards the bay.

If anything could have added to the Major's discomfiture and embarrassment, it would have been the pressure of Carlota's arm on his, as she hung confidingly on him—a pressure not proceeding from her weight only, but active, and with a meaning in it; but he was in that state of mental numbness from the successive shocks of astonishment, that, as with a soldier after the first two dozen, any additional laceration passed unheeded. He was embarked in an adventure of which he could by no means see the end; all was strange and dark in the foreground of his future; and if he had been at that moment tried, cast, and condemned for an imaginary crime, he would have been too apathetic to say anything in arrest of judgment.

Silently and swiftly, as a forlorn hope, they passed through the town and along the sandy causeway. The succession of white rolling waves on their left, where extended the full breadth of the Straits, while the bay on their right was almost smooth, showed the wind to be still against them; but it was now so moderate that they might safely beat up for the Rock. Arrived at the head of the stairs leading to the water, they paused in the angle of the wall to reconnoitre. Francisco was lying coiled up in the head of the boat, his hand on the rope, ready to cast her loose, and the boat-hook projecting over the bow. Above them, and behind the wall, at a little distance, they could hear the measured tread of the sentry, and catch the gleam of his bayonet as he turned upon his walk: a few vigorous shoves would carry them outside the sea-wall and beyond his ken. All depended on their silence; and like two stealthy cats did Owen and Juana descend to the boat—the Major and Carlota watching the success of their attempt with protruded necks. Cautiously did Owen stride from the last stair to the deck—cautiously did he transfer Juana to the bark, and guide her aft. The Major was just preparing to follow, when a noise from the boat startled him: Juana had upset an unlucky wine-jar which Francisco had left there. The sentry put his head over the wall, and challenged; Francisco, starting up, shoved hastily off; the sentry fired his piece, his bullet shattering the wine-jar that had caused the mischief. Juana screamed, Owen swore in English, and Francisco surpassed him in Spanish. There was no time to return or wait for the other pair, for the guard was alarmed by the sentry's shot, and their accoutrements might be heard rattling near at hand, as they turned hastily out. Before they reached the 538 wall, however, the boat had disappeared.

Major Flinders watched it till it was out of sight, and, at first, experienced a feeling of despair at being thus deprived of the aid of Garry's boldness and promptitude, and left to his own resources. Presently, however, a gleam of comfort dawned upon him—perhaps Carlota would now abandon the enterprise, and he should thus, at any rate, be freed from the embarrassment her presence occasioned him. In this hope he was shortly undeceived. To have added the shame of failure and exposure to her present disappointment, while an opening to persevere still remained, did not suit that lady's ardent spirit; and whether it was that the unscrupulous Garry had really represented the Major as very much in love, or whether such an impression resulted from her own lively imagination, she certainly thought her companion would be as much chagrined at such a denouement as herself. She displayed a prompt decision in this emergency, being, indeed, as remarkable for presence as the Major was for absence of mind. Taking the Major's arm, she caused him swiftly to retrace his steps with her to the inn where he had slept. As they retreated, they heard the boom of a gun behind them, fired, doubtless, from the Point, at the Fair Unknown. At Carlota's orders, a couple of horses, one with a side-saddle, were speedily at the inn-door; they mounted, and, before the sun was yet risen, had issued forth from the gate of Tarifa, on the road to Gibraltar.

The Major rode beside her like a man in a dream—in fact, he was partly asleep, having been deprived of a large portion of his natural and accustomed rest, and partly bewildered. A few days before he had been the most methodical, unromantic, not to say humdrum, old bachelor in his Majesty's service; and here he was, how or why he did not well know, galloping away at daybreak with a foreign lady, of whose existence he had been ignorant a week before, with the prospect of being apprehended by her relatives for her abduction, and by the Government for assisting in the escape of, a smuggler. When at length roused to complete consciousness by the rapidity of their motion, he positively groaned in anguish of spirit, and vowed internally that, once within the shelter of his own quiet quarters, nothing on earth should again tempt him forth on such harum-scarum expeditions.

It was near noon when they reached Algeçiras, where they stopped to breakfast, both of them rather exhausted with fatigue and hunger. This town stands just opposite Gibraltar, across the bay—the road they had come by forms the base of a triangle, of which Cabrita Point is the apex, the bay washing one side of the projecting coast, the Straits the other. The Major was reserved and embarrassed; there was a tenderness about Carlota's manner that frightened him out of his usual gallantry, and, to avoid meeting her glance, he looked steadily out of the window at the rock of Gibraltar, casting wistful glances at the spot where his quarters lay hidden in a little clump of foliage. Immediately after the meal he quitted the room, on pretence of looking after the horses. He determined to protract their stay in Algeçiras till late in the afternoon, that they might enter Gibraltar in the dusk, and thus avoid awkward meetings with equestrian parties from the garrison, who would then be hastening homewards, in order to be in before gun-fire, when the gates are shut.

On returning, still out of temper, to the room where he had left Carlota, he found her, quite overcome with fatigue, asleep on the sofa. Her head was thrown a little back on the cushion; her lips were just parted, and she looked in her sleep like a weary child. The Major approached on tiptoe, and stood regarding her. His ill-humour melted fast into pity. He thought of all her kindness to him, and, by a sudden soft-hearted impulse, took gently one of her hands projecting over the side of the sofa. Carlota opened her eyes, and squeezed the hand that held hers; whereupon the Major suddenly quitted his hold, and, retreating with great discomposure to the window, did not venture to look at her again till it was time to resume their journey.

At a little distance from Algeçiras 539 is the river Palmones, called by the English the Second River. This was crossed by a floating bridge, pulled from shore to shore by a ferryman warping on a rope extended across. They had just reached the opposite bank of the stream, when Carlota noticed two horsemen galloping fast along the road they had just traversed. A second glance showed them to be Don Pablo and the lover of Juana. The first inquiries of the Governor had led him to suppose that all had escaped in the boat, and it was not till some time after that he had learned the true state of affairs.

The fugitives now hastened on in earnest, and roused their horses to a steady gallop, never pausing till they reached the Guadaranque, or First River, about a mile nearer Gibraltar than the other, and furnished with a similar bridge. The delay of the pursuers at the former ferry had thrown them far in rear; and my grandfather, inspired by the imminence of the peril, now conceived a bright idea—the brightest, probably, that ever flashed upon him—by executing which they might effectually distance their pursuers. Dropping his glove at a little distance from the shore, he sent the ferryman to fetch it, and then pushed off, (Carlota having already embarked,) and warped the bridge to the opposite bank, heedless of the frantic gesticulations of the proprietor, who screamed furiously after them to stop. When he reached the opposite side, he took out his pocket-knife and deliberately cut the rope. Having thus, as it were, blown up the communication in his rear, my grandfather, without the loss of his baggage, continued his retreat to the fortress; while the little Governor, who galloped up just as they were disappearing, was, like Lord Ullin, left lamenting.

The sun was already declining, and threw their shadows far before them on the sands, as they rode along the beach close to the water. The bay at this inner extremity makes a great circular sweep—radii drawn from the rock to different distant points of the arc would be almost equal; and for half an hour they continued to see Gibraltar at nearly the same distance to the right and in front of them, holding itself aloof most provokingly. Twilight descended as they passed the Spanish lines and entered on the Neutral Ground. The Major glanced anxiously at his watch—in a few minutes the gun from Middle Hill would give the signal for shutting the gates, and doom them irretrievably to return into Spain for the night. For the first time in his life Major Flinders really punished his horse, lifting the tired beast along with whip and rein. Carlota's kept easily beside him under her lighter weight, and they rapidly neared the barrier. Just as they passed it, a stream of flame shot from the rock, illumining objects like a flash of lightning;—then came the heavy report of the gun—another minute and the drawbridge at Landport would be lifted; but they were upon it. They dashed across somewhat in the style of Marmion quitting Douglas's castle, "just as it trembled on the rise," and were safe in Gibraltar.

CHAPTER V.

After life's fitful fever, the Major did not sleep well. He had left Carlota comfortably established at the inn; and he now lay nervously thinking how his embarrassment with regard to her was to terminate, especially if Owen did not shortly make his appearance. Then he was worried by doubts as to the fate of the Fair Unknown and her passengers. They might have been recaptured, as escaped smugglers, by a guarda costa—they might be detained in the Straits by adverse winds or calms—they might have run ashore into some bay, and come on overland. This last supposition haunted him most pertinaciously, and he resolved to go up the rock as soon as it should be daylight to look out for them along the road from Spain. He lay tossing restlessly till the morning gun gave the signal of the approach of dawn, and before the echoes died away he had his breeches on.

Night was at odds with morning 540 my grandfather, with a telescope under his arm, sallied forth and began the ascent. Silence was over the rock, except an occasional sighing of a remnant of night wind that had lost itself among the crags. At first, the only clear outline visible was that of the rugged edge of the rock above against the colourless sky; but as he toiled up the steep zig-zag path, the day kept pace with him—each moment threw a broader light on the scene—blots of shadow became bushes or deep fissures, and new shapes of stone glided into view. The only symptoms of animal life that he beheld were a rabbit that fled silently to his hole, and a great white vulture that, startled from his perch on a grey crag, sailed slowly upward on his black-tipped wings, circling higher and higher, till his breast was crimsoned by the yet unrisen sun.

The path led diagonally to the summit; and, turning a sharp level corner, my grandfather looked perpendicularly down on the Mediterranean, whose lazy waves, sending up a gentle murmur, rippled far below him. On his left, also steep down below him, was the Neutral Ground, level as the sea itself, extending northward into sandy plains, abruptly crossed by tumbled heaps of brown mountains. A reddening of the sky showed that the sun was at hand; and presently the glowing disk came swiftly up from behind the eastern hills; the pale earth shared in the ruddiness of the sky, and a long rosy gleam swept gradually over the breadth of the grey sea, like an unwilling smile spreading itself from a man's lips to his eyes and forehead.

Conspicuous on the highest point in the landscape stood my grandfather, panting with his exertions as he wiped his forehead. After standing for a moment, bronzed in front like a smith at the furnace, face to face with the sun, he turned and swept with his telescope the road into Spain. Early peasants, microscopic as ants, were bringing their fruits and vegetables into the fortress—a laden mule or two advanced along the beach over which the Major had last night galloped—but nothing resembling what he sought was in sight. Then turning completely round, with his face to the path he had just ascended, he gave a long look towards the Straits; and as he did so, the wind, which had shifted to the south-west towards morning, blew gently on his face. A sail or two was discernible in the distance, outward bound, but nothing resembling the cutter. As the Major looked, a signal was made from Cabrita, and directly two feluccas left their station at Algeçiras, and swooped out, like two white birds, as if to intercept some bark yet hidden by the Point. Again my grandfather looked out to the Strait, and presently a small white sail came in sight near Cabrita. For a quarter of an hour he stood steadily, with levelled telescope, and then he was almost sure—yes, he could swear—that he saw the small English ensign relieved against the sail; and above, at the mast-head, the yellow-striped flag that Francisco hoisted before as the mark of a yacht. It was the Fair Unknown—and my grandfather at once comprehended that the pursuers, whom he had escaped the night before, had, on returning to Algeçiras, made arrangements for her capture as soon as she should appear.

The breeze was on her beam, and much fresher with her than farther in the bay, so that the feluccas steered slantingly across her course as she made for the rock. They held on thus, the pursuers and pursued, till within a mile of each other, when the cutter suddenly altered her course to one nearly parallel with that of the feluccas. The latter, however, now gained fast upon her, and presently a puff of smoke from the bow of the foremost was followed by the report of a gun. My grandfather could look no longer through his glass, for his hand shook like a reed, but began, with huge strides more resembling those of a kangaroo than a quiet middle-aged gentleman, to descend the rock. Breathless, he reached his quarters, had his horse saddled and brought out, and galloped off towards Europa.

Europa Point is at the southern extremity of the rock, and commands at once the entrance of the bay and the passage of the Straits. The road to it from the north, where the Major was quartered, affords, for the most 541 part, a view of the bay. Many an anxious glance did he cast, as he sped along, at the state of affairs on the water. The feluccas fired several shots, but all seemed to fall wide, and were probably intended only to frighten the chase, out of consideration for her fair freight. Still, however, the English colours floated, and still the cutter held her course.

Some artillerymen and an officer were assembled at the Point as the Major galloped up.

"Can't you fire at 'em," said he, as he drew up beside the battery.

"Too far off," said the Lieutenant, rising from the parapet on which he was leaning, and showing a drowsy unshaven countenance; "we should only frighten them."

"By heavens!" said my grandfather, "'tis horrible. I shall see the boy taken before my eyes!"

"Boy!" quoth the Lieutenant, wondering what particular interest the Major could take in the smuggler. "What boy?"

"Why, Owen of ours—he's running away with a Spanish lady."

"The devil!" cried the Lieutenant, jumping down. "What, Garry Owen!—we must try a long shot. Pull those quoins out," (to a gunner.) "Corporal, lay that gun; a dollar if you hit the felucca. I'll try a shot with this one." So saying, he laid the thirty-two pounder next him with great care.

"Fire!" said he, jumping on the parapet to see the effect of the shot. At the second rebound it splashed under the bows of the leading felucca, which still held on. She was now scarcely three hundred yards from the cutter.

"Why, d—n their impudence!" muttered the Lieutenant, on seeing his warning pass unheeded, "they won't take a hint. Corporal, let drive at 'em."

The Corporal earned his dollar. The shot went through the side of the felucca, on board of which all was presently confusion; in a few minutes it was apparent she was sinking. The other, abandoning the chase, went to the assistance of her consort, lifting the crew out, some of whom were evidently hurt.

"A blessed shot!" cried my grandfather, giving the lucky Corporal a bit of gold; "but I'm glad they're picking up the crew."

The cutter instantly stood in for the harbour, and half an hour afterwards the Major bade his young friend and Juana welcome to Gibraltar.

Carlota was beside herself with joy at seeing the wanderers safe. She first cast herself upon Juana, and cried over her; then embraced the Ensign, who made no scruple of kissing her; lastly, threw herself tenderly upon the Major, who gazed over her head as it lay on his shoulder with a dismayed expression, moving his arms uneasily, as if he didn't know what he was expected to do with them. Every moment it was becoming clearer to him that he was a compromised man, no longer his own property. On his way through the streets that morning he had passed a knot of officers, one of whom he overheard describing "Old Flinders" as "a sly old boy," for that he "had run away with a devilish handsome Spaniard—who would have thought it?" "Ay, who indeed!" groaned the Major, internally. But the seal was put to his doom by the Colonel, who, when he went to report himself, slapped him on the shoulder, and congratulated him on his happiness. "Fine woman, I hear, Flinders—didn't give you credit for such spirit—hope you'll be happy together." The Major, muttering an inarticulate denial, hastily retreated, and from that moment surrendered himself to his fate an unresisting victim.

About dusk that night, Owen came to him.

"By heavens!" the Ensign began, throwing himself into a chair, "I'm the most unlucky scoundrel! Nothing goes right with me. I promised myself that this should be my wedding-night—and here I am, as forlorn a bachelor as ever."

"What has gone wrong?" inquired my grandfather, removing his pipe from his mouth.

"I pressed her with all my eloquence," said Owen; "reminded her of her promise to marry me the day we should arrive here—of the necessity of caring for her reputation, after leaving her father's house and coming here under my protection," (here my 542 grandfather winced;) "talked, in fact, like an angel who had been bred a special pleader—yet it was all of no use."

"Deliberating about marriage!" said the Major, "after leaving her father and lover for you! What gnat can she be straining at, after swallowing a camel of such magnitude?"

"A piece of female Quixotry," returned Owen. "She says she can't think of such selfishness as being comfortably married herself, while Carlota is so unhappy, and her fate so unsettled." Here he made a significant pause; but my grandfather was immovably silent, only glancing nervously at him, and smoking very hard.

"In fact, she protests she won't hear of marrying me, till you have settled when you will marry Carlota."

"Marry Carlota!" gasped the Major in an agonised whisper.

"Why, you don't mean to say you're not going to marry her!" exclaimed the Ensign, throwing a vast quantity of surprise into his expressive countenance.

"Why—why, what should I marry her for?" stammered the Major.

"Oh, Lord!" said Garry, "here will be pleasant news for her! Curse me if I break it to her."

"But really, now, Frank," the Major repeated—"marriage, you know—why, I never thought of such a thing."

"You're the only person that hasn't then," rejoined Owen. "Why, what can the garrison think, after the way you smuggled her in; what can she herself think, after all your attentions?"

"Attentions, my dear boy;—the merest civility."

"Oh,—ah! 'twas civility, I suppose, to squeeze her hand in the inn at Algeçiras, in the way she told Juana of—and heaven knows what else you may have done during the flight. Juana is outrageous against you—actually called you a vile deceiver; but Carlota's feeling is more of sorrow than of anger. She is persuaded that nothing but your ignorance of Spanish has prevented your tongue from confirming what your looks have so faithfully promised. I was really quite affected to-day at the appealing look she cast on me after you left the room; she evidently expected me to communicate her destiny."

My grandfather smoked hard.

"Lots of fellows would give their ears for such a wife," pursued the Ensign. "Lovelace, the Governor's aide-de-camp, bribed the waiter of the hotel to lend him his apron to-day, at dinner, that he might come in and look at her—swears she's a splendid woman, and that he'd run away with such another to-morrow."

Still my grandfather smoked hard, but said nothing, though there was a slight gleam of pride in his countenance.

"Poor thing!" sighed Garry. "All her prospects blighted for ever. Swears she never can love another."

At this my grandfather's eyes grew moist, and he coughed as if he had swallowed some tobacco-smoke.

"And as for me, to have Juana at my lips, as it were, and yet not mine—for she's as inflexible as if she'd been born a Mede and Persian—to know that you are coming between me and happiness as surely as if you were an inexorable father or a cruel guardian—worse, indeed; for those might be evaded. Major, major, have you no compassion!—two days of this will drive me crazy."

The Major changed his pipe from his right hand to his left, and, stretching the former across the table, sympathetically pressed that of the Ensign.

"Do, Major," quoth Garry, changing his flank movement for a direct attack—"do consent to make yourself and me happy; do empower me to negotiate for our all going to church to-morrow." (My grandfather gave a little jump in his chair at this, as if he were sitting on a pin.) "I'll manage it all; you shan't have the least trouble in the matter."

My grandfather spoke not.

"Silence gives consent," said the Ensign, rising. "Come, now, if you don't forbid me, I'll depart on my embassy at once; you needn't speak, I'll spare your blushes. I see this delay has only been from modesty, or perhaps a little ruse on your part. Once, twice, thrice,—I go." And he vanished.

The Major remained in his chair, in the same posture. His pipe was 543 smoked out, but he continued to suck absently at the empty tube. His bewilderment and perturbation were so great that, though he sat up till two in the morning, during which time he smoked eleven pipes, and increased the two glasses of grog with which he was accustomed to prepare for his pillow to four, he was still, when he went to bed, as agitated as ever.

In this state of mind he went to the altar, for next day a double ceremony was performed, making Owen happy with Juana, and giving Carlota a husband and me a grandfather. The Major was more like a proxy than a principal in the affair; for Owen, taking the entire management upon himself, left him little more to do than to make the necessary responses.

Carlota made a very good-tempered, quiet, inobtrusive helpmate, and continued to be fond of her spouse even after he was a gray-headed colonel. My grandfather, though credulous in most matters, could with difficulty be brought to consider himself married. He would sometimes seem to forget the circumstance for a whole day together, till it came to be forced on his recollection at bed-time. And when, about a year after his marriage, a new-born female Flinders (now my venerable aunt) was brought one morning by the nurse for his inspection and approval, he gazed at it with a puzzled air, and could not be convinced that he was actually in the presence of his own flesh and blood, till he had touched the cheek of his first-born with the point of his tobacco-pipe, removed from his mouth for that purpose, making on the infant's countenance a small indentation.

The little Governor, Don Pablo, was subsequently induced to forgive his relatives, and frequent visits and attentions were interchanged, till the commencement of the siege put a stop to all intercourse between Gibraltar and Spain.

I have often, on a summer's evening, sat looking across the bay at a gorgeous sunset, and retracing in imagination the incidents I have related. My grandfather's establishment was broken up during the siege by the enemy's shells, but a similar one now stands on what I think must have been about the site of it. The world has changed since then; but Spain is no land of change; and, looking on the imperishable outline of the Andaluçian hills, unaltered, probably, since a time to which the period of my tale is but as yesterday, it is easy for me to "daff aside" the noisy world without, and, dropping quietly behind the age, to picture to myself my old-fashioned grandfather issuing forth from yonder white-walled town of Algeçiras with his future bride.

GERMAN LETTERS FROM PARIS.2

German Professors are altered men since those joyous days when we drank chopines and swang the schlaeger in the thirsty and venerable University of Saxesaufenberg. We remember them studious bookworms, uneasy when removed from library and lecture-room, their meerschaum their only passion, knowledge their sole ambition, beholding the external world through "the loopholes of retreat,"—the said embrasures being considerably obscured by tobacco-smoke and misty philosophy. Such is the portrait our memory has preserved of them; and we doubt not that its fidelity will be recognised by our brother-burschen of bygone days. But great has been the change. The quality of a German professor now suggests the idea of a red-hot democrat, fanning revolution, pining in prison, or fugitive in foreign lands. The smoking-cap is exchanged for the bonnet rouge, and the silence of the sage for the clamour of the demagogue. This may not be true of all, perhaps not even of a majority, but it is true of a pretentious and prominent minority. The busy, bustling multitude knows nothing of the others. 544

Professor Stahr, of the University of Oldenburg, is a gentleman chiefly remarkable for his democratic tendencies, and for the fluent correctness of his literary style. Few men write better German, or profess doctrines more revolutionary. His reputation as a literary man rests principally upon a work on Italy, published after a twelvemonth's residence in that country.3 As a critic of fine art, he is not without merit. As a politician he is wild and speculative. The revolutionary coterie to which he belongs reckons amongst its members Fanny Lewald, the lively Hebrew socialist, and Moritz Hartmann, the bitter radical. Both of these, especially the former, are his intimate friends, and appear to have been his constant companions during two months of last autumn, spent by him in Paris, and which have given occasion and a title to his latest book. With Mr Hartmann he forgathered at Brussels, early in the month of September, and together they proceeded southwards. In consideration of Professor Stahr's acknowledged abilities, we will not apply to him a common rule, and judge him by the company he keeps. But, in spite of his well-turned periods and general moderation of expression, his book is not pleasant to read. There is an ill-conditioned tone about writers of his political class, extremely trying to the patience and temper of the reader. Convinced of the general unfitness of existing human institutions, and of the necessity for radical changes, they inevitably fall into a cavilling and censorious strain. Viewing the condition of society with a jaundiced eye, they adopt the maxim that whatever is, is wrong. Mr Stahr has hardly entered the railway carriage that is to transport him to Paris, when he shows himself querulous and a grumbler. He hoisted his colours before leaving Brussels. Had we never before heard either of him or his principles, we yet should have been at no loss to discover the latter by certain passages in his very first chapter. Sitting in his inn at eventide, after visiting the monument to the slain of 1830, he reads an account of the Belgian revolution. The Dutch troops, he finds, made but one hundred and twenty-two prisoners, whilst the insurgents captured four hundred and ninety-five. On the other hand, the Belgian killed and wounded exceeded by three hundred those of their opponents. Mr Stahr is ready with an inference from these statistics. It takes the form of a slur upon the soldiers who were doing their duty to their king and country. "The inequality in the number of prisoners may well arise from the circumstance that the Dutch, as fighters for loyal tranquillity and order, were least disposed to give quarter. And soldiers against men without uniform—one knows that!" Then he falls foul of the writer of the narrative, for attributing to Providence the preservation of the royal palace, and other public buildings, to which the Dutch attempted to set fire; and, gliding thence into religious speculations, he gets very profound, and rather profane, so that we are not sorry when the current of his ideas is diverted into a more commonplace channel, by the visit, at Valenciennes, of the French customhouse officers, on the look-out for Belgian cigars and reprints. He is sore at this irksome visitation—wonders that powerful France so long endures the literary piracies of her little neighbour—and finally prophesies the abolition of all customhouses. "A time will come," he says, "when this system of legally privileged waylaying will appear just as fabulous to the people of Europe, as do now to us the highway depredations of the robber-knights." Pending the advent of that desirable state of things, he revenges himself on a fellow-traveller for his customhouse annoyances. A German book which he had left in the carriage on alighting had disappeared, and could not be recovered. A douanier had perhaps taken it for a contraband commodity. He should have declared it, opined a fat Frenchman in the same carriage. Mr Stahr was indignant. It was a German book, he tartly replied, and was not printed at Brussels, but at Leipzig—a place, he added, which must still be pretty well remembered 545 in France! A polite and tasteful allusion which did the German radical infinite credit, and to which the fat Frenchman might fairly have retorted, "Jena," and half a dozen other significant names, instead of holding his tongue, and leaving his fellow-traveller to digest at leisure his loss and his ill-humour.

Mr Stahr's volumes, composed of letters to friends, are desultory, and for the most part slight. Picture galleries are favourite haunts of his: now he criticises a pamphlet, now a play; he moralises, after his own peculiar fashion, in deserted palaces, assists at a banquet of workmen, witnesses extravagant dances at Mabille, sits by the bedside of the infirm and suffering Heine. His first walk in Paris was to the Palais Royal, after nightfall. "Stahr," said his companion to him suddenly, on the way, "this is the Place de Grève!"—"Were I to live a century," exclaims the impressionable professor, "I should never forget the shudder that came over me at these words." And he breaks into a tumid rhapsody about the lava-streams of the great European volcano, talks of the guillotine, tells the well-known story of Favras, and proceeds to the Palais Royal, where, at ten o'clock at night, he is unable to obtain a beef-steak for supper, and whose glory he accordingly declares departed. Returning to their quarters, at a hotel beyond the Seine, the two Germans get bewildered in the labyrinth of the Quartier Latin, and are indebted for guidance to some artisans, whose "Good night, citoyens!" at parting, again thrills the sensitive Stahr. The historical and fanciful associations that crowd upon his mind are of a less practical nature than the reflection suggested to his companion by the Republican mode of address—"We must exchange our grey Calabrian hats" (the sort of bandit sombreros affected by travelling students and red republicans) "for the loyal hats of order, or soon we shall have Louis Napoleon's police at our heels." Thus spoke Mr Hartmann—who has a natural aversion to all police, and who gladly sneers at the party of Order, and at Louis Napoleon as its representative. Mr Stahr professes no great liking or tenderness for the chief of the Republic—the first gendarme in France, as he calls him, meaning thereby to cast opprobrium on the President, gentlemen of his political complexion having an instinctive detestation of gendarmes. He saw him for the first time at the celebrated review held at Satory, on the 10th October 1850. On his way thither, Mr Stahr joined in conversation with peasants, who were flocking from all the country round to see the President and the military pageant. Many of them had sons in the regiments that were to be reviewed. They made no mystery of their political creed. It was simple enough: "Peace and moderate taxation," said they, "is what we want. He who gives us those two things is our man, whether as King or President matters not." The review over, the throng of spectators drew up to see Louis Napoleon. After the Minister of War, d'Hautpoul, and the then-all-powerful Changarnier, had passed, each with his staff, "there came by, mounted on a tall gray horse, the elect of six millions of voters. Judiciously-distributed adherents waved their hats and shouted, at the top of their voices, 'Long live the Emperor! Vive Napoleon!' The people were mute. It was a laughable farce. The hero of Strasburg and Boulogne, mounted on a tall charger, in a brilliant general's uniform, the broad riband of the Legion of Honour over his shoulder, in plumed hat and jackboots, was the very model of a circus equestrian." An air of helplessness and exhaustion, according to Mr Stahr, was the main characteristic of the President's appearance. "I stood near enough," he continues, "to see him well, and never did I behold a more unmeaning countenance. An unwholesome grey-brown is its prevailing tint. Of likeness to the great Emperor there is scarcely a trace." There is no chance, Mr Stahr declares, of such a person as Louis Napoleon putting the republic in his pocket. Having given his opinion of the President's exterior, he proceeds in the next chapter to sketch his character, as described by a person who had known him from his youth. "He is naturally goodtempered and harmless," said 546 this anonymous informant, "and by no means without ability. But he is tainted with the moral corruption of all European societies, Italian, French, and English. He has the pourriture of the drawing-room education of all nations. Still he is not devoid of sense, nor of a certain goodness of disposition. He can weep, unaffectedly weep, over a touching case of wretchedness and misery, and he willingly shows clemency, when asked, even to political opponents. But no reliance can be placed in him. In a word, his character is that of a woman. As a result of his wandering and adventurous existence, he appears to-day as a German, to-morrow as a Frenchman, and the day after to-morrow as an Englishman or Italian. He is wholly without fixed principles, and without moral stay. If one represents to him the immorality of an act, he will laugh and say, 'Bah! what is that to me?' But the very next day you shall find him as much oppressed with moral scruples as any German candidate. He has the physical courage of his unusual bodily strength—corporis robore stolide ferox—supported by a fatalist belief in his star; and this belief, which has lately acquired increased strength by his extraordinary vicissitude of fortune, blinds him to his real position, and renders him deaf to the warning voices of his few honest friends. In this respect his mother, who unceasingly stimulated his ambition, did him much harm. Personally he is modest and unassuming, but he is madly vain of his name and of his legitimate claims. That he has done and continues to do himself grievous harm, as it is universally said, by excesses of the most unrefined description, and by opium-smoking, seems unfortunately to be only too true. For the change in him since his youth has been altogether too great. Nevertheless, he is much less the tool of others than might be supposed. He has a way of half-closing his inexpressive light-blue eyes, which he has adopted to prevent persons from reading his thoughts. His chief delusion is that the army is unconditionally devoted to him. This is by no, means the case." We give this curious sketch, in which truth and malignity are ingeniously blended, for no more than it is worth. The reader will have little difficulty in sifting the grain from the chaff, the idle or malicious gossip from the well-founded observations. Mr Stahr supports the assertion of the indifference of the French army to the commonplace nephew of their great idol, by anecdotes derived from personal experience. After the review, he dined for some days in company with three hussar officers, quartered in the house he lived in. His account of them hardly agrees with the popular notion of French officers. "They are modest, reserved, and serious in manner. Nowhere in Paris have I found a trace of that overweening presumption by which German officers, especially cavalrymen, seek to give themselves importance at tables d'hôte and other public places. We spoke of yesterday's manœuvres, and I paid them a compliment on the really splendid bearing of the troops and the capital equipments. There are no longer grounds to depreciate the French cavalry. Africa has been an excellent school for them. 'But there was one thing wanting,' I remarked—'namely, enthusiasm.' 'You are quite right, sir,' replied one of the officers; 'but there is not much to be enthusiastic about in the position in which we are.' The speaker was a thorough soldier, and anything but an upholder of revolutionary or socialist-democratic ideas. The supporters of the latter he invariably spoke of as 'les Voraces,' and bitterly complained that for years past he and his comrades had had nothing else to do than to 'faire la chasse aux voraces!' But with the 'Nephew of the Uncle' none of the officers showed the least sympathy. Concerning him they all observed a very eloquent silence." In contrast to the ridicule and censure levelled by Mr Stahr at the more recent portion of Louis Napoleon's career, are some anecdotes he tells us of his earlier years. "In his youth," he says, "he must have been very amiable. I have had opportunity to look through a collection of letters written by him to a friend of his family, and extending over more than twenty years. It included even notes 547 written when he was a boy of eleven, some of them in the German language and character. Louis Napoleon is known to be a perfect master of German. The most pleasing and amiable of these letters were a series written from his prison at Ham. Good feeling, hearty gratitude for proofs of faithful adherence and for affectionate little services, and a deep dejection at his lot, were the characteristics of these letters. He read and studied a great deal at Ham, especially military science, but also poetry and literature. Within those prison-walls he now and then began to distrust the 'star' of his destiny." These letters were doubtless the same spoken of elsewhere by Mr Stahr as filling several volumes, and as having been addressed to Madame Hortense Cornu, a well-known writer on fine art, who was long attached to the household of Queen Hortense. She had known Louis Napoleon from his childhood, and retained sufficient influence over him to obtain the rescue from the hands of the Roman priesthood of the Italian republican Cernuschi. The letters, says Mr Stahr, abound in evidence of the esteem and gratitude entertained by the French President for the staunch and trusty friend of his youth. "This correspondence, fragments of which I was favoured with permission to read, includes all the epochs of his adventurous life. It ceases with the day when the infatuated man, having attained to power, laid hands upon the right of universal suffrage which had raised him from the dust. Madame Cornu's last letter was a solemn exhortation to abstain from that step. She laboured in vain, for fate is stronger than humanity. But it is an honourable testimony to the originally good disposition of the blinded man that he did not withdraw his favour from his tried friend. A proof of this is to be found in Cernuschi's deliverance."

During a visit paid by Mr Stahr to Alexander Dumas, the French romance-writer told the German professor an anecdote of Louis Napoleon and the late Duke of Orleans, which is curious, if true. Perhaps it is as well to bear in mind, whilst reading it, that its narrator is a story-teller by profession, and the most imaginative and decorative of historians. Dumas, it appears, had been long acquainted with the imperial pretender and his mother; was aware of the rash schemes of the Prince, then meditating the Strasburg expedition; and advised him, by letter, to abandon them, or at least to adopt a totally different mode of carrying them out. If he would uproot (deraciner) the dynasty of Louis Philippe, wrote Dumas, he must try very different means. He must endeavour to obtain the revocation of his sentence of exile, get himself elected member of the French Chamber of Deputies, and so follow up his plans in opposition to the ruling dynasty. Deaf to this advice, which was certainly sensible enough, Louis Napoleon made his ridiculous attempt at Strasburg, and was taken prisoner. Thereupon his mother, Queen Hortense, hurried to the neighbourhood of Paris under an assumed name, and with one confidential attendant. This person she sent to Dumas, to entreat him to apply to his patron, the Duke of Orleans, to know what the Court had decided with respect to the prisoner's fate. Dumas wrote forthwith for an audience; the Duke received him with a smile. "Well!" he said, "so your protégé has not succeeded in uprooting us?" "Prince, you know——?" stammered the terrified novelist. "Do you suppose we are so badly served for our money as not to know what brings you here, and where Queen Hortense is at this very moment?" After a short pause, during which he enjoyed the embarrassment of Dumas, the Duke continued, "Tell Madame Hortense," he said, "that the Orleans do not yet feel themselves strong enough to have their Duke d'Enghien."

"It is a bitter answer, your royal highness," replied Dumas, taking his leave, "but still it will console the mother's heart."

"And now," muses Mr Stahr, "the shattered bones of the unfortunate young Duke of Orleans have long been mouldering in the grave, his statue in the court of the Louvre has been dragged down and stowed away in a corner of the Versailles Museum, and the Adventurer of Strasburg rules France as a republic, with power 548 more unlimited than the wily Louis Philippe ever possessed over it as a monarchy! For so long as it lasts, that is to say; for methinks the feet of those who shall carry him out are already before the door. But how did he ever get in? How was it that even his candidature for the presidency was not overwhelmed and rendered impossible by that most dangerous of all opponents in France, the curse of the Ridiculous, which had already decorated with cap and bells the hero of the blunders of Strasburg and Boulogne, the trainer of the tame eagle, the special constable of London?" It has puzzled acuter politicians than Mr Stahr to reply to this question, which millions have asked. The riddle interests him, and he runs about on all sides seeking its solution. He has little success, and evidently himself mistrusts the ingenious and original conclusion to which he at last comes, that the election of Louis Napoleon was a homage to the hereditary principle. "When I recently, on my way across the plain of Satory, asked a countryman if he had given his vote to the President, his reply was, 'Of course! was he not the rightful heir, his uncle's legitimate successor?' This may sound ill for the republican education of the people of the French republic; but it is the truth. The principle of hereditary rule may be perfectly incompatible with that of 'liberty and equality,' but it is, or was, (at the time of Louis Napoleon's election,) the prevailing principle in the heads of the French rural population. 'One must know the French peasantry as I know them, who have grown up amongst them,' lately said to me the representative De Flotte, 'to find their conduct in this matter quite natural. The French peasant has only one fundamental idea in politics, and that is derived from his own family relations. That fundamental idea is the sacredness and necessity of hereditary right. That the territorial property of the father should descend to the son, or next of kin, seems to him the main condition or all human existence.'" Admitting, for argument's sake, the soundness of this statement, and that the French peasant is thus devoted to the hereditary principle, the natural inference is that, when he perceived his country to be in a state of transition, ruled by provisional intruders, and anxiously looking out for a more permanent chief of the state, he should have hoisted the white cockade, and tossed up his beaver for the Fifth Henry. Messrs Stahr and De Flotte explain why he did not do this. "The French peasant has no longer any sort of sympathy with the elder Bourbons. For him the glory of Louis XIV. is far too remote. What else he knows of them is, that they brought the foreigner into his country, and on that account he curses them." In this there is some truth. The old royalist spirit still lingers in certain departments of France, but in the country generally the Count de Chambord's partisans are rather intelligent and influential than numerous. Should he ascend the throne, it will not be in virtue of zeal for the principle of legitimacy or of personal attachment to himself, but because the nation will see in his accession the best guarantee of order and economical administration. These two things are the real wants and desires of the mass of the population. The peasant who told Mr Stahr he wished for peace and light taxation, spoke the feeling of a great majority of Frenchmen. "The dynasty of Orleans," says the professor's informant, continuing his explanation of the concurrence of circumstances which raised Louis Napoleon to the president's chair, "never enjoyed much prestige amongst the rural population, who did not forgive old Louis Philippe for having violated the principle of hereditary right." This is rather far-fetched. If the provinces cared little for Louis Philippe, it was because he had troubled himself little about them. True to his system of centralisation, Paris, to him, was France, and ungrateful Paris it was that finally abandoned and expelled him. It is unnecessary to go out of one's way to seek reasons for the fact, that when, in December 1848, the French, exhausted by nine months' anarchy and misery, and ashamed of those February follies into which a few deluded and designing men had led them, cast about for a ruler under whom they might hope for respite and breathing 549 time, none turned a wishful or expectant eye to any member of the house of Orleans. The family had been weighed and found wanting. From the astute politician, "whose word no man relied on," and who reaped in his latter days those bitter fruits of usurpation and anarchy whose seeds he had sown in his prime, down to the youngest of the sons to whose advancement he had sacrificed his conscience and his country, and who, in the supreme hour of peril and confusion, were found utterly deficient in princely and manly qualities, in self-possession, energy, and resource, there was not one of the line whom France would trust. The time was too short that had elapsed since the picture of selfishness and incapacity had been exhibited to wondering Europe: the cause had been unable to revive from the grievous and self-inflicted shock; it lay supine and seemingly dead, awaiting the day when intrigue and hypocrisy should galvanise it into a precarious vitality. When the crisis of May 1852 arrives, we shall see what has been the effect of the complicated manœuvres of the house of Orleans, which, in December 1848, stood so low in public estimation. Then, according to Mr Stahr, Buonapartism was the only political creed that appealed to the prejudices and feelings of the French peasant, and it required no great skill to get him to write upon his election-ticket the name of the prince whom he looked upon as the rightful heir of the Emperor. "He did it of his own accord, out of a conviction that he was performing an act of justice, and that hereditary right demanded it. Other motives concurred. The forty-five-centime impost had embittered the countryman against the Republic, which had increased instead of lightening his load. Upon the Democrat-Socialists he looked distrustfully. He would have nought to say to those 'partageux' (dividers.) He cared nothing for the fine speeches of parliamentary orators. The peasant is by nature taciturn, and has little confidence in assemblies of great talkers. He was not disposed to make a stir about the freedom of the press, of which he makes no use. His political understanding did not extend beyond one wish, and that wish was, a strong government, which should secure to him the enjoyment and inheritance of his property. And who could do that better than a Napoleon—Napoleon himself, the Emperor of Béranger?—for there are many places where the country people have never believed the Emperor dead." The clever author of Jerome Paturot has expressed a similar opinion as regards the prevalence of this scarcely credible delusion amongst the uneducated classes in certain districts of France. It does not appear to be entirely confined to that country. "I myself am witness," says Mr Stahr, "that, in the year 1848, a peasant of a province of Northern Germany, on hearing of the new French revolution, and of its first consequences in Germany, remarked that, 'without doubt old Buonaparte had a finger in the pie.'" It is Mr Stahr's belief that Louis Napoleon is destined to dispel, by his inability to fulfil the expectations of the ignorant portion of his constituents, that Buonapartist prestige to which he partly owed his election, and that attachment to the hereditary principle which the professor assumes still to exist in France. "The nephew of the great Emperor," he says, "is selected by fate to disturb, if not to destroy, the idolatry with which a large portion of the French nation has hitherto regarded the name and memory of its greatest tyrant. Napoleon the Second throws a grey shadow over Napoleon the First."

If the French President receives but rude handling from the German republican, the Orleans family cannot congratulate themselves on much better treatment. His first reference to that fallen dynasty is suggested by a little book, which, at the time of its appearance, attracted some attention both in England and France. M. Louis Tirel's La République dans les Carrosses du Roi was neither calculated nor intended to please the democrats. Mr Stahr, however, is pretty fair in his appreciation of it, sneering a little at the author for taking what he calls a valet-de-chambre's view of the February revolution, but doing justice to the interest and instruction to be found in his pages, which show up the parties honteuses of that most 550 disastrous and ill-advised political convulsion; the scandalous greed, vanity, and egotism of the adventurers and knaves who alone profited by the storm they had contributed to raise. M. Tirel, although to all appearance honest and truthful, certainly wrote like a partisan. His position and attachments were incompatible with a just estimate of circumstances. Whilst accurately describing events, he deluded himself as to the causes that led to them, and, above all, he could see no wrong in his master; could not for the life of him comprehend how it was that Louis Philippe, "who had so faithfully observed his oath to maintain the charter, and who had a majority in the Chambers," should have been ejected from his throne and kingdom. The worthy keeper of the royal carriages never attains to more than a glimmering and confused notion that the nation could scarcely be said to be represented by the majority in question, and that a moderate extension of the suffrage, accorded with a good grace, would probably have maintained the July dynasty at the helm of French affairs to this day, and for years to come. His admiration of Louis Philippe's wisdom and skill is unlimited, as is also his indignation at the ingratitude of the people. Mr Stahr loses patience at the affectionate manner in which the ex-controlleur des equipages lauds the virtues of the old "Jesuit-King," as the German irreverently styles the defunct monarch; and, provoked by Tirel's exaggerated encomiums, he retorts by the following severe but too true remarks with reference to the oft-repeated accusation of miserly hoarding, brought against Louis Philippe by Republican and Legitimist writers:—"Louis Philippe," he says, "was no avare such as Molière has drawn—no comedy-miser—but yet he was immoderately avaricious. There was no end to his demands of money for the princes of his house. He knew, or thought he knew, that money is power; and as he could not obtain enough of the latter, he restlessly strove after the former as the means to an object. He was a good father of a family, in the bourgeois sense of the word; but he had no conception of that which makes a king the father of his people. His defenders celebrate the care which this prince, denounced as grasping, expended upon the conservation of the royal palaces, the great sums which he laid out upon rich furniture, numerous attendants, brilliant equipages, and luxurious festivals—to which latter often three or four thousand guests were invited. 'How,' it is said, 'could the people tax such a sovereign with niggardliness and greed of gold?' But the people had no part or share in these enjoyments. It suffered hunger and want, whilst the higher and middle classes of the bourgeoisie revelled in these feasts, and grew rich by supplying their materials." Raised to the throne by the suffrages of the middle classes, Louis Philippe relied on them for support. He was bitterly disappointed. Scandalous and cowardly was the manner in which the men of July—those whom he had fed, pampered and decorated, favoured and preferred—deserted him in the hour of danger. The very national guards of Neuilly, who had lived and flourished in the shadow of the château walls, refused to turn out, when, in February 1848, the intendant of the castle appealed to them to protect from plunder the property of their patron and king. They had caught the contagion of that intense selfishness which was Louis Philippe's most striking characteristic. "Let those who choose go out to be shot," said the burghers of Neuilly; "we shall stop at home and take care of our houses." And assuredly the inert and unsympathising attitude of the Paris national guard contributed more than anything else to deter Louis Philippe from resisting by force the progress of the February revolutionists. The burghers were disgusted by the dilapidation of the finances, and the venality of the administration—they were disgusted with Guizot for not daring to resist the headstrong will of the old king—and they cried out for electoral reform. With a little more patience they would have achieved their desire;—over-hasty, 551 they suddenly beheld themselves plunged into revolution. They had not foreseen it; they lacked presence of mind to repel its first inroads. And they also lacked, there can be no question, that feeling of personal attachment to the sovereign which would have prevented their standing by, tame witnesses of his dethronement. "Louis Philippe," says Mr Stahr, "never knew how to inspire an earnest and cordial attachment even in those nearest his person. The circumstances of his fall are the most speaking proof of this. His own panegyrist tells us that Louis Philippe himself had a misgiving that none loved him for his own sake. He often said to his most confidential attendants: 'You serve me faithfully, but not with the zeal and warmth which distinguished the servants of Napoleon. Their devotion to his person was unbounded.' If such was the case in the French king's prosperous days, what could he expect in the hour of adversity? M. Tirel himself proves, beyond the possibility of refutation, that, when the moment of danger arrived, the nearest personal attendants of the king thought, almost without exception, only of themselves. Not one of them troubled himself about the safety of the immense sums contained in the treasury of the Tuileries. None thought of holding in readiness the necessary means of travelling, in the possible case of the departure or flight of the king and his family; and even M. Tirel exclaims, with reference to this—'It is difficult to credit such utter want of foresight, when they knew they were standing on a volcano.'" At Neuilly, as already mentioned, the national guard refused to turn out; whilst the servants of the royal residence busied themselves in saying their own things, leaving their master's property to be pillaged and burned by the rabble, with whose disgusting and disgraceful depredations the troops of the line did not interfere. Regulars and militia, domestics and mob, the same want of feeling was manifest in all; none showed attachment or devotion to the prince, whose star was on the decline. Mr Stahr made a pilgrimage to Neuilly, and devotes a letter to it. It was a grey, sad-looking autumn afternoon, and the road was silent and deserted along which he took his way to the favourite residence of the departed king. The impression made upon him was most melancholy. "Vous verrez de belles choses," said the porter at the lodge, as he pointed out to the Germans the way to the ruins. "Up to this time," says Mr Stahr, "nothing in Paris had reminded me that here had raged, but a very few years before, the hurricane of a revolution that shook the world, and that had swept a dynasty from the soil of France like chaff from the thrashing-floor. At Neuilly I first received this impression. They made clean work of it, those bands of incendiaries of the 28th February 1848. A single night sufficed to convert that stately building, and all its splendour, into a heap of hideous ruins.... High grass now grows upon the floors of the state apartments of the destroyed king's-home. Bushes spring up around the columns, over which creepers luxuriantly twine; and the red poppy and the yellow king-cup wave their blossoms in the chambers and saloons in which, so short a time ago, the ruler of proud France paced his Persian carpets, revolving plans for the eternal consolidation of his dynasty! On the ravaged foot-paths before the windows, the melted glass of the magnificent panes has flowed down and formed a brilliant flooring. At the foot of a balcony, whose pillars still supported the remains of broken beams, a flush of pale pink harvest roses exhaled their delicate fragrance. It was an incredibly melancholy sight. The closely-locked doors and shattered windows of the wing that was saved increased the gloom of the whole impression. Everywhere the tall iron lattice-work, and the iron posts supporting lamps, are rent and broken; the statues on the flights of steps are shivered to pieces; there remain but a couple of colossal sphinxes, which gaze inquiringly out of the dark green of the shrubbery. Who shall solve their riddle—the riddle of the history 552 of France and of mankind? Louis Philippe, wise amongst the wise, thought he had done so. Where is he now? His weary bones sleep the eternal sleep in the country of the banished kings of France."

Neuilly has become a place of pilgrimage for the friends of the fallen dynasty. A host of inscriptions, mostly in an anti-republican sense, were to be read upon the walls and pillars at the period of Mr Stahr's visit. Of several which he took the trouble to copy, one only is superior in tone and significance to the usual average of such scribblings. "High upon a broken column a firm hand had inscribed with charcoal, and in gigantic characters, these three words: Droit du Talion. 1830. 1848.
Other hands had tried to obliterate the writing, but in vain. The revengeful word 'RETALIATION' was still quite legible. And this word best expresses the feeling with which plain-dealing probity contemplates the fate of the overthrown July monarch. For here at Neuilly was it that he, a modern Richard III., played the hypocritical part of rejecting power, when the blood of the July revolution still reddened the streets of Paris. Here was it that he wrote the letter to Charles X. in which he assured him of his fidelity and devotion, when he was already extending a lustful hand towards the crown of the rightful heir. Here too, in Neuilly, was it that he spun that Spanish web, whose most secret documents Lord Palmerston carefully preserves, and which gave the world a glimpse into an abyss of moral foulness at which the soul shudders. And here, in presence of this funeral pile of his happiness and his splendour—here, before the memorial of his disgraceful and ignominious fall—here, when I called to mind his acts, I felt no touch of pity for the fallen King. But the man I did indeed pity, the husband and the father. He had loved this Neuilly. Here had he enjoyed such a measure of domestic happiness as is rarely vouchsafed to a monarch. This house had he, for many a long year, built up and decorated with that fine feeling for art and architecture which was proper to him. To this green retirement and solitude, to this remote dwelling, hidden from all eyes, he loved to withdraw. Here, where all was his own creation—where no stone was added, no tree planted, no path cut, but under his eye—exactly here, in the most sensitive spot, the blow struck him. The destruction of this house was more deeply felt by the man than was the loss of his throne by the king! Before the Count of Neuilly had left French ground, the building had ceased to exist from which he had borrowed the name. And all his wiles and stratagems, all his cunning, were as insufficient to avert, from the man and from the king, this last fated climax, as were the fortifications and bastilles with which he had surrounded the dreaded Paris."

Quitting Neuilly, Mr Stahr was startled, as well he might be, by the terms of a bill stuck upon the park-gates—

"House of Orleans, (thus it ran,) château and domain of Neuilly to let for three years with immediate possession; about one hundred and eighty acres, meadows, forest-land, &c., bordering on the fortifications!"

Wandering through the endless galleries of Versailles, Mr Stahr is naturally enough led to reflect how strange it is that Louis Philippe, the Napoleon of Peace, as his flatterers called him, and as he loved to hear himself called—the man whose motto, as his enemies constantly asserted, was "Peace at any price," and who avowedly and upon principle disliked war—should have devised and carried out the plan of a national gallery of French military fame. A merciless analyser of the citizen king's secret thoughts and motives, Mr Stahr declares this gallery to have been a speculation of "the crowned shopkeeper,"—a speculation by which his dynasty was to gain strength at the expense of a national weakness. There is truth in this; but, at the same time, the professor's opinion must not here be accepted as impartial evidence. He is evidently led into unusual fervour by his holy horror of war. We suspect him of being a member of the Peace Congress—to which he in one place kindly alludes, as the humble commencement of a great movement. Like many other 553 adherents of the political sect which proposes to itself an aim that could never possibly be attained without terrible convulsions and sanguinary conflicts, he cannot abide the sight of blood, shudders at wounds, and recoils in terror and dismay from the "slaying and murdering, singeing and burning, cutting and stabbing," depicted upon the walls of the Versailles gallery. He looks not lovingly upon this pictorial history of France, sketched from her battle-fields, and including the exploits of her innumerable warriors, from Clodwig down to Bugeaud. On the other hand, he curiously and eagerly examines the pictures illustrating the events of 1830 and Louis Philippe's accession. Of the battle-pieces he has set down some (and not altogether without reason) as mere daubs, which no one would glance at twice but for the sake of the subject. When surveying the illustrations of the July revolution, he forgets artistic criticism in his satirical account of the personages that fill the canvass, and especially of the chief actor in those scenes, Louis Philippe himself. "His arrival at the Palais Royal," says the rancorous professor, "has something sneaking about it. He is profusely adorned with tricolor ribbons, wears white trousers, a brown coat, and a round hat. He looks like a rogue who has just crept into another man's estate. But characteristic above all is the picture in which he signs the proclamation naming him Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom (July 31, 1830.) The figures are the size of life, all in plain clothes, and decorated with the tricolor. They sit round a green council-table, the coming Citizen-King in the midst of them, dressed in a brown coat with a black velvet collar and a black satin waistcoat, a large fine shirt-frill, a neatly tied white cravat, his hair carefully curled, his eyes half closed, the corners of his month lugubriously drawn down. He holds up the momentous sheet of paper, close above which the pen in his right hand hovers, and seems to ask those around him—'Ought I then?—must I?' All eyes are fixed trustingly upon him, especially those of honest Laffitte, in the corner on the left. Sebastiani looks somewhat keener and shrewder. Never in my life did I see a picture that so perfectly represents an assemblage of Jew bankers, gathered round their leader to advise on a 'bull' or 'bear' speculation. The whole party have this Jewish calculating expression—Louis Philippe more than any of them. And this is the countenance the man has himself had perpetuated! It is a strange historical irony. All the old Bourbons, even the two last Louises and Charles X. looked noble, or at least like noblemen, in the expression of their features, compared with this essentially common physiognomy. Their faces, at any rate, expressed the decided and undeniable consciousness of high descent, whilst the predominating expression in Louis Philippe's countenance is that of a cunning shopkeeper. And this expression is everywhere the same, in all the pictures, &c. &c." There is more in the same strain. Some may be disposed to quarrel with Mr Stahr for pressing so hard upon a dead man; but, living or dead, kings are fair subjects of criticism; and, unsparing and savage as are often the professor's strictures on the character and policy of Louis Philippe, they yet are the most truthful and just of all the political portions of his book. Messrs Montalivet and Miraflores, and the other unscrupulous panegyrists of the late King of the French, would have too good a game left them if it were forbidden to reply by more exact and impartial statements to their exaggerated encomiums.

Passing from the deceased sovereign to his family, we are led to an apparently remote subject—namely, Mr Stahr's visit to Alexander Dumas, who, as is well known, was a favourite and intimate of the dukes of Orleans and Montpensier. When reviewing, a few years ago, the Paris diary of a countryman of Mr Stahr's—a gentleman of similar politics and equal discretion—we noticed an offensive practice common amongst modern German writers, many of whom, on return from foreign travel, scruple not to commit to print the most confidential conversation and minute domestic details of persons who have hospitably welcomed them, and imprudently admitted them to intimacy. 554 No consideration of propriety checks these impudent scribblers. Delicacy and reserve are things unknown to them. The persons concerning whom they flippantly babble may dwell within a day's railroad of them, and be sure to see their books—may be equally sure to feel vexed or disgusted by their unwarrantable revelations and offensive inferences; no matter, they speak of them as though Pekin were their domicile. As regards the radical professor from Oldenburg, we sincerely trust that he may fall in, at an early day, with the martial author of the Mousquetaires, and receive from him, as guerdon for his gossip, a delicately administered estocade. We never heard whether Janin chastised Mr Carl Gutzkow, either with pen or pistol, for his slipshod and indecent chatter concerning him and Madame Janin; but we remember somebody doing it for him in the Revue des Deux Mondes, where we suspect Mr Stahr has a fair chance of being in his turn gibbeted. Here is the German professor's account of Dumas's personal appearance and private residence. It is a curious bit of miniature-painting. "In person he is tall and powerful; his movements, once unquestionably very flexible, are now characterised by an easy negligence. His bright complexion and large prominent light-blue eyes contrast with the mouth and nose, which betray his African origin. Good-nature, and a combination of intellectuality with a keen relish of life, are the most prominent characteristics of his broad round face. His thick woolly hair, now all but grey, seems to have been formerly light-coloured. He sits in a very large room on the first floor of the last house in the Avenue Frochot. His apartment is reached through a dark corridor. On the side that looks out upon the very quiet street, is a glass gallery, which serves as a greenhouse. There was nothing remarkable in it. Mignonette and heliotropes were growing in the tubs in which a few large oleander bushes were planted. Of the magnificent tropical vegetation of which report has spoken, there was no sign. The room was decorated, and divided into two parts, with brown woollen hangings. In the largest division, into which visitors are conducted, and in front of the greenhouse windows, stands a vast writing-table. Ancient and modern arms deck the walls. But of Oriental luxury there was not the least appearance. And some other apartments through which he afterwards took me, to show me his winter reception-room, were by no means so luxuriously fitted up as has been reported in Germany."

"I found his bookseller with him. 'Look well at the man,' said Dumas, 'who pays to one author a hundred thousand francs a-year. Such men are not to be seen every day.' Notwithstanding this little bit of brag, I hear that his finances are in no very brilliant state, and that the failure of his Théatre Historique, especially, threatens him with heavy losses. In the course of conversation, he humourously complained of the total absence of repose in his laborious existence, of which we easy-going, comfortable, German authors could scarcely form an idea. So many newspapers, a theatre of his own, the contract-romances, and the stipulated dramas—truly, it amounts to a considerable total. On subsequent visits, I never found his room and antechamber free from a throng of visitors—booksellers, printers, managers, actors, secretaries, and others—all of whom he knew how to despatch with great rapidity, and without interrupting the thread of our conversation for more than a few moments at a time." Conversations with so lively and versatile a genius as M. Dumas, turned, as may be supposed, on a vast variety of subjects, but that of which Mr Stahr has given us most details related to the ex-royal family of France. "In a side-room he showed us some very pretty pen-and-ink drawings—hunting subjects, by the late Duke of Orleans. This gave him opportunity to speak of his high respect for the mental endowments of the prince, with whom it is well known that he was on a footing of intimacy. 'He had wit enough for ten,' said Dumas. 'When we were five or six hommes d'esprit de Paris together,' added he, with amusing naiveté, 'it was quite impossible to distinguish which was the prince and which the wit. The prince was the incarnation of French 555 esprit, and of the Parisian-French esprit, which includes all possible qualities. Her inability to understand and appreciate this esprit Parisien was a drawback upon the domestic happiness of the Duchess of Orleans, notwithstanding her many excellent qualities. Her heavier German nature did not harmonise with her husband's light elastic disposition. It put her beside herself when he transgressed in the presence of a third person the rules prescribed by the etiquette of little German courts.' Dumas told some interesting examples of this—examples, however, not adapted for publication, as they related to the prince's private life. The Duke of Orleans foresaw a revolution, in a republican sense, as a consequence of his father's system. His testamentary arrangements with respect to the education of his son were all made in anticipation of such an event coming to pass. In any case, he wished his wife to have nothing to do with the government of the country. The passage of his will relating to this point is conceived quite in the spirit of the words with which Homer's Telemachus consigns his mother Penelope to the society of her women. 'If, unhappily, the king's authority could not watch over my son until his majority, Helen should prevent her name being pronounced for the regency. Leaving, as it is her duty and her interest, all the cares of government to virile hands, accustomed to handle the sword, Helen should devote herself entirely to the education of our children.' The Duke of Orleans' death was pregnant with fatal consequences for the dynasty, because he, the most highly gifted of all the old king's sons, was perhaps the only one who would have been capable of giving things a different turn in the event of a conflict like the February revolution. He knew his brothers too well not to be convinced that they were unequal to such an emergency. 'Nemours,' said he to one of his confidants, 'is the man of rule and etiquette: he keeps step well, and keeps himself behind me with scrupulous attention. He will never assume the initiative.' He held the Dukes of Nemours and Aumale to be brave soldiers. Of the Prince de Joinville he said: 'He has a passion for danger: he will commit a thousand acts of brilliant imprudence, and will receive a ball in his breast at the assault of a barricade,'—a fate which Joinville escaped in February probably only by his absence from Paris. 'Now that younger sons are no longer made abbés,' continued the Duke of Orleans, referring to little Montpensier, 'I am at a loss to imagine what is to be done with them.'

"Of none of his sons was the old king more jealous," says Mr Stahr, "than of the heir to the crown. Letters found in the Tuileries in February 1848 show that he kept him in the strictest dependence, and had spies observing him wherever he was. In the year 1839 the duke complained 'that he had less power than any private citizen who had a vote at elections; that he did nothing but the commissions of the ministers; that everything was in danger, nothing gave promise of durability, and that it was impossible to say what might happen from one day to the other.' The prince, expressed himself thus whilst upon a journey, in a confidential circle of officers of rank. Two days later his words, set down in writing, were in the hands of the king. The surprising irresolution and want of presence of mind displayed by the other princes in the hour of danger, can only be accounted for by the slavish dependence in which the old monarch had kept them."

Although easy and affable in his intercourse with his friends, a certain jealous vigilance with regard to the respect due to his rank formed a feature in the character of the Duke of Orleans. The anecdote told to Mr Stahr by Dumas, as an illustration of this trait, can hardly, however, be admitted to prove undue susceptibility, but rather the prince's consciousness that his house stood upon an unstable foundation. It was at a hunting-party at Fontainebleau. The chase was very unsuccessful. The Duke of Orleans turned to an Italian nobleman, to whose family Louis Philippe had obligations of ancient date, and who on that account was on a friendly footing at court. "Well! Monsieur de—," said the duke, "how are we hunting to-day?" "Like 556 pigs, Monseigneur, (comme les cochons,)" was the Italian's coarse reply. The duke, evidently annoyed, said to Dumas: "And you believe our monarchy possible, when a De ... dares thus to answer the heir to the throne?" Mr Stahr was interested to find that Dumas, notwithstanding his monarchical friendships and associations, believed in the necessity and durability of the republic. "It seems," said the ingenious and versatile author of Monte Christo, "as if Providence had resolved to let us try all manner of monarchies, in order to convince us that not one of them is adapted to our character and condition." Then he gave his auditors a detailed sketch of all the French monarchies previous to the Revolution of 1789. "Since that Revolution," he went on, "we have had the monarchy of Genius: it lasted ten years. We have had the restoration of the monarchy of esprit and chivalrous gallantry: it lasted fifteen years; and was succeeded by the citizen-monarchy, which lasted eighteen. What would you have us try now? This republic is bad. But a child in swaddling-clothes matures into a man." Sensibly enough spoken for a romance-writer, indulgently remarks Mr Stahr, who is always glad to obtain a suffrage in favour of republican institutions. We attach the same degree of value to M. Dumas's political vaticinations as to his Frenchified rifaccimenti of Shakspeare's plays. Shakspeare in French, as Mr Ford remarks in his Spanish Handbook, "is like Niagara passed through a jelly-bag." A miracle of degradation which reminds us to turn to a scornful and indignant chapter suggested to Mr Stahr by a certain Monsieur Michel Carré's version of Goethe's Faust, performed at the Gymnase theatre. "Goethe is unknown in France," says the Countess d'Agoult, one of the few competent French appreciators of German literature, in her Esquisses Morales et Politiques. Nothing, according to Mr Stahr, could be better fitted to confirm and perpetuate French ignorance of the great German than such dramas as that which he painfully endured at the Gymnase. According to Madame d'Agoult, her countrymen will not take the trouble to study Goethe. To do so they must first learn a language. "Why did he not write in French? He has only what he deserves, after all. How is it possible to be a German?—(comment est on Allemand?)" "If this is not exactly out-spoken," says Madame d'Agoult, "it is at least privately thought in a country where the arrogance of ignorance attains proportions unknown to other nations." "La superbe de l'ignorance," "der Uebermuth der Unwissenheit!" cries Mr Stahr in an ecstasy: "I kiss the fair lady's hand who wrote the word, for, without it, I should never have hit upon the appropriate term for this newest French atrocity of M. Michel Carré, perpetrated upon the most profound work of German genius. I am not without experience of the theatrical sufferings of our day; but such torture as was yesterday inflicted, at the Gymnase theatre, upon every German fibre in our frames, I never before in my whole life witnessed or underwent. I was prepared for little that was good, and for much that was laughable; but my expectations and fears were surpassed to an extent it was impossible to anticipate. Marsyas flayed by Apollo is no very pleasing picture, but the Belvidere Apollo flayed by a Marsyas is a spectacle which it takes all the nerve of German critical observation to endure." Mr Stahr then proceeds to dissect the drama, act by act, and almost scene by scene, with considerable acuteness and humour. The specimens of fustian he gives, the execrable French taste he exposes, fully justify the intensity of his disgust. The Gymnase drama is evidently worse than a tame translation; it is an obscene parody of Goethe's great poem. It is a compound, as Mr Stahr expresses it, of "dirt and fire—that sort of fire, namely, which is lighted by the brandy-bottle." We believe it impossible that Faust should ever be done justice to in a French version. But if translators, owing to the want of power of the French language, and to the utter absence of affinity and sympathy between it and the German, must ever fall to a certain extent, they at least may avoid degrading and distorting the tone and sentiments of the original. This M. Carré, of 557 whom we now hear for the first time, seems to have cultivated his taste and sought his inspirations in the worst school of modern French literature, and in the orgies of Parisian rakes. The inference is inevitable from the scenes and passages described and quoted by Mr Stahr. As to the verbal spirit and fidelity of the translation, the following may serve as a specimen. "In the church-going scene, the lines, so charming in the original:— 'Mein schónes Fräulein, darf ich wagen,
Arm und Geleite anzutragen?'
are thus rendered in M. Carré's French: Oserai-je, Mademoiselle, vous offrir mon bras, pour vous conduire jusqu'à chez vous? For Gretchen's exquisitely graceful and saucy reply— 'Bin weder Fräulein, weder schön,
Kann ungeleitet nach Hause gehn!'
which so completely captivates Goethe's Faust, this Frenchman has been able to discover no better equivalent than, 'Pardon, Monsieur, je puis fort bien rentrer seule à la maison'—an answer too flat and insipid even for a Paris Lorette of the present day." Mr Stahr was tolerably well pleased with the bearing of the audience who had come to partake of this pitiable French hash. They may have felt a natural curiosity to know something about the Faust and Margaret whose acquaintance they had made in the print-shop windows, but their sympathy with the piece went no farther. Even the Rose of the Gymnase, the Rose Chéri, so cherished by the Parisian public, failed to extract applause as M. Carré's Margaret. "It is very romantic," Mr Stahr heard some of his neighbours remark, "but it is a little too German; Monsieur Goethe's poetry does not suit the French taste." Poor public! Poor Goethe! introduced to each other under such dismal auspices. It must have been a relief to Mr Stahr to quit this miserable travesty, and turn to the native drama; although even by this, judging from a letter on theatrical subjects addressed to his friend Julius Mosen, he does not appear to have been much gratified. "I know not," he says, "whether my taste for theatres is gone by, or what is the reason, but as yet I have been scarcely half-a-dozen times to the play. Beginning with the Théatre Français, I might place as a motto at the beginning of this letter the words of Courier: 'The fact is that the Théatre Français, and all the old theatres of Paris, the Opera included, are excessively wearisome.' To be sure, Rachel is not here. She is gathering laurels in Germany; and when I complained confidentially to an acquaintance that the tragedy of the Théatre Français did not move me, he endeavoured to console me by telling me of Madlle. Rachel, and of her speedy return to Paris. She stands alone, incomparable, a phenomenon. But the phenomenon is absent; and the Paris stage is consequently darkened. It is always a bad sign for the condition of an art when it thus entirely depends upon one of its professors." Mr Stahr was better pleased with the lively performances at the four Vaudeville theatres, and gives an amusing analysis of La Fille bien gardée, the little one-act piece which, for many weeks of last year, nightly drew crowds to the Théatre Montansier. It belongs to a class of dramatic trifles in which French playwrights and actors are perfect and inimitable; trifles which only grow upon French soil, and will not bear transplanting.

After his savage attacks upon Louis Philippe and the French President, it would be quite out of character if Mr Stahr—who evidently bears monarchy a grudge, and will tolerate no government that can possibly be identified with the cause of order—had not a fling at Henri Cinq. Perhaps it is because he deems the Legitimist interest less formidable to his views than the Orleanist or Buonapartist, that he adopts a different mode of attack, and exchanges ferocity for raillery. The German tongue being but indifferently adapted to the lighter manner of warfare, he glides into French, in which language he writes nearly a whole chapter. Stepping one day into a hair-dresser's rooms, he was so fortunate as to come under the hands of the master of the establishment, an eager politician and a red-hot Legitimist, voluble and communicative as only a Frenchman 558 and a barber can be. With the very first clip of the scissors an animated conversation began, which Mr Stahr has set down so far as his memory serves him, although he much doubts that his pen has conveyed all the minuter comical touches of the dialogue. This began with the usual exordium of Frenchmen of all classes since the revolution—"You, Monsieur," said the man of wigs, "are a foreigner, and consequently uninterested in our quarrels. Tell me what you think of our situation?"

"I think," replied I, "that the President will never willingly resign power."

"But, Monsieur, what is to be hoped for from such an imbécile?"

"I do not say he will succeed; I say he will make the attempt."

"And I say that he will fail. Henry the Fifth for me! à la bonne heure! There is a man for you."

"What do you know about him? You are very anxious, then, to make tonsures?"

"What do I know about him? But, Monsieur, I have seen him, I am acquainted with him, I have spoken to him, and I tell you he is a charming man!"

"Where did you see him?"

"Did I not go to see him at Wiesbaden! Sir, there were thirty-nine of us—workmen, we called ourselves, though we were all masters—who went of our own accord to pay our respects to Henry V. The thing was briskly done, I beg you to believe. I spoke to him as I speak to you, sir, at this moment. At first I was received by M. de la Ferronnaye, his aide-de-camp. 'Good morning, Monsieur R.,' said he, 'how do you do?'—'Very well, sir, I thank you,' answered I; and far from making me wait whole hours at the door, like those republicans of the Veille, he made me sit down beside him on the sofa, as affable as could be."

Mr Stahr inquired of the worthy coiffeur what had been the motive of his journey to Wiesbaden, which he seemed to look upon as a sort of North Pole expedition, and of whose fatigues and privations he drew a vivid picture. He wished to judge for himself, he said; to see whether the rightful heir to the throne was as ill-favoured as his enemies represented him to be. He found him, on the contrary, full of amiable qualities. He was a little lame, but his smile was irresistible. Warming with his subject, the enthusiastic Henriquinquist asked his customer's permission to relate all the particulars of his reception at Wiesbaden. This was just what Mr Stahr wished, and he duly encouraged his interlocutor.

"On our arrival," continued the hairdresser, "we presented ourselves to the aide-de-camp, as I have had the honour of informing you. He took down our names, and gave us each a number of rotation, according to which we were arranged in the afternoon at the general audience. We were formed in three ranks. The prince was informed beforehand of the name and trade of each number, so that he was able to address a few well-chosen words to everybody. When we were all drawn up in order, he came in, placed himself in the midst of us, at a few paces distance, and addressed us. 'Good day to you, my friends,' he said: 'believe me when I say that I am most sensible of the mark of sympathy you have so spontaneously given me, by quitting your families and occupations, and undertaking a journey into a foreign country to see and console me in my exile. Be sure that I will never forget what you have done for me.' Then he said, 'Come nearer, my friends!' We advanced a step. 'Nearer yet, my friends. You come from too far not to come nearer! I hope to see you all at eight o'clock to-night!'"

The hairdresser acted this scene as he related it, addressing himself and Mr Stahr alternately as the prince, by whose mandate to draw a step nearer he was evidently vastly flattered. The professor, immensely amused by the performance, still fancied he saw that the main cause of the fascination which Henry V. had exercised upon his devoted adherent was still undivulged. The sequel showed that he was not mistaken.

"In the evening," continued the coiffeur, "we returned to the Prince's 559 residence; there we partook of refreshments, and the Prince had an amiable word for each and all of us. He talked about the state of affairs in France, and wished to know all our opinions of it. The next day some of us were received in private audience. I was of the number. But as we were numerous, and the Prince was very busy, I could not have much conversation with him. However, he gave me a silver medal, and—'Mr R.,' said he, 'have you a comfortable bed at your hotel?' 'Monseigneur,' I replied, 'since you deign to ask the question, I am accustomed to sleep between two sheets, and as I do not understand a word of German, I have been unable to make them understand this at my hotel. They put the sheet sometimes over and sometimes under the blanket, but never more than one.' Sir," continued the delighted barber, addressing himself to Mr Stahr, whilst his face beamed with triumph, "that night I had two sheets upon my bed. Could anything be more amiable? Ah, sir, I have seen them from very near, those republicans of the Mountain, those members of the Provisional Government!—what blockheads! what boors! They aspired to command, and in their whole lives scarcely one of them had had as much as a servant at his orders! Sir, it was pitiable to behold."

Mr Stahr observed to the loyal hair-curler that he had seen the persons in question only after they had attained power, and that there are few more amiable people in the world than a pretender, before he has gained his object. He thought it possible that, once at the Tuileries, Henry V. might show himself in a less agreeable light, and trouble himself less about his adherent's bedlinen. The barber's sensible reply did him honour. But barbers, from Don Quixote's day downwards, have been men of good counsel.

"Monsieur," said the coiffeur, "I am not a fool. Do you suppose I shall go and plague him, when he is king? He will have other matters to mind then. I have no pretensions to be made minister or prefect, when there are people who have studied those things all their lives. I am a hairdresser, and I shall remain one. But I want to dress a great deal of hair, and under the republic I dress none."

"But," remarked Mr Stahr, "you dress more under the President."

The barber, however, was no admirer of the President, whom he had also been to see, before his election, and upon the appearance of whose head he passed a most unfavourable opinion. He was sulky, he said, and not conversable. The affairs of France could never go on well under a man who knew not how to talk. Moreover, nothing could suit him but Henry V. He was neither Buonapartist nor Republican. But when things were at the worst, he said, his cry had always been "Vive la France!" "Stick to that!" said a customer who just then stepped in. "France has a tough existence, and will outlive your Henri Dieudonné and all his kin, and the President to boot. And now have the goodness to curl my hair."

Whether fact or invention, this sketch has one truthful point: it gives a sound enough notion of the manner of reasoning of the French shopkeeper and petit bourgeois—a numerous and weighty class, without whose concurrence no state of things can long be permanent in France. With them the whole question, since they first awoke from the shock and folly of the February revolution, has been one of two sheets on their bed and more hair to dress. They will support any government under which they can sleep in peace and drive a good trade. Some of our readers will not have forgotten the sufferings and fate of poor Monsieur Bonardin.4 The disasters and commercial depression of 1848 were a severe but perhaps a wholesome and necessary lesson to many thousands of Frenchmen. Unfortunately, as illustrated in M. Bonardin's case, the lesson was given to many who neither required nor deserved it. Wandering near Versailles, in the pleasant valley of Jouy, Mr Stahr and his companions were invited by a friendly dame, whose acquaintance they had made in the omnibus, to walk into her house 560 and taste her grapes. She perhaps thought the object of the foreigners' pedestrian stroll was to purchase one of the pleasant country houses, surrounded by vineyards and orchards, which there abound; for she took them all through her kitchen-garden and vineyard, and through the copse of chestnuts and hazel bushes, to the fish-pond, and to the pleasant grotto, fitted up as a chapel, and even to the vine-dresser's cottage, from whose windows a lovely view repaid the ascent of the numerous terraces. During this tour of inspection the good lady's tongue was not altogether idle, and a melancholy page out of a Paris citizen's life was laid open to the Germans' eyes. The pleasant little domain they were rambling over was the fruit of five-and-twenty years' toil. "Monsieur Cendrell, a skilful gilder, had bought it a few years before the last revolution, and had laid out considerable sums in building and embellishment. The revolution broke out just as he had given up his business to a friend and assistant. He suffered heavy losses, and was now compelled, in spite of the general depreciation of all landed property, to part with his little estate. It was to be had for only thirty thousand francs, as it stood—garden and vineyard, dwelling-house and garden-cottage, shady copse, and pond well stocked with carp, and right of shooting over I know not how many acres. And how neatly and comfortably arranged was the house, with its bath and billiard-rooms, and its library with portraits of Louis Philippe and the Count de Paris—how cleanly kept was every room from the kitchen to the attics, the gardener's house and the stable included! There was nothing wanting, but—thirty thousand francs to buy it with, and as much more to live there quietly till the end of one's days. We sat full half-an-hour in the cottage on the hill, refreshing ourselves with the sweet grapes that clustered round the windows of the rush-matted room, whilst the kindly Frenchwoman told us her story. It is that of thousands of her class in Paris since the February revolution. Truly it grieved us, both for her sake and our own, that we could not purchase the pleasant country house." This, it will be said, is a common-place incident. There is certainly nothing in it very striking or dramatic. Every day somebody or other suffers losses, and is compelled to reduce his establishment, or to put it down altogether; to sell his last acre of sunny meadow and vineyard, and toil in an obscure lodging for daily bread. But there will be found in the picture something deeply affecting, if we suffer the mind to dwell upon it for a moment, recalling, at the same time, the well-known fact referred to by Mr Stahr, that, since the dreary days of 1848, the fate of the frame-gilder of Jouy has been that of multitudes of others who, like him, had passed a laborious manhood in earning, for their old age, a competency and a right to repose. Thus we obtain a glimpse of a mass of misery, of domestic happiness broken up, if not destroyed, of hallowed associations rudely ruptured—by no fault of the victims, but as a melancholy effect of the obstinacy of a selfish king, and of the rashness and precipitancy of a section of his subjects. But these material evils, deplorable as they are, sink, in our opinion, into insignificance, contrasted with the moral results of the last most ill-omened French revolution. These strike Mr Stahr in a very different light. The early part of the month of October was passed by him at the pretty village of Loges, near Versailles, whither he went to enjoy the beautiful scenery and the mellow autumnal weather, and to escape for a few days from the whirl and rattle of Paris. In the course of his walks, he and his friends not unfrequently visited a little rural inn on the way to Jouy, kept by a corpulent but active dame, who usually favoured them with her society and conversation, whilst they consumed a glass of her country wine and a slice of her fromage de Brie. She read no newspapers—none were received in her modest tavern—and knew but little of the intricacies of her country's dissensions; but she had political notions of her own, and was a warm republican. "We French," said she to Mr Stahr, "soon get tired of governments. They have driven away all that have been chosen since Napoleon; and when they were 561 driven away the consequence always was a terrible shock, affecting all kinds of property. Now, in a republic, there is no one person to drive away with so much clatter, and that is why, for my part, I desire neither a Napoleon nor a king." "Query," exclaims Mr Stahr, "whether the woman is so much in the wrong? For my part, from no French politician have I yet heard a more striking remark with respect to the present circumstances of France. That France has no longer any king, any family ruling her by right divine, that is the chief thing won by the February revolution. The dynastic and monarchical illusion is completely eradicated from the people's mind, never again to take firm root." This prospect, in which the German radical exults, we, as staunch upholders of the monarchical principle, should of course deplore, did we attach any value to his predictions. But, after what has passed, we think anything possible in France, and should be no more astonished at a Bourbon restoration, than at a consolidation of the republic; at Joinville's presidency, than at Louis Napoleon's re-election. It needs more temerity than judgment to hazard a prophecy concerning what will or will not take place in a country which, as far as politics go, has become, above all others, le pays de l'imprévu. The title used to belong to Spain; and in the years of Continental tranquillity that preceded 1848, it was amusement for unoccupied politicians to watch the unforeseen crises constantly occurring in the Peninsula. It is infinitely more exciting to wait upon the caprices of a great and powerful country, whose decisions, however unreasonable, may influence the state of all Europe. They can but be waited upon, they cannot be foretold. Since the memorable 10th of December 1848, this has been our conviction. Before that date there was at least a certain logical sequence in the conduct of the French nation. Although often impossible to approve, it had always been possible to account for it. But the common sense of Europe certainly stood aghast when Louis Napoleon Buonaparte was elected ruler of France, by a majority so great as to attach a sort of ridicule to the petty minorities obtained by men who, in ability and energy, and, as far as two of them were concerned, in respectability, were infinitely his superiors. At that period, Louis Napoleon had never given one proof of talent, or rendered the slightest service, civil or military, to the nation that thus elected him its head. Twice he had violated, by armed and unjustifiable aggression, resulting in bloodshed and disgrace, the laws of his country. Pardoned the first time, on a pledge of future good conduct, he took an early opportunity of forfeiting his word. Notwithstanding the stigma thus incurred, four districts, when universal suffrage became the law of France, elected him their representative to the National Assembly. This may not be worth dwelling upon. There were stranger elections to the Assembly than that, after the February revolution. But when, out of seven millions of voters, five and a half millions gave their voices to a man whose sole recommendation was a name,—then did wonder reach its perigee. And thenceforward bold indeed must be the politician who attempts to foreshadow the possible whims of the fickle people of France. 562

THE SUBMARINE TELEGRAPH.

Who will venture to make catalogue of the possible results of the "Submarine Electric Telegraph?" The more we meditate, the more new wonders open before us. We are running a race with Time; we outstrip the sun, with the round world for the race-course.—Yet, let us not boast: we do not run the race, but that more than a hundred million horse-power invisible to us, which was created with the sun. We are but the atoms involved, and borne about in the secrets of nature. And the secrets—what know we of them?—The facts only of a few of them: the main-springs of their action are, and perhaps ever will be, hidden. The world progresses; it has its infant state, its manhood state, and its old age—in what state are we now? and what is the world's age? Madame de Stael considered it quite in its youth—only fifteen—scarcely responsible! It seems, however, making rapid growth. Is it past the conceited epoch, and now cutting its wise teeth? We stand like spectators at the old fair-show; we see the motley, the ever busy, ever running harlequin and columbine; we are astonished at the fooleries, and are amazed at the wit, the practical wisdom, the magical wand power of the fantastic descendants of Adam and Eve, the masculine, and the feminine; and we laugh to behold the shuffling step of old Grandfather Time, as—

It is through the agency of mind that a few secrets are disclosed to us, and for our use. We call the recipient and the inventor Genius. It is given, as it is wanted, at the right time, and for the preordained purpose. We are sceptical as to "mute inglorious Miltons." Where the gift is bestowed it is used; and if it appear to be partially used, it is where partially given, that one man may advance one step, his successor another—and thus invention leads to invention. Genius for one thing arises in one age, and sleeps after his deed is done; genius for another thing succeeds him. Who shall dare to limit the number? One thing only we pause to admire—how seldom does the gift fall upon bad men!

There have been, perhaps, those who have had thrown in upon their minds a wondrous vision of things to come, which they were not allowed, themselves, to put forth in manifest action to the world. There have been seers of knowledge; and, perhaps, prophesiers in facts. No one will credit the assertion, therefore we make it not, that thousands of years ago steam was known, and applied to the purposes of life. We call, then, certain records the prophecies of Facts; that is, there was a certain practical knowledge, which in its description is prophetic of a new knowledge to be developed. Semiramis set up a pillar on which it was written, "I, Semiramis, by means of iron made roads over impassable mountains, where no beasts [of burthen] come." Did Semiramis prophecy a railroad—or were there Brunells and Stephensons then? When Homer spake, of the ships of the Phæcians, how they go direct to the place of their venture, "knowing the mind" of the navigator, "covered with cloud and vapour," had the old blind bard a mind's-eye vision of our steam-ships? Many more may be the prophecies of Facts; for in these cases doubtless there were facts, the prophecy being in the telling.

But there have been visions also without facts—that is, without the practical visions of an inward knowledge—wherein nature had given a mirror and bade genius look into it. Friar Bacon's prophecy is an example.

"Bridges," says he, "unsupported by arches, can be made to span the foaming current; man shall descend to the bottom of the ocean safely breathing, and treading with firm step on the golden sands never brightened by the light of day. Call but the secret powers of Sol and Luna into action, and behold a single steersman, sitting at the helm, guiding the vessel which divides the waves with greater rapidity than if she had been filled with a crew of 563 mariners tolling at the oars. And the loaded chariot, no longer encumbered by the panting steeds, darts on its course with relentless force and rapidity. Let the pure and simple elements do thy labour; bind the eternal elements, and yoke them to the same plough."

Here is poetry and philosophy wound together, making a wondrous chain of prophecy. Who shall adventure upon a solution of that golden chain, which the oldest of poets told us descended from heaven to earth, linking them as it were together? Was it an electric fluid in which mind and matter were in indissoluble union?

What prophetic truths may yet be extracted from myth and fable, and come blazing like comets we know not whence, into the world's field! Hermes "the inventor," what is his wand, serpent-twined, and its meaning, brought into vulgar translation, and seen in the buffoonery of harlequinade? of what new power may it not be the poetical prototype? Who shall contemplate the multiplicity of nature's facts, and the myriads of multiplicities in their combination? Knowing that all that has ever been written or spoken, in all languages, is but the combination of a few sounds transferred to the alphabet of twenty-four letters, or even less, are we not lost in the contemplation of the possibilities of the myriads of facts, in their interchangings, combinations, and wonderful dove-tailings?

Perhaps, that we may not know too much before our time, facts are withdrawn from us as others are protruded. Memory may sleep, that invention may awake. Did we know by what machinery Stonehenge was built, we might have rested satisfied with a power inadequate to other and new wants, for which that power might have been no help. Archimedes did that which we cannot do, in order that we might do that which he did not. Who shall lift the veil of possibility?

Of this we may be sure, as the mind is made inventive, (and there is no seeming probability that a faculty once given will be taken away from our created nature,) there is a large and inexhaustible store-house, wherefrom it shall have liberty to gather and to combine. We do not believe that steam itself, the miracle of our age, is anything more than a stepping-stone to the discovery of another power—means superseding means. There is and will be no end, as long as the fabric of the world lasts.

There is an old German play, in which the whimsical idea of bringing the Past and Present together in dramatis personæ is amusingly embodied. We forget the particulars, but we think Cæsar or Cicero figure in the dialogue. The ridiculous is their laughable ignorance of the commonest things. The modern takes out his watch and puts it to his ear, and tells the ancient the hour of the day. This is but one out of many puzzling new things; but, even here, how little is told of the real post-Ciceronian inventions; for the object of the play is to show the skill of the Germans only; it is but an offering to the German genius of invention.

Could a tale of Sinbad's voyage have been read to the Roman—how, as he approached the mountain, the nails flew out of the ship, for lack of comprehension of the load-stone—he would have thought it only fantastically stupid; and if he had laughed, it would have been at the narrator's expense. And so, indeed, it has fared with discoverers: they have been before the time of elucidation, like Friar Bacon; and some for fear of ridicule have kept back their knowledge; but not many perhaps; for knowledge, when it is touched by genius, becomes illuminated and illuminating, and will shine though men may shut the door, and stay themselves outside and see it not, while it brightens up only the four walls of a small chamber as it were with the magic lantern in a student's hand. Whereas it ought, according to its power, to gild the universe. The secresy of invention is rather of others' doing—of an envious or doubting world of lookers-on, than of the first perceiving genius. Fortunately the gift of genius, as intended for the use of mankind, comes with an expansive desire of making it known.

If the memory of tradition fails, and some inventions are lost, that their detail may not hamper the faculty 564 that should take altogether a new line, so have we what we may term false lines, that yet, nevertheless, lead into the true. Science may walk in an apparently unnecessary labyrinth, and awhile be lost in the wildest mazes, and yet come out into day at last, and have picked up more than it sought by the way. Wisdom herself may have been seen sometimes wearing the fool's cap. The child's play of tossing up an apple has ended in establishing the law of gravitation. The boy Watt amused himself in watching a kettle on the fire: his genius touched it, and it grew and grew into a steam-engine; and, like the giant in the show, that shook off his limbs, and each became another giant, myriads of gigantic machines, of enormous power, hundred armed Briareuses, are running to and fro in the earth, doing the bidding of the boy observant at his grandam's hearth. Is there an Arabian tale, with all its magic wonders, that can equal this? We said that Wisdom has worn the fool's cap; true, and Foolery was the object—the philosopher's stone; but in the wildest vagaries of her thought, there were wise things said and done, and her secretary, Common Sense, made notes of the good; and all was put down together in a strange shorthand, intelligible to the initiated; and the facts of value were culled, in time, and sifted from the follies, and from the disguises—for there were disguises, that strangers should not pry into them before the allowed hour. Alchemy has been the parent of chemistry—that "[Greek: epistêmê iera]," and its great mysteries, to reveal which was once death!! Secrets were hidden under numbers, letters, signs of the zodiac, animals, plants, and organic substances. Thus in the vocabulary of the alchemists, the basilisk, the dragon, the red and green lions, were the sulphates of copper and of iron; the salamander, the fire; milk of the black cow, mercury; the egg, gold; the red dragon, cinnabar. There is a curious specimen, in the work of the monk Theophilus, translated by Mr Hendrie, how to make Spanish gold:—

"The Gentiles, whose skilfulness in this art is probable, make basilisks in this manner: They have underground a house, walled with stones everywhere, above and below, with two very small windows, so narrow that scarcely any light can appear through them: in this house they place two old cocks, of twelve or fifteen years, and they give them plenty of food. When these have become fat, through the heat of their good condition, they agree together, and lay eggs. Which being laid, the cocks are taken out, and toads are placed in, which may hatch the eggs, and to which bread is given for food. The eggs being hatched, chickens issue out like hens' chickens, to which, after seven days, grow the tails of serpents, and immediately, if there were not a stone pavement, they would enter the earth," &c. &c.—"After this, they uncover them, and apply a copious fire, until the animals' insides are completely burnt. Which done, when they have become cold, they are taken out, and carefully ground, adding to them a third part of the blood of a Red Man, which blood has been dried and ground."

Doubtless it was the discovery of some such language as this which led to the popular belief that the Jews, who were great goldsmiths and alchemists, made sacrifices with the blood of children; and many a poor Jew suffered for the sin of mistifying knowledge. "The toads of Theophilus," says Mr Hendrie, "are probably fragments of the mineral salt, nitrate of potash, which would yield one of the elements for the solvent of gold; the blood of the Red Man, which had been dried and ground, probably a muriate of ammonia," &c. Such were the secrets of the "Ars Hermetica;" and their like may have been bidden in the wand of Hermes. Dragons, serpents, and toads! Awful the vocabulary, to scare the profane; but fair Science came at length unscathed out of the witches' cauldron: and thus it appeared that natural philosophy, like its own toad, ugly and venomous, bore a "precious jewel in its head."

Alchemy and magic were twin sisters, and often visited grave philosophers in their study both together. The Orphic verses and the hexameters of Hesiod, on the virtues of precious stones, exhibit the superstitions of science. They descended into the deeply imaginative mind of Plato, 565 and perhaps awakened the curiosity of the elder, scarcely less fabulous Pliny, the self-devoted martyr to the love of discoveries in science. The Arabian Tales may owe some of their marvels to the hidden sciences, in which the Arabs were learned, and which they carried with them into Spain. Albertus Magnus, in his writings, preserved the Greek and Arab secrets; and our Roger Bacon turned them over with the hand of a grave and potent genius, and his touch made them metaphorically, if not materially, golden. His prophecy, which we have given, was, when uttered, a kind of "philosopher's stone."

Superstitions of science, of boasted and boasting philosophy! And why not? Is there not enough of superstition now extant—a fair sample of the old? Is the new philosophy without that original ingredient? It is passed down from the old, and will incorporate itself with all new in some measure or other, for the very purpose of misleading, that the very bewilderment may set the inventive brain to work, in ways it thought not of. Reasoners are every day reasoning themselves out of wholesome, airbreathing, awakening truths into the visionary land of dreams, and, speaking mysteriously like uncontradicted somnambulists, believe themselves to be oracular. Materialists have followed matter, driven it into corners, divided it, dissected it, and cut it into such bits that it has become an undiscernible evaporation; and they have come away disappointed, and denied its existence altogether. Thus, mesmerism is the bewildered expression of this disappointment, their previous misapprehension. They will not believe that the wand of Hermes represents two serpents intertwined—they see but one, though the two look each other in the face before them, and they are purblind to the wand and the hand that holds it. Even the "Exact Sciences," as they are called, are not complete; they lead to precipices, down which to look is a giddiness. The fact is, the action of the mind is as that of the body: mind and body have their daily outward work, and their times of sleep and of dreaming, and the dreaming of the one is not unfrequently the life of the other. The dream of the philosopher, be he waking or sleeping, is his refreshment, and at times suggestive of the to come. How know we but that "such stuff as dreams are made of" may serve for the fabrication of noble thoughts, and be inwoven into the habit of life, and become useful wear?

Perhaps magic was the first and needful life of philosophy—needful as a covering while it grew, and which it shook off as its swaddling-clothes, and became a truth. How few can trace invention to its germ, or know where the germ lies, and how that it fed upon reached it! The suggestion of a dream begetting a reality! They are no fools who think that good and bad angels are the authors of inventions. It is ingenious to suppose that we are rather the receivers and encouragers of our original thoughts than the authors of them. We may use the magnifying glasses of our reason or our passions, and do but a little distort them, or advance them to use and beauty, as we are good or bad in ourselves. And thus, from suggestions given, the imaginative genius, inventing, magnifies and multiplies by these his glasses and his instruments; and the thing invented requires much of this brilliant finery of our own to be removed before it be fitted for demand and use. Like wrought iron, the sparks must be beaten out of it while it is forming into shape. It must be off its red heat or white heat—be dipped in the cold stream of doubt, and look ugly enough to the eye of common opinion, and be long in the hand of experiment to try the patience of the inventor. And, after all, will the benefited be thankful? History has many a sad tale to tell on this subject. The "Sic vos non vobis" should be inscribed over the portals of the patent office. Yet sometimes, in pity to lost expectations, in the carrying out one great idea to—shall we say its final incompletion, to its last residuum of insanity?—some little scarcely noticeable matter in the machinery has been by some kind suggesting spirit held up to the eye of the philosopher, which has proved to be the magnum bonum of the whole scheme.

We once knew a tradesman who had spent the best years of his life, as 566 well as his substance, to discover "perpetual motion." He sold off his goods when he fancied he had discovered it, and left his provincial town for the great metropolis and a philosopher's fame. As he travelled by the coach, going over in his mind the processes of his machinery, a portion of it struck him as applicable to a manufacture of common use, but of no very high pretensions. His perpetual motion failed. There was a good angel that whispered to him, "Descend from the ladder of your ambition—do not lose sight of it; but try the little interloping suggestion, and raise the means for prosecuting more favourably your perpetual motion." He did so. The action saved him from lunacy—the undignified and bye-sport, as it were, of his invention answered—from a ruined man he became rich, and his new business required of him so much perpetual motion bodily, that the idea of it, wonderful to say, was driven out of his speculative mind.

A sudden thought—a happy hit—we are too apt to call a lucky one. Will it be the worse if we give it a better name, and say it is a gift? The thankfulness implied in gift may make it a blessing. It was no deep study that brought the great improvements into our manufacturing machinery.

The poor boy Arkwright, in a moment of idleness or weariness, thought happily of a cog in the wheel; and that little cog, was to him and his posterity a philosopher's stone; realising the alchemist's hopes, by far more sure experiment than the dealings with "green" and "red lions" and "dragons" for a result never to be reached. How wonderful has been the result, even to the whole world, of that momentary thought—that simple invention!

We have often heard it remarked that this is an age of inventions. It is true: not that the inventive mind was ever wanting. It is a practical age; the necessities of multiplied life make it so. The well-known "century of inventions" of the Marquis of Worcester is a stock not yet exhausted. But to speak of this our age, how can it be otherwise? Not only are material means enlarged by geographical and other discoveries, but the inventive mind is multiplied because mankind are multiplied, whose nature it is to invent. A population—to speak of England, for it is of England we are thinking—of five millions, as it was in the time of Queen Elizabeth, cannot bear comparison with ours of nearer twenty millions. Then, if we enlarge our view, and take in England's transplanted progeny, whose activity and whose advancement in knowledge and science we share, under every facility for the transmission of knowledge, we may fairly speculate upon a very wonderful futurity. The glory of the German dramatist, with his watch, and perhaps, but we forget, his printing-press, (for it ought to be in the play,) is annihilated: the author himself would now stand in the place of his Cæsar or Cicero.

It would be a dream worth dreaming to bring back from his Elysian Fields Agricola, the Roman governor of Britain—he who first discovered that it was an island—to show him his semi-barbarians, whom he so equitably governed, (passing by, however, how far we are, any of us, their descendants.) We will imagine but an hour or two passed with him at the Polytechnic Rooms, to show him enormous iron cables twisted into knots, as if they were pieces of tape—to see vast ponderous masses suspended by magnetism only—to let him look into the wonders of the telescope and the microscope, besides a thousand marvellous things, too numerous and too often enumerated to mention. Nor would it be unamusing to dream that we return with him, and on his way accompany him, summoned to the court of Pluto and Proserpine to narrate the incidents of his sojourn above. We could believe the line of Homer verified, and that we see the grim and sceptical Pluto leap up from his throne in astonishment, and perhaps, as the poet would have it, fear lest our subterranean speculators should break in upon his dominions, and let in the light of our day. We have taken the humblest walk for the "surprise." What if we had accompanied the ex-governor of Britain to the Crystal Palace? That we will not venture upon. But had he continued his narrative of all he saw there, Pluto would have given a 567 look—at which Cerberus would have growled from his triple throats—and that the unlucky narrator might escape the castigation of Rhadamanthus, he would have been ordered a fresh dip in Lethe, as one contaminated, and who had contracted the lying propensities of people in the upper air.

We know not if the wonder in us be not the greater that we have not the slightest pretensions to mechanical knowledge. But we confess that, when we suddenly came upon the mechanical department, and saw the various machinery at work, the world's life and all its business came out vividly upon the canvass of our thought, as the great poetry of nature. Yes, nature rather than art, for art is but the capability of nature in practice. We thought of Sophocles and his chorus of laudation of man—the inventor and the [Greek: pontoporos]—and how impoverished did the Greek seem, how tame and inadequate the description!

Shakspeare is more to the mark. The whole world is scarcely large enough for the exhibition of man's thought and deed, as Shakspeare sees him. There is no small talk of his little doings—how he passes over the seas and bridles the winds. Inimitable Shakspeare omits the doing to show the capacity; makes, for a moment of comparison only, the earth a sterile promontory, and man that is on it himself, and in his own bosom, the ample region of all fertility, in undefined thought and action. "What a piece of work is man!—how noble in reason!—how infinite in faculties! In form and moving how express and admirable!—in action how like an angel!—in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!" Behold man the inventor!

We have said that the increase of population must necessarily enlarge the stock of inventions, both by new and multiplied demands, and by the added number of inventors. But there is another cause in operation, that is seldom taken into the account—there are not only more millions of human hands to do the work, but there is an artificial working population, if we may call horse-power of steam a population as equivalent to hands.

In this view the working population, or working power, so far exceeds our actual population, that they can scarcely be named together. If it be said, this is not a power of mind, and therefore cannot be said to be inventive; it may be answered, that every instrument is a kind of mind to him who takes it up, improves, and works upon it, and with it: for, after all, it is mind that is operating in it. The man is not to be envied who in heart and understanding is dead to the manifold evolutions of this great workshop of the human brain, who cannot feel the poetry of mechanics. Is it not a creative power?—and is it not at once subjecting and civilising the world? Is not this poetry of mechanics showing also that man has dominion given him over the inert materials, as over other living creatures of the earth? We hail it in all its marvellous doings, as subject for creative dreams, scarcely untrue. Let those who will (and many there be who profess this blindness to the poetry of art and science) see nothing but the tall chimneys and the black smoke. To the imaginative, even the smoke itself becomes an embodied genie, at whose feet the earth opens at command; and they who yield themselves to the spell are conducted, through subterranean ways, to the secret chambers of the treasures of nature; and, by a transition to a more palpable reality, find themselves in a garden covered with crystal, to behold all beauteous things and precious stones for fruit, such as Aladdin saw, and fountains throwing out liquid gems, and fair company, as if brought together by enchantment—and this is the romance of reality. If we write rhapsodically, let the subject be the excuse, for the secrets of nature throw conjecture into the depths of wonder, and thought far out of the conveyance of language.

It was our purpose to speak of the Submarine Telegraph, and it is not surprising if we have in some degree been transported to great distances by its power.

The inventors, Messrs Brett, under every difficulty and discouragement, have at length succeeded. Our 568 greatest engineers for a long while withheld their countenance; practical philosophers denied the probability. The possibility was tested by the first experiment. Fortunately no accident occurred in laying down the wire across the Channel, until communication by means of it had been made between France and England; and even the subsequent accident—the cutting the wire by the fishermen—has only served the good purpose of making more sure the permanent setting up of this extraordinary telegraph. The protection of the wires by the gutta-percha covering is considered perfect; but should it turn out otherwise, it will not affect the certainty of the invention: it must be permanent. A narrative of all the difficulties which beset the inventors, and which have delayed the experiment for years, would be curious. The discouragements and the expenses would have crushed men of less energy. Even at last, in making the cable, there was a disappointment and a hitch, arising from rival companies. We extract from the Times.

"On the 19th of July last, Mr Crampton undertook to construct and lay down a cable containing four electric wires, each insulated in two coatings of gutta percha, and the whole protected by ten strands of galvanised iron wire, on or before the 30th of September. The electric wires, covered with gutta percha, in length a hundred miles, were turned out by Mr Statham, at the works of the Gutta Percha Company, and nothing can be more perfect than the manner in which that order was executed. The wire covering was ordered from Messrs Wilkins and Weatherly; but unfortunately, a dispute respecting the patent for making wire ropes occurred between that firm and Messrs Newall, which seriously delayed the progress of the work, as an injunction was served by the latter to prevent Messrs Wilkins and Co. from proceeding with the order.

"This was eventually compromised, and the rope was made conjointly by the workmen of the two firms on the premises of Messrs Wilkins and Weatherly, at Wapping.

"The very hurried manner in which (from this unforeseen delay) the work had to be accomplished, prevented that close attention that ought to have been given to any fracture, however small, of the wire; and in consequence, the outer casing, though of great strength and solidity, was not made with the same exquisite nicety and care that had been bestowed on the core of the cable."

The weather was unpropitious, and was probably the cause, from the circumstance of the Blazer being driven somewhat out of her course, that the length of the wire cable was not sufficient. This defect was, however, only of a temporary kind, and was supplied by that which was intended for another purpose. We extract the interesting account of the proceedings from the Times:—

"Shortly after 7 o'clock the fastenings at the end of the cable at the Foreland were completed, and the Fearless started to point out the exact course to be followed by the Blazer, which was towed by two tugs, one alongside, and the other ahead of her.

"A third tug belonging to the Government was also in attendance.

"The arrangements for paying out the cable consisted simply of a bar fixed transversely above the hold, over which the rope was drawn as it was uncoiled from below, and a series of breaks acting by levers fitted to the deck, in order to arrest the passage of the rope in the case of too rapid a delivery. On reaching the stem the cable passed overboard through a 'chock' of a semicircular shape, lined with iron. On starting, the steam-tugs proceeded at much too rapid a pace, (from four to five knots an hour,) and consequently one of the fractured wires (before alluded to) caught in the friction-blocks, and, before the way of the vessel could be checked, one strand of the iron wire was, for a length of about eighteen yards, stripped from the cable. The steam-tug towing ahead was then ordered alongside, when the speed could be better regulated, and the rate was reduced to about one and a half to two knots an hour. About six miles from shore it was determined to test the wires; but, from a misapprehension of instructions, the telegraph instruments at the South Foreland were not joined up with those on board the Blazer. A steam-tug, with one of the engineers and directors on board, immediately returned to the Foreland, when communication was made by telegraph and fusees fired from the vessel to the shore, and from the shore to the Blazer.

"At about mid-Channel, in the midst of a heavy sea, and a strong wind from the SW., an accident occurred, but for which the enterprise would have been carried out with the most perfect success; this was the snapping of the towrope 569 (an eight-inch cable) and the consequent drifting of the Blazer from her appointed course to the length of a mile and a-half. Notwithstanding the delay caused by this untoward incident, the Blazer arrived off Sangatte at about 6 o'clock. The evening was, however, too far advanced, and the weather too stormy to attempt a landing; and, after embarking most of her passengers on board one of the steamers that ran into Calais, she was anchored for the night about two miles from the shore.

"On Friday the wind blew a strong gale from the westward, which rendered all near approach to the shore impracticable; but the Blazer was towed to within a mile of the beach, when, it being considered dangerous to leave her at anchor, the remainder of the rope was made fast to a buoy and hove overboard. The steam-tugs then returned with the Blazer to England.

"On Saturday the weather continued unfavourable, but Captain Bullock proceeded with the Fearless to the buoy off Sangatte, and, having hauled up the end of the rope, he towed it some hundred yards nearer the shore, and then again moored it.

"On Sunday the wind shifted more to the southward and moderated. Accordingly, the engineers and managers of the Gutta Percha Company took on board the Fearless a large coil of gutta percha roping, and, after hauling up the end of the telegraph cables, the first wires were carefully attached, and at half-past five in the afternoon a boat landed them on the beach at Sangatte. The moment chosen for landing was low-water, and the coil of gutta percha ropes was immediately buried in the beach by a gang of men in attendance, up to low-water mark, and even to a short distance beyond it. Thence to where the cable was moored did not much exceed a quarter of a mile.

"The telegraphs were instantly attached to the submarine wires, and all the instruments responded to the batteries from the opposite shore. At six o'clock messages were printed at Sangatte from the South Foreland, specimens of which Captain Bullock took over to Dover the same evening for the Queen and the Duke of Wellington.

"On Monday morning the wires at Sangatte were joined to those already laid down to Calais, and two of the instruments used by the French Government having been sent to the South Foreland, Paris was placed in immediate communication with the English Court."

We have remarked that very important discoveries are accidentally made in pursuing one of quite a different character from those which come up in the search unexpectedly.

They who remember our towns lighted with the old lamps, that in comparison with our gas-lights made but a "palpable obscure," should also remember how the change was brought about. The gas, which has proved of such vast utility that we can now-a-days scarcely conceive how the world could go on without it, was first a misfortune. It was generated in the coal mines, and, in order to get rid of it, it was conveyed by tubes to the outer air: in doing this it was found there to ignite, and from this simple attempt to effect an escape for a nuisance is almost every town in the civilised world illuminated by gas—besides which, the advantageous use of it in manufactories is beyond calculation. Even of gutta percha, now applied as a coating to these wires, who can determine all the uses to which it may be found applicable? Nature, it should seem, does not fabricate one material for itself, or for one use only, but adapts one thing to many purposes—and thus, as it were, teaches us that there is a chain in the facts of nature, by showing us a few of the connected links; and, at the same time, so far from exhibiting any sudden breaks, offering evidences of a continuous connection reaching beyond our conception. Verily this poor opaque earth of ours is the foundation on which the Jacob's ladder of invention is laid. We know not where it reaches, but there may be suggesting angels passing to and fro, and when their feet touch the ground, it delivers up its secrets, that float into the ears of the dreamer.

Electricity, it would appear, is the great agent in this connecting chain—nay, is it not, whatever it be in its essence, the chain itself, and the universal power equally in inert matter and in life? It has neither boundary on the earth nor in space. Its home is ubiquity; like the sphere of Hermes, its centre is everywhere, its circumference nowhere. That this astonishing power is yet under restraint—that it is not only kept from the evil it would do, but rendered to us serviceable—is a proof of the great beneficence of 570 Him who made it and us. When the admiring child touches that gem, the dew-drop on the rose-leaf, it knows not that the little hand is on that which has lightning in it enough to cause instant death. It is scarcely the lover's poetical dream that he may be killed by the lightning of an eye—done dead by the tear that only moves his pity, on his mistress's eye-lid. In that little drop is the power of death—and by what miracle (truly all nature is miraculous) is the execution staid—the power forbidden to act? Nay, even the pity that we speak of, love itself, strange in its suddenness as we see it, how know we what of electricity be in it, instantly conveying from person to person natural but unknown sympathy?

Let us not get out of our depths,—but emerge from "the submarine," to land; and for this purpose, and to complete our argument of unexpected and collateral uses, we offer an extract from the Army and Navy Register:—

"New Mode of Discharging Gunpowder.—On Monday, August 18, some interesting experiments were tried at the Gutta Percha Company's Works, Warf Road, City Road, for the purposes of demonstrating the means by which this extraordinary production may be applied to the operation of discharging gunpowder. A galvanic battery was connected with upwards of 50 miles of copper wire covered with gutta percha, to the thickness of an ordinary black lead pencil. The wire, which was formed into coils, and which has been prepared for the projected submarine telegraph, was attached to a barge moored in the canal alongside the manufactory, the coils being so fixed together (although the greater portion of them were under water) as to present an uninterrupted communication with the battery to a distance limited at first to 57 miles, but afterwards extended to 70. A "cartridge" formed with a small hollow roof of gutta percha, charged with gunpowder, and having an intercommunicating wire attached, was then brought into contact with the electric current. The result was, that a spark was produced, which, igniting the gunpowder, caused an immediate explosion similar to that which would arise from the discharge of a small cannon. The same process was carried out in various ways, with a view of testing the efficient manner in which the gutta percha had been rendered impervious to wet, and in one instance the fusee or cartridge was placed under the water. In this case the efficiency of the insulation was equally well demonstrated by the explosion of the gunpowder at the moment the necessary "contact" was produced; and by way of showing the perfect insulation of the wire, an experiment was tried which resulted in the explosion of the fusee from the charge of electricity retained in the coils of wire, three seconds after contact with the battery had been broken. This feature in the experiment was especially interesting from the fact of its removing all difficulty and doubt as to whether the gutta percha would so far protect the wires as to preserve the current of electricity under the most disadvantageous circumstances. Another experiment was successfully tried by passing the electric current to its destination through the human body. Mr C. J. Wollaston, civil engineer, volunteered to form part of the circuit by holding the ends of 35 miles of the wire in each hand. The wire from the battery was brought to one end of the entire length of 70 miles, and instant explosion of the cartridge took place at the other end. The experiments were altogether perfectly successful, as showing beyond all question that the properties of gutta percha and electricity combined are yet to be devoted to other purposes than that of establishing a submarine telegraph. The blasting of a rock, the destruction of a fortification, and other operations which require the agency of gunpowder, have often been attended with considerable danger and trouble, besides involving large outlays of money; but it may be truly said that the employment of electricity in the manner described is calculated to render such operations comparatively free from difficulty. Amongst the company present on this occasion was Major-General Sir Charles Pasley, who took a warm interest in the proceedings, and expressed himself much gratified at the result. It is impossible to foretell the value of this discovery, particularly in engineering and mining operations. It forms a valuable addition to the benefits already conferred upon the public by the enterprise of the Gutta Percha Company."

This extract may lead the reader to conclude that there are double and opposite purposes in the secrets of nature. The chain which was intended to connect all nations in a bond of peace, has, it should seem, also (incidental to the first discovery) its apparatus for war. 571

When his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury was blessing the Crystal Palace, and all within it, as emblems of a religious bond of peace, and of amity of all nations, and it pleased the admiring masses to proclaim it the Temple of Peace and of Love, there was little thought that, among the machinery and instruments it contained, those of murderous purpose would be the first required for use, which was actually the case, when permission was asked and given for the removal of revolving firearms from the American department, to be sent out to the Cape.

Thus, good and evil are not unmixed. Either may be extracted, and leave the remainder, in appearance to us, a kind of caput mortuum.

It is far more pleasant to look to the peaceful results of inventions—to hear the spirit that is in the electric fluid say—

Let it be the means that far-off friends at the Antipodes shall communicate, if not by voice, by that which is like it—by sound and by lettered words. Let it touch a bell at their mid-day, and it may tingle at that instant in your ears at midnight, and awake you to receive, evolved from the little machinery at your bed's head, a letter in a printed strip, conveying "thoughts that breathe, and words that burn," even as though you felt the breath that uttered them. Reader, be not sceptical. How many very practicable things have you denied, and yet found brought tangibly before your eyes, and into your hands! This simultaneous tingle of two bells—one at the Antipodes, and one within reach of your own touch, and at your own ear—may cause you to curl your lip in derision; but say, is it impossible? We have heard you say of much more improbable things, "Where there is a will there is a way." Well, here it is evident you have only a little to strengthen your will, and the length of the way will be no obstacle. You may amuse yourself with the idea, and make a comparison of it, and look at the figures on your China plate, and imagine them moved to each other under spell of their passion, (see the tale of the willow pattern,) to the defiance of all the ordinary rules of distance. Did not the foreseeing artist intimate thereby that love and friendship have no space-limits, and hold within themselves a power that laughs at perspective, as it does "at locksmiths?" The artist whom you contemned as ignorant was, you acknowledge, wise—wise beyond his art, if not beyond his thought. He had a second-sight of a new mode of communication, and expressed it prudently in this his hieroglyphic.

Does any marvel exceed this in apparent absurdity—that you, in London or Edinburgh, shall be able to communicate instantaneously with your friend or relative at St Petersburg or Vienna; for which purpose you have but to touch a few keys denoting letters of the alphabet, and under water and over land your whole thoughts pass as soon as your fingers have delivered them to the keys—nay, the letters are forestalling your thought, and those before it? Does it not seem very absurd to say that all the foreign news may be at your breakfast-table, fresh from every capital in Europe, before the Times can be published and circulated? How will the practice of the press be affected by this novelty? "The latest intelligence" becomes a bygone tale, "flat, stale, and unprofitable." Far greater things than the poet dreamed of become daily realities. Richest in fancy, Shakspeare apologetically covers the incredible ubiquity of his Ariel with a sense of fatigue—of difficulty in his various passages—Ariel, the spirit who "thought it much to tread
The ooze of the salt deep."
Our Government officers will have ready on the instant, messengers far swifter than Ariel—wondrous performers on the "slack-wires." They will put you "A girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes."
No; that was the lagging, loitering pace of the old spirit. It will not 572 take forty seconds. What are thousands of miles to a second of time? Time is, as it were, annihilated: the sand in the glass must be accelerated, or the glass, held for ages, taken out of his hand, and some national exhibition ransacked for a new hour-instrument. The Prospero's wand broken, and newer wonders to be had for a trifle. Fortunatus's "wishing-cap" to be bought at the corner-shop, and the famed "seven-league boots" next door—and to be had cheap, considering, that you may tell all your thoughts, at ever so great a distance, by a little bell and a wire, while you are sitting in your armchair. It will be quite an easy matter to "Waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole."
Railroads and the Submarine Telegraph more than double man's life, if we count his years by action. History itself must now begin as from a new epoch. All the doings of the world, through this rapidity given to person and to thought, must be so altered as to bear no parallel with the past. The old locomotive and communicating powers are defunct—they are as the water that has passed the mill. It must grind with that which succeeds. They are new powers that must set the wheels of governments and of all the world's machinery in motion.

There is in the Spectator a paper of the true Addisonian wit, descriptive of an Antediluvian courtship, in which the young couple, having gone through the usual process in the early art of love, complete their happiness in the some hundredth year of their ages. Theorists have entertained the notion that this long life was bestowed upon man in the world's first era, that knowledge might be more readily transmitted, there being few generations to the Flood. To the lovers of life it would be a sad thing to be led to the conclusion, that, transmission being quickened, life will be shortened; or that, as in the winding-up of a drama, events are crowding into the last act of our earth's duration. It may relieve their apprehensions to read of the advance the medical science is making simultaneously with all other sciences, so that they may look to a state in which a man may live as long as he likes, and at the same time do ten times the work: a man's day will perhaps be a year, counting by his doings. Morose poets and philosophers have lamented over us as ephemeral; if so, we are at least like the Antediluvian butterflies, and our day long. And now, with all our sanitary inventions, it stands a fair chance of a tolerable lengthening.

We have observed that it has been said that the world is not fifteen years of age; and, indeed, it looks like enough. Hitherto Nature has treated us as a kind mother does her children—given us toys and playthings, to be broken and discarded as we get older. We are throwing them by, we are becoming of age, and Nature opens her secrets to us, and we are just setting up for ourselves—as it were, commencing the business of life, like grown men in good earnest; and every day we find out more secrets, and all worth knowing.

We will not lay down the pen without expressing our congratulations to the inventors of the Submarine Telegraph, the Messrs Brett, and wishing them the fullest success. They themselves as yet know not the extent of the reach of their own invention, or they might well wonder at their own wonders, like "Katerfelto, with his hair on end!"
We wish them long life to see the results—and that they will not, through mistrust of so great a discovery, imitate Copernicus, who, says Fontenelle, "distrusting the success of his opinions, was for a long time loth to publish them, and, when they brought him the first sheet of his work, died, foreseeing that he never should be able to reconcile all its contradictions, and therefore wisely slipped out of the way." Messrs Brett will think it wiser to live, and be in the way and at their post, (no post obit,) ready to answer all queries and contradictions, through the convincing, the very satisfactory means, of their "Submarine Telegraph." 573

MY NOVEL; OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE.
BY PISISTRATUS CAXTON.

BOOK VIII.—INITIAL CHAPTER.
THE ABUSE OF INTELLECT.

There is at present so vehement a flourish of trumpets, and so prodigious a roll of the drum, whenever we are called upon to throw up our hats, and cry, "Huzza" to the "March of Enlightenment," that, out of that very spirit of contradiction natural to all rational animals, one is tempted to stop ones ears, and say, "Gently, gently; LIGHT is noiseless; how comes 'Enlightenment' to make such a clatter? Meanwhile, if it be not impertinent, pray, where is Enlightenment marching to?" Ask that question of any six of the loudest bawlers in the procession, and I'll wager tenpence to California that you get six very unsatisfactory answers. One respectable gentleman, who, to our great astonishment, insists upon calling himself "a slave," but has a remarkably free way of expressing his opinions, will reply—"Enlightenment is marching towards the nine points of the Charter." Another, with his hair à la jeune France, who has taken a fancy to his friend's wife, and is rather embarrassed with his own, asserts that Enlightenment is proceeding towards the Rights of Women, the reign of Social Love, and the annihilation of Tyrannical Prejudice. A third, who has the air of a man well to do in the middle class, more modest in his hopes, because he neither wishes to have his head broken by his errand-boy, nor his wife carried off to an Agapemoné by his apprentice, does not take Enlightenment a step farther than a siege on Debrett, and a cannonade on the Budget. Illiberal man! the march that he swells will soon trample him under foot. No one fares so ill in a crowd as the man who is wedged in the middle. A fourth, looking wild and dreamy, as if he had come out of the cave of Trophonius, and who is a mesmeriser and a mystic, thinks Enlightenment is in full career towards the good old days of alchemists and necromancers. A fifth, whom one might take for a Quaker, asserts that the march of Enlightenment is a crusade for universal philanthropy, vegetable diet, and the perpetuation of peace, by means of speeches, which certainly do produce a very contrary effect from the Philippics of Demosthenes! The sixth—(good fellow, without a rag on his back)—does not care a straw where the march goes. He can't be worse off than he is; and it is quite immaterial to him whether he goes to the dogstar above, or the bottomless pit below. I say nothing, however, against the march, while we take it altogether. Whatever happens, one is in good company; and though I am somewhat indolent by nature, and would rather stay at home with Locke and Burke, (dull dogs though they were,) than have my thoughts set off helter-skelter with those cursed trumpets and drums, blown and dub-a-dubbed by fellows that I vow to heaven I would not trust with a five-pound note—still, if I must march, I must; and so deuce take the hindmost. But when it comes to individual marchers upon their own account—privateers and condottieri of Enlightenment—who have filled their pockets with lucifer-matches, and have a sublime contempt for their neighbours' barns and hay-ricks, I don't see why I should throw myself into the seventh heaven of admiration and ecstasy.

If those who are eternally rhapsodising on the celestial blessings that are to follow Enlightenment, Universal Knowledge, and so forth, would just take their eyes out of their pockets, and look about them, I would respectfully inquire if they have never met any very knowing and enlightened gentleman, whose acquaintance is by no means desirable. If not, they are monstrous lucky. Every man must judge by his own experience; and the 574 worst rogues I have ever encountered were amazingly well-informed, clever fellows! From dunderheads and dunces we can protect ourselves; but from your sharp-witted gentleman, all enlightenment, and no prejudice, we have but to cry, "Heaven defend us!" It is true, that the rogue (let him be ever so enlightened) usually comes to no good himself, (though not before he has done harm enough to his neighbours.) But that only shows that the world wants something else in those it rewards, besides intelligence per se and in the abstract; and is much too old a world to allow any Jack Horner to pick out its plumbs for his own personal gratification. Hence a man of very moderate intelligence, who believes in God, suffers his heart to beat with human sympathies, and keeps his eyes off your strong-box, will perhaps gain a vast deal more power than knowledge ever gives to a rogue.

Wherefore, though I anticipate an outcry against me on the part of the blockheads, who, strange to say, are the most credulous idolaters of enlightenment, and, if knowledge were power, would rot on a dunghill; yet, nevertheless, I think all really enlightened men will agree with me, that when one falls in with detached sharpshooters from the general march of enlightenment, it is no reason that we should make ourselves a target, because enlightenment has furnished them with a gun. It has, doubtless, been already remarked by the judicious reader, that of the numerous characters introduced into this work, the larger portion belong to that species which we call the Intellectual—that through them are analysed and developed human intellect, in various forms and directions. So that this History, rightly considered, is a kind of humble familiar Epic, or, if you prefer it, a long Serio-Comedy, upon the Varieties of English Life in this our Century, set in movement by the intelligences most prevalent. And where more ordinary and less refined types of the species round and complete the survey of our passing generation, they will often suggest, by contrast, the deficiencies which mere intellectual culture leaves in the human being. Certainly, I have no spite against intellect and enlightenment. Heaven forbid I should be such a Goth. I am only the advocate for common sense and fair play. I don't think an able man necessarily an angel; but I think if his heart match his head, and both proceed in the Great March under a divine Oriflamme, he goes as near to the angel as humanity will permit: if not, if he has but a penn'orth of heart to a pound of brains, I say, "Bon jour, mon ange! I see not the starry upward wings, but the grovelling cloven-hoof." I'd rather be offuscated by the Squire of Hazeldean, than enlightened by Randal Leslie. Every man to his taste. But intellect itself (not in the philosophical, but the ordinary sense of the term) is rarely, if ever, one completed harmonious agency; it is not one faculty, but a compound of many, some of which are often at war with each other, and mar the concord of the whole. Few of us but have some predominant faculty, in itself a strength; but which, (usurping unseasonably dominion over the rest,) shares the lot of all tyranny, however brilliant, and leaves the empire weak against disaffection within, and invasion from without. Hence intellect maybe perverted in a man of evil disposition, and sometimes merely wasted in a man of excellent impulses, for want of the necessary discipline, or of a strong ruling motive. I doubt if there be one person in the world, who has obtained a high reputation for talent, who has not met somebody much cleverer than himself, which said somebody has never obtained any reputation at all! Men, like Audley Egerton, are constantly seen in the great positions of life; while men, like Harley l'Estrange, who could have beaten them hollow in anything equally striven for by both, float away down the stream, and, unless some sudden stimulant arouse the dreamy energies, vanish out of sight into silent graves. If Hamlet and Polonius were living now, Polonius would have a much better chance of being Chancellor of the Exchequer, though Hamlet would unquestionably be a much more intellectual character. What would become of Hamlet? Heaven knows! Dr Arnold said, from his experience of a school, that the difference between one man and another was not mere 575 ability—it was energy. There is a great deal of truth in that saying.

Submitting these hints to the judgment and penetration of the sagacious, I enter on the fresh division of this work, and see already Randal Leslie gnawing his lip on the back-ground. The German poet observes, that the Cow of Isis is to some the divine symbol of knowledge, to others but the milch cow, only regarded for the pounds of butter she will yield. O tendency of our age, to look on Isis as the milch cow! O prostitution of the grandest desires to the basest uses! Gaze on the goddess, Randal Leslie, and get ready thy churn and thy scales. Let us see what the butter will fetch in the market.

CHAPTER II.

A new reign has commenced. There has been a general election; the unpopularity of the Administration has been apparent at the hustings. Audley Egerton, hitherto returned by vast majorities, has barely escaped defeat—thanks to a majority of five. The expenses of his election are said to have been prodigious. 'But who can stand against such wealth as Egerton's—no doubt backed, too, by the Treasury purse?' said the defeated candidate. It is towards the close of October; London is already full; Parliament will meet in less than a fortnight.

In one of the principal apartments of that hotel in which foreigners may discover what is meant by English comfort, and the price which foreigners must pay for it, there sat two persons, side by side, engaged in close conversation. The one was a female, in whose pale clear complexion and raven hair—in whose eyes, vivid with a power of expression rarely bestowed on the beauties of the north, we recognise Beatrice, Marchesa di Negra. Undeniably handsome as was the Italian lady, her companion, though a man, and far advanced into middle age, was yet more remarkable for personal advantages. There was a strong family likeness between the two; but there was also a striking contrast in air, manner, and all that stamps on the physiognomy the idiosyncrasies of character. There was something of gravity, of earnestness and passion, in Beatrice's countenance when carefully examined; her smile at times might be false, but it was rarely ironical, never cynical. Her gestures, though graceful, were unrestrained and frequent. You could see she was a daughter of the south. Her companion, on the contrary, preserved on the fair smooth face, to which years had given scarcely a line or wrinkle, something that might have passed, at first glance, for the levity and thoughtlessness of a gay and youthful nature; but the smile, though exquisitely polished, took at times the derision of a sneer. In his manners he was as composed and as free from gesture as an Englishman. His hair was of that red brown with which the Italian painters produce such marvellous effects of colour; and, if here and there a silver thread gleamed through the locks, it was lost at once amidst their luxuriance. His eyes were light, and his complexion, though without much colour, was singularly transparent. His beauty, indeed, would have been rather womanly than masculine, but for the height and sinewy spareness of a frame in which muscular strength was rather adorned than concealed by an admirable elegance of proportion. You would never have guessed this man to be an Italian; more likely you would have supposed him a Parisian. He conversed in French, his dress was of French fashion, his mode of thought seemed French. Not that he was like the Frenchman of the present day—an animal, either rude or reserved; but your ideal of the Marquis of the old régime—the roué of the Regency.

Italian, however, he was, and of a race renowned in Italian history. But, as if ashamed of his country and his birth, he affected to be a citizen of the world. Heaven help the world if it hold only such citizens!

"But, Giulio," said Beatrice di Negra, speaking in Italian, "even 576 granting that you discover this girl, can you suppose that her father will ever consent to your alliance? Surely you know too well the nature of your kinsman?"

"Tu te trompes, ma sœur," replied Giulio Franzini, Count di Peschiera, in French as usual—"tu te trompes; I knew it before he had gone through exile and penury. How can I know it now? But comfort yourself, my too anxious Beatrice, I shall not care for his consent till I've made sure of his daughter's."

"But how win that in despite of the father?"

"Eh, mordieu!" interrupted the Count, with true French gaiety; "what would become of all the comedies ever written, if marriages were not made in despite of the father? Look you," he resumed, with a very slight compression of his lip, and a still slighter movement in his chair—"look you, this is no question of ifs and buts; it is a question of must and shall—a question of existence to you and to me. When Danton was condemned to the guillotine, he said, flinging a pellet of bread at the nose of his respectable judge—'Mon individu sera bientôt dans le néant'—My patrimony is there already! I am loaded with debts. I see before me, on the one side, ruin or suicide; on the other side, wedlock and wealth."

"But from those vast possessions which you have been permitted to enjoy so long, have you really saved nothing against the time when they might be reclaimed at your hands?"

"My sister," replied the Count, "do I look like a man who saved? Besides, when the Austrian Emperor, unwilling to raze from his Lombard domains a name and a house so illustrious as our kinsman's, and desirous, while punishing that kinsman's rebellion, to reward my adherence, forbore the peremptory confiscation of those vast possessions at which my mouth waters while we speak, but, annexing them to the Crown during pleasure, allowed me, as the next of male kin, to retain the revenues of one-half for the same very indefinite period—had I not every reason to suppose, that, before long, I could so influence his Majesty or his minister, as to obtain a decree that might transfer the whole, unconditionally and absolutely, to myself? And methinks I should have done so, but for this accursed, intermeddling English Milord, who has never ceased to besiege the court or the minister with alleged extenuations of our cousin's rebellion, and proofless assertions that I shared it in order to entangle my kinsman, and betrayed it in order to profit by his spoils. So that, at last, in return for all my services, and in answer to all my claims, I received from the minister himself this cold reply—'Count of Peschiera, your aid was important, and your reward has been large. That reward, it would not be for your honour to extend, and justify the ill opinion of your Italian countrymen by formally appropriating to yourself all that was forfeited by the treason you denounced. A name so noble as yours should be dearer to you than fortune itself.'"

"Ah, Giulio," cried Beatrice, her face lighting up, changed in its whole character—"those were words that might make the demon that tempts to avarice fly from your breast in shame."

The Count opened his eyes in great amaze; then he glanced round the room, and said, quietly—

"Nobody else hears you, my dear Beatrice; talk common sense. Heroics sound well in mixed society; but there is nothing less suited to the tone of a family conversation."

Madame di Negra bent down her head abashed, and that sudden change in the expression of her countenance, which had seemed to betray susceptibility to generous emotion, faded as suddenly away.

"But still," she said coldly, "you enjoy one-half of those ample revenues—why talk, then, of suicide and ruin?"

"I enjoy them at the pleasure of the crown; and what if it be the pleasure of the crown to recall our cousin, and reinstate him in his possessions?"

"There is a probability, then, of that pardon? When you first employed me in your researches, you only thought there was a possibility." 577

"There is a great probability of it, and therefore I am here. I learned some little time since that the question of such recall had been suggested by the Emperor, and discussed in Council. The danger to the State, which might arise from our cousin's wealth, his alleged abilities—(abilities! bah!)—and his popular name, deferred any decision on the point; and, indeed, the difficulty of dealing with myself must have embarrassed the ministry. But it is a mere question of time. He cannot long remain excluded from the general amnesty already extended to the other refugees. The person who gave me this information is high in power, and friendly to myself; and he added a piece of advice, on which I acted. 'It was intimated,' said he, 'by one of the partisans of your kinsman, that the exile could give a hostage for his loyalty in the person of his daughter and heiress; that she had arrived at marriageable age; that if she were to wed, with the Emperor's consent, some one whose attachment to the Austrian crown was unquestionable, there would be a guarantee both for the faith of the father, and for the transmission of so important a heritage to safe and loyal hands. Why not' (continued my friend) 'apply to the Emperor for his consent to that alliance for yourself?—you, on whom he can depend;—you who, if the daughter should die, would be the legal heir to those lands?' On that hint I spoke."

"You saw the Emperor?"

"And after combating the unjust prepossessions against me, I stated, that so far from my cousin having any fair cause of resentment against me, when all was duly explained to him, I did not doubt that he would willingly give me the hand of his child."

"You did!" cried the Marchesa, amazed.

"And," continued the Count imperturbably, as he smoothed, with careless hand, the snowy plaits of his shirt front—"and that I should thus have the happiness of becoming myself the guarantee of my kinsman's loyalty—the agent for the restoration of his honours, while, in the eyes of the envious and malignant, I should clear up my own name from all suspicion that I had wronged him."

"And the Emperor consented?"

"Pardieu, my dear sister. What else could his majesty do? My proposition smoothed every obstacle, and reconciled policy with mercy. It remains, therefore, only to find out, what has hitherto baffled all our researches, the retreat of our dear kinsfolk, and to make myself a welcome lover to the demoiselle. There is some disparity of years, I own; but—unless your sex and my glass flatter me, overmuch—I am still a match for many a gallant of five-and-twenty."

The Count said this with so charming a smile, and looked so pre-eminently handsome, that he carried off the coxcombry of the words as gracefully as if they had been spoken by some dazzling hero of the grand old comedy of Parisian life.

Then interlacing his fingers, and lightly leaning his hands, thus clasped, upon his sister's shoulder, he looked into her face, and said slowly—"And now, my sister, for some gentle but deserved reproach. Have you not sadly failed me in the task I imposed on your regard for my interests? Is it not some years since you first came to England on the mission of discovering these worthy relatives of ours? Did I not entreat you to seduce into your toils the man whom I knew to be my enemy, and who was indubitably acquainted with our cousin's retreat—a secret he has hitherto locked within his bosom? Did you not tell me, that though he was then in England, you could find no occasion even to meet him, but that you had obtained the friendship of the statesman to whom I directed your attention, as his most intimate associate? And yet you, whose charms are usually so irresistible, learn nothing from the statesman, as you see nothing of Milord. Nay, baffled and misled, you actually suppose that the quarry has taken refuge in France. You go thither—you pretend to search the capital—the provinces, Switzerland, que sais-je?—all in vain,—though—foi de gentilhomme—your police cost me dearly,—you return to England—the same chace, and the same result. Palsambleu, ma sœur, I do too much credit 578 to your talents not to question your zeal. In a word, have you been in earnest—or have you not had some womanly pleasure in amusing yourself and abusing my trust?"

"Giulio," answered Beatrice sadly, "you know the influence you have exercised over my character and my fate. Your reproaches are not just. I made such inquiries as were in my power, and I have now cause to believe that I know one who is possessed of this secret, and can guide us to it."

"Ah, you do!" exclaimed the Count. Beatrice did not heed the exclamation, and hurried on.

"But grant that my heart shrunk from the task you imposed on me, would it not have been natural? When I first came to England, you informed me that your object in discovering the exiles was one which I could honestly aid. You naturally desired first to know if the daughter lived; if not, you were the heir. If she did, you assured me you desired to effect, through my mediation, some liberal compromise with Alphonso, by which you would have sought to obtain his restoration, provided he would leave you for life in possession of the grant you hold from the crown. While these were your objects, I did my best, ineffectual as it was, to obtain the information required."

"And what made me lose so important, though so ineffectual an ally?" asked the Count, still smiling; but a gleam that belied the smile shot from his eye.

"What! when you bade me receive and co-operate with the miserable spies—the false Italians—whom you sent over, and seek to entangle this poor exile, when found, in some rash correspondence, to be revealed to the court;—when you sought to seduce the daughter of the Counts of Peschiera, the descendant of those who had ruled in Italy, into the informer, the corrupter, and the traitress! No, Giulio—then I recoiled; and then, fearful of your own sway over me, I retreated into France. I have answered you frankly."

The Count removed his hands from the shoulder on which they had reclined so cordially.

"And this," said he, "is your wisdom, and this your gratitude. You, whose fortunes are bound up in mine—you, who subsist on my bounty—you, who——"

"Hold," cried the Marchesa, rising, and with a burst of emotion, as if stung to the utmost, and breaking into revolt from the tyranny of years—"Hold—gratitude! bounty! Brother, brother—what, indeed, do I owe to you? The shame and the misery of a life. While yet a child, you condemned me to marry against my will—against my heart—against my prayers—and laughed at my tears when I knelt to you for mercy. I was pure then, Giulio—pure and innocent as the flowers in my virgin crown. And now—now—"

Beatrice stopped abruptly, and clasped her hands before her face.

"Now you upbraid me," said the Count, unruffled by her sudden passion, "because I gave you in marriage to a man young and noble?"

"Old in vices, and mean of soul! The marriage I forgave you. You had the right, according to the customs of our country, to dispose of my hand. But I forgave you not the consolations that you whispered in the ear of a wretched and insulted wife."

"Pardon me the remark," replied the Count, with a courtly bend of his head, "but those consolations were also conformable to the customs of our country, and I was not aware till now that you had wholly disdained them. And," continued the Count, "you were not so long a wife that the gall of the chain should smart still. You were soon left a widow—free, childless, young, beautiful."

"And penniless."

"True, Di Negra was a gambler, and very unlucky; no fault of mine. I could neither keep the cards from his hands, nor advise him how to play them."

"And my own portion? Oh Giulio, I knew but at his death why you had condemned me to that renegade Genoese. He owed you money, and, against honour, and I believe against law, you had accepted my fortune in discharge of the debt."

"He had no other way to discharge it—a debt of honour must be paid—old stories these. What matters? Since then my purse has been open to you."

"Yes, not as your sister, but your 579 instrument—your spy! Yes, your purse has been open—with a niggard hand."

"Un peu de conscience, ma chère, you are so extravagant. But come, be plain. What would you?"

"I would be free from you."

"That is, you would form some second marriage with one of these rich island lords. Ma foi, I respect your ambition."

"It is not so high. I aim but to escape from slavery—to be placed beyond dishonourable temptation. I desire," cried Beatrice with increased emotion, "I desire to re-enter the life of woman."

"Eno'!" said the Count with a visible impatience, "is there anything in the attainment of your object that should render you indifferent to mine? You desire to marry, if I comprehend you right. And to marry, as becomes you, you should bring to your husband not debts, but a dowry. Be it so. I will restore the portion that I saved from the spendthrift clutch of the Genoese—the moment that it is mine to bestow—the moment that I am husband to my kinsman's heiress. And now, Beatrice, you imply that my former notions revolted your conscience; my present plan should content it; for by this marriage shall our kinsman regain his country, and repossess, at least, half his lands. And if I am not an excellent husband to the demoiselle, it will be her own fault. I have sown my wild oats. Je suis bon prince, when I have things a little my own way. It is my hope and my intention, and certainly it will be my interest, to become digne époux et irréprochable père de famille. I speak lightly—'tis my way. I mean seriously. The little girl will be very happy with me, and I shall succeed in soothing all resentment her father may retain. Will you aid me then—yes or no? Aid me, and you shall indeed be free. The magician will release the fair spirit he has bound to his will. Aid me not, ma chère, and mark, I do not threaten—I do but warn—aid me not; grant that I become a beggar, and ask yourself what is to become of you—still young, still beautiful, and still penniless? Nay, worse than penniless; you have done me the honour, (and here the Count, looking on the table, drew a letter from a portfolio, emblazoned with his arms and coronet,) you have done me the honour to consult me as to your debts."

"You will restore my fortune?" said the Marchesa, irresolutely—and averting her head from an odious schedule of figures.

"When my own, with your aid, is secured."

"But do you not overrate the value of my aid?"

"Possibly," said the Count, with a caressing suavity—and he kissed his sister's forehead. "Possibly; but by my honour, I wish to repair to you any wrong, real or supposed, I may have done you in past times. I wish to find again my own dear sister. I may overvalue your aid, but not the affection from which it comes. Let us be friends, cara Beatrice mia," added the Count, for the first time employing Italian words.

The Marchesa laid her head on his shoulder, and her tears flowed softly. Evidently this man had great influence over her—and evidently, whatever her cause for complaint, her affection for him was still sisterly and strong. A nature with fine flashes of generosity, spirit, honour, and passion, was hers—but uncultured, unguided—spoilt by the worst social examples—easily led into wrong—not always aware where the wrong was—letting affections good or bad whisper away her conscience or blind her reason. Such women are often far more dangerous when induced to wrong, than those who are thoroughly abandoned—such women are the accomplices men like the Count of Peschiera most desire to obtain.

"Ah, Giulio," said Beatrice, after a pause, and looking up at him through her tears, "when you speak to me thus, you know you can do with me what you will. Fatherless and motherless, whom had my childhood to love and obey but you?"

"Dear Beatrice," murmured the Count tenderly—and he again kissed her forehead. "So," he continued more carelessly—"so the reconciliation is effected, and our interests and our hearts re-allied. Now, alas! to descend to business. You say that 580 you know some one whom you believe to be acquainted with the lurking-place of my father-in-law—that is to be!"

"I think so. You remind me that I have an appointment with him this day: it is near the hour—I must leave you."

"To learn the secret?—Quick—quick. I have no fear of your success, if it is by his heart that you lead him?"

"You mistake; on his heart I have no hold. But he has a friend who loves me, and honourably, and whose cause he pleads. I think here that I have some means to control or persuade him. If not—ah, he is of a character that perplexes me in all but his worldly ambition; and how can we foreigners influence him through that?"

"Is he poor, or is he extravagant?"

"Not extravagant, and not positively poor, but dependent."

"Then we have him," said the Count composedly. "If his assistance be worth buying, we can bid high for it. Sur mon âme, I never yet knew money fail with any man who was both worldly and dependent. I put him and myself in your hands."

Thus saying, the Count opened the door, and conducted his sister with formal politeness to her carriage. He then returned, reseated himself, and mused in silence. As he did so, the muscles of his countenance relaxed. The levity of the Frenchman fled from his visage, and in his eye, as it gazed abstractedly into space, there was that steady depth so remarkable in the old portraits of Florentine diplomatist or Venetian oligarch. Thus seen, there was in that face, despite all its beauty, something that would have awed back even the fond gaze of love; something hard, collected, inscrutable, remorseless. But this change of countenance did not last long. Evidently thought, though intense for the moment, was not habitual to the man. Evidently he had lived the life which takes all things lightly—so he rose with a look of fatigue, shook and stretched himself, as if to cast off, or grow out of, an unwelcome and irksome mood. An hour afterwards, the Count of Peschiera was charming all eyes, and pleasing all ears, in the saloon of a high-born beauty, whose acquaintance he had made at Vienna, and whose charms, according to that old and never-truth-speaking oracle, Polite Scandal, were now said to have attracted to London the brilliant foreigner.

CHAPTER III.

The Marchesa regained her house, which was in Curzon Street, and withdrew to her own room, to readjust her dress, and remove from her countenance all trace of the tears she had shed.

Half-an-hour afterwards she was seated in her drawing-room, composed and calm; nor, seeing her then, could you have guessed that she was capable of so much emotion and so much weakness. In that stately exterior, in that quiet attitude, in that elaborate and finished elegance which comes alike from the arts of the toilet and the conventional repose of rank, you could see but the woman of the world and the great lady.

A knock at the door was heard, and in a few moments there entered a visitor, with the easy familiarity of intimate acquaintance—a young man, but with none of the bloom of youth. His hair, fine as a woman's, was thin and scanty, but it fell low over the forehead, and concealed that noblest of our human features. " A gentleman," says Apuleius, "ought, if he can, to wear his whole mind on his forehead."5 The young visitor would never have committed so frank an imprudence. His cheek was pale, and in his step and his movements there was a langour that spoke of fatigued nerves or delicate health. But the light of the eye and the tone of the voice were those of a mental temperament controlling the bodily—vigorous 581 and energetic. For the rest, his general appearance was distinguished by a refinement alike intellectual and social. Once seen, you would not easily forget him. And the reader no doubt already recognises Randal Leslie. His salutation, as I before said, was that of intimate familiarity; yet it was given and replied to with that unreserved openness which denotes the absence of a more tender sentiment.

Seating himself by the Marchesa's side, Randal began first to converse on the fashionable topics and gossip of the day; but it was observable, that, while he extracted from her the current anecdote and scandal of the great world, neither anecdote nor scandal did he communicate in return. Randal Leslie had already learned the art not to commit himself, nor to have quoted against him one ill-natured remark upon the eminent. Nothing more injures the man who would rise beyond the fame of the salons, than to be considered backbiter and gossip; 'yet it is always useful,' thought Randal Leslie, 'to know the foibles—the small social and private springs by which the great are moved. Critical occasions may arise in which such knowledge may be power.' And hence, perhaps, (besides a more private motive, soon to be perceived,) Randal did not consider his time thrown away in cultivating Madame di Negra's friendship. For despite much that was whispered against her, she had succeeded in dispelling the coldness with which she had at first been received in the London circles. Her beauty, her grace, and her high birth, had raised her into fashion, and the homage of men of the first station, while it perhaps injured her reputation as woman, added to her celebrity as fine lady. So much do we cold English, prudes though we be, forgive to the foreigner what we avenge on the native.

Sliding at last from these general topics into very well-bred and elegant personal compliment, and reciting various eulogies, which Lord this and the Duke of that had passed on the Marchesa's charms, Randal laid his hand on hers, with the license of admitted friendship, and said—

"But since you have deigned to confide in me, since when (happily for me, and with a generosity of which no coquette could have been capable) you, in good time, repressed into friendship feelings that might else have ripened into those you are formed to inspire and disdain to return, you told me with your charming smile, 'Let no one speak to me of love who does not offer me his hand, and with it the means to supply tastes that I fear are terribly extravagant;'—since thus you allowed me to divine your natural objects, and upon that understanding our intimacy has been founded, you will pardon me for saying that the admiration you excite amongst these grands seigneurs I have named, only serves to defeat your own purpose, and scare away admirers less brilliant, but more in earnest. Most of these gentlemen are unfortunately married; and they who are not belong to those members of our aristocracy who, in marriage, seek more than beauty and wit—namely, connections to strengthen their political station, or wealth to redeem a mortgage and sustain a title."

"My dear Mr Leslie," replied the Marchesa—and a certain sadness might be detected in the tone of the voice and the droop of the eye—"I have lived long enough in the real world to appreciate the baseness and the falsehood of most of those sentiments which take the noblest names. I see through the hearts of the admirers you parade before me, and know that not one of them would shelter with his ermine the woman to whom he talks of his heart. Ah," continued Beatrice, with a softness of which she was unconscious, but which might have been extremely dangerous to youth less steeled and self-guarded than was Randal Leslie's—"ah, I am less ambitious than you suppose. I have dreamed of a friend, a companion, a protector, with feelings still fresh, undebased by the low round of vulgar dissipation and mean pleasures—of a heart so new, that it might restore my own to what it was in its happy spring. I have seen in your country some marriages, the mere contemplation of which has filled my eyes with delicious tears. I have learned in England to know the value of home. And with such a heart as I describe, 582 and such a home, I could forget that I ever knew a less pure ambition."

"This language does not surprise me," said Randal; "yet it does not harmonise with your former answer to me."

"To you," repeated Beatrice smiling, and regaining her lighter manner; "to you—true. But I never had the vanity to think that your affection for me could bear the sacrifices it would cost you in marriage; that you, with your ambition, could bound your dreams of happiness to home. And then, too," said she, raising her head, and with a certain grave pride in her air—"and then, I could not have consented to share my fate with one whom my poverty would cripple. I could not listen to my heart, if it had beat for a lover without fortune, for to him I could then have brought but a burden, and betrayed him into a union with poverty and debt. Now, it may be different. Now I may have the dowry that befits my birth. And now I may be free to choose according to my heart as woman, not according to my necessities, as one poor, harassed, and despairing."

"Ah," said Randal, interested, and drawing still closer towards his fair companion—"ah, I congratulate you sincerely; you have cause, then, to think that you shall be—rich?"

The Marchesa paused before she answered, and during that pause Randal relaxed the web of the scheme which he had been secretly weaving, and rapidly considered whether, if Beatrice di Negra would indeed be rich, she might answer to himself as a wife; and in what way, if so, he had best change his tone from that of friendship into that of love. While thus reflecting, Beatrice answered—

"Not rich for an Englishwoman; for an Italian, yes. My fortune should be half a million—"

"Half a million!" cried Randal, and with difficulty he restrained himself from falling at her feet in adoration.

"Of francs!" continued the Marchesa.

"Francs! Ah," said Randal, with a long-drawn breath, and recovering from his sudden enthusiasm, "about twenty thousand pounds!—eight hundred a-year at four per cent. A very handsome portion, certainly—(Genteel poverty! he murmured to himself. What an escape I have had! but I see—I see. This will smooth all difficulties in the way of my better and earlier project. I see)—a very handsome portion," he repeated aloud—"not for a grand seigneur, indeed, but still for a gentleman of birth and expectations worthy of your choice, if ambition be not your first object. Ah, while you spoke with such endearing eloquence of feelings that were fresh, of a heart that was new, of the happy English home, you might guess that my thoughts ran to my friend who loves you so devotedly, and who so realises your ideal. Proverbially, with us, happy marriages and happy homes are found not in the gay circles of London fashion, but at the hearths of our rural nobility—our untitled country gentlemen. And who, amongst all your adorers, can offer you a lot so really enviable as the one whom, I see by your blush, you already guess that I refer to?"

"Did I blush?" said the Marchesa, with a silvery laugh. "Nay, I think that your zeal for your friend misled you. But I will own frankly, I have been touched by his honest ingenuous love—so evident, yet rather looked than spoken. I have contrasted the love that honours me with the suitors that seek to degrade; more I cannot say. For though I grant that your friend is handsome, high-spirited, and generous, still he is not what—"

"You mistake, believe me," interrupted Randal. "You shall not finish your sentence. He is all that you do not yet suppose him; for his shyness, and his very love, his very respect for your superiority, do not allow his mind and his nature to appear to advantage. You, it is true, have a taste for letters and poetry rare among your countrywomen. He has not at present—few men have. But what Cimon would not be refined by so fair an Iphigenia? Such frivolities as he now shows belong but to youth and inexperience of life. Happy the brother who could see his sister the wife of Frank Hazeldean."

The Marchesa leant her cheek on her hand in silence. To her, marriage was more than it usually seems to dreaming maiden or to disconsolate widow. So 583 had the strong desire to escape from the control of her unprincipled and remorseless brother grown a part of her very soul—so had whatever was best and highest in her very mixed and complex character been galled and outraged by her friendless and exposed position, the equivocal worship rendered to her beauty, the various debasements to which pecuniary embarrassments had subjected her—(not without design on the part of the Count, who, though grasping, was not miserly, and who by precarious and seemingly capricious gifts at one time, and refusals of all aid at another, had involved her in debt in order to retain his hold on her)—so utterly painful and humiliating to a woman of her pride and her birth was the station that she held in the world—that in marriage she saw liberty, life, honour, self-redemption; and these thoughts, while they compelled her to co-operate with the schemes, by which the Count, on securing to himself a bride, was to bestow on herself a dower, also disposed her now to receive with favour Randal Leslie's pleadings on behalf of his friend.

The advocate saw that he had made an impression, and with the marvellous skill which his knowledge of those natures that engaged his study bestowed on his intelligence, he continued to improve his cause by such representations as were likely to be most effective. With what admirable tact he avoided panegyric of Frank as the mere individual, and drew him rather as the type, the ideal of what a woman in Beatrice's position might desire, in the safety, peace, and honour of a home, in the trust, and constancy, and honest confiding love of its partner! He did not paint an elysium; he described a haven; he did not glowingly delineate a hero of romance—he soberly portrayed that Representative of the Respectable and the Real which a woman turns to when romance begins to seem to her but delusion. Verily, if you could have looked into the heart of the person he addressed, and heard him speak, you would have cried admiringly, "Knowledge is power; and this man, if as able on a larger field of action, should play no mean part in the history of his time."

Slowly Beatrice roused herself from the reveries which crept over her as he spoke—slowly, and with a deep sigh, and said—

"Well, well, grant all you say; at least before I can listen to so honourable a love, I must be relieved from the base and sordid pressure that weighs on me. I cannot say to the man who wooes me, 'Will you pay the debts of the daughter of Franzini, and the widow of di Negra?'"

"Nay, your debts, surely, make so slight a portion of your dowry."

"But the dowry has to be secured;" and here, turning the tables upon her companion, as the apt proverb expresses it, Madame di Negra extended her hand to Randal, and said in her most winning accents, "You are, then, truly and sincerely my friend?"

"Can you doubt it?"

"I prove that I do not, for I ask your assistance."

"Mine? How?"

"Listen; my brother has arrived in London—"

"I see that arrival announced in the papers."

"And he comes, empowered by the consent of the Emperor, to ask the hand of a relation and countrywoman of his; an alliance that will heal long family dissensions, and add to his own fortunes those of an heiress. My brother, like myself, has been extravagant. The dowry which by law he still owes me it would distress him to pay till this marriage be assured."

"I understand," said Randal. "But how can I aid this marriage?"

"By assisting us to discover the bride. She, with her father, sought refuge and concealment in England."

"The father had, then, taken part in some political disaffections, and was proscribed?"

"Exactly so; and so well has he concealed himself that he has baffled all our efforts to discover his retreat. My brother can obtain him his pardon in cementing this alliance—"

"Proceed."

"Ah Randal, Randal, is this the frankness of friendship? You know that I have before sought to obtain the secret of our relation's retreat—sought in vain to obtain it from Mr Egerton, who assuredly knows it—"

"But who communicates no secrets 584 to living man," said Randal, almost bitterly; "who, close and compact as iron, is as little malleable to me as to you."

"Pardon me. I know you so well that I believe you could attain to any secret you sought earnestly to acquire. Nay, more, I believe that you know already that secret which I ask you to share with me."

"What on earth makes you think so?"

"When, some weeks ago, you asked me to describe the personal appearance and manners of the exile, which I did partly from the recollections of my childhood, partly from the description given to me by others, I could not but notice your countenance, and remark its change; in spite," said the Marchesa, smiling, and watching Randal while she spoke—"in spite of your habitual self-command. And when I pressed you to own that you had actually seen some one who tallied with that description, your denial did not deceive me. Still more, when returning recently, of your own accord, to the subject, you questioned me so shrewdly as to my motives in seeking the clue to our refugees, and I did not then answer you satisfactorily, I could detect—"

"Ha, ha," interrupted Randal, with the low soft laugh by which occasionally he infringed upon Lord Chesterfield's recommendations to shun a merriment so natural as to be ill-bred,—"ha, ha, you have the fault of all observers too minute and refined. But even granting that I may have seen some Italian exiles, (which is likely enough,) what could be more simple than my seeking to compare your description with their appearance; and granting that I might suspect some one amongst them to be the man you search for, what more simple, also, than that I should desire to know if you meant him harm or good in discovering his 'whereabout?' For ill," added Randal, with an air of prudery, "ill would it become me to betray, even to friendship, the retreat of one who would hide from persecution; and even if I did so—for honour itself is a weak safeguard against your fascinations—such indiscretion might be fatal to my future career."

"How?"

"Do you not say that Egerton knows the secret, yet will not communicate?—and is he a man who would ever forgive in me an imprudence that committed himself? My dear friend, I will tell you more. When Audley Egerton first noticed my growing intimacy with you, he said, with his usual dryness of counsel, 'Randal, I do not ask you to discontinue acquaintance with Madame di Negra—for an acquaintance with women like her forms the manners and refines the intellect; but charming women are dangerous, and Madame di Negra is—a charming woman.'"

The Marchesa's face flushed. Randal resumed: "'Your fair acquaintance' (I am still quoting Egerton) 'seeks to discover the home of a countryman of hers. She suspects that I know it. She may try to learn it through you. Accident may possibly give you the information she requires. Beware how you betray it. By one such weakness I should judge of your general character. He from whom a woman can extract a secret will never be fit for public life.' Therefore, my dear Marchesa, even supposing I possess this secret, you would be no true friend of mine to ask me to reveal what would emperil all my prospects. For as yet," added Randal, with a gloomy shade on his brow,—"as yet I do not stand alone and erect—I lean;—I am dependent."

"There may be a way," replied Madame di Negra, persisting, "to communicate this intelligence, without the possibility of Mr Egerton's tracing our discovery to yourself; and, though I will not press you farther, I add this—You urge me to accept your friend's hand; you seem interested in the success of his suit, and you plead it with a warmth that shows how much you regard what you suppose is his happiness; I will never accept his hand till I can do so without blush for my penury—till my dowry is secured, and that can only be by my brother's union with the exile's daughter. For your friend's sake, therefore, think well how you can aid me in the first step to that alliance. The young lady once discovered, and my brother has no fear for the success of his suit." 585

"And you would marry Frank if the dower was secured?"

"Your arguments in his favour seem irresistible," replied Beatrice, looking down.

A flash went from Randal's eyes, and he mused a few moments.

Then slowly rising, and drawing on his gloves, he said—

"Well, at least you so far reconcile my honour towards aiding your research, that you now inform me you mean no ill to the exile."

"Ill!—the restoration to fortune, honours, his native land."

"And you so far enlist my heart on your side, that you inspire me with the hope to contribute to the happiness of two friends whom I dearly love. I will, therefore, diligently seek to ascertain if, among the refugees I have met with, lurk those whom you seek; and if so, I will thoughtfully consider how to give you the clue. Meanwhile, not one incautious word to Egerton."

"Trust me—I am a woman of the world."

Randal now had gained the door. He paused, and renewed carelessly—

"This young lady must be heiress to great wealth, to induce a man of your brother's rank to take so much pains to discover her."

"Her wealth will be vast," replied the Marchesa; "and if anything from wealth or influence in a foreign state could be permitted to prove my brother's gratitude—"

"Ah, fie," interrupted Randal, and approaching Madame di Negra, he lifted her hand to his lips, and said gallantly,

"This is reward enough to your preux chevalier."

With those words he took his leave.

CHAPTER IV.

With his hands behind him, and his head drooping on his breast—slow, stealthy, noiseless, Randal Leslie glided along the streets on leaving the Italian's house. Across the scheme he had before revolved, there glanced another yet more glittering, for its gain might be more sure and immediate. If the exile's daughter were heiress to such wealth, might he himself hope——. He stopped short even in his own soliloquy, and his breath came quick. Now, in his last visit to Hazeldean, he had come in contact with Riccabocca, and been struck by the beauty of Violante. A vague suspicion had crossed him that these might be the persons of whom the Marchesa was in search, and the suspicion had been confirmed by Beatrice's description of the refugee she desired to discover. But as he had not then learned the reason for her inquiries, nor conceived the possibility that he could have any personal interest in ascertaining the truth, he had only classed the secret in question among those the farther research into which might be left to time and occasion. Certainly the reader will not do the unscrupulous intellect of Randal Leslie the injustice to suppose that he was deterred from confiding to his fair friend all that he knew of Riccabocca, by the refinement of honour to which he had so chivalrously alluded. He had correctly stated Audley Egerton's warning against any indiscreet confidence, though he had forborne to mention a more recent and direct renewal of the same caution. His first visit to Hazeldean had been paid without consulting Egerton. He had been passing some days at his father's house, and had gone over thence to the Squire's. On his return to London, he had, however, mentioned this visit to Audley, who had seemed annoyed and even displeased at it, though Randal well knew sufficient of Egerton's character to know that such feelings could scarce be occasioned merely by his estrangement from his half brother. This dissatisfaction had, therefore, puzzled the young man. But as it was necessary to his views to establish intimacy with the Squire, he did not yield the point with his customary deference to his patron's whims. He, therefore, observed, that he should be very sorry to do anything displeasing to his benefactor, but that his father had been naturally anxious that he should not appear positively to slight the friendly overtures of Mr Hazeldean. 586

"Why naturally?" asked Egerton.

"Because you know that Mr Hazeldean is a relation of mine—that my grandmother was a Hazeldean."

"Ah!" said Egerton, who, as it has been before said, knew little, and cared less, about the Hazeldean pedigree, "I was either not aware of that circumstance, or had forgotten it. And your father thinks that the Squire may leave you a legacy?"

"Oh, sir, my father is not so mercenary—such an idea never entered his head. But the Squire himself has indeed said—'Why, if anything happened to Frank, you would be next heir to my lands, and therefore we ought to know each other.' But—"

"Enough," interrupted Egerton, "I am the last man to pretend to the right of standing between you and a single chance of fortune, or of aid to it. And whom did you meet at Hazeldean?"

"There was no one there, sir; not even Frank."

"Hum. Is the Squire not on good terms with his parson? Any quarrel about tithes?"

"Oh, no quarrel. I forgot Mr Dale; I saw him pretty often. He admires and praises you very much, sir."

"Me—and why? What did he say of me?"

"That your heart was as sound as your head; that he had once seen you about some old parishioners of his; and that he had been much impressed with a depth of feeling he could not have anticipated in a man of the world, and a statesman."

"Oh, that was all; some affair when I was member for Lansmere?"

"I suppose so."

Here the conversation had broken off; but the next time Randal was led to visit the Squire he had formally asked Egerton's consent, who, after a moment's hesitation, had as formally replied, "I have no objection."

On returning from this visit, Randal mentioned that he had seen Riccabocca; and Egerton, a little startled at first, said composedly, "Doubtless one of the political refugees; take care not to set Madame di Negra on his track. Remember, she is suspected of being a spy of the Austrian government."

"Rely on me, sir," said Randal; "but I should think this poor Doctor can scarcely be the person she seeks to discover."

"That is no affair of ours," answered Egerton; "we are English gentlemen, and make not a step towards the secrets of another."

Now, when Randal revolved this rather ambiguous answer, and recalled the uneasiness with which Egerton had first heard of his visit to Hazeldean, he thought that he was indeed near the secret which Egerton desired to conceal from him and from all—viz., the incognito of the Italian whom Lord l'Estrange had taken under his protection.

"My cards," said Randal to himself, as, with a deep-drawn sigh, he resumed his soliloquy, "are become difficult to play. On the one hand, to entangle Frank into marriage with this foreigner, the Squire could never forgive him. On the other hand, if she will not marry him without the dowry—and that depends on her brother's wedding this countrywoman—and that countrywoman be, as I surmise, Violante—and Violante be this heiress, and to be won by me! Tush, tush. Such delicate scruples in a woman so placed and so constituted as Beatrice di Negra, must be easily talked away. Nay, the loss itself of this alliance to her brother, the loss of her own dowry—the very pressure of poverty and debt—would compel her into the sole escape left to her option. I will then follow up the old plan; I will go down to Hazeldean, and see if there be any substance in the new one;—and then to reconcile both—aha—the House of Leslie shall rise yet from its ruin—and—"

Here he was startled from his reverie by a friendly slap on the shoulder, and an exclamation—"Why, Randal, you are more absent than when you used to steal away from the cricket ground, muttering Greek verses at Eton."

"My dear Frank," said Randal, "you—you are so brusque, and I was just thinking of you."

"Were you? And kindly, then, I am sure," said Frank Hazeldean, his honest handsome face lighted up with the unsuspecting genial trust of 587 friendship; "and heaven knows," he added, with a sadder voice, and a graver expression on his eye and lip—"heaven knows I want all the kindness you can give me!"

"I thought," said Randal, "that your father's last supply, of which I was fortunate enough to be the bearer, would clear off your more pressing debts. I don't pretend to preach, but really I must say once more, you should not be so extravagant."

Frank, (seriously).—"I have done my best to reform. I have sold off my horses, and I have not touched dice nor card these six months: I would not even put into the raffle for the last Derby." This last was said with the air of a man who doubted the possibility of obtaining belief to some assertion of preternatural abstinence and virtue.

Randal.—"Is it possible? But, with such self-conquest, how is it that you cannot contrive to live within the bounds of a very liberal allowance?"

Frank, (despondingly).—"Why, when a man once gets his head under water, it is so hard to float back again on the surface. You see, I attribute all my embarrassments to that first concealment of my debts from my father, when they could have been so easily met, and when he came up to town so kindly."

"I am sorry, then, that I gave you that advice."

"Oh you meant it so kindly, I don't reproach you; it was all my own fault."

"Why, indeed, I did urge you to pay off that moiety of your debts left unpaid, with your allowance. Had you done so, all had been well."

"Yes, but poor Borrowwell got into such a scrape at Goodwood; I could not resist him—a debt of honour, that must be paid; so when I signed another bill for him, he could not pay it, poor fellow: really he would have shot himself, if I had not renewed it; and now it is swelled to such an amount with that cursed interest, that he never can pay it; and one bill, of course, begets another, and to be renewed every three months; 'tis the devil and all! So little as I ever got for all I have borrowed," added Frank with a kind of rueful amaze. "Not £1500 ready money; and it would cost me almost as much yearly,—if I had it."

"Only £1500."

"Well, besides seven large chests of the worst cigars you ever smoked; three pipes of wine that no one would drink, and a great bear, that had been imported from Greenland for the sake of its grease."

"That should at least have saved you a bill with your hairdresser."

"I paid his bill with it," said Frank, "and very good-natured he was to take the monster off my hands; it had already hugged two soldiers and one groom into the shape of a flounder. I tell you what," resumed Frank, after a short pause, "I have a great mind even now to tell my father honestly all my embarrassments."

Randal, (solemnly.)—"Hum!"

Frank.—"What? don't you think it would be the best way? I never can save enough—never can pay off what I owe; and it rolls like a snowball."

Randal.—"Judging by the Squire's talk, I think that with the first sight of your affairs you would forfeit his favour for ever; and your mother would be so shocked, especially after supposing that the sum I brought you so lately sufficed to pay off every claim on you. If you had not assured her of that, it might be different; but she who so hates an untruth, and who said to the Squire, 'Frank says this will clear him; and with all his faults, Frank never yet told a lie.'"

"Oh my dear mother!—I fancy I hear her!" cried Frank with deep emotion. "But I did not tell a lie, Randal; I did not say that that sum would clear me."

"You empowered and begged me to say so," replied Randal with grave coldness; "and don't blame me if I believed you."

"No, no! I only said it would clear me for the moment."

"I misunderstood you, then, sadly; and such mistakes involve my own honour. Pardon me, Frank; don't ask my aid in future. You see, with the best intentions I only compromise myself."

"If you forsake me, I may as well go and throw myself into the river," said Frank in a tone of despair; "and sooner or later my father must know my necessities. The Jews 588 threaten to go to him already; and the longer the delay, the more terrible the explanation."

"I don't see why your father should ever learn the state of your affairs; and it seems to me that you could pay off these usurers, and get rid of these bills, by raising money on comparatively easy terms—"

"How?" cried Frank eagerly.

"Why, the Casino property is entailed on you, and you might obtain a sum upon that, not to be paid till the property becomes yours."

"At my poor father's death? Oh, no—no! I cannot bear the idea of this cold-blooded calculation on a father's death. I know it is not uncommon; I know other fellows who have done it, but they never had parents so kind as mine; and even in them it shocked and revolted me. The contemplating a father's death and profiting by the contemplation,—it seems a kind of parricide—it is not natural, Randal. Besides, don't you remember what the governor said—he actually wept while he said it, 'Never calculate on my death; I could not bear that.' Oh, Randal, don't speak of it!"

"I respect your sentiments; but still all the post-obits you could raise could not shorten Mr Hazeldean's life by a day. However, dismiss that idea; we must think of some other device. Ha, Frank! you are a handsome fellow, and your expectations are great—why don't you marry some woman with money?"

"Pooh!" exclaimed Frank, colouring. "You know, Randal, that there is but one woman in the world I can ever think of, and I love her so devotedly, that, though I was as gay as most men before, I really feel as if the rest of her sex had lost every charm. I was passing through the street now,—merely to look up at her windows—"

"You speak of Madame di Negra? I have just left her. Certainly she is two or three years older than you; but if you can get over that misfortune, why not marry her?"

"Marry her!" cried Frank in amaze, and all his colour fled from his cheeks. "Marry her!—are you serious?"

"Why not?"

"But even if she, who is so accomplished, so admired—even if she would accept me, she is, you know, poorer than myself. She has told me so frankly. That woman has such a noble heart! and—and—my father would never consent, nor my mother either. I know they would not."

"Because she is a foreigner?"

"Yes—partly."

"Yet the Squire suffered his cousin to marry a foreigner."

"That was different. He had no control over Jemima; and a daughter-in-law is so different; and my father is so English in his notions; and Madame di Negra, you see, is altogether so foreign. Her very graces would be against her in his eyes."

"I think you do both your parents injustice. A foreigner of low birth—an actress or singer, for instance—of course would be highly objectionable; but a woman, like Madame di Negra, of such high birth and connections—"

Frank shook his head. "I don't think the governor would care a straw about her connections, if she were a king's daughter. He considers all foreigners pretty much alike. And then, you know"—Frank's voice sank into a whisper—"you know that one of the very reasons why she is so dear to me would be an insuperable objection to the old fashioned folks at home."

"I don't understand you, Frank."

"I love her the more," said young Hazeldean, raising his front with a noble pride, that seemed to speak of his descent from a race of cavaliers and gentlemen—"I love her the more because the world has slandered her name—because I believe her to be pure and wronged. But would they at the hall—they who do not see with a lover's eyes—they who have all the stubborn English notions about the indecorum and license of Continental manners, and will so readily credit the worst?—Oh, no—I love—I cannot help it—but I have no hope."

"It is very possible that you may be right," exclaimed Randal, as if struck and half-convinced by his companion's argument—"very possible; and certainly I think that the homely folks at the Hall would fret and fume at first, if they heard you were married to Madame di Negra. Yet still, when your father learned 589 that you had done so, not from passion alone, but to save him from all pecuniary sacrifice—to clear yourself of debt—to—"

"What do you mean?" exclaimed Frank impatiently.

"I have reason to know that Madame di Negra will have as large a portion as your father could reasonably expect you to receive with any English wife. And when this is properly stated to the Squire, and the high position and rank of your wife fully established and brought home to him—for I must think that these would tell, despite your exaggerated notions of his prejudices—and then, when he really sees Madame di Negra, and can judge of her beauty and rare gifts, upon my word, I think, Frank, that there would be no cause for fear. After all, too, you are his only son. He will have no option but to forgive you; and I know how anxiously both your parents wish to see you settled in life."

Frank's whole countenance became illuminated. "There is no one who understands the Squire like you, certainly," said he, with lively joy. "He has the highest opinion of your judgment. And you really believe you could smooth matters?"

"I believe so, but I should be sorry to induce you to run any risk; and if, on cool consideration, you think that risk is incurred, I strongly advise you to avoid all occasion of seeing the poor Marchesa. Ah, you wince; but I say it for her sake as well as your own. First, you must be aware, that, unless you have serious thoughts of marriage, your attentions can but add to the very rumours that, equally groundless, you so feelingly resent; and, secondly, because I don't think any man has a right to win the affections of a woman—especially a woman who seems to me likely to love with her whole heart and soul—merely to gratify his own vanity."

"Vanity! Good heavens, can you think so poorly of me? But as to the Marchesa's affection," continued Frank, with a faltering voice, "do you really and honestly believe that they are to be won by me?"

"I fear lest they may be half won already," said Randal with a smile and a shake of the head; "but she is too proud to let you see any effect you may produce on her, especially when, as I take it for granted, you have never hinted at the hope of obtaining her hand."

"I never till now conceived such a hope. My dear Randal, all my cares have vanished—I tread upon air—I have a great mind to call on her at once."

"Stay, stay," said Randal. "Let me give you a caution. I have just informed you that Madame di Negra will have, what you suspected not before, a fortune suitable to her birth; any abrupt change in your manner at present might induce her to believe that you were influenced by that intelligence."

"Ah!" exclaimed Frank, stopping short, as if wounded to the quick. "And I feel guilty—feel as if I was influenced by that intelligence. So I am, too, when I reflect," he continued, with a naiveté that was half pathetic; "but I hope she will not be very rich—if so, I'll not call."

"Make your mind easy, it is but a portion of some twenty or thirty thousand pounds, that would just suffice to discharge all your debts, clear away all obstacle to your union, and in return for which you could secure a more than adequate jointure and settlement on the Casino property. Now I am on that head, I will be yet more communicative. Madame di Negra has a noble heart, as you say, and told me herself, that, until her brother on his arrival had assured her of this dowry, she would never have consented to marry you—never crippled with her own embarrassments the man she loves. Ah! with what delight she will hail the thought of assisting you to win back your father's heart! But be guarded, meanwhile. And now, Frank, what say you—would it not be well if I ran down to Hazeldean to sound your parents? It is rather inconvenient to me, to be sure, to leave town just at present; but I would do more than that to render you a smaller service. Yes, I'll go to Rood Hall to-morrow, and thence to Hazeldean. I am sure your father will press me to stay, and I shall have ample opportunities to judge of the manner in which he would be likely to regard your marriage with 590 Madame di Negra—supposing always it were properly put to him. We can then act accordingly."

"My dear, dear Randal. How can I thank you? If ever a poor fellow like me can serve you in return—but that's impossible."

"Why, certainly, I will never ask you to be security to a bill of mine," said Randal, laughing. "I practise the economy I preach."

"Ah!" said Frank, with a groan, "that is because your mind is cultivated—you have so many resources; and all my faults have come from idleness. If I had had anything to do on a rainy day, I should never have got into these scrapes."

"Oh! you will have enough to do some day managing your property. We who have no property must find one in knowledge. Adieu, my dear Frank; I must go home now. By the way, you have never, by chance, spoken of the Riccaboccas to Madame di Negra?"

"The Riccaboccas? No. That's well thought of. It may interest her to know that a relation of mine has married her countryman. Very odd that I never did mention it; but, to say truth, I really do talk so little to her; she is so superior, and I feel positively shy with her."

"Do me the favour, Frank," said Randal, waiting patiently till this reply ended—for he was devising all the time what reason to give for his request—"never to allude to the Riccaboccas either to her or to her brother, to whom you are sure to be presented."

"Why not allude to them?"

Randal hesitated a moment. His invention was still at fault, and, for a wonder, he thought it the best policy to go pretty near the truth.

"Why, I will tell you. The Marchesa conceals nothing from her brother, and he is one of the few Italians who are in high favour with the Austrian court."

"Well!"

"And I suspect that poor Dr Riccabocca fled his country from some mad experiment at revolution, and is still hiding from the Austrian police."

"But they can't hurt him here," said Frank, with an Englishman's dogged inborn conviction of the sanctity of his native island. "I should like to see an Austrian pretend to dictate to us whom to receive and whom to reject."

"Hum—that's true and constitutional, no doubt; but Riccabocca may have excellent reasons—and, to speak plainly, I know he has, (perhaps as affecting the safety of friends in Italy,)—for preserving his incognito, and we are bound to respect those reasons without inquiring further."

"Still, I cannot think so meanly of Madame di Negra," persisted Frank, (shrewd here, though credulous elsewhere, and both from his sense of honour,) "as to suppose that she would descend to be a spy, and injure a poor countryman of her own, who trusts to the same hospitality she receives herself at our English hands. Oh, if I thought that, I could not love her!" added Frank, with energy.

"Certainly you are right. But see in what a false position you would place both her brother and herself. If they knew Riccabocca's secret, and proclaimed it to the Austrian government, as you say, it would be cruel and mean; but, if they knew it and concealed, it might involve them both in the most serious consequences. You know the Austrian policy is proverbially so jealous and tyrannical?"

"Well, the newspapers say so, certainly."

"And, in short, your discretion can do no harm, and your indiscretion may. Therefore, give me your word, Frank. I can't stay to argue now."

"I'll not allude to the Riccaboccas, upon my honour," answered Frank; "still, I am sure that they would be as safe with the Marchesa as with"——

"I rely on your honour," interrupted Randal hastily, and hurried off.

CHAPTER V.

Towards the evening of the following day, Randal Leslie walked slowly from a village in the main road, (about two miles from Rood Hall,) at which he had got out of the coach. He passed through meads and corn-fields, 591 and by the skirts of woods which had formerly belonged to his ancestors, but had been long since alienated. He was alone amidst the haunts of his boyhood, the scenes in which he had first invoked the grand Spirit of Knowledge, to bid the Celestial Still One minister to the commands of an earthly and turbulent ambition. He paused often in his path, especially when the undulations of the ground gave a glimpse of the grey church tower, or the gloomy firs that rose above the desolate wastes of Rood.

"Here," thought Randal, with a softening eye—"here, how often, comparing the fertility of the lands passed away from the inheritance of my fathers, with the forlorn wilds that are left to their mouldering hall—here, how often have I said to myself—'I will rebuild the fortunes of my house.' And straightway Toil lost its aspect of drudge, and grew kingly, and books became as living armies to serve my thought. Again—again—O thou haughty Past, brace and strengthen me in the battle with the Future." His pale lips writhed as he soliloquised, for his conscience spoke to him while he thus addressed his will, and its voice was heard more audibly in the quiet of the rural landscape, than amidst the turmoil and din of that armed and sleepless camp which we call a city.

Doubtless, though Ambition have objects more vast and beneficent than the restoration of a name,—that in itself is high and chivalrous, and appeals to a strong interest in the human heart. But all emotions, and all ends, of a nobler character, had seemed to filter themselves free from every golden grain in passing through the mechanism of Randal's intellect, and came forth at last into egotism clear and unalloyed. Nevertheless, it is a strange truth that, to a man of cultivated mind, however perverted and vicious, there are vouchsafed gleams of brighter sentiments, irregular perceptions of moral beauty, denied to the brutal unreasoning wickedness of uneducated villany—which perhaps ultimately serve as his punishment—according to the old thought of the satirist, that there is no greater curse than to perceive virtue, yet adopt vice. And as the solitary schemer walked slowly on, and his childhood—innocent at least of deed—came distinct before him through the halo of bygone dreams—dreams far purer than those from which he now rose each morning to the active world of Man—a profound melancholy crept over him, and suddenly he exclaimed aloud, "Then I aspired to be renowned and great—now, how is it that, so advanced in my career, all that seemed lofty in the means has vanished from me, and the only means that I contemplate are those which my childhood would have called poor and vile? Ah! is it that I then read but books, and now my knowledge has passed onward, and men contaminate more than books? But," he continued, in a lower voice, as if arguing with himself, "if power is only so to be won—and of what use is knowledge if it be not power—does not success in life justify all things? And who prizes the wise man if he fails?" He continued his way, but still the soft tranquillity around rebuked him, and still his reason was dissatisfied, as well as his conscience. There are times when Nature, like a bath of youth, seems to restore to the jaded soul its freshness—times from which some men have emerged, as if reborn. The crises of life are very silent. Suddenly the scene opened on Randal Leslie's eyes. The bare desert common—the dilapidated church—the old house, partially seen in the dank dreary hollow, into which it seemed to Randal to have sunken deeper and lowlier than when he saw it last. And on the common were some young men playing at hockey. That old-fashioned game, now very uncommon in England, except at schools, was still preserved in the primitive vicinity of Rood by the young yeomen and farmers. Randal stood by the style and looked on, for among the players he recognised his brother Oliver. Presently the ball was struck towards Oliver, and the group instantly gathered round that young gentleman, and snatched him from Randal's eye; but the elder brother heard a displeasing din, a derisive laughter. Oliver had shrunk from the danger of the thick-clubbed sticks that plied around him, and received some stroke across the legs, 592 for his voice rose whining,and was drowned by shouts of, "Go to your mammy. That's Noll Leslie—all over. Butter shins."

Randal's sallow face became scarlet. "The jest of boors—a Leslie!" he muttered, and ground his teeth. He sprang over the stile, and walked erect and haughtily across the ground. The players cried out indignantly. Randal raised his hat, and they recognised him, and stopped the game. For him at least a certain respect was felt. Oliver turned round quickly, and ran up to him. Randal caught his arm firmly, and, without saying a word to the rest, drew him away towards the house. Oliver cast a regretful, lingering look behind him, rubbed his shins, and then stole a timid glance towards Randal's severe and moody countenance.

"You are not angry that I was playing at hockey with our neighbours," said he deprecatingly, observing that Randal would not break the silence.

"No," replied the elder brother; "but, in associating with his inferiors, a gentleman still knows how to maintain his dignity. There is no harm in playing with inferiors, but it is necessary to a gentleman to play so that he is not the laughing-stock of clowns."

Oliver hung his head, and made no answer. They came into the slovenly precincts of the court, and the pigs stared at them from the palings, as they had stared, years before, at Frank Hazeldean.

Mr Leslie senior, in a shabby straw hat, was engaged in feeding the chickens before the threshold, and he performed even that occupation with a maundering lack-a-daisical slothfulness, dropping down the grains almost one by one from his inert dreamy fingers.

Randal's sister, her hair still and for ever hanging about her ears, was seated on a rush-bottom chair, reading a tattered novel; and from the parlour window was heard the querulous voice of Mrs Leslie, in high fidget and complaint.

Somehow or other, as the young heir to all this helpless poverty stood in the courtyard, with his sharp, refined, intelligent features, and his strange elegance of dress and aspect, one better comprehended how, left solely to the egotism of his knowledge and his ambition, in such a family, and without any of the sweet nameless lessons of Home, he had grown up into such close and secret solitude of soul—how the mind had taken so little nutriment from the heart, and how that affection and respect which the warm circle of the hearth usually calls forth had passed with him to the graves of dead fathers, growing, as it were, bloodless and ghoul-like amidst the charnels on which they fed.

"Ha, Randal, boy," said Mr Leslie, looking up lazily, "how d'ye do? Who could have expected you? My dear—my dear," he cried, in a broken voice, and as if in helpless dismay, "here's Randal, and he'll be wanting dinner, or supper, or something." But, in the meanwhile, Randal's sister Juliet had sprung up and thrown her arms round her brother's neck, and he had drawn her aside caressingly, for Randal's strongest human affection was for this sister.

"You are growing very pretty, Juliet," said he, smoothing back her hair; "why do yourself such injustice—why not pay more attention to your appearance, as I have so often begged you to do?"

"I did not expect you, dear Randal; you always come so suddenly, and catch us en dish-a-bill."

"Dish-a-bill!" echoed Randal, with a groan. "Dishabille!—you ought never to be so caught!"

"No one else does so catch us—nobody else ever comes! Heigho," and the young lady sighed very heartily.

"Patience, patience; my day is coming, and then yours, my sister," replied Randal with genuine pity, as he gazed upon what a little care could have trained into so fair a flower, and what now looked so like a weed.

Here Mrs Leslie, in a state of intense excitement—having rushed through the parlour—leaving a fragment of her gown between the yawning brass of the never-mended Brummagem worktable—tore across the hall—whirled out of the door, scattering the chickens to the right and left, and clutched hold of Randal in her motherly embrace. "La, how you do shake my nerves," 593 she cried, after giving him a most hasty and uncomfortable kiss. "And you are hungry too, and nothing in the house but cold mutton! Jenny, Jenny, I say Jenny! Juliet, have you seen Jenny? Where's Jenny? Out with the odd man, I'll be bound."

"I am not hungry, mother," said Randal; "I wish for nothing but tea." Juliet, scrambling up her hair, darted into the house to prepare the tea, and also to "tidy herself." She dearly loved her fine brother, but she was greatly in awe of him.

Randal seated himself on the broken pales. "Take care they don't come down," said Mr Leslie with some anxiety.

"Oh, sir, I am very light; nothing comes down with me."

The pigs stared up, and grunted in amaze at the stranger.

"Mother," said the young man, detaining Mrs Leslie, who wanted to set off in chase of Jenny—"mother, you should not let Oliver associate with those village boors. It is time to think of a profession for him."

"Oh, he eats us out of house and home—such an appetite! But as to a profession—what is he fit for! He will never be a scholar."

Randal nodded a moody assent; for, indeed, Oliver had been sent to Cambridge, and supported there out of Randal's income from his official pay;—and Oliver had been plucked for his Little Go.

"There is the army," said the elder brother—"a gentleman's calling. How handsome Juliet ought to be—but—I left money for masters—and she pronounces French like a chambermaid."

"Yet she is fond of her book too. She's always reading, and good for nothing else."

"Reading!—those trashy novels!

"So like you—you always come to scold, and make things unpleasant," said Mrs Leslie peevishly. "You are grown too fine for us, and I am sure we suffer affronts enough from others, not to want a little respect from our own children."

"I did not mean to affront you," said Randal sadly. "Pardon me. But who else has done so?"

Then Mrs Leslie went into a minute and most irritating catalogue of all the mortifications and insults she had received; the grievances of a petty provincial family, with much pretension and small power; of all people, indeed, without the disposition to please—without the ability to serve—who exaggerate every offence, and are thankful for no kindness. Farmer Jones had insolently refused to send his waggon twenty miles for coals. Mr Giles, the butcher, requesting the payment of his bill, had stated that the custom at Rood was too small for him to allow credit. Squire Thornhill, who was the present owner of the fairest slice of the old Leslie domains, had taken the liberty to ask permission to shoot over Mr Leslie's land, since Mr Leslie did not preserve. Lady Spratt (new people from the city, who hired a neighbouring country seat) had taken a discharged servant of Mrs Leslie's without applying for the character. The Lord-Lieutenant had given a ball, and had not invited the Leslies. Mr Leslie's tenants had voted against their landlord's wish at the recent election. More than all, Squire Hazeldean and his Harry had called at Rood, and though Mrs Leslie had screamed out to Jenny, "Not at home," she had been seen at the window, and the Squire had actually forced his way in, and caught the whole family "in a state not fit to be seen." That was a trifle, but the Squire had presumed to instruct Mr. Leslie how to manage his property, and Mrs Hazeldean had actually told Juliet to hold up her head and tie up her hair, "as if we were her cottagers!" said Mrs Leslie with the pride of a Montfydget.

All these and various other annoyances, though Randal was too sensible not to perceive their insignificance, still galled and mortified the listening heir of Rood. They showed, at least, even to the well-meant officiousness of the Hazeldeans, the small account in which the fallen family was held. As he sat still on the moss-grown pale, gloomy and taciturn, his mother standing beside him, with her cap awry, Mr Leslie shamblingly sauntered up, and said in a pensive, dolorous whine—

"I wish we had a good sum of money, Randal, boy!" 594

To do Mr Leslie justice, he seldom gave vent to any wish that savoured of avarice. His mind must be singularly aroused, to wander out of its normal limits of sluggish, dull content.

So Randal looked at him in surprise, and said, "Do you, sir?—why?"

"The manors of Rood and Dulmansberry, and all the lands therein, which my great-grandfather sold away, are to be sold again when Squire Thornhill's eldest son comes of age, to cut off the entail. Sir John Spratt talks of buying them. I should like to have them back again! 'Tis a shame to see the Leslie estates hawked about, and bought by Spratts and people. I wish I had a great—great sum of ready-money."

The poor gentleman extended his helpless fingers as he spoke, and fell into a dejected reverie.

Randal sprang from the paling, a movement which frightened the contemplative pigs, and set them off squalling and scampering. "When does young Thornhill come of age?"

"He was nineteen last August. I know it, because the day lie was born I picked up my fossil of the sea-horse, just by Dulmansberry church, when the joy-bells were ringing. My fossil sea-horse! It Will be an heirloom, Randal—"

"Two years—nearly two years—yet—ah, ah!" said Randal; and his sister now appearing to announce that tea was ready, he threw his arm round her neck and kissed her. Juliet had arranged her hair and trimmed up her dress. She looked very pretty, and she had now the air of a gentlewoman—something of Randal's own refinement in her slender proportions and well-shaped head.

"Be patient, patient still, my dear sister," whispered Randal, "and keep your heart whole for two years longer."

The young man was gay and good-humoured over his simple meal, while his family grouped round him. When it was over, Mr Leslie lighted his pipe, and called for his brandy and water. Mrs Leslie began to question about London and Court, and the new King and the new Queen, and Mr Audley Egerton, and hoped Mr Egerton would leave Randal all his money, and that Randal would marry a rich woman, and that the King would make him a prime-minister one of these days; and then she should like to see if Farmer Jones would refuse to send his waggon for coals! And every now and then, as the word "riches" or "money" caught Mr Leslie's ear, he shook his head, drew his pipe from his mouth, and muttered, "A Spratt should not have what belonged to my great-great-grandfather. If I had a good sum of ready-money!—the old family estates!" Oliver and Juliet sate silent, and on their good behaviour; and Randal, indulging his own reveries, dreamily heard the words "money," "Spratt," "great-great-grandfather," "rich wife," "family estates;" and they sounded to him vague and afar off, like whispers from the world of romance and legend—weird prophecies of things to be.

Such was the hearth which warmed the viper that nestled and gnawed at the heart of Randal, poisoning all the aspirations that youth should have rendered pure, ambition lofty, and knowledge beneficent and divine.

CHAPTER VI.

When the rest of the household were in deep sleep, Randal stood long at his open window, looking over the dreary, comfortless scene—the moon gleaming from skies half-autumnal, half-wintry, upon squalid decay, through the ragged fissures of the firs; and when he lay down to rest, his sleep was feverish, and troubled by turbulent dreams.

However, he was up early, and with an unwonted colour in his cheeks, which his sister ascribed to the country air. After breakfast, he took his way towards Hazeldean, mounted upon a tolerable horse, which he hired of a neighbouring farmer who occasionally hunted. Before noon, the garden and terrace of the Casino came in sight. He reined in his horse, and by the 595 little fountain at which Leonard had been wont to eat his radishes and con his book, he saw Riccabocca seated under the shade of the red umbrella. And by the Italian's side stood a form that a Greek of old might have deemed the Naiad of the Fount; for in its youthful beauty there was something so full of poetry—something at once so sweet and so stately—that it spoke to the imagination while it charmed the sense.

Randal dismounted, tied his horse to the gate, and, walking down a trellised alley, came suddenly to the spot. His dark shadow fell over the clear mirror of the fountain just as Riccabocca had said, "All here is so secure from evil!—the waves of the fountain are never troubled like those of the river!" and Violante had answered in her soft native tongue, and lifting her dark, spiritual eyes—"But the fountain would be but a lifeless pool, oh my father, if the spray did not mount towards the skies!"

THE MASTER THIEF.
A NORSE POPULAR TALE.

On a gloomy autumn evening I sat alone with the "proprietor," to whose children I was then tutor, in his country house, about twenty miles from Christiania. Out of doors something was falling which was neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, but a mixture of all three; and inside, in the "proprietor's" parlour, the lights burned so sluggishly, that no other objects were discernible through the haze than a corner cupboard, filled with Chinese nick-nacks, a great mirror in an old-fashioned gilt frame, and a hereditary tankard, the reward of one of the proprietor's ancestors for service rendered to the state. That worthy individual had nestled himself into one corner of the sofa, where he pored over the proof-sheets of his pamphlet, entitled, "A few Patriotic Expressions for the Country's Good; by an Anonymous Writer."

While brooding over this gold mine of his own ideas he gave birth to many sagacious thoughts, which, from time to time, with a twinkle of his grey eyes, he threw out for my edification, as I sat and tried to read in the other corner of the sofa. After a while, warming with his theme, he poured out a host of "patriotic expressions" and opinions, worthy of all respect, but of which nothing save the pamphlet quoted above, or his great Treatise on Tithe, can give an adequate idea. I am ashamed to own that all this wisdom was lost upon me. I knew it all by heart, for I had heard the same story forty times at least before. I am not gifted with a patience of Indian-rubber; but what could I do? Retreat to my own room was impossible, for it had been scoured for Sunday, and was full of reek and damp. So, after some fruitless attempts to bury myself in my book, I was forced to give in, and to suffer myself to be carried along in the troubled stream of the proprietor's eloquence. Of course he dilated on questions of profound national importance, which he furbished up with all sorts of cut-and-dried figures of speech. He was now fairly on his hobby, and rose rapidly to the seventh heaven. He stood up and gesticulated; then he strode up and down, and his grey dressing-gown described streaming circles behind him, as he turned short round, and limped backwards and forwards on his spindle-shanks,—for, like Tyrtæus, the proprietor had a strong halt. The candles flared, flickered, and guttered, as he passed triumphantly by the table on which they stood; and his winged words sung in my ears like humble-bees when the linden-trees are in bloom. Off he went on "Class Legislation" and "Judicial Reform," on "Corn Laws and Free Trade," on "Native Industry and Centralisation," on the "Victorious progress of Ideas," and the "Insufficiency of our Circulating Medium," on "Bureaucracy," and the "Aristocracy of Office," till he bid fair to exhaust all the 596 cracies, archies, and isms that ever existed, from King Solomon to the present time.

Mortal man could hold out no longer, and I was just on the point of bursting out into a roar of laughter in the worthy proprietor's face, when peal after peal of laughter resounded from the kitchen, and came to my rescue. It was Christian the blacksmith who had the word in that quarter of the house, and when he ceased speaking, repeated roars of mirth followed.

"I'll just go out and hear some of the smith's stories," I cried as I ran out, leaving the proprietor behind in the parlour with the dull candles and his drowsy current of thought.

"Children's prate and lying stories," growled the proprietor as I shut the door. "People of intelligence should be ashamed to listen to them; but well-meant patriotic expressions—" The rest was lost upon me.

Light and life and mirth streamed forth in the high and airy hall; on the hearth blazed a pile of logs, which threw a strong light into the furthest nook. In the chimney-corner sat enthroned the proprietor's housekeeper with her spinning-wheel; and though for many years she had had hard struggles with the rheumatism, and barricaded the enemy out with a multitude of undercoats and kirtles, throwing over all, as an outwork, a huge grey woollen wrapper, yet her face shone under her plaited cap like the full moon. At her feet lay the proprietor's children laughing and cracking nuts; while round about sat a circle of maids and workmen's wives, who trode their spinning-wheels with busy feet, or plied the noisy carding-comb. In the entrance the threshers shook off the snow from their feet, and stepping in with icicles in their hair, sat down at the long table, where the cook served up to them their supper—a bowl of milk and a dish of close-pressed porridge. Against the high chimney-piece leant the smith, who smoked tobacco from a short pipe, and whose face, while it showed traces of the smithy, bore an expression of dry humour, which testified that he had been telling a good story, and telling it well.

"Good afternoon, smith," said I; "what story have you been telling which aroused so much laughter?"

"Ha, ha!" shouted the boys, "Christian has been telling us all about the 'Devil and the Smith,' and how the smith got the fiend into a hazel-nut; and now he's going to tell us about the Master Thief, and how he won the Squire's daughter."

"Well, don't let me stop the story, smith," I replied, only too glad to escape for a while from the proprietor with his "Patriotic Expressions," his "Corn Laws and Free Trade," his "Circulating Mediums and Bureaucracies," and to refresh myself with hearing one of these old national tales, told in a simple childish way by one of the people.

So after one or two long-drawn puffs, the Smith began

THE MASTER THIEF.

Once upon a time there was a poor cottager who had three sons. He had nothing to leave them when he died, and no money with which to put them to any trade, so that he did not know what to make of them. At last he said he would give them leave to take to anything each liked best, and to go whithersoever they pleased, and he would go with them a bit of the way; and so he did. He went with them till they came to a place where three roads met, and there each of them chose a road, and their father bade them good-bye, and went back home. I have never heard tell what became of the two elder; but as for the youngest, he went both far and long, as you shall hear.

So it fell out one night as he was going through a great wood that such bad weather overtook him. It blew and drizzled so that he could scarce keep his eyes open; and in a trice, before he knew how it was, he got bewildered, and could not find either road or path. But as he went on and on, at last he saw a glimmering of light far far off in the wood. So he thought he would try and get to the light; 597 and after a time he did reach it. There it was in a large house, and the fire was blazing so brightly inside that he could tell the folk had not yet gone to bed; so he went in and saw an old dame bustling about and minding the house.

"Good evening," said the youth.

"Good evening," said the old dame.

"Hutetu! it's such foul weather out of doors to-night," said he.

"So it is," said she.

"Can I get leave to have a bed and shelter here to-night?" asked the youth.

"You'll get no good by sleeping here," said the old dame; "for if the folk come home and find you here, they'll kill both me and you."

"What sort of folk, then, are they who live here?" asked the youth.

"Oh, robbers! And such a bad lot of them too," said the old dame. "They stole me away when I was little, and have kept me as their housekeeper ever since."

"Well, for all that, I think I'll just go to bed," said the youth. "Come what may, I'll not stir out at night in such weather."

"Very well," said the old dame; "but if you stay it will be the worse for you."

With that the youth got into a bed which stood there, but he dared not go to sleep, and very soon after in came the robbers; so the old dame told them how a stranger fellow had come in whom she had not been able to get out of the house again.

"Did you see if he had any money?" said the robbers.

"Such a one as he money!" said the old dame, "the tramper! Why, if he had clothes to his back, it was as much as he had."

Then the robbers began to talk among themselves what they should do with him; if they should kill him outright, or what else they should do. Meantime the youth got up and began to talk to them, and to ask if they did not want a servant, for it might be that he would be glad to enter into their service.

"Oh," said they, "if you have a mind to follow the trade that we follow, you can very well get a place here."

"It's all one to me what trade I follow," said the youth; "for when I left home, father gave me leave to take to any trade I chose."

"Well, have you a mind to steal?" asked the robbers.

"I don't care," said the youth, for he thought it would not take long to learn that trade.

Now there lived a man a little way off who had three oxen. One of these he was to take to the town to sell, and the robbers had heard what he was going to do, so they said to the youth, that if he were good to steal the ox from the man by the way without his knowing it, and without doing him any harm, they would give him leave to be their serving man.

Well! the youth set off, and took with him a pretty shoe, with a silver buckle on it, which lay about the house; and he put the shoe in the road along which the man was going with his ox; and when he had done that, he went into the wood and hid himself under a bush. So when the man came by he saw the shoe at once.

"That's a nice shoe," said he. "If I only had the fellow to it, I'd take it home with me, and perhaps I'd put my old dame into a good humour for once." For you must know that he had an old wife, so cross and snappish that it was not long between each time that she boxed his ears. But then he bethought him that he could do nothing with the odd shoe unless he had the fellow to it; so he went on his way and let the shoe lie on the road.

Then the youth took up the shoe, and made all the haste he could to get before the man by a short cut through the wood, and laid it down before him in the road again. When the man came along with his ox he got quite angry with himself for being so stupid as to leave the fellow to the shoe lying in the road instead of taking it with him; so he tied the ox to the fence, and said to himself, "I may just as well run back and pick up the other, and then I'll have a pair of good shoes for my old dame, and so, perhaps, I'll get a kind word from her for once."

So he set off, and hunted and hunted up and down for the shoe, but no shoe did he find; and at length he had to go back with the one he had. But, meanwhile, the youth had 598 taken the ox and gone off with it; and when the man came and saw that his ox was gone, he began to cry and bewail, for he was afraid that his old dame would kill him outright when she came to know that the ox was lost. But just then it came across his mind that he would go home and take the second ox, and drive it to the town, and not let the old dame know anything about the matter. So he did this, and went home and took the ox without his dame's knowing it, and set off with it to the town. But the robbers knew all about it, and they said to the youth, if he could get this ox too, without the man's knowing it, and without his doing him any harm, he should be as good as any one of them. If that were all, the youth said, he did not think it a very hard thing.

This time he took with him a rope, and hung himself up under the armpits to a tree right in the man's way. So the man came along with his ox, and when he saw such a sight hanging there he began to feel a little queer.

"Well," said he, "whatever heavy thoughts you had who have hanged yourself up there, it can't be helped; you may hang for what I care! I can't breathe life into you again;" and with that he went on his way with his ox. Down slipped the youth from the tree, and ran by a footpath, and got before the man, and hung himself up right in his way again.

"Bless me!" said the man, "were you really so heavy at heart that you hanged yourself up there—or is it only a piece of witchcraft that I see before me? Ay, ay! you may hang for all I care, whether you are a ghost or whatever you are." So he passed on with his ox.

Now the youth did just as he had done twice before; he jumped down from the tree, ran through the wood by a footpath, and hung himself up right in the man's way again. But when the man saw this sight for the third time, he said to himself,—

"Well! this is an ugly business! Is it likely now that they should have been so heavy at heart as to hang themselves, all these three? No! I cannot think that it is anything else than a piece of witchcraft that I see. But now I'll soon know for certain: if the other two are still hanging there, it must be really so; but if they are not, then it can be nothing but witchcraft that I see."

So he tied up his ox, and ran back to see if the others were still really hanging there. But while he went and peered up into all the trees, the youth jumped down and took his ox and ran off with it. When the man came back and found his ox gone, he was in a sad plight, and, as any one might know without being told, he began to cry and bemoan; but at last he came to take it easier, and so he thought—

"There's no other help for it than to go home and take the third ox without my dame's knowing it, and to try and drive a good bargain with it, so that I may get a good sum of money for it."

So he went home and set off with the ox, and his old dame knew never a word about the matter. But the robbers, they knew all about it, and they said to the youth, that, if he could steal this ox as he had stolen the other two, then he should be master over the whole band. Well, the youth set off, and ran into the wood; and as the man came by with his ox he set up a dreadful bellowing, just like a great ox in the wood. When the man heard that, you can't think how glad he was, for it seemed to him that he knew the voice of his big bullock, and he thought that now he should find both of them again; so he tied up the third ox, and ran off from the road to look for them in the wood; but meantime the youth went off with the third ox. Now, when the man came back and found he had lost this ox too, he was so wild that there was no end to his grief. He cried and roared and beat his breast, and, to tell the truth, it was many days before he dared go home; for he was afraid lest his old dame should kill him outright on the spot.

As for the robbers, they were not very well pleased either, when they had to own that the youth was master over the whole band. So one day they thought they would try their hands at something which he 599 was not man enough to do; and they set off all together, every man Jack of them, and left him alone at home. Now, the first thing that he did when they were all well clear of the house, was to drive the oxen out to the road, so that they might run back to the man from whom he had stolen them; and right glad he was to see them, as you may fancy. Next he took all the horses which the robbers had, and loaded them with the best things he could lay his hands on—gold and silver, and clothes and other fine things; and then he bade the old dame to greet the robbers when they came back, and to thank them for him, and to say that now he was setting off on his travels, and that they would have hard work to find him again; and with that, off he started.

After a good bit he came to the road along which he was going when he fell among the robbers; and when he got near home, and could see his father's cottage, he put on a uniform which he had found among the clothes he had taken from the robbers, and which was made just like a general's. So he drove up to the door as if he were any other great man. After that he went in and asked if he could have a lodging? No; that he couldn't at any price.

"How ever should I be able," said the man, "to make room in my house for such a fine gentleman—I who scarce have a rag to lie upon, and miserable rags too?"

"You were always a stingy old hunks," said the youth, "and so you are still, when you won't take your own son in."

"What, you my son!" said the man.

"Don't you know me again?" said the youth. Well, after a little while he did know him again.

"But what have you been turning your hand to, that you have made yourself so great a man in such haste?" asked the man.

"Oh, I'll soon tell you," said the youth. "You said I might take to any trade I chose, and so I bound myself apprentice to some thieves and robbers, and now I've served my time out, and am become a Master Thief."

Now there lived a Squire close by to his father's cottage, and he had such a great house, and such heaps of money, that he could not tell how much he had. He had a daughter too, and a smart and pretty girl she was. So the Master Thief set his heart upon having her to wife; and he told his father to go to the Squire and ask for his daughter for him.

"If he asks by what trade I get my living, you can say I am a Master Thief."

"I think you've lost your wits," said the man, "for you can't be in your right mind when you think of such nonsense."

No! he had not lost his wits; his father must and should go up to the Squire and ask for his daughter.

"Nay, but I tell you, I daren't go to the Squire and be your spokesman; he who is so rich, and has so much money," said the man.

Yes, there was no help for it, said the Master Thief; he should go whether he would or no; and if he did not go by fair means, he would soon make him go by foul. But the man was still loath to go; so he stepped after him, and rubbed him down with a good birch cudgel, and kept on till the man came crying and sobbing inside the Squire's door.

How now, my man! What ails you? said the Squire.

So he told him the whole story; how he had three sons who set off one day, and how he had given them leave to go whithersoever they would, and to follow whatever calling they chose. "And here now is the youngest come home, and has beaten me till he has made me come to you and ask for your daughter for him to wife; and he bids me say, besides, that he is a Master Thief." And so he fell to crying and sobbing again.

"Never mind, my man," said the Squire, laughing; "just go back and tell him from me, that he must prove his skill first. If he can steal the roast from the spit in the kitchen on Sunday, while all the household are looking after it, he shall have my daughter. Just go and tell him that."

So he went back and told the youth, who thought it would be an easy job. So he set about and 600 caught three hares alive, and put them into a bag, and dressed himself in some old rags, until he looked so poor and filthy that it made one's heart bleed to see; and then he sneaked into the passage at the backdoor of the Squire's house on the Sunday forenoon, with his bag, just like any other beggar-boy. But the Squire himself and all his household were in the kitchen watching the roast. Just as they were doing this, the youth let one hare go, and it set of and ran round and round the yard in front of the house.

"Oh, just look at that hare!" said the folk in the kitchen, and were all for running out to catch it.

Yes, the Squire saw it running too. "Oh, let it run," said he; "there's no use in thinking to catch a hare by running after it."

A little while after, the youth let the second hare go, and they saw it in the kitchen, and thought it was the same they had seen before, and still wanted to run out and catch it; but the Squire said again it was no use. It was not long before the youth let the third hare go, and it set off and ran round and round the yard as the others before it. Now, they saw it from the kitchen, and still thought it was the same hare that kept on running about, and were all eager to be out after it.

"Well, it is a fine hare," said the Squire; "come, let's see if we can't lay our hands on it."

So out he ran, and the rest with him—away they all went, the hare before, and they after; so that it was rare fun to see. But meantime the youth took the roast and ran of with it; and where the Squire got a roast for his dinner that day I don't know; but one thing I know, and that is, that he had no roast hare, though he ran after it till he was both warm and weary.

Now it chanced that the Priest came to dinner that day, and when the Squire told him what a trick the Master Thief had played him, he made such game of him that there was no end to it.

"For my part," said the Priest, "I can't think how it could ever happen to me to be made such a fool of by a fellow like that."

"Very well—only keep a sharp look-out," said the Squire; "maybe he'll come to see you before you know a word of it." But the Priest stuck to his text,—that he did, and made game of the Squire because he had been so taken in.

Later in the afternoon came the Master Thief, and wanted to have the Squire's daughter, as he had given his word. But the Squire began to talk him over, and said, "Oh, you must first prove your skill a little more; for what you did to-day was no great thing, after all. Couldn't you now play off a good trick on the Priest, who is sitting in there, and making game of me for letting such a fellow as you twist me round his thumb."

"Well, as for that, it wouldn't be hard," said the Master Thief. So he dressed himself up like a bird, threw a great white sheet over his body, took the wings of a goose and tied them to his back, and so climbed up into a great maple which stood in the Priest's garden. And when the Priest came home in the evening, the youth began to bawl out—

"Father Laurence! Father Laurence!"—for that was the Priest's name.

"Who is that calling me?" said the Priest.

"I am an angel," said the Master Thief, "sent from God to let you know that you shall be taken up alive into heaven for your piety's sake. Next Monday you must hold yourself ready for the journey, for I shall come then to fetch you in a sack; and all your gold and your silver, and all that you have of this world's goods, you must lay together in a heap in your dining-room."

Well, Father Laurence fell on his knees before the angel, and thanked him; and the very next day he preached a farewell sermon, and expounded how there had come down an angel unto the big maple in his garden, who had told him that he was to be taken up alive into heaven for his piety's sake; and he preached and made such a touching discourse, that all who were at church wept, both young and old.

So the Monday after came the Master Thief like an angel again, and 601 the Priest fell on his knees and thanked him before he was put into the sack; but when he had got him well in, the Master Thief drew and dragged him over stocks and stones.

"Ow! ow!" groaned the Priest inside the sack, "wherever are we going!"

"This is the narrow way which leadeth unto the kingdom of heaven," said the Master Thief, who went on dragging him along till he had nearly broken every bone in his body. At last he tumbled him into a goose-house that belonged to the Squire, and the geese began pecking and pinching him with their bills, so that he was more dead that alive.

"Now you are in the flames of purgatory, to be cleansed and purified for life everlasting," said the Master Thief; and with that he went his way, and took all the gold and silver, and all the fine things which the Priest had laid together in his dining-room. The next morning, when the goose-girl came to let the geese out, she heard how the priest lay in the sack and bemoaned himself in the goose-house.

"In heaven's name, who's there, and what ails you?" she cried. "Oh!" said the Priest, "if you are an angel from heaven, do let me out, and let me return again to earth, for it is worse here than in hell. The little fiends keep on pinching me with tongs."

"God help us, I am no angel at all," said the girl as she helped the Priest out of the sack; "I only look after the Squire's geese, and like enough they are the little fiends which have pinched your reverence."

"Oh!" groaned the Priest, "this is all that Master Thief's doing. Ah! my gold and my silver, and my fine clothes." And he beat his breast, and hobbled home at such a rate that the girl thought he had lost his wits all at once.

Now when the Squire came to hear how it had gone with the Priest, and how he had been along the narrow way, and into purgatory, he laughed till he wellnigh split his sides. But when the Master Thief came and asked for his daughter as he had promised, the Squire put him off again, and said—

"You must do one masterpiece better still, that I may see plainly what you are fit for. Now I have twelve horses in my stable, and on them I will put twelve grooms, one on each. If you are so good a thief as to steal the horses from under them, I'll see what I can do for you."

"Very well, I daresay I can do it," said the Master Thief; "but shall I really have your daughter if I can?"

"Yes, if you can, I'll do my best for you," said the Squire.

So the Master Thief set off to a shop, and bought brandy enough to fill two pocket-flasks, and into one of them he put a sleepy drink, but into the other only brandy. After that he hired eleven men to lie in wait at night, behind the Squire's stableyard; and last of all, for fair words and a good bit of money, he borrowed a ragged gown and cloak from an old woman; and so, with a staff in his hand and a bundle at his back, he limped off, as evening drew on towards the Squire's stable. Just as he got there they were watering the horses for the night, and had their hands full of work.

"What the devil do you want?" said one of the grooms to the old woman.

"Oh, oh! hutetu! it is so bitter cold," said she, and shivered and shook, and made wry faces. "Hutetu! it is so cold, a poor wretch may easily freeze to death;" and with that she fell to shivering and shaking again.

"Oh! for the love of heaven, can I get leave to stay here a while, and sit inside the stable door?"

"To the devil with your leave," said one. "Pack yourself off this minute, for if the Squire sets his eye on you he'll lead us a pretty dance."

"Oh! the poor old bag-of-bones," said another, who seemed to take pity on her, "the old hag may sit inside and welcome; such a one as she can do no harm."

And the rest said, some she should stay, and some she shouldn't; but while they were quarrelling and minding the horses, she crept further and further into the stable, till at last she sat herself down behind the door; and when she had got so far, no one gave any more heed to her.

As the night wore on, the men 602 found it rather cold work to sit so still and quiet on horseback.

"Hutetu! it is so devilish cold," said one, and beat his arms crosswise.

"That it is," said another. "I freeze so, that my teeth chatter."

"If one only had a quid to chew," said a third.

Well! there was one who had an ounce or two; so they shared it between them, though it wasn't much, after all, that each got; and so they chewed and spat, and spat and chewed. This helped them somewhat; but in a little while they were just as bad as ever.

"Hutetu!" said one, and shivered and shook.

"Hutetu!" said the old woman, and shivered so, that every tooth in her head chattered. Then she pulled out the flask with brandy in it, and her hand shook so that the spirit splashed about in the flask, and then she took such a gulf, that it went "bop" in her throat.

"What is that you've got in your flask, old girl?" said one of the grooms.

"Oh! it's only a drop of brandy, old man," said she.

"Brandy! Well, I never! Do let me have a drop," screamed the whole twelve, one after another.

"Oh! but it is such a little drop," mumbled the old woman, "it will not even wet your mouths round." But they must and would have it; there was no help for it; and so she pulled out the flask with the sleeping drink in it, and put it to the first man's lips; then she shook no more, but guided the flask so that each of them got what he wanted, and the twelfth had not done drinking before the first sat and snored. Then the Master Thief threw off his beggar's rags, and took one groom after the other so softly off their horses, and set them astride on the beams between the stalls; and so he called his eleven men, and rode off with the Squire's twelve horses.

But when the Squire got up in the morning, and went to look after his grooms, they had just begun to come to; and some of them fell to spurring the beams with their spurs, till the splinters flew again, and some fell off, and some still hung on and sat there looking like fools.

"Ho! ho!" said the Squire; "I see very well who has been here; but as for you, a pretty set of blockheads you must be to sit here and let the Master Thief steal the horses from between your legs."

So they all got a good leathering because they had not kept a sharper look-out.

Further on in the day came the Master Thief again, and told how he had managed the matter, and asked for the Squire's daughter, as he had promised; but the Squire gave him one hundred dollars down, and said he must do something better still.

"Do you think now," said he, "you can steal the horse from under me while I am out riding on his back?"

"O, yes! I daresay I could," said the Master Thief, "if I were really sure of getting your daughter."

Well, well, the Squire would see what he could do; and he told the Master Thief a day when he would be taking a ride on a great common where they drilled the troops. So the Master Thief soon got hold of an old worn-out jade of a mare, and set to work, and made traces and collar of withies and broom-twigs, and bought an old beggarly cart and a great cask. After that he said to an old beggar woman, that he would give her ten dollars if she would get in the cask, and keep her mouth agape over the taphole, into which he was going to stick his finger. No harm should happen to her; she should only be driven about a little; and if he took his finger out more than once, she was to have ten dollars more. Then he threw a few rags and tatters over himself, and stuffed himself out, and put on a wig and a great beard of goat's hair, so that no one could know him again, and set off for the common, where the Squire had already been riding about a good bit. When he reached the place, he went along so softly and slowly that he scarce made an inch of way. Gee up! Gee up! and so he went on little; then he stood stock still, and so on a little again; and altogether the pace was so miserable that it never once came 603 into the Squire's head that this could be the Master Thief.

At last the Squire rode right up to him, and asked if he had seen any one lurking about in the wood thereabouts.

"No," said the man, "I haven't seen a soul."

"Harkye, now," said the Squire, "if you have a mind to ride into the wood, and hunt about and see if you can fall upon any one lurking about there, you shall have the loan of my horse, and a shilling into the bargain, to drink my health, for your pains."

"I don't see how I can go," said the man, "for I am going to a wedding with this cask of mead, which I have been to town to fetch, and here the tap has fallen out by the way, and so I must go along, holding my finger in the taphole.

"Ride off," said the Squire; "I'll look after your horse and cask."

Well, on these terms the man was willing to go; but he begged the Squire to be quick in putting his finger into the taphole when he took his own out, and to mind and keep it there till he came back. Yes, the Squire would do the best he could; and so the Master Thief mounted the horse and rode off. But time went by, and hour after hour passed, and still no one came back. At last the Squire grew weary of standing there with his finger in the taphole, so he took it out.

"Now I shall have ten dollars more!" screamed the old woman inside the cask; and then the Squire saw at once how the land lay, and took himself off home; but he had not gone far before they met him with a fresh horse, for the Master Thief had already been to his house, and told them to send one.

The day after, he came to the Squire and would have his daughter, as he had given his word; but the Squire put him off again with fine words, and gave him two hundred dollars, and said he must do one more masterpiece. If he could do that, he should have her. Well, well, the Master Thief thought he could do it, if he only knew what it was to be.

"Do you think, now," said the Squire, "you can steal the sheet off our bed, and the shift off my wife's back. Do you think you could do that?"

"It shall be done," said the Master Thief. "I only wish I was as sure, of getting your daughter."

So when night began to fall, the Master Thief went out and cut down a thief who hung on the gallows, and threw him across his shoulders, and carried him off. Then he got a long ladder and set it up against the Squire's bedroom window, and so climbed up, and kept bobbing the dead man up and down, just for all the world like one who was peeping in at the window.

"That's the Master Thief, old lass!" said the Squire, and gave his wife a nudge on the side. "Now see if I don't shoot him, that's all."

So saying he took up a rifle which he had laid at his bedside.

"No! no! pray don't shoot him after telling him he might come and try," said his wife.

"Don't talk to me, for shoot him I will," said he; and so he lay there and aimed and aimed; but as soon as the head came up before the window, and he saw a little of it, so soon was it down again. At last he thought he had a good aim; "bang" went the gun, down fell the dead body to the ground with a heavy thump, and down went the Master Thief too as fast as he could.

"Well," said the Squire, "it is quite true that I am the chief magistrate in these parts; but people are fond of talking, and it would be a bore if they came to see this dead man's body. I think the best thing to be done is that I should go down and bury him."

"You must do as you think best, dear," said his wife. So the Squire got out of bed and went down stairs, and he had scarce put his foot out of the door before the Master Thief stole in, and went straight up-stairs to his wife.

"Why, dear, back already!" said she, for she thought it was her husband.

"Oh yes, I only just put him into a hole, and threw a little earth over him. It is enough that he is out of sight, for it is such a bad night out of 604 doors; by-and-by I'll do it better. But just let me have the sheet to wipe myself with—he was so bloody—and I have made myself in such a mess with him."

So he got the sheet.

After a while he said—

"Do you know I am afraid you must let me have your night-shift too, for the sheet won't do by itself; that I can see."

So she gave him the shift also. But just then it came across his mind that he had forgotten to lock the house-door, so he must step down and look to that before he came back to bed, and away he went with both shift and sheet.

A little while after came the right Squire.

"Why! what a time you've taken to lock the door, dear!" said his wife; "and what have you done with the sheet and shift?"

"What do you say?" said the Squire.

"Why, I am asking what you have done with the sheet and shift that you had to wipe off the blood," said she.

"What, in the devil's name!" said the Squire, "has he taken me in this time too?"

Next day came the Master Thief and asked for the Squire's daughter as he had promised; and then the Squire dared not do anything else than give her to him, and a good lump of money into the bargain; for, to tell the truth, he was afraid lest the Master Thief should steal the eyes out of his head, and that people would begin to say spiteful things of him if he broke his word. So the Master Thief lived well and happily from that time forward. I don't know whether he stole any more; but if he did, I am quite sure it was only for the sake of a bit of fun.

DAY-DREAMS OF AN EXILE.

V.
Air—"O Cara Memoria."

"I perceive that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his own works, for that is his portion."—Eccles. iii. 22.

605

VI.
TO ——,

VII.

606

VIII.

IX.
COLONISATION.
(I.)

(II.)

H. G. K.
India, 1851.

607

AUTUMN POLITICS.

Rarely, during the autumnal season of the year, is any very vivid interest displayed in political matters. This is both natural and wholesome. The soldier, after a hard campaign, requires rest and recreation; and those whose destiny it is to occupy themselves with public affairs and their conduct, are all the better for a short respite from these absorbing toils. So, after the close of the Parliamentary Session, our legislators betake themselves to the provinces or the Continent, to the skirts of Ben Nevis, or to the sequestered valleys of Switzerland, with all the glee of schoolboys who have escaped from the magisterial yoke. Who can blame them? The mountain breeze is assuredly more fresh and salubrious than the loaded atmosphere of St Stephen's; the sound of the purling brook is more grateful to the ear than the croakings of Joseph Hume; and the details of a restaurant's bill of fare more interesting than the ingenious statistics of Mr Wilson of Westbury. Nobody is sorry when the clattering of the great machine of Parliament is silenced. It is bad enough to be compelled to peruse the debates during the months of winter and spring, without continuing the ordeal throughout the rest of the year. We cannot live always in a state of excitement. Scully and Keogh are splendid and soul-searching orators; but we would as lieve submit to have all our dishes seasoned with ether, as allow our nerves to be daily agitated by the roll of their irresistible eloquence. We love John Bright, and are fascinated by the humour of Fox, yet we can find it in our hearts to part company with them for a season. In autumn the towns are torpid. Every one who can, endeavours to escape from them; and to judge from the hurry on rail and river, you would conclude that at least one-half of the population of these islands is on the move. Subjects which a few months before engrossed the public attention are now mentioned with a luxurious languor, and never ardently discussed. Few people know or care what Cardinal Wiseman may be doing. A porter with a load of grouse is a more interesting object than Lord John Russell, even were he laden with the draught of his new Reform Bill; and it is a matter of total indifference to the million whether Earl Grey has gone to Howick or to Kamschatka. The only class of men who remain indefatigably political are the popularity hunters, more especially such of them as require a little coopering for their somewhat leaky reputations. Old Joe sets off on a reforming tour to the northern burghs, hoping here and there to pick up a stray burgess ticket. Sir James Graham will go any distance to receive the hug of fraternity from a provost, and to add to his chaplet such fresh leaves of laurel as are in the gift of a generous town council. Lord Palmerston undertakes to keep the electors of Tiverton in good humour, and favours them with a funny discourse upon all manner of topics, excepting always the projected measure of reform, on which he judiciously keeps his thumb. These, however, are mere interludes, and few people care about them. Most sincerely to be pitied, at this season of the year, is the condition of the London journalists. However scanty be the crop of events, however dry the channels of public interest, they must find subjects for their leaders. Each day there is a yawning gap of white paper to be filled; a topic to be selected and discussed; and an insatiable devil to be laid. It was popularly believed on the Border that Michael Scott was saddled with an infernal servitor, to whom he was compelled to assign daily a sufficient modicum of work, under the penalty, in case of failure, of a forced visit to Pandemonium. Quite as bad is the predicament of the journalist. The printer's demon is ever at his elbow; nor dare he attempt to escape. It is not surprising if sometimes our unhappy brothers should be reduced to the last extremity. Generally, nay universally, they are a kind-hearted race of men; yet no one who hears 608 their complaints during a season of unusual stagnation would set them down as philanthropists. Their aspirations are after revolutions, murders, casualties—anything, in short, which can furnish them with a topic for a good stirring article. All manufacturers, except the dealers in devil's-dust and shoddy, admit that there is no possibility of constructing a passable fabric out of inferior raw material. Whatever be the capabilities of the artisan, or the excellence of his tools, he cannot do without a subject to work upon. Facts, according to the approved doctrine of the public press, are of two kinds—real and imagined. The distinction is as wide as that which lies between history and romance. If the first do not emerge in sufficient value or importance, recourse must be had to the second, provided nothing be advanced for which there is not some apparent colour. The position and prospects of parties is always a safe autumnal theme. Some paragraph is sure to appear, some letter to be published, some pamphlet written, or some speech delivered, from which ingenuity can extract matter of startling commentary. One while, supposed differences in the Cabinet are made the subject of conjecture and discussion, though where the Cabinet is no one can tell, the members thereof being notoriously so scattered that no two of them are within a hundred miles of each other. Lord John Russell's resignation has of late years become a regular autumnal event. We look for it as confidently as the housekeeper expects her annual supply of damsons. No one is rash enough to aver that Sir Charles Wood intends voluntarily to resign; but somehow or other it happens that his colleagues are annually seized in September with a burning desire to kick him out—a species of phrenzy which only lasts until the return of the colder weather. We really forget how often Lord Clarendon has been announced as the coming Premier. If there be any faith in prophecy, his time must be nigh at hand.

It was, we believe, confidently anticipated on the part of the Liberal journals, that the present autumn would prove an exception to the general rule, by furnishing a more than average crop of topics acceptable to the public ear. After such a dreary lapse of time, prosperity was expected to arrive about the middle of 1851, and that event would of itself justify the expenditure of many columns of pœans. True, there had been various attempts made at intervals, during the last three or four years, to persuade the public that the coy nymph had either arrived or was arriving on the British shores; and some journals went so far as to discharge a royal salute in honour of her supposed landing. But the mistake was soon discovered. If the agriculturists were discontented, the manufacturers were depressed, and the shopkeepers evidently sulky. Prosperity, if she really had arrived, seemed to possess the secret of the fern-seed, and to walk invisibly, for no one had seen her except Mr Labouchere; and on investigating his experiences, it turned out that he had merely received his information from others. This year, however, everything was to be put to rights. Markets were to rise so high that even the most grumbling of the farmers would be glad of heart, and be enabled to make such purchases at the nearest town as would at once gratify the wife of his bosom, and give a material impulse to the production of home manufactures. Great were to be the profits of Manchester, Bradford, and Nottingham. Reciprocity was to be developed; and foreign nations, convinced of the necessity of universal brotherhood, were to fling their tariffs to the winds, and admit our produce duty free. By this time, too, we were to have Mr Mechi's balance-sheet before us. Mr Huxtable's pigs were to have produced ammonia enough to fertilise the seashore; or, if that scheme did not answer, the Netherby system of farming would be found equally advantageous. Nay, it was even prophesied that railway stocks would rise, and that on some hyperborean lines there was a possibility that a dividend might be paid on the preference shares. The iron districts were to outstrip California, and our shipping to multiply indefinitely. 609

It is deeply to be deplored, on every ground, that these expectations have not been realised. We have been repeatedly reproached by the advocates of the new commercial system for the gloominess of our views, and the absence of that hopeful spirit which animates the efforts, and gives vivacity to the style, of the light and lively Free-Traders. Now, it is quite true that we, being unable, after the most anxious consideration of the subject in all its bearings, to discover how the prosperity—that is, the wealth—of the nation could be increased by measures which had the direct tendency to lower the value of its produce, have had occasion very frequently to enunciate opinions which could not be agreeable to the cotton-stuffed ears of Manchester. We have periodically exposed, to the great dudgeon of the democrats, the clumsy fallacies and egregious nonsense of the Economist, familiarly known to the concoctors of statistical returns by the soubriquet of the "Cook's Oracle." We have taken sundry impostors by the nape of the neck, and have shaken them, as was our bounden duty, until they had not breath enough to squeak. But we maintain that the facts and results of each successive year have borne us out in the views which we originally entertained; and that the working of Free Trade, when brought into operation, has proved, as we predicted it would be, utterly subversive of the theories of the men who were its exponents, its champions, and its abettors. So much the worse for the country. But why should we be blamed for having simply spoken the truth? Show us your prosperity, if that prosperity really exists; or, at all events, be kind enough to specify to us the prominent symptoms of its coming. We need not, we are well aware, look for these among the farmers. Ministers have given that up—never more decidedly, though they did not probably understand the force of the language they were using, or its inevitable conclusion, than when they declared their hope and expectation that the British agriculturist, depressed by foreign importations, could not fail to profit ultimately by the improved condition of the other classes of the community! The gentleman who devised that sentence must have had, indeed, an implicit reliance in the gullibility of mankind! He might just as well have told the stage-coachmen, who were driven off the road by the substitution of the rail, that they would be sure to profit in the long run by the bettered circumstances of the stokers! If that is all the comfort that can be extended to the agriculturists, they will hardly warm themselves by it. But among the manufacturers, if anywhere, we may look for some measure of prosperity; and we grieve to say that, if such really exists, they take especial care to conceal it. Talk of farmers grumbling, indeed! If the whole race of corn-growers, from Triptolemus downwards, were assembled, and entreated to state their grievances and the causes of their dejection, we defy them to produce such a catalogue of continued woe as has been trumpeted from the trade circulars and reports during the last three years. Falling markets—continued stagnation—nothing doing. Such are the phrases with which we are familiar, and we meet with nothing else; wherefrom we conclude either that the manufacturers are all banded together in a league of unparalleled and very scandalous deceit, or that Free Trade, by contracting the home market, has made wild work with their profits also. Commercial failures, too, about which we have heard a good deal, and are likely to hear something more, are not to be accepted as unequivocal signs of the rising prosperity of the country.

Messrs Littledale write as follows, in their circular of 4th October, since which date much has occurred to give weight and confirmation to their statements:—

"Nothing seems to change the untoward course of events in this memorable year. An abundant harvest has been gathered, with less damage and at less cost than for many years, which was to prove the turning-point in commercial matters; instead of which, the depression seems only to increase from day to day, without apparent cause or termination. This state of things naturally begets mistrust amongst money-lenders and bankers; and just at the time when their support is most needed, and would prove most 610 valuable in preventing that ruinous depression which forced sales on a declining market ever produce, their confidence is destroyed, and accommodation is refused.

"The losses on imports of every kind are alarming, and yet the tide is unabated; and unless a more vigorous stand is made by importers, either to bring down prices in the foreign market to a parity with our own, or to get their returns home in another form than produce, or, which perhaps is the only true course, to limit their operations to more legitimate bounds, nothing but a commercial crisis can be expected; indeed, had it not been for the abundance of money and the large supply of bullion from the West, aided by a splendid harvest, we should doubtless have had a repetition of '47 to some extent at the present moment."

Shipowners and millers tell us a tale of similar disaster; and the shopkeepers, if unanimous in nothing else, agree that their business is decreasing. The working-classes have cheap bread, but at the same time they have lowered wages; so that the advantage received on the one hand is neutralised by the reduction on the other.

Grievous, therefore, was the disappointment of the journalists, who had expected this year to wile away the lazy autumn in "hollaing and singing anthems" in praise of commercial resuscitation. From that resource they were effectually cut out. Something was wanted to vary the monotony of leaders on the Exhibition, a capital subject whilst its novelty lasted, but soon too familiar to admit of indefinite protraction. Sewerage was overdone last season. People will not submit to perpetual essays on the jakes, or diatribes on the shallowness of cesspools: the flavour of such articles can only be enjoyed by a thorough-paced disciple of Liebig. It was therefore with no small anxiety that our brethren awaited the autumnal meetings of the agricultural societies, at which, since Free Trade brought havoc to the farmer's home, there has usually been some excitement manifested, and some explanations required and given. The old rule, that politics should be excluded from these assemblies, is manifestly untenable at the present time. Until a trade is established on a sound and substantial basis, it is ludicrous to recommend improvements involving an enormous additional outlay. The farmers feel and know that the blow struck at their interests has gone too deep to be healed by any superficial nostrums. Their struggle is for existence, and they have resolved to speak out like men.

One of the worst effects of the repeal of the Corn Laws, and that which may prove the most permanently detrimental to the welfare of the country, is the apparent separation which it has caused in many cases between the interests of the landlord and the tenant. We say "apparent," because in reality, and finally, the interest of both classes is the same. But, in the mean time, there can be no doubt whatever that the farmers have endured by far the greatest share of the loss. Bound to the land by the outlay of their capital in it and upon it, they cannot abandon their vocation, or even change their locality, without incurring immediate ruin. It is easy for those who know nothing about the matter, to advise them to emigrate elsewhere if they cannot procure a livelihood here. It is still easier for a Free-trading landlord, to whose tergiversation a great part of the mischief is attributable, to meet the reasonable request of his tenantry for a reduction of their rents with an intimation that he is perfectly ready to free them from the obligation of their leases. Such conduct is not more odiously selfish than it is grossly hypocritical, the landlord being perfectly well aware that it is out of the power of his tenantry to accept the offer, without at once sacrificing and abandoning nearly the whole of their previous outlay. The farmer is tied to the stake, and cannot escape. He must pursue his vocation, else he is a beggar; and he cannot pursue that vocation without an annual and material loss. Under those circumstances, a reduction of rent is all the alleviation which the farmer can hope to obtain. In many instances he has obtained it. We hear of remissions made to the extent of ten and fifteen per cent; but these are alleviations only. The farmer is still a loser, and would be a loser were the remissions infinitely greater. In former papers 611 we have shown that the reduction of fifty per cent on the rents throughout Scotland would not avail to remunerate the farmers at present prices, and we have ample testimony to prove that in England the case is the same. On this matter of reduction we shall quote a few sentences from a pamphlet entitled A Treatise on the present Condition and Prospects of the Agricultural Interest, by a Yorkshire Farmer, published at Leeds in the present year:—

"It appears to me that neither farmers nor landlords have been aware of the magnitude of the evil; for the intentions of several of our landlords, who, I have no doubt, were actuated by a desire to bear a fair proportion of the loss, were published in the newspapers, stating their determination to reduce their rent from ten to fifteen per cent; and no doubt they thought it would, to some considerable extent, countervail the general reduction in the value of agricultural produce, and perhaps sincerely believed they had acquitted themselves of their duty as landlords.

"But as closing our eyes will not avert the danger now impending, and threatening to engulph farmers and landlords in one general ruin, I have thought it not amiss to insert the following table, which shows that a reduction of ten per cent does not reach a degree approaching to anything like a comparison with the losses farmers are suffering. To the occupier of land rented at £4, it is 8s. an acre against a loss of £2, 4s. 1d.—more than half his rent. To the occupier of the second class, rent £2, it is 4s. an acre against the loss of £1, 14s. 7¾d.—nearly the whole of his rent. To the occupier of the third class, rent £1, it is 2s. an acre against a loss of £1, 6s. 4½d.—6s. 4½d. more than his rent. And to the unfortunate occupier of the fourth class, rent 7s., it is 8 2/5d. an acre against a loss of £1, 1s. 4¾d.—or more than three times his rent.

"I have taken four farms, of one hundred acres each, of different descriptions of soil, showing the net loss on each farm, deducting ten per cent from the rent. For results, see below:—

Key:
A = Classes
B = No. of Acres

"The above table shows that, though a reduction of ten per cent may be thought considerable and fair on the part of the landlord, it is like a drop in the bucket when viewed as a set-off against the farmer's losses; and that along with every possible reduction that can be made on the rent, other measures, more comprehensive in character, must be adopted, to place the farmer in a position to enable him to cultivate the soil."6

Thus much we have said regarding the adequacy of reduction of rent to meet the agricultural depression, because of late a very vigorous effort has been made by the Liberal press to mislead public opinion on this subject. "After all," say these organs, deserting their first position that farming was as profitable as ever—"after all, it is a mere question of rent: let the farmer settle that with the landlord." It is not a mere question of rent: it is the question of the extinction of a class; for if, in the long run, it shall become apparent that no reduction of rent, short of that which must leave the owners of the soil generally without profit, owing to the amount of incumbrances which are known to exist upon the 612 land, can suffice to render cultivation profitable, then the landlord must necessarily supersede the tenant, and the owner the occupier; and one of the two profits which hitherto have been recognised as legitimate, be extinguished. To this point things are tending, and that very rapidly. The process has begun in Ireland and in the northern parts of Scotland, and it will become more apparent with the ebbing of the tide. Continental prices cannot rule in this country without reducing the whole of our agricultural system to the Continental level, and placing the collection of the revenue and the maintenance of the national credit in the greatest jeopardy.

Still, nothing can be more reasonable than the request generally urged by the farmers for a reduction of their rents. They say, and say truly, that they are not able to meet the pressure of the times. They do not say, however, that any reduction which the circumstances of the landlords will enable them to make can suffice to remedy the mischief. It insures them no profit; it merely saves them from a certain additional loss. In some cases the landlords either will not, or cannot, grant such reductions. They have no margin left them. They can but preach hope against knowledge; and in doing so, they play the game of the enemy, and justly lay themselves open to the charge of hypocrisy. In fact, what the farmers want, is less a reduction of rent—which they know to be but a temporary expedient—than a more manly and decided attitude on the part of the owners of the soil. Too many of the landlords allowed themselves to be led astray by the specious representations of the Free-Traders, or were betrayed into supporting the policy of a Minister, for whose antecedents and ability they entertained an egregiously exaggerated respect. Trusting to vamped reports and speculative opinions, presumptuously hazarded by men who knew nothing whatever of the subject, they disregarded the clear warnings of those who foresaw the magnitude and imminency of the danger; and surrendered themselves, without retaining the means of defence, to a faction which laughed at their credulity. These are the men who at agricultural meetings affect to talk hopefully of the prospects of agriculture, and who always assure the farmers that their case is regarded with the utmost sympathy by the Legislature. They are constantly advising their hearers, not only to have patience, for that were a proper charge, but to augment the amount of their outlay. They are grand upon the subject of artificial manures, and seem to have an idea that guano is an inexhaustible deposit. They will even bring down lecturers—dapper young chemical men from laboratories—to enlighten their tenants; but seldom, or rarely, will they grant a single sixpence of reduction. Is it wonderful if the honest farmer, thoroughly alive to the real peril of his situation, and indignant at the treachery of which he has been made the innocent victim, should conceive any feeling but those of respect and cordiality for the landlord who is acting so paltry a part, and condescending to so wretched an imposture? The farmer feels that now or never his cause must be resolutely fought. He knows that the interest of the landlord is as much concerned as his own; and yet when he applies to him for support and encouragement, he is met with silly platitudes.

As it has turned out, the agricultural meetings of the present autumn have proved far more fruitful to the journalists than they had any reason to expect. Our brethren of the Liberal press have extracted from them grounds for exceeding jubilation and triumph. Mr Disraeli, Mr Palmer, Mr Henley, and others, justly considered as very influential members of the Protectionist party in the House of Commons, are represented to have expressed themselves in a manner inconsistent with the maintenance of the great struggle which, Session after Session, has been renewed. They are claimed as converts, not to the principles of Free Trade—for those they have distinctly repudiated—but to the doctrine that it is impossible, by direct legislation, to disturb the present existing arrangement; and, as a matter of course, a defection so serious as this is joyously announced as an abandonment of the cause by 613 several of those men who were its most doughty champions.

Before proceeding to consider the merits of that line of policy which Mr Disraeli proposes to adopt during the ensuing session, and which, in his judgment, is that most likely, under present circumstances, to procure some measure of relief for the agricultural interest, let us distinctly understand whether or not Protection, as a principle, has been abandoned by any of its supporters in Parliament. We have perused the speeches which have been made the subject of so much comment with the greatest care and anxiety; but we have not been able to discover any admission that the views so long and so ably maintained by those gentlemen have undergone an iota of change. They may, indeed, and very naturally, despair of success in the present Parliament. Knowing, as they do, the weight and apportionment of parties in the present House of Commons, and enabled by experience to calculate upon the amount of support which would be given to any proposition, they may have arrived at the conclusion that the best course of policy which they can adopt, is to concentrate their efforts towards obtaining relief from what is clearly unjust taxation, leaving the grand question of a return to the Protective system in the hands of the country, to be decided at the next general election.

This is our distinct understanding of the views which have been announced by these gentlemen. It may be that some of them have not sufficiently guarded themselves against the possibility of misrepresentation; an error of judgment which, in the present state of the public mind, may have a detrimental effect. We have no hesitation in expressing our opinion that the sentiments uttered by the Marquis of Granby, and those contained in the admirable letters of Mr G. F. Young, are more calculated to advance the cause, and to insure co-operation amongst all classes who are opposed to the bastard system of Free Trade, than speeches which are only directed towards a subsidiary point, which are apt to be misunderstood, and which have been seized on by our opponents as proofs of despondency or despair.

No one, we believe, expected that, in the present Parliament, such a change of opinion could be wrought as would lead to the immediate restoration of Protection. In May 1850, the Earl of Derby, then Lord Stanley, distinctly explained to the delegates who waited upon him, that "it was not in the House of Lords, it was not in the House of Commons, it was in the country at large, that the battle must be fought, and their triumph must be achieved." "You have," said the noble lord, "the game in your own hands. You may compel your present members—or, at least, you may point out to them the necessary, the lamentable consequences to themselves of persisting in their present courses; and when the time shall come, you will have it in your own power, by the return of men who really represent your sentiments, to exercise your constitutional influence over the Legislature of the country, and to enforce your just demands in another House of Parliament." What has since taken place has most clearly established the soundness and wisdom of this advice. Beyond all question, the cause of Protection during the last two years has advanced with rapid strides. The total failure of every prophesied result on the part of the Free-Traders—the continued depression which has prevailed, not only in agriculture, but in manufactures, trade, and commerce—the state of the working-classes, which has experienced no amelioration since the latter measures of Free Trade were carried—the depopulation of Ireland, and the astounding increase of emigration from the northern part of Great Britain—all have contributed to dispel the popular delusion, and to give new courage and confidence to the disinterested supporters of the cause. Public opinion, in so far as that can be gathered from the results of casual elections, has declared itself in favour of Protection. Meetings of the working-classes have been held in the metropolis, at which resolutions in favour of a return to a general protective policy have been passed by 614 acclamation. Nothing whatever has occurred to give a check to the advance of these principles; much has transpired to show how rapidly and strongly they are progressing. That progress does not depend, and never did depend, solely upon the result of the agricultural experiment. The true secret of the reaction against Free Trade lies in this, that every one of the productive classes of the community is interested in opposing a system which crushes and enthrals labour for the undue benefit of the capitalist. It may be that, in some quarters, that common interest is not yet fully understood. It may be that relative cheapness of provisions may be considered by many unthinking and unreflective people in the light of a positive blessing, irrespective altogether of the effect of that cheapness in diminishing the sphere of employment, and contracting the wages of labour at home. This is not wonderful, because, previous to the repeal of the Corn Laws, the tariff had been deliberately altered, and the pressure and privation occasioned by these first experiments upon British industry were, for a time, materially relieved by the fall on the price of provisions consequent on the later measures. But very soon it became apparent to all thinking men, that the prostration of so great a branch of industry as that of British agriculture must act prejudicially upon all the others, and that the temporary benefit was more than counterbalanced by the universal decline of employment. Among the working-classes, even in larger towns, that opinion is daily gaining ground, and becoming a settled conviction. Labour is so much depressed that some effectual remedy must be found, if the country is to remain without convulsion; and it is most important for us all that the remedy, which may finally be resorted to, should be a just and equitable one, not such as unscrupulous demagogues might apply.

Therefore, at the present time, and in the present temper of the public mind, if we read its symptoms aright, we greatly deprecate any deviation from the broad principle and assertion of Protection to all branches of British Industry. To argue the Agricultural case alone, however important that may be, is to weaken the general cause, which is the cause of Labour. To make terms for the agriculturists only, by adjustment of taxation or otherwise, even if such adjustment could by possibility enable them to struggle on, would not be a wise policy. Never let it be forgotten that the Corn Laws could not have been repealed, but for the previous alterations on the tariff, stealthily and insidiously made, which left the agriculturists of Britain in the possession of an apparent monopoly. As monopolists, they never can regain their former position; but they may, and, we believe, will regain it, if they are true to the common cause, as British producers against foreign competition, on account of the burdens imposed upon all production by the State, and on account of monetary laws and changes which have more than doubled their original burden. But they never will obtain that justice to which they are entitled, unless they combine with the other classes who are equally suffering under the withdrawal of Protection, and insist upon a total change, in the commercial policy of Great Britain, as affecting not this or that interest only, but the whole mass of productive labour upon which the wealth of the nation depends.

We have no hesitation in stating our opinion on this matter in the broadest possible terms. We do not differ from Mr Disraeli in his estimate of the unequal burdens which are laid upon the land in comparison with the other property of Great Britain. That is a subject well worthy of consideration; and if it can be treated as entirely subsidiary to the greater question of Protection, and enforced without any appearance of an attempt at compromise, we are not prepared to say that any other step, under existing circumstances, would be preferable. But we cannot regard any such adjustment of taxation as a remedy of the grand evil. We doubt the advantage to be derived from a policy which, if successful, would only protract the period of general suffering; whilst, in the mean time, it will assuredly be represented as an attempt to compromise a principle, and therefore, 615 weaken the amount of that support upon which we now can confidently reckon. "Never," said Burke, in his latest political treatise, "never succumb. It is a struggle for your existence as a nation. But I have no fears whatever for the result. There is a salient living principle of energy in the public mind of England, which only requires proper direction to enable her to withstand this or any other ferocious foe. Persevere, therefore, till this tyranny be overpast." The lesson of the great statesman, though directed to other dangers than those which now beset us, has lost none of its value. Perseverance, where the principle is clear, is less matter of policy than a duty; and therefore we cannot but feel some regret that, at such a time as this, any declaration should have been made, or any policy indicated, which can have the effect of damping the hopes or checking the ardour of those who are most resolute in the cause. That the efforts of our adversaries to misrepresent the tenor of some of the late speeches have been partially successful, can hardly be doubted by any one who has noted the prevalent tone at the subsequent farmers' meetings. We believe that Mr Disraeli is at heart and by conviction as much a Protectionist as before. We do not even deny that his tactics, if pursued and successful, might, from the universal impatience of taxation which prevails, compel any Ministry then in power to raise an additional amount of revenue by the imposition of customs duties. Or otherwise, the success of his movement might have the effect of displacing the present Ministry, and necessitating an entire party change in Her Majesty's counsels. We are fully alive to the advantage of one or other of these results. We are opposed to further direct taxation, and we have no confidence whatever in the present advisers of the Crown. But we cannot approve of any move or any tactics which may have the effect of throwing even the slightest doubt on the determination of the great Protectionist party to persevere in this struggle, until due Protection is obtained for all the productive classes of the community. That party has taken its stand upon a principle so just and so true, that, sooner or later, despite every effort on the part of its opponents—every shortcoming on the part of its advocates—it must be triumphant; for the cause is that of the whole industrious population of Britain, not of a section or a class.

Mr Disraeli proposes to equalise the burdens upon land. Let us suppose him successful; and, according to his own showing, £6,000,000 of taxation, or rather of local rates, should be removed from the land and levied elsewhere. We do not doubt the accuracy of his calculation: we believe it to be strictly correct. But, were that grievance remedied, would the case be materially altered? We are given to understand that £90,000,000 is the amount of the annual depreciation of agricultural produce which has taken place since the Corn Laws were repealed. That calculation was made nearly two years ago, and since then prices have considerably fallen. Would the farmers accept such share of this £6,000,000 as might fall to their lot as a compensation for their losses? The idea is preposterous. We are well aware that Mr. Disraeli has never said this; but does he not see that, in bringing forward this subject in any shape approaching to, or appearing to be, a compromise, he incurs the danger of sacrificing the support, and alienating the interest of the most important, honest, and honourable body of men that exist within the British dominions? The farmers will not stand finessing. They neither comprehend circuitous coups d'etat, nor will they follow those who attempt them. The plain English sense is hostile to such manœuvres. They are ready to follow any one in whose capacity and judgment they can place reliance, so long as he pursues a clear and open course; but the moment that his tactics are veiled, uncertain, or unintelligible, they lose confidence in his guidance. That we believe to be, at all times, the tendency of the English character. Late events have engendered, not without great reason, much suspicion of the sincerity of public men, whatever be their party or denomination, and therefore it is the more needful that, wherever a 616 principle is involved, no step whatever should be taken which may lead to the remotest suspicion that such principle is about to be compromised. We believe most firmly, most sincerely, that any idea of such compromise never entered into the mind of Mr Disraeli, or any other of the gentlemen whose speeches have been made the subject of joyous comment by the Free-Traders. We are satisfied that the line of action they have announced is, in itself, honourable and praiseworthy; but we regret that they have not made it distinctly and unequivocally subordinate to the grand cause in which every man in this country, who lives by his labour, physical or intellectual, is concerned.

We have long regarded with much anxiety the position of the farmers of England. Viewed as a body, they form the great conservative nucleus of the country; and it is to their hatred of innovation, sound constitutional feeling, and determined loyalty, that we owe our immunity from those democratic convulsions which have taken place in almost every other part of Europe. To subject such a class of men as this to gross and cruel injustice—to persevere in a policy which is reducing them to ruin, after its effects have been made evident—to insult them by the mock language of sympathy, whilst denying them an effectual remedy—these are acts of infatuation which were never committed by any British Ministry save that under Lord John Russell, or approved of by any House of Commons save that which is presently in existence. Of the patience which the farmers have exhibited under such trying circumstances, we cannot speak in terms of sufficient admiration. But all endurance has its limit. The farmers were content to wait so long as there was a reasonable prospect of a change of that policy which was gradually bringing them to ruin, and long abstained from joining in any agitation for purposes which, though they might have had the effect of alleviating their condition, were fraught with danger to the commercial credit of the country, and in some respects to the stability of its institutions. But now, finding that both Government and Parliament are obstinately deaf to their representations, and dogged in their refusal of redress—meeting with far less support than they were entitled to expect on the part of many of the landlords—embarrassed and confused by the tactics announced by some of their supporters in Parliament —they have combined for their own defence, and are instituting a movement which may hereafter have a most important effect upon the credit and the destinies of the kingdom. Are they to be blamed for this? It would be difficult so to blame them. Rather let the blame rest with those whose obstinacy, ignorance, selfishness, or pride has driven them to this position, and compelled the farmer to seek from extravagant and impracticable schemes, and from clamorous agitation, that relief which was denied him as a sound supporter of the Constitution.

The nature and objects of the Agricultural Relief Associations may be gathered from the report of the Suffolk meeting, lately held at Bury St. Edmunds. The assumption of all the speakers was, that Protection cannot be expected either from the present or the future Parliament.

"Politicians," said one gentleman, "were every day shifting their ground. Men who a few short months ago threatened to assume the reins of Government, with the express design of reversing the policy of the last few years, were now faltering in their purpose, and confessing both their inability and unwillingness to effect these changes."

Another spoke as follows:—

"It was generally known, that while the farmers were asleep the Free-Trade policy came into operation. This at once cut off not less than 20 per cent of the capital employed in farming. This blow the farmers felt very keenly. They at once began to open their eyes, unstop their ears, and to unloose their tongues. They earnestly inquired what steps should be taken by them in the new circumstances under which they were placed. They heard various voices in reply, but the loudest and most powerful of these assured them that they would go back to Protection, and that by next Session too. Next Session passed, however, without exhibiting the least prospect of that result, and they had been going on, Session after Session, until the present moment, when they seemed farther from 617 Protection than ever. Others told them to lay out all their capital on land, and they would be sure to get remuneration. They had done that too, and their capital was gone without any prospect of remuneration."

Another gentleman, hitherto known as a staunch Protectionist, thus announced his reasons for joining the movement:—

"The fact was, that when he found members of the House of Commons, who had been returned to Parliament for the express purpose of supporting Protection, saying, behind the scenes, that it was impossible to expect Protection back again; and when he found members of the House of Peers telling him that if they stood out for Protection it would cost them their coronets, he was forced to come to the conclusion that the voice of the people had doomed these laws. He then began to ask himself this plain and simple question—if they give the country cheap corn, won't they give us cheap taxation? He was willing to grow corn against any man, come from where he might; but, at the same time, he must have a fair field to do it in."

Here are the views of the society as contained in the chairman's summary:—

"When their agricultural distress had been relieved by the repeal of the malt-tax, by the permanent fixation of tithe on an equitable basis, by the extinction of church-rates, by a revision of the county expenditure, the abolition of the game-laws, the removal of all restrictions on the cultivation of land, a change in the law of distress, the rights of the tenant-farmers recognised, the abominable abuses of the poor-law corrected, and when the bulk of taxation was shifted from the shoulders of the productive to those of the unproductive classes—from industry upon wealth—then might they hope that honesty, industry, and perseverance would meet their due reward."

We do not make these quotations with any intention of criticising the opinions expressed. We simply lay them before our readers as a specimen of that spirit which is now possessing the farmers—a spirit engendered by wrong, and strengthened by the suffering of years. If anything could make us believe that coronets are in danger of falling, it is the expression of such views on the part of men who hitherto have been the best defenders of the Constitution, and the most averse to yield to any of the impulses of change. But, as we have already said, we cannot blame the speakers. If they are convinced in their own minds that a return to Protection is impossible, their condition is such that they must necessarily have recourse to any expedient, however desperate, which can afford them the prospect of relief. We have long foreseen this crisis. Situated as Great Britain is, the choice lies simply between a return to Protection to Labour, and an assault on the public burdens. There is no other alternative. Cheapness may be established as the rule, but cheapness cannot co-exist with heavy taxation. To hope that the burden can be shifted from one shoulder to another is clearly an absurdity. If it is to be sustained, the productive classes must have the means of sustaining it. If those means are denied them, the burden is altogether intolerable.

It is not a little instructive to remark that, even now, the supporters of Free Trade are compelled to stop and leave their scheme unfinished. They cannot carry it out in its integrity without ruining the finances of the country. They have exposed the farmer to unlimited competition in produce, but they still continue to restrict the sphere of his industry and production. The malt-tax is a heavy burden upon him, and he is specially prohibited from growing tobacco, or engaging in the manufacture of beetroot sugar. These restrictions, say the Free-Traders, are absolutely necessary for revenue. Granted; but if you put on restrictions, are you not bound to give an equivalent? As for the argument in favour of the malt-tax, that it is the consumer who really pays the duty, that might be extended with equal justice to the instance of raw cotton. Why is barley, the produce of our own country, to be taxed, and cotton, the produce of a foreign country, to be exempted? Besides this, we have always understood that beer, tobacco, and sugar, are articles which enter largely into the consumption of the agricultural as well as that of other classes; so that here is a grievance totally opposed to the principles of 618 Free Trade, and yet supported and perpetuated by the very men who have adopted Free Trade as their motto! We instance these things as proofs that Free Trade never can be made, in the strict sense of the word, the law and system of the land, so long as the present enormous expenditure is continued; and in saying this, we hope it will be understood that we are as much opposed as ever to the views of the party who are for cutting down our national establishments.

We anticipate, in the course of next Session, to hear many propositions made on the subject of adjustment of taxation. Each class is anxious to be freed from its own peculiar burdens, and to devolve them upon others; and certainly never was there any case so strong or so urgent as that which can be brought forward on the part of the agriculturists. But who is to relieve them? Will any other class submit to the transference which is necessarily implied? Will the manufacturers or the capitalists undertake to provide for the six millions which at present they are most unjustly wresting from the owners and occupiers of the soil? Here is the real difficulty. Justice, we know, is not regarded as an indispensable element of taxation: if it were so, the income-tax would never have been imposed in its present form. If the claims of the farmers who are banded together for agricultural relief were granted, immediate national bankruptcy would be the result. This is the grand dilemma in which we are placed by the Free-Traders. Either a gross and palpable act of injustice and oppression must be perpetuated—so long at least as the victims have the means of payment—or, as was long ago prophesied, the capitalists and the fundholders must suffer. The truth is, that the productive power of the country cannot meet the demands upon it in the shape of taxation if it remains exposed to unlimited foreign competition.

In order properly to comprehend this point, which is one of the utmost importance, it is necessary to discard theory altogether, and to adopt history as our guide. The financial system of Great Britain, acting upon and influencing the commercial arrangements and social relations of the country, is not difficult of comprehension if we trace it step by step; and without a due understanding of this, and the vast influence which monetary laws exercise over the wellbeing and progress of a nation, it is impossible for any one to form a sound judgment on the conflicting principles of Protection and Free Trade, or to discover the true and only source of the difficulties which now surround us. It is the misfortune of the present age that so little attention is paid to the abstruser portions of history, which, in reality, are the most valuable for us. Wars of succession or conquest, naval engagements, records of intrigue or details of diplomatic dexterity, have a peculiar charm and interest for readers of every kind; but few take the pains to go more deeply into the subject, and investigate in what manner such events have affected the resources of a country, and whether, by diminishing its wealth or by stimulating the energies of its population, they have lowered or raised its position in the scale of nations. That portion of history which relates to external events is worthless for practical purposes, unless we combine with it the study of that portion which relates to its finance. Under the modern system, now universal throughout Europe, which leaves the debts and engagements of former generations to be liquidated or provided for by the next, no man can be called a statesman or politician who has not addicted himself to these studies.

The Funding System, as is well know, began with the Revolution, and has continued up to the present hour. It was strenuously opposed and vigorously assailed by some of the most able and clear-sighted in the country, such as Bolingbroke, David Hume, and Adam Smith, who from time to time pointed out the consequences which must ultimately ensue from this method of mortgaging posterity, more especially if the burden were allowed to increase without any steps being taken to provide for its ultimate extinguishment. It is the peculiarity of a debt so constituted, that for a time it gives great additional stimulus to the energies of a country. It enables it to 619 prosecute conquests, and to undertake designs, which it could not otherwise have achieved; and it is not until long afterwards, when the payment of the interest or annual charge becomes a severe burden upon a generation which had no share in contracting the debt, that the mischievous effects of the system become apparent. At the outbreak of the French Revolution, the public debt of Great Britain amounted to £261,735,059, and the annual charge was £9,471,675. A very large portion of this debt was incurred for the war waged with our American colonies.

At that time the currency of the country was placed on the metallic basis, but the great drain of the precious metals occasioned by the enormous subsidies which Great Britain furnished to her allies on the Continent, to engage their support against the revolutionary armies of France, reduced the nation to the very verge of bankruptcy, and necessitated in 1797 the suspension of cash payments. The immediate effect of this step upon the finances of the country has been so justly, and at the same time so clearly, stated by Mr Alison in his History of Europe, and the consequences of the subsequent return to the old system of cash payments, after their suspension for nearly a quarter of a century, are so graphically depicted, that we cannot do better than entreat the attention of the reader to the following extract:—

"This measure having been carried by Mr Pitt, a committee was appointed, which reported shortly after that the funds of the Bank were £17,597,000, while its debts were only £13,770,000, leaving a balance of £3,800,000 in favour of the establishment; but that it was necessary, for a limited time, to suspend the cash payments. Upon this, a bill for the restriction of payments in specie was introduced, which provided that bank-notes should be received as a legal tender by the collectors of taxes, and have the effect of stopping the issuing of arrest on mesne process for payment of debt between man and man. The bill was limited in its operation to the 24th June; but it was afterwards renewed from time to time, and in November 1797 continued till the conclusion of a general peace; and the obligation on the Bank to pay in specie was never again imposed till Sir Robert Peel's Act in 1819.

"Such was the commencement of the paper system in Great Britain, which ultimately produced such astonishing effects; which enabled the empire to carry on for so long a period so costly a war, and to maintain for years armaments greater than had been raised by the Roman people in the zenith of their power; which brought the struggle at length to a triumphant issue, and arrayed all the forces of Eastern Europe in English pay, against France on the banks of the Rhine. To the same system must be ascribed ultimate effects as disastrous, as the immediate were beneficial and glorious; the continued and progressive rise of rents, the unceasing, and to many calamitous, fall in the value of money during the whole course of the war; increased expenditure, the growth of sanguine ideas and extravagant habits in all classes of society; unbounded speculation, prodigious profits and frequent disasters among the commercial rich; increased wages, general prosperity, and occasional depression among the labouring poor. But these effects, which ensued during the war, were as nothing compared to those which have, since the peace, resulted from the return to cash payments by the bill of 1819. Perhaps no single measure ever produced so calamitous an effect as that has done. It has added at least a third to the National Debt, and augmented in a similar proportion all private debt in the country, and at the same time occasioned such a fall of prices by the contraction of the currency as has destroyed the sinking fund, rendered great part of the indirect taxes unproductive, and compelled in the end a return to direct taxation in a time of general peace. Thence has arisen a vacillation of prices unparalleled in any age of the world; a creation of property in some and destruction of it in others, which equalled, in its ultimate consequences, all but the disasters of a revolution."7

The immediate effect of the suspension of cash payments on the part of the State bank was an enormous increase in the circulation of paper. The prices of commodities rose to nearly double their previous value, and a period of prosperity commenced, at least for one generation. During the twenty-two years which elapsed 620 from the suspension of cash payments in 1797 down to 1819, when their resumption was provided for by Act of Parliament, or at least during eighteen years of that period, reckoning down to the re-establishment of peace in Europe, the career of England has no parallel in the annals of the world. The vast improvements and discoveries in machinery which were made towards the latter end of the century—the inventions of Hargreaves, Arkwright, Cartwright, Crompton, and Watt, came into play with astounding effect at a time when Great Britain held the mastery of the seas, and could divert the supplies of raw material from all other shores except her own. During the hottest period of the war, and in spite of all prohibitions, England manufactured for the Continent. Capital, or that which passed for capital, was plentiful; credit was easy, and profits were enormous. Some idea of the rapidity with which our manufactures progressed may be drawn from the fact that, whereas in 1785 the quantity of cotton wrought up was only 17,992,882 lbs., in 1810 it had increased to 123,701,826. Under this stimulus the population augmented greatly. The rise in the value of commodities gave that impulse to agriculture by means of which tracts of moorland have been converted into smiling harvest-fields, fens drained, commons enclosed, and huge tracts reclaimed from the sea. The average price of wheat in 1792, was 42s. 11d.; in 1810, it was 106s. 2d. per quarter. Wages rose, though not in the same proportion, and employment was abundant.

In short, the paper age, while it lasted, transcended, in so far as Britain was concerned, the dreams of a golden era. Those who suffered from the suspension of cash payments were the original fundholders, annuitants, and such landlords as had previously let their properties upon long leases. But the distress of such parties was little heard, and less heeded, amid the hum of the multitudes who were profiting by the change. The creditor might be injured, but the debtor was largely benefited. One immediate effect of this rise in prices was, a corresponding rise in fixed salaries and the expenses of government. Hence, the domestic expenditure of the country was greatly increased; new taxes were levied, and the permanent burden of the National Debt augmented to an amount which, sixty years ago, would have been reckoned entirely fabulous. As a specimen of the increased expense of cultivating arable land, it may here be worth while to insert the following comparative table, calculated by Mr Arthur Young, and laid before a committee of the House of Lords. The extent is one hundred acres:—

621

So long as the war lasted, the import of corn from abroad into this country was insignificant in amount. In 1814 the amount of wheat and wheat flour brought in amounted to only 681,333 quarters, being considerably above the average of years since the commencement of the century. In fact, Britain was then self-supporting. In time of war it is plain that, from our insular position, we cannot trust to any supplies beyond those which are raised at home, and there cannot be any doubt of the capability of the land to support a much larger population than that which presently exists. To those who glance superficially at the above table, the price of wheat in the year 1813 will appear monstrous, even when the great increase in the cost of cultivation is taken into account. This is the error, and it is a gross one, which has been studiously perpetuated by our statists, and even by some eminent writers on political economy. True, the price of wheat was then 108s. 9d., but it was estimated in a depreciated currency. Owing to various causes which it would be tedious to explain, the apparent difference between the value of the pound note and the guinea was far slighter than might have been expected, not amounting to more than seven or eight shillings, and actual depreciation, by sale of the notes for less than their nominal value, was by statute made penal. The price of gold and silver bullion never rose to an extent commensurate with the depreciation of the paper: in fact the coinage, as must be in the recollection of many, almost entirely disappeared, and was replaced by tokens of little intrinsic value, which served as the medium of interchange. In this depreciated and fluctuating currency commodities were valued, and by far the greater part of our National Debt was contracted. The paper pound in 1813 was probably, we may almost say certainly, not worth more than 10s. of metallic currency. In this view the quarter, estimated according to the present standard, was sold for 54s. 4½d—a price which modern statesmen allow to be barely remunerative.

If this point were generally understood, a vast amount of delusion which possesses the public mind would be dispelled. The relative value of money to commodities has been as entirely changed, by the return to cash payments, as if shillings had been substituted for sixpences. If the creditor suffered in 1797, the debtor has suffered far more severely in consequence of the Act of 1819, as we shall immediately proceed to show. Meantime, we shall entreat the reader to keep in mind that all incomes and expenditure, public or private, during the war and the suspension of cash payments, are to be estimated not by our present metallic standard, but by the fluctuating value of a depreciated currency.

When peace was established the ports were opened. Then it became evident that foreign importations, if permitted, would at once and for ever extinguish the landed interest. The annual charge of the debt alone was, in 1816, the first year of peace, £32,938,751; and the current annual expenditure £32,231,020—in all, upwards of sixty-five millions. Had, therefore, the price of wheat in Britain been suddenly reduced to the Continental level, as would have been the case but for the imposition of the Corn Laws, the national bankruptcy would have been immediate. No argument is required to prove this and it has often struck us as singular that this crisis—for such it was—has been so seldom referred to, especially in later discussions. We are not now defending the original suspension of cash payments—a measure which, nevertheless, seems to us to have been dictated by the strongest political necessity, however baneful its results may prove to the present and future generations. We simply say, that eighteen years' operation of that system, with the enormous expenditure and liabilities which it entailed, rendered Protection necessary the moment importation was threatened, to save the country from immediate bankruptcy following on its unparalleled efforts.

It is utter folly, and worse, to say, as political economists now contend, and as ignorant demagogues aver, that the Corn Laws were originally proposed solely for the benefit of the landlords. Without the imposition 622 of such laws, the whole financial system of Great Britain must instantly have disappeared. The amount of taxes which were required—first, to pay the interest of the National Debt, and, secondly, to meet the expenses of Government, (greatly increased by the change in the monetary laws effected in 1797)—rendered Protection to labour and to native produce absolutely indispensable. How could it be otherwise? Had wheat been sold in the British market at 46s., or even 50s., from what sources could the revenue have been levied? Under the new system, the expenses of cultivation had nearly doubled in twenty-three years—could the produce be put back to the same rates as before? So long as the monetary system then established did exist, that was clearly impossible. Protection was imperatively demanded, not by any class of the community, but by the state. To refuse it would have been national suicide. And so it was carried, doubtless very much against the inclination of the populace, who naturally enough expected that the return of peace would bring with it some substantial advantages in the shape of cheapness, and were proportionally disappointed when they discovered that the whole rent-charge of the wars, which had been so long maintained, must be liquidated before they could taste the anticipated blessings of the cheap loaf.

The return to cash payments, effected by the Act of 1819, is by far the most important event in our history since the change of dynasty. We believe that the late Sir Robert Peel, then a very young man, who was made the mouthpiece of a particular party on that occasion, really did not understand, to its full extent, the tremendous responsibility which he incurred. He acted simply as the exponent of the measure, at the instigation and by the direction of Mr Ricardo, who, under the guise of a political economist, concealed the crafty and selfish motives of the race from which he originally sprung. Ricardo was at that time considered a grand authority on matters of finance, his field of preparatory study having been the Stock Exchange, on which he is understood to have realised a large fortune. All his prepossessions, therefore, were in favour of the capitalists; and it is not uncharitable to conclude that his private interests lay in the same direction. That act provided for the gradual resumption of cash payments throughout England, to be consummated in 1823, for the establishment of a fixed gold standard, and for the withdrawal of all bank-notes under the amount of five pounds. Had this act been carried into effect in all its integrity, general bankruptcy must have immediately ensued, from the absorption of the circulating medium. The existence of the small notes, however, was respited, and this enabled the country bankers to go on for some time without a crash. Still the violent contraction of the currency, so caused, had the necessary effect of spreading dismay throughout all sections of the community. The circulation of the Bank of England, at 27th February 1819, was £25,126,700. On the 28th February 1823, it was contracted to £18,392,240. At the former period its private discounts amounted to more than nine millions; at the latter, they were considerably under five. As a matter of course, the country bankers were compelled to follow the example of the great establishment, and the immediate results of this grand financial measure may be described in a few words. The tree was thoroughly shaken. According to Mr Doubleday—

"As the memorable first of May 1823 drew near, the country bankers, as well as the bank of England, naturally prepared themselves, by a gradual narrowing of their circulation, for the dreaded hour of gold and silver payments "on demand," and the withdrawal of the small notes. We have already seen the fall of prices produced by this universal narrowing of the paper circulation. The effects of the distress produced all over the country—the consequence of this fall—we have yet to see."

"The distress, ruin, and bankruptcy, which now took place, were universal; affecting both the great interests of land and trade; but amongst the landlords, whose estates were burdened by mortgages, jointures, settlements, legacies, &c., the effects were most marked, and out of the ordinary course. In hundreds of cases, from the tremendous reduction in the price of land which now took place, 623 the estates barely sold for as much as would pay off the mortgages; and hence the owners were stripped of all, and made beggars. I was myself personally acquainted with one of the victims of this terrible measure. He was a schoolfellow, and inherited a good fortune, made principally in the West Indies. On coming of age, and settling with his guardians, he found himself possessed of fully forty thousand pounds; and with this he resolved to purchase an estate, to marry, and to settle for life. He was a young man addicted to no vice; of a fair understanding and a most excellent heart; and was connected with friends high in rank, and likely to afford him every proper assistance and advice. The estate was purchased, I believe, about the year 1812 or 1813, for eighty thousand pounds, one moiety of the purchase money being borrowed on mortgage of the land bought. In 1822-3 he was compelled to part with the estate, in order to pay off his mortgage, and some arrears of interest; and when this was done, he was left without a shilling—the estate bringing only half of its cost in 1812."8

But isolated instances, however great may be their interest, will not adequately exhibit the effects of this measure upon the vital interests of the country. At least one half of the National Debt was incurred after the suspension of cash payments, and during the prevalence of the Paper Currency. The interest of that debt was now, and in all time coming, to be paid in coin greatly above the value of the currency in which it was contracted; and the Private Creditor shared in the advantage which thus was given to the Fund-holder. The taxes were all to be levied in the same way, the metallic standard being made of universal application. As a matter of course, prices fell, and fell in a corresponding ratio.

The great prosperity of England during the war, and the unexampled development of its resources, whether agricultural, manufacturing, or commercial may be traced to the combination of at least three causes. In the first place, England was thoroughly protected. Her artisans and labourers had nothing to fear from foreign competition. They had the monopoly of their own home market, and were not liable to be undersold by the products of other nations. In the second place, we had a most extensive foreign trade, the real value of which cannot be ascertained from the official tables, owing to the manner in which that trade was carried on. But even according to the defective records which we possess, it appears that our exports in 1805 were equal to those of 1823, many of the intermediate years showing a much larger amount. In 1810, our exports were close upon forty-six millions; in 1832 they were barely above thirty-six. In the third place, the country possessed a large circulating medium, which gave ample scope to enterprise. We shall not enter upon the vexed question of systems of currency in the abstract; it is enough for us to know that for more than twenty years British prosperity went on without a check, until it was strangled by the bullionists. At present, we have neither Protection, nor an Expanded Currency. Our foreign trade, in so far as exports are concerned, is nominally large; but those who are best qualified to judge of the value of that trade, declare that it is unremunerative.

We are therefore very much at a loss to know what element of prosperity exists at the present time. We have every faith in British energy if it is allowed fair play, but that is precisely what we contend is not vouchsafed to it. Our whole legislation, under the guidance of the political economists, may be characterised as a systematic attempt to depress British industry. This could not have been effected at once, or by one isolated effort: several attacks upon the productive classes were required before this was consummated. The change of currency lowered the value of produce, and increased the burden of taxation. In other words, it brought down both prices and wages, to the manifest gain of the capitalist. Then came the gradual relaxation of the tariff, which has resulted in free importation—a measure by which all the working-classes, 624 without any exception, are assailed. This was effected with a perseverance and ingenuity which we cannot help admiring, even when we denounce it as diabolical. The first advances to Free Trade were no more remarked by the public in general than the footmarks of the tiger in the jungle when he advances stealthily on his prey. The real instigators were the exporting manufacturers. After the return of peace, they saw clearly enough that their old monopoly was at an end. Cobbett wrote, very shrewdly, though in his own peculiar manner, in 1815:—

"It is now hoped by some persons that the restoration of the Pope, the Inquisition, the Jesuits, and the Bourbons, will so far brutalise the people of the Continent of Europe that we shall have no rivals in the arts of peace; and that thus we shall be left to enjoy a monopoly of navigation, commerce, and manufactures; and be thereby enabled to pay the interest on our debt, and to meet the enormous annual expenses of our government. Without stopping to comment on the morality and humanity of this hope, entertained in a country abounding with Bible Societies, I venture to give it as my decided opinion, that the hope is fallacious. Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Holland, Austria, Spain, the Italian States, and even the Bourbons, will all push forward for their share of the benefits of the arts of peace. While our purse is open to them all, they will be subservient to us; but that cannot be for ever."

The old sergeant was perfectly right—with the return of peace our monopoly of the foreign market was over; but the question still remained, whether, by the sacrifice of home labour, our exporting manufacturers might not be able, for a considerable period at least, to keep ahead of their new rivals in distant markets. Unfortunately for us all, the political economists determined to make the attempt.

In some important branches of manufacture Britain was still unrivalled. The nearest, readiest, and therefore most lucrative market for these was to be found in Europe, and in consequence, it was deemed necessary that concessions should be made to admit some kinds of produce as imports, by way of inducing the foreigners to concede a free admission to our exports. There is a scene in Shakspeare's play of Julius Cæsar, in which Antony, Octavius, and Lepidus are represented, seated at a table, conceding amicably the deaths of the near relations of each, in exchange for a similar surrender. This is not quite a parallel to the case before us. Our statesmen doomed their friends and fellow-countrymen without requiring a reciprocal sacrifice, and the consequence was that we gradually opened our home market to the foreigner, without insisting that he should render to us the same measure of justice. The artisans were the first to feel the blow. They had already suffered, most severely, from the change in the currency, which brought down prices, and, with them, the remuneration of labour; and the withdrawal of Protection from them made them the natural enemies of all those who were still shielded from foreign competition. The feeling was perfectly natural. The system begun by Huskisson, and consummated by Peel, could have no other effect than in arming one class of the community against the other. Deprive John forcibly of his coat, under the pretext of justice, and he will immediately insist that the same measure of deprivation shall be extended to James. He has a converse of a Christian rule to utter in his defence—"Why should not others be done to, precisely as I have been done by?"

This argument, in the hands of its able advocates, has proved irresistible. John and James are alike without coats; and until they agree with one another, and come to a common understanding, there is not much likelihood of their resumption of their necessary wear. It never has been, and never can be, for the interest of the producer that prices should be generally low. Very great nonsense has of late years been talked by public men, and, amongst others, by members of the present cabinet, regarding the "natural price" of corn. They seem to think that they have stumbled upon a happy phrase, and claim credit to themselves for patriotism in resisting all attempts to make the bread of the people dearer. But they do not, or will not, see that the 625 great body of the people are interested in this question, not as consumers, but as producers. The vast majority of the population of these islands have hitherto derived their means of subsistence, not from manufactures, but from the soil. Manufactures do not in reality constitute more than one-fourth part of the annual creation of our wealth; and two-thirds at least of all our manufactures are intended for the home market, and will be profitable or not according to the circumstances of the general body of consumers. Now, the natural price of corn depends upon the circumstances of the country in which it is produced. It may be ten shillings in Poland: it may be sixty shillings in England. No doubt you can get corn, and are getting it, from Poland far cheaper than you can raise it in England—but at what cost? Why, at the sacrifice of that enormous capital which has been sunk in the cultivation of the land, and of nearly one-half of the annual creation of our wealth!

The average price of wheat, for a number of years preceding 1790, was 46s. per quarter. It is so stated in Mr Arthur Young's table, which we have given above, and may be taken as the average of thirty years. The average for 1790 was considerably higher, for we observe that Mr Porter states it at 53s. 2d. Now, since that period, both the amount of our debt and of our current annual public expenditure has been tripled—that is, we have three times as much to pay in the shape of taxation as formerly. This is independent of poor-rates and local taxation, which have also greatly increased. That being the case, we ask how it is possible that corn can be grown now in Britain at a profit, when the ruling price, owing to importations from abroad, is eight shillings per quarter lower than it was on an average of years preceding 1790? The absurdity is palpable.

How, then, are the taxes to be paid? That is the question. Not out of the profits of the foreign trade certainly, for the whole value of our exports is not much above the amount of the national expenditure, and when we add the local taxes, would not reach one-half of the requisite sum. Besides, at the present moment, the exports are not nearly balancing the imports. According to the official tables, the declared value of the exports for the year ending 5th January 1850, was £63,596,025; the official value of the imports for the same period was £105,874,607. We presume it will be admitted that taxes can only be permanently paid out of profits, and we want to know where these profits are? It is perfectly evident that the cultivation of the land cannot be carried on for ever at a loss. Sooner or later both capital and credit must be exhausted; soils of an inferior description—indeed all except the best land in the neighbourhood of towns—must be abandoned and withdrawn from tillage, and the working-classes will find themselves utterly unable to meet the demands of taxation. An immense portion of our taxation is, and must be, drawn from the labouring men. They contribute largely to our revenue through the customs and excise, and the extent of their consumption depends entirely upon the amount of the wages which they receive. Any measure which tends to lessen the sphere of production is a direct blow at their interests. Cheap bread is just another word for low wages, as already many of them have discovered to their cost; and we have now arrived at that stage of the experiment when its effects will be rapidly developed.

Mr Porter, whose brains are principally valuable in the preparation of cumbrous statistics, breaks out, for once in a way, into a fine burst of eloquence on the subject of over-population. Let us hear him in his animated mood:—

"Whence arises this fear—this childish fear of the increase of our numbers?—childish, because it exists without regard to the lessons of experience. What evidence is there in our present condition to justify the complaint of 'surplus population,' that did not exist in as great, or even in a greater degree of force, when our numbers had not reached one-half their present amount? Why, then, shall we not go forward to double, and again to double our population in safety, and even to advantage, if, 626 instead of rearing millions of human clods, whose lives are passed in consuming the scanty supplies which is all that their task of intelligence enables them to produce, the universal people shall have their minds cultivated to a degree that will enable each to add his proportion to the general store?"9

Good lack, Mr Porter, there was no occasion at all for your putting yourself into such an inconvenient heat! Nobody, so far as we know, is making any complaint of surplus population. You and your friends have taken effectual measures to prevent such a state of matters, and we may now rest without any apprehension of a visit from the ghost of Malthus. The "universal people" alluded to in your last brilliant though somewhat unintelligible sentence, are likely to follow your advice, and abstain from "rearing millions of human clods," at least upon British soil. Be satisfied—you have done for the clods. Ireland is a noble example of your trophies in that way; and if you want to glorify yourself on another, you may refer to the Scottish Highlands. The true way to provide against the evils of over-population is to lower the value of produce, which is the condition of labour, below the remunerative point. Do that, and you may make a wilderness out of the most fertile region of the earth. But then, Mr Porter, did you never ask yourself what is to become of those who derive their subsistence and incomes from the labour of these self-same clods? A good many of us, we suspect, are in that condition, and very melancholy indeed would be our countenances if called upon to assist at the funeral of the last of that race. "Meddle not," said the Giant, in the German fable, to his child, who had picked up a peasant as a plaything—"meddle not with the husbandman! But for him, what would become of us Giants?" It would be well if you and your political allies had the intelligence to apprehend the moral.

The Times, in a late number, has treated the subject of emigration in a lively manner. The depopulation which has taken place since Free Trade became the law of the land, is too startling a fact to be passed over without notice; and it is thus that the leading journal speculates on the strange phenomenon. The announcement in the opening sentence may puzzle, if not alarm, some of the most zealous advocates of foreign production:—

"The stream of emigration now set towards America will not stop till Ireland is absolutely depopulated; and the only question is, when will that be? Twenty years at the present rate would take away the whole of the industrious classes, leaving only the proprietors and their families, members of the learned professions, and those whose age or infirmities keep them at home. Twenty years are but a short time in treating great social or political questions. It is more than twenty years since the passing of the Emancipation Act and the introduction of the Reform Bill. What if it should really come to pass that before another twenty years the whole Celtic race shall have disappeared from these isles, and the problem of seven centuries received its solution? We dwell in wonderful times, in an age of great discoveries, splendid improvements, and grand consummations. Art has always been found the handmaid of human developments. The discovery of gunpowder put an end to the little wars and little states of the middle ages, and introduced larger political manipulations. The discovery of printing prepared for the revival of learning and arts, and paved the way to the Reformation. The discovery of the mariner's compass showed our navigators a path to the East Indies and the New World. It may be the first mission of railways to set all the populations of the Old World on the move, and send them in quest of independent and comfortable homes.

And when will this movement stop? Incuriousness and prejudice are ready with the reply, that it will stop, at all events, when the Celtic race is exhausted. The Englishman, we are assured, is too attached to his 627 country, and too comfortable at home, to cross the Atlantic. But surely it is very premature to name any such period for this movement, or to say beforehand what English labourers will do, when seven or eight millions of Irish have led the way to comfort and independence. The Englishman is now attached to his own home, because he knows of no other. His ideas of other regions are dark and dismal. He trembles at the thought of having to grope his way through the Cimmerian obscurity of another hemisphere. The single fact that he will have no 'parish' in America is, in his mind, a fatal bar to locomotion. But all this is quickly passing away. Geography, union workhouses, ocean mails, and the daily sight of letters arriving in ten days from prosperous emigrants, are fast uprooting the British rustic from the soil, and giving him cosmopolitan ideas. In a very few years the question uppermost in his mind will be whether he will be better off here or there? Whether he should go with the young and enterprising, or stay at home with the old and stupid? If a quarter of a million British subjects have left this country for the Australian colonies in the present generation, there may easily be a much larger movement to a nearer and more wealthy region. It has been imagined, indeed, that such a migration will have a natural tendency to stop itself at a certain stage. We are told that the English labourer will find a new field in Ireland, deserted by the Celt. It will, however, cost no more effort of mind to cross the ocean at once than to cross the Irish Channel for a land which, in the English mind, must ever be associated with violence and blood. High wages, again, we are told, the enjoyment of a liberal government, and an improved condition, will bind the Englishman afresh to the soil of his ancestors. But when you make the English labourer richer, more independent, more intelligent, and more of a citizen, you have put him more in a condition and temper to seek his fortune, wherever it may be found. The men who in the United States leave their homes for the Far West are generally they who have prospered where they are, and who want the excitement of another start in life. On the whole, we are disposed to think that the prospect is far too serious to be neglected, or treated as a merely speculative question. The depopulation of these isles, supposing the Celtic exodus to run out its course, and a British exodus to follow, constitute about as serious a political event as can be conceived; for a change of dynasty, or any other political revolution, is nothing compared with a change in the people themselves. All the departments of industry—the army, the navy, the cultivation of the fields, the rent of landed property, the profit of trades, the payment of rates and taxes—depend on the people, and without the people there must ensue a general collapse of all our institutions. We are, however, rather desirous to recommend the question to the consideration of others, and especially of our statesmen, than to answer it ourselves."

Is it only now that this question is submitted to the consideration of our statesmen? Why, if they are statesmen at all, they must have thought and dreamed of little else for the last few years. The picture here presented, though a frightful one, is by no means new. It has been drawn over and over again by the advocates of the protective policy, and as regularly ridiculed by the Free-Traders as a suggestion of a diseased imagination. Now, the facts have emerged, the prophecy has proved strictly true, and we are asked to consider about a remedy! What remedy is there open to us, save one? Let labour be made remunerative at home, which can only be done by Protection, and we shall answer for it that the tide of emigration will be stayed. People do not leave their country and their homes, at least in numbers like this, except under the coercion of the most stringent necessity. Give an Englishman work to do, and wages to live by, and he will rather remain here than attempt to better his condition in a foreign soil. But in order that he may remain here, his labour must be protected. Very truly says the writer in the Times, that "all the departments of industry, the army, the navy, the cultivation 628 of the fields, the rent of landed property, the profit of trades, the payment of rates and taxes, depend on the people; and without the people, there must ensue a general collapse of all our institutions." To every word of this we adhere. But unless we can suppose that the people will submit to the degraded position of the foreign serfs, with whose produce they are now called upon to compete, Britain cannot hope to retain anything like its present population. The exodus must go on, and every vestige of our former greatness disappear. Unprotected labour and high taxation cannot exist together. Prolong the struggle as we may, the experience of each succeeding month will show the impossibility of such a reconciliation.

We are curious to know if, with such facts before them as those admitted in the Times, Ministers will have the temerity next year to assure us that the country generally is in prosperous circumstances. Do men emigrate wholesale from prosperous countries? Are they ever ready to leave comfort behind them, and recommence the struggle of life on a more unpromising field? If we are forced to reject that conclusion, then we defy any one to arrive at another save this—that our recent legislation has so narrowed the sphere of labour, and so depressed its prospects, that the population are driven per force from their native country, to seek elsewhere the means of existence which they cannot procure at home.

To talk of Protection as hopeless, is to acquiesce in the national doom. All classes of the community, from the fundholder and capitalist down to the meanest labourer, have a stake in this great question. Let not the former deceive themselves. Without the labour of the people their securities are as valueless as the mere paper on which they are written. Therefore, it is their part to see that no line of policy shall be allowed to continue if it has the effect of drying up the springs of our national prosperity. If they will not listen to the remonstrances of the distressed, let them at all events view their own position dispassionately. We may be on the verge of a great crisis, and a great struggle may be approaching, but we have not the slightest doubt that the cause which must ultimately prevail is that which is essentially the cause of the people. Prosperity will only return to the nation when Native Industry is protected.

Printed by William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh.