The Project Gutenberg eBook of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 64, No. 395, September, 1848

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Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 64, No. 395, September, 1848

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE, VOL. 64, NO. 395, SEPTEMBER, 1848 ***

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BLACKWOOD’S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

NO. CCCXCV.      SEPTEMBER, 1848.      VOL. LXIV.

CONTENTS.

A    REVIEW OF THE LAST SESSION,

261

T   O A CAGED SKYLARK. BY B. SIMMONS,

290

S   ONNET.—TO DENMARK,

292

L   IFE IN THE “FAR WEST.” PART IV.,

293

T   HE CAXTONS. PART VI.,

315

L   IFE AND TIMES OF GEORGE II.,

327

T   HE GREAT TRAGEDIAN,

345

T   HE MOSCOW RETREAT,

359

W   HAT WOULD REVOLUTIONISING GERMANY BE AT?

373

EDINBURGH:

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET; AND 37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.

To whom all Communications (post paid) must be addressed.

SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

BLACKWOOD’S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

NO. CCCXCV.      SEPTEMBER, 1848.      VOL. LXIV.

A REVIEW OF THE LAST SESSION.

There is perhaps no body of men confederated in her Majesty’s dominions who are less properly the subjects of envy than the members of the present Cabinet. A session, begun under circumstances of unexampled commercial pressure, continued amidst insurrection abroad and turbulence at home, and ending with an Irish rebellion, ought surely to have exhibited some specimens of extraordinary and judicious legislation. Slovenliness in high places, at no time decorous, is most undecent, dangerous, and unendurable, at a period when the whole world is drunk with the revolutionary elixir. France, that old irreclaimable bacchante, is staggering to and fro, madly bellicose, and threatening incendiarism in her cups. Germany, once thought too stolid to be roused, is hiccuping for national unity, and on the fair way of contributing largely to the overthrow of the equilibrium of power in Europe. The Irish symptoms have by no means surprised us. The insurrection there is the inevitable fruit of the measures and policy against which, for the last twenty years, we have entered our strong and unflinching protest. The shameful truckling of the Whigs to O’Connell and his scandalous followers; the unconstitutional fostering of the Roman Catholic Church; and the conciliation system, which, while it did gross injustice to the people of England and Scotland, contributed to confirm the spirit of improvidence and pauperism among the Irish, without in any way securing their gratitude,—have resulted in a rebellion, imbecile, indeed, and almost ludicrous in its issue, but not, on that account, less afflicting to the supporters of order and the crown.

More than once, too, we have been threatened at home by manifestations of the insurrectionary spirit. In so densely populated a country as this, it is impossible that commercial distress and slackness can exist for any length of time, without trying sorely the patience and the fortitude of the working classes. Such distress undoubtedly did prevail, towards the close of last year, in a most alarming degree; and throughout the whole spring there was a vast want of employment in the manufacturing districts. The completion of some of the great lines of railway, and in others the partial abandonment or suspension of the works, caused by the extreme tightness of the money market, also threw a great deal of unemployed labour on the public; and this evil was increased by the heterogeneous character of the masses. Irish immigration has increased to such an extent, that not only in all the towns of Britain, but almost in every village, especially on the western coast, there exists a Hibernian colony; unreclaimed by civilisation—uneducated as the brutes that perish—knowing nothing of religion, save as an idolatrous form, and professing rebellion as a principle. This class have always formed a nucleus for disaffection, and, but for the extreme reluctance of the native labourers to fraternise with those children of Esau, the results might ere now have been more serious than we altogether care to contemplate. As it was, the British demagogue was always sure of finding a ready partisan, confederate, and coadjutor in the western Celt; and we need hardly say that the Chartist leaders availed themselves to the full of that sympathy. We shall presently see how far this state of matters received the attention of the men in power.

In this critical position we were entitled to expect that the government would have shown itself fully adequate to the crisis—that the causes of distress, which lie at the root of turbulence and disaffection, would be probed with a firm and prudent hand—that every possible relief and assistance would be given to the home market—and that, above all, nothing should be done which might tend, in the remotest degree, to endanger the integrity of the empire. The welfare of Great Britain is a terrible trust in times like these, and the responsibility of those who have professed themselves ready to govern, and who, in fact, have rather claimed the government than received it, is proportionally great.

Let us then take a candid and impartial review of the proceedings which have characterised this session of Parliament, extending over a period more fertile in insurrection than any which the world has known. Let us examine how Lord John Russell and his colleagues have acquitted themselves in the discharge of their important functions. We shall be sparing neither of praise nor blame: glad, indeed, if we can find an opportunity of being lavish of the former, or, in case of neglect, of stumbling upon an honest excuse.

Our readers cannot have forgotten the circumstances under which this last session of Parliament commenced. The commercial world has not, for very many years, felt any thing like a corresponding crisis; and the change is most remarkable, when we reflect that the depression followed immediately upon a period of almost unexampled prosperity. Our opinion is still unchanged, as to the causes which led to this. We pointed out, in former articles, long before the pressure began, what must be the inevitable result of a wholesale departure from our older system, of the adoption of the free-trading economical views, and of the arbitrary contraction of the currency, as devised by Sir Robert Peel. Every word we then said has been verified to the letter; and, as we expected, the very contingencies which we suggested as likely to operate in producing this unfavourable state of matters, and which actually did subsequently occur, have been paraded, by the free-traders and extreme bullionists, as the causes of the whole disaster. It is of great importance that the public should understand this subject clearly; and, therefore, without repeating what we have elaborately attempted to demonstrate before, let us merely remark that the tendency of free trade, and of fettered currency combined, was to prostrate the whole commercial world, on the first occurrence of a bad season and a scarcity of food, by stimulating the exportation of gold, and at the same time by withdrawing its representative. In fact, Sir Robert Peel constructed his machinery so, that the result, in the event which we have instanced, could be calculated on with mathematical certainty. The realised wealth of Britain was rendered of no avail in this emergency, for the counters which represented it were amissing, and nothing else would be received in exchange. Hence arose that total prostration of credit, and consequent lack of employment, which was so lamentably felt towards the close of the year 1847.

So intolerable was the pressure that, after much delay and repeated refusals to interfere, the Whig ministers were compelled to bestir themselves, and to suspend the operation of the Banking Act, in order to save the country from actual convulsion. Parliament was summoned about the middle of November, more, perhaps, for the sake of obtaining a bill of indemnity for the suspension—a measure which, after all, did not lead to any infringement of the Act—than with the view of boldly facing the increasing difficulties of the country. Notwithstanding annual disappointment, every one waited for the speech from the throne with the most intense anxiety, trusting that at such a time some comforting glimpses for the future, some earnest ministerial schemes would be announced, likely to retrieve the commercial world from its embarrassment. These expectations were destined to receive an immediate check. The financial prose of the author of “Don Carlos” was as vague and unsatisfactory as his halting tragic verse. There was, of course, a decent show of regret for public calamity, but no vestige of an intention to interpose any remedial measure. In point of finance, the only intelligible topic contained in the speech was ominous of the repeal of the Navigation Laws. Sanitary improvements, the great Whig hobby, which they are constantly thrusting forward beneath the public nose, were also recommended. Ireland, then testifying the humane and Christian disposition of its inhabitants, by a series of the most cold-blooded and revolting murders, was recommended to the benevolence of the state. A treaty with the Republic of the Equator, touching the suppression of the slave-trade, was announced; and the Whigs looked forward “with confidence to the maintenance of the general peace of Europe.” A more paltry programme was never yet submitted to the public eye.

The ministerial move in November, and the suspension of the Banking Act, for however short a period, was in truth a remarkable circumstance. If the suspension was right, it must necessarily imply that Sir Robert Peel was utterly wrong in framing the measure as he did. We know that the Act is useless for control in times of prosperity, and that it pinches us by becoming operative under adverse seasons; and it was precisely when the pinch was felt that the Whigs were forced to suspend it. True—a great deal of the mischief had by that time been accomplished. Men, every whit as respectable as the late Premier, had been driven into the Gazette for the sheer want of temporary accommodation, and property sank in value as rapidly as the mercury before a storm. But the true nature of the Act had been felt and condemned by the public; and in no one instance do we ever recollect to have witnessed a greater unanimity of opinion, hostile to its endurance and principle, than prevailed, at least beyond the walls of the House of Commons. If the public were wrong in this impression, then it followed as a matter of course that the ministry were highly blameable for the suspension; that Peel’s machine, being a sound and salutary one, should have been left to do its work, and to crush down as many victims as it could possibly entangle in its wheels. But in truth, very few could be found to support such a proposition. If credit is to be altogether annihilated in this country, whether by Banking Acts like this, framed and forced upon us contrary to the experience and in face of the remonstrance of the mercantile classes, or by anarchy and mob rule, as has been the case in France, we must prepare to bid an everlasting farewell to our greatness. Credit, it is in vain to deny, has made the British nation. Credit may, like every thing else, be pushed too far; but even over-trading is a far less calamity than a restrictive system, which in a day can destroy the accumulated profits of years, for the first carries with it its own antidote and cure. Peel’s banking legislation, we do not hesitate to say, has been productive of more harm to this country in three years, than has ever occurred from any known cause within the same period of time; and the obstinacy with which he has clung to his delusion, the sophistry which he has invariably employed to shift the responsibility from his shoulders, and the manœuvring style of his defence, may be consistent with the character of the man, but are not worthy of the dignity of a British statesman.

In suspending the operation of the Banking Act, the Whigs tacitly admitted that, in their opinion, whether lately adopted or not, there was something fundamentally injurious and wrong with the measure. The subject was a very serious one. You may bungle sanitary bills, pass coercive laws, or tamper with the jurisprudence of the country, without doing more than a limited amount of evil. But the subject of the currency is so intimately and vitally connected with our whole commercial greatness, that it must be handled with the utmost precaution. A leak in a ship is not more dangerous than a flaw in a monetary statute; and, when once discovered, not a moment should be lost in repairing it.

Not one member of the present Cabinet was in any way competent for the task. It is most extraordinary, that the Whigs, after all their official experience, should exhibit such a singular incapacity in every matter which has the slightest connexion with finance. They do not seem to comprehend the subject at all; and if their private affairs were conducted in the same slovenly fashion as are those of the public when unfortunately committed to their guidance, we should very soon see the Gazette adorned with some elegant extracts from the Court Guide. The only respectable Chancellor of the Exchequer whom they ever produced was Mr Baring; and he, it is rumoured, was considered too scrupulous to be admitted to that post again. Besides this, his views upon the currency were known to be diametrically opposite to those entertained by Sir Robert Peel. Sir Charles Wood, the worst financier that ever disgraced the memory of Cocker, had committed himself before the suspension of the Act, in an especially ridiculous manner. At one time, this gentleman was quite jocund and hopeful, a firm believer in the existence of a plethora, and smiled at the idea of a crisis with a happy air of mingled indifference and satisfaction. Shortly afterwards, however, he took the alarm, attempted to eat in his own words—an operation which he performed with most indifferent grace,—and possibly became dimly conscious that a Chancellor of the Exchequer has more duties to perform than to sign the receipt for his salary. Sir Charles evidently was not the man to grapple with the difficulty; and besides this, he could not afford to offend Sir Robert Peel, or give a triumph to his political opponents, who had all along denounced the Banking Act as an experiment of a perilous nature. In this position, the Whigs adopted the safest course for themselves, if not for the country. They asked for a committee, both in the Lords and Commons, to consider the question of the currency, taking care, of course, to nominate members whose opinions were already known. We thoroughly agree with Mr Herries, that the inquiry was a work of supererogation. The subject has been already investigated in every possible way. Blue books have been issued from time to time, containing an enormous mass of deliberate evidence; and that evidence has been repeatedly analysed and dissected by writers of great ability and statistical knowledge on either side. The public mind was perfectly ripe for decision—indeed, for months the currency had formed almost the sole topic discussed by the press; and it was peculiarly desirable that we should no longer be left in a state of uncertainty, or exposed to the operation of another panic. But such an arrangement did not suit the Whigs. They were not prepared to come forward with an intelligible plan for remedying the evil which they had already admitted to exist.—Not secretly displeased, perhaps, at the general impression that the Tamworth Baronet had committed a gross and unpardonable blunder, they were unable to dispense with his support, and extremely unwilling to give him umbrage—and therefore they took refuge in the convenient scheme of committees. In vain did Mr Herries, in an able and statesmanlike speech, point out the danger of delay, and exhibit the true causes of the distress which had lately prevailed, and which was still weighing upon the country. In vain did he implore ministers to face the question manfully. His proposal that the House should proceed at once to the consideration of the Banking Act, with the view of suspending permanently its limitations, subject to a wholesome control, was lost by a majority of forty-one. After a most lengthened examination, the committees have issued their reports; and the result is another difference of opinion, which leaves the whole matter open to renewed discussion. The session has rolled away, and the Banking Act is left untouched.

We presume that the most confirmed free-trader within the four seas of Britain will at all events admit this fact, that not one of the glorious promises held out to us by the political economists and gentlemen of the Manchester school has as yet been realised. We can hardly expect that they will be candid enough to confess the fallacy of the views which they then so enthusiastically maintained; and we doubt not that, in any discussion, we should still hear some very ingenious explanations to account for the non-advent of the anticipated blessings. But the boldest of them will not deny that, in the mean time, all the fiscal changes have been followed by a decline in our prosperity, a falling-off in trade, and a consequent defalcation of the revenue. We have certainly not gained in employment, we have lost money; and the best proof of it is, the low ebb of the national revenue. Such being the case, it is no wonder if the budget or financial statement of the minister was expected with the most intense anxiety, and if, for the time, every other topic was merged in the consideration of this. Political history does not contain many episodes equal to that famous discussion—many instances of utter helplessness like that exhibited by the Premier.

We have already analysed the budget fully in another article,[1] and it is not worth while now to recur to it for the purposes of exposure. The deficit was estimated at no less than three millions for the year; and this large sum was to be made up by the imposition of an augmented income-tax. Considering what had taken place on the occasion when Sir Robert Peel first proposed that discreditable and decidedly odious impost, the assurances that it was to be merely temporary in its endurance, and the specious pleas of necessity with which it was then fortified,—it is no matter of surprise that the ministerial plan should have been received with symptoms of marked disgust, even by those who usually accord their support to the measures of the present government. Mr Hume opined that the ministry were mad. Mr Osborne declared his belief that, had there been a regularly organised Opposition, such a financial statement would have been the death-warrant of any administration. Even the Manchester section of the free-traders held aloof from ministers, just as cowards might do from the support of a drowning man. For however vexatious the admission might be, they were bound in common gratitude to have recollected that the change from indirect to direct taxation was effected mainly at their instance, and to gratify their everlasting clamour. That change had resulted in a huge deficit of the revenue; and, it being admitted on all sides that a revenue must be raised—for we have not yet got the length of talking openly of the sponge—they, at all events, might have been expected to say something in favour of their friends, at a crisis of their own producing. But there is no creature on earth so utterly selfish and devoid of compunction, as your thorough-paced economical free-trader. Point merely in the direction of his pocket, and he instantly howls with terror. Five per cent income-tax was as obnoxious in the eyes of Cobden and Bright as in those of other men who acted upon sounder principles; and it is not uninstructive to remark the course which on this occasion the ex-members of the League thought fit to pursue. It had been long apparent to them, as it was to every man in the country, that the revenue of the year must prove insufficient to meet the expenditure. They knew that the unpalatable fact, when announced in Parliament, would inevitably lead to a discussion regarding the policy of past measures, and the wisdom of persisting in a course which hitherto had met with no reciprocity from foreign countries, but, on the contrary, had been used to increase the burden of our embarrassments. Such discussion was to be deprecated and avoided by every possible means; and the readiest way of effecting this seemed to be the suggestion of a plan whereby the expenditure might be lessened and brought down to the level of the revenue. This very desirable result was not so easy of accomplishment; but nevertheless Mr Cobden undertook the task. The product was worthy of the author. The wise, politic, and sagacious principle of the calico-printer was to effect a saving by the material reduction of our military and naval establishments, and the weakening of the national arm. We hope our readers have not forgotten, were it merely from the disgust they must have excited, the silly and egotistic remarks of this complacent personage touching his travels, his observations, and his mission as a peaceful regenerator. Free trade, which ought long ago to have made Great Britain rich, had, according to his experiences, already pacified the world. There was to be no more war—the French were the most affectionate and domesticated men upon the face of the earth—and he, Cobden, and his friend Cremieux, were interchanging congratulatory letters on the advent of the new millennium. In our March Number for the present year, we had the satisfaction of bestowing a slight castigation upon Cobden, to which we beg now to refer those gentlemen who were so wroth with us for presuming to question the dicta of the oracle of the West Riding. Within a few days after that article was penned, Europe was wrapped in insurrection, and Cobden’s correspondent a member of a revolutionary government! The French free-trader, Cremieux, was a consenting party to the decree which drove forth the British labourers from France, without warning and without compensation! The barricades of June have demonstrated the affectionate and domesticated character of the race whom Cobden delighteth to honour. If to cut, in cold blood, the throats of prisoners, to shoot down the messengers of peace in spite of their sacred calling, to mangle the bodies of the wounded, and these brothers and countrymen, under circumstances unheard-of, save perhaps in the tales of African atrocity—if these things constitute domestication, then by all means let us fall back upon a more erratic and natural state of society. How would we have stood at this moment, with regard to Ireland, save for the fact of our being able to overawe rebellion by the presence of an overwhelming military force? Did ever a man, professing to be an apostle and a prophet, find himself landed in such a ridiculous and ignominious posture?

It is strange that the reception which he met with in the House of Commons, upon the occasion of his first attack upon the army, did not induce Cobden to pause before committing himself to a second absurdity. But there are some men whose conceit is of such extravagant a development, that no experience, no failure, no argument, will induce them to part with one iota of a preconceived opinion. Such a person is Cobden. Unabashed by the result of his previous exhibitions, callous to shame, and impenetrable to ridicule, he again addressed the House on the subject of the navy estimates, for the purpose of demonstrating the propriety of an immediate reduction of the fleet. This was too much even for Lord John Russell, who for once took heart of grace, and administered a fair allowance of punishment to the arrogant and ignorant free-trader. But the truth is, Mr Cobden’s career is ended. The Times, once a warm admirer of this confident gentleman, has ceased to vouchsafe him its protection, as will be seen from the following extract of 11th August last:—

“What has he done? What have been his tactics? What is the sum and substance of the statesmanship to which all the world looked forward so anxiously? Simply this—a depreciation of our military and naval establishments, and an emulation of America. The first constitutes the whole gist and pith of the honourable member’s speeches; the latter, of his policy. England is to disband her fleets and armies, to give up her colonies, and to enter boldly on a course of Yankee statesmanship. We would not wrong the hon. gentleman. We refer to his speeches on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, as well as those delivered at the close of the last year. What do they amount to? ‘Retrench your expenditure; give up your ships; abolish the ordnance; send round embassies to every country and court of Europe; tell them you have disarmed; ask them to do the same; and then set to work, and tinker up your constitution on the model of the United States. Do away with open voting. Destroy the privilege of the suffrage; abolish the virtue of patriotic courage; give every man a vote, and make every man vote in secret. Then you will be rich and prosperous; your expenditure will at once be curtailed, and your commerce will be diffused by the amity of nations.’ This is the policy which is to save us from ruin, to pay our debt and confirm our strength. All that we can say is, that one part of it is well matched to the other; that both equally demonstrate the ability of the counsellor to advise, as his vaticinations last winter proved his ability to prophesy.”

And yet this is the person whom the Whigs lauded, and whom Sir Robert Peel elaborately eulogised for his sagacity!

By a somewhat curious coincidence, the budget was brought forward on the very week when the French revolution broke out. Mr Cobden’s proposal, therefore, met with no support; and it must have become evident, even to the free-traders, that under such a threatening aspect as the Continent presented, no sane man would agree to a reduction in our military force. Still that party continued inflexibly opposed to the ministerial measure for raising an adequate revenue, and, by doing so, we maintain that they were guilty of an act of political ingratitude. In this situation, ministers were fain to withdraw their proposal, and to continue the income-tax as formerly, for a period of three years, without any definite scheme of making up for the deficiency in the revenue.

In fact, the session has passed away without a budget at all. That which Lord John Russell tabled, has crumbled away like a thing of gossamer; and, so far as financial matters are concerned, we are left in the pleasant impression that we are getting into further debt, and have no distinct means of paying it. To exhibit the recklessness with which the Whigs regard all matters connected with revenue, it is sufficient to remark, that with three millions of deficit admitted, our rulers think this an advantageous and a proper time to sacrifice about fifty thousand pounds annually, the produce of duties upon imported copper ore.

Mr Osborne was right. No ministry, had there been a decent Opposition, could have stood such an exposure. We even go further; for we believe that—but for the French revolution, and the universal turbulence abroad, which rendered it absolutely necessary that this country should maintain a firm front, and exhibit no symptoms of internal weakness or discord—the present ministry could not have existed for another fortnight. As it is, we are in some respects glad that they have continued in office; because, though late, they have been called upon to act under circumstances which, in future, may give a new and improved tone to Whig political opinions.

Before quitting the budget, let us say a word or two regarding future financial prospects. It is no doubt possible that trade may revive—though, from the present aspect of European affairs, we are not inclined to be at all sanguine in our expectations. We cannot, it is quite clear, reduce our effective establishments; for no one can say what emergency may arise to make us, not mere spectators, but active partisans in a contest which we shall deeply and long deplore. Economy we may practise at home, and for once we are of Joseph’s mind. There are items in our civil and pension list clearly superfluous and undefensible, and we wish to see these removed, though with a just regard to vested interests and claims. We are no admirers of such antiquated offices as that of Hereditary Grand Falconer; and we think that Mr MacGregor’s inquiry, as to the heirs of the Duke of Schomberg, who for a century and a half have been billeted upon the country to the tune of three thousand a-year, deserved at least a courteous reply from so very determined an economist as the Premier formerly proclaimed himself. A doorkeeper may surely be maintained at a less annual expense than the income of a country gentleman; and in many departments even of government, we have certainly been over lavish of remuneration. But these retrenchments, though they may give satisfaction to the nation, can never free it from its embarrassments. The revenue has clearly sunk to a point when it must be augmented by some decided and effective measure; and it will well become us all to consider, even without reference to past disputes, from what quarter the supply is to come. If the decision, or at all events the expressed feeling, of the House of Commons can be taken as an index of the popular wish, the nation will not submit to an augmentation of the income-tax. No increased duties upon excise can be levied,—indeed the cry is general for the removal of those which exist. The window-tax—though it might be materially improved by a more equitable arrangement, and by rating great houses without any graduated scale—is decidedly unpopular. In fact, all direct taxation is of an obnoxious character—it is the fertile source of murmur and of discontent, and it never can be adjusted so as to render it palatable to the payer.

From what quarter, then, is it possible for us to recruit our revenue? How are we to provide for casualties, and for a possibly increased expenditure? That question must be solved in one way or the other, and that without lack of time. It will not do to go on from year to year with a continually increasing deficit, the arrears of which shall be passed to the capital of our national debt—we must raise money, and the only question is, how to do it.

Within the last six years, says Sir Charles Wood, the nation has remitted seven and a half millions of annual taxation: since the peace, says Lord John Russell, more than thirty-nine millions of annual taxes have been removed. Highly satisfactory this, no doubt—but what does it prove? Simply that we have pushed the abolition of indirect taxation too far. We have gone on, year after year, lowering tariffs, for the purpose of stimulating foreign trade. We have thereby unquestionably increased our imports, but we have failed in giving any thing like a corresponding buoyancy to our exports. Why we did this is not very difficult of comprehension, if we look attentively to the state of party which has subsisted for the last few years in this country.

Free-trade, in so far as it lessens the cost of production, is clearly the interest of the master-manufacturer who exports for the foreign market; but, we repeat, it is the interest of no one else in the community. Free-trade in certain articles,—that is, in raw material introduced to this country for the purpose of being manufactured, sold at home, or exported—is just and commendable. Free-trade in what are called the necessaries of life, such as corn and cattle, does not tend to the wealth of the country; but, for the present, we shall leave that subject in abeyance. Free-trade in luxuries and in manufactured goods, whenever these latter displace the home labourer in the home market, we hold to be utterly injurious, and we shall presently state our reasons.

The Manchester school have adopted, preached, and insisted upon free trade in all these branches. It was their interest to push the cotton trade to its utmost possible limits, and to undersell all competitors in every accessible market. Hence their favourite doctrine of cheapness, which in appearance is so plausible, but which actually is so fallacious, and the pertinacity with which they have continued to preach it up. Hence the League, in the formation of which they displayed such undoubted energy, and the immense sums which they lavished for the popular promulgation of their creed. To conciliate these men, swollen to a formidable number, and maintaining their opinions with extreme plausibility, and no ordinary share of talent, became an important object to the leaders who were then at the head of the two great parties of the state. It is in vain to deny that a large body of the middle classes were concerned in this movement, and, to gain their votes and support, the unholy race for power began.

Hence our legislation, whether under Peel or Russell, has been directed for the last six or seven years invariably to one point. The man who could boast of having removed the greatest amount of taxation was sure to be the popular favourite; and we all know in what manner, and by what means, Sir Robert Peel accomplished his share of the work. He first, on the assurance that it was to be merely temporary, obtained an income-tax, amply sufficient to redeem the financial deficit which was the legacy of his predecessors. He next proceeded to make that income-tax permanent, by paring at, and reducing the tariffs; and finally, in order that his rival might not have the start of him in popularity, he threw his party overboard, and consented to the abolition of the corn-laws.

But there is a point beyond which taxation cannot possibly be remitted; and that point Sir Robert Peel had reached before he retired from office. True, the effect of his measures had not yet become apparent, but they were foreseen by many, and perhaps not unsuspected by himself towards the close of his tenure of office. Further than as being consenting parties to those reckless sacrifices of revenue, it would be unfair to charge the Whigs with having brought us into our present perplexity. Sir Robert Peel is the real author of this, and he cannot escape the responsibility.

Now upon two points—viz., the introduction of raw material for manufacture, and of articles of food—we shall for the present forbear joining issue with the free-traders. But the third one, that of the admission of foreign manufactured goods at nearly nominal rates of duty, is far too important to be passed over, even at the risk of repetition.

The industry of this country is not confined to a few, but flows through a thousand channels. There are, however, about four great trades in which Britain can at present, owing to her mineral wealth, machinery, and capital, compete with decided advantage against any other country in the world. These are the cotton, the linen, the woollen, and the iron trade, the exports of which articles amount to rather more than TWO-THIRDS of the whole exports of the United Kingdom, or in round numbers from thirty-three to thirty-five millions annually. It is to the unceasing agitation of men connected with these trades that we owe the erection of the League, and the progress of free trade which has brought us to so low a condition.

It is no matter of surprise that the corn-laws were obnoxious to such persons. With the agricultural interest they had no natural sympathy; and being always able to command the monopoly of the home market, their invariable effort has been to stimulate trade abroad to the very utmost of their power. High wages interfered with their profits; and in order to command the labour market, they formed their famous scheme for reducing the price of food, by dealing a blow to agriculture at home, and opening the ports to the admission of foreign corn. This cry was to a certain degree popular, especially amongst those who were not connected with their works; for the more intelligent of the operatives, to their credit be it said, very early detected the selfishness of the whole manœuvre, and saw, that with the price of food wages also would inevitably decline. Foreign corn, however, was not enough for the appetite of those grasping monopolists. They looked with envy on the smaller non-exporting trades, who constituted a great portion of the population, and who were defended in the home market, their only field, by a reasonable scale of duties. It presently occurred to them, that if, by any means this scale could be broken down, and the market inundated with foreign manufactures, they might be enabled to export a larger quantity of their own fabrics, reduce the price of articles which they were personally inclined to consume, and finally reap another benefit by cheapening labour—that is, by forcing a new class, through want of employment, to compete with their former operatives. These we know to have been the secret views of the League, and to these ends, for several years past, they have bent the whole of their energies. How they have succeeded, let the present state of the labour market tell. The tariffs of 1846 were expressly framed in their favour. They have done half of the anticipated work; for by the admission of foreign manufactures into this country at a reduced rate of duty, they have thrown many thousands of industrious handicraftsmen into the streets. The small shopkeeper has been reduced from an employer into a mere retailer, and disaffection has been engendered through the pressure of absolute misery.

This may seem a highly-coloured picture; but if any man of intelligence will take the trouble to make himself acquainted with the feelings, and to listen to the individual histories of persons of the working-class, he will find it to be strictly true. Four-fifths of the men who were in attendance at the late Chartist meetings belonged in 1845 to the non-exporting trades, were then in full employment, and probably as loyal as any subjects in the kingdom. So, indeed, we believe they are still, in so far as loyalty to the crown is concerned; for, thank God! Republicanism has not taken any root in the empire. But they are utterly discontented with the government, and furious at the apathy with which, they think, their sufferings are regarded. They find that the repeal of the corn-laws has done absolutely nothing in their favour. They find that the lowered tariffs have opened a sluice-gate through which articles of foreign manufacture have rushed in to swamp them; and they gloomily, and even savagely, assert, that this state of things is the result of a combination of the rich against the poor. So it is: but from that combination the aristocracy and gentlemen of England stand apart. The headquarters of the grinding-society are at Manchester, Liverpool, and Sheffield; the machinery it uses are the arms of the League; the master-spirits of the confederacy are Cobden, Wilson, and Bright.

A very pregnant instance of the sympathy which is felt by the free-traders and political economists for the suffering of the lower orders, occurred during a debate towards the beginning of May last. We specially notice the fact, because it proves that, however two successive ministers may have forgot their duty to the people, there exists, in a higher quarter still, the deepest commiseration for their distress, and an earnest desire to alleviate it in every possible manner. It appears from official documents that, during the first three months of the present year, there were entered for home consumption, at the port of London alone, foreign silk goods worth £400,000, equal to the employment of 31,000 weavers; lace and needlework worth £40,000, or sufficient to displace the produce of 4000 workwomen and sempstresses; and 7000 dozen of boot and shoe fronts, enough to keep 1200 cordwainers in full employment. So near as we can calculate, the duty payable upon those articles, under the tariff of 1845, would have amounted to £88,150: at present it is not more than £65,575, thus entailing a primary loss of £22,575 to the revenue. Such an influx of goods, at a peculiarly unprofitable season, was tantamount to displacing the labour of 36,200 persons, who were to be thrown upon the public charity, without any other resource. A short time after these facts became known, an order was issued from the Lord Chamberlain’s office, containing her Majesty’s commands to the ladies of England, that in attending court they should appear attired in dresses exclusively the production of native industry. Yes! our gracious Queen, whose heart is unchilled by the cold dogmas of political economy, felt like a woman and a sovereign, and resolved, on her part at least, to rescue from famine and misery so many thousands of her poorer subjects. It is most gratifying to know that this exercise of the royal care and benevolence has met with its best reward, for in the midst of all the distress which has unfortunately prevailed, the class for whose benefit those timely orders were issued have been kept in employment and food: the example set from the throne has been widely and generously followed. But will it be believed, that this act of mercy gave huge umbrage to the free-traders, and was fiercely commented on in their journals as a gross infringement of the principles of enlightened government? Therefore, in the eyes of the Leaguers, it seems a crime to interfere for the support of the British workman,—and unjustifiable interference with Providence to give work to the labouring poor!

But this is not all. Lord John Russell, on being asked in the House of Commons whether he had any share in suggesting this philanthropic action, or whether the sole credit of it appertained to his royal mistress, was not slow in uttering his disclaimer. “He had not advised the crown in the matter,—he could only say that the order had issued from the Chamberlain’s office.” After a vain attempt to show that no extra quantity of goods had been imported, but that the apparent increase arose solely from the cessation of smuggling, he proceeded to remark:—“But if more goods are now entered, and thereby a particular class do suffer inconvenience or distress, yet these entries must stimulate the production and exportation of the classes of goods for which the imports are exchanged.” There spoke the convert to the League—the truckler to Cobden and Co.! There, from the lips of a British minister, fell the most un-British, the most unpatriotic doctrine that ever yet was enunciated! Said we not truly that the whole object of free trade is to put down and exterminate the non-exporting trades, for the exclusive benefit of the few monster monopolies? The Premier concluded an ungracious, halting, and discreditable speech with the somewhat unnecessary announcement that, under all circumstances, he thought he should be the last person to advise her Majesty to make an alteration in the commercial policy which of late years had been pursued.

We need hardly remark that, in the present instance, the importation of these foreign goods could in no way “stimulate the production or exportation” of any kind of British manufacture whatever. The articles in question were sent from France, at a time when every thing was unsaleable, and were sold in London for hard cash, at a heavy discount. Even Cobden need not have grudged this little encouragement to Spitalfields and Bethnal Green. He did not sell a yard of calico the less. Gold, and not shirting, was what the French wanted, what they bargained for, and what they received. But let us see a little more of the sympathy of the Leaguers for the poor, and respect for the sovereign, who surely might be left, in matters of this kind, to exercise some discretion of her own.

Colonel Thompson, representing an exporting constituency, was furious at the alleged interference. “He would ask whether there was any charity, any humanity, any justice, any policy, any common-sense in representing hostility to one portion of the manufacturing classes of the country, to come from a quarter of which he was sure no one in that House wished to speak otherwise than with feelings of the utmost affection and reverence?” We are not sure that we quite understand this outburst of the gallant Colonel, which we copy verbatim from the columns of the Spectator, but, as he talks about charity and humanity with reference to his waistcoat and pantaloon exporting constituency of Bradford, we take him to mean that that favoured place should flourish, and Spitalfields utterly disappear. This is pure Leaguer’s doctrine, distinctly redolent of the Bastile!

Mr John Bright was also true to his order. The partisan of peace opined that “there was no difference between driving out workmen, and keeping out their work: though no order had been issued to exclude foreign work, yet the effect of the order really given is, that French silks, which would have been consumed, will not be used, and English taken instead. It should be known, that from the late convulsions, the contingent depression of trade, and the low price of French silks in France, very large quantities of them have been purchased and brought to this country. The announcement in question might therefore entail great loss on large capitalists, and ruin on many of smaller means. The kindness to the Spitalfields weavers would then be done only at a cost of loss and injury to other classes.” Quite right, Friend Bright! the first persons to be guarded are your speculators and your capitalists. The poor operative, who is not in your line, may starve for any thing you care. There is a protective spirit about this, which absolutely charms us. We wonder that Mr Bright did not on a former occasion foresee that the repeal of the corn-laws might entail great loss on large proprietors, and ruin on many of smaller means!

Sir William Molesworth considered that “it was a silly and foolish order; and he was informed, on the best authority, that there was not the slightest chance of its being obeyed.” We leave this remark of Molesworth without any comment, merely asking his authority for holding that, to assist in feeding the hungry, and maintaining our poorer countrymen by the exercise of their own industry, is a silly and a foolish act; and requesting him to consider how far his chivalrous title is consistent with such language, when applied to an order emanating directly from his sovereign.

This little episode is very instructive, as elucidating the views of the free-traders. The great exporting trades have combined to crush and annihilate the small handicrafts, and this they are rapidly doing through the operation of these lowered tariffs. If direct taxation were to be introduced, and the custom-house virtually abolished, in so far as regards articles of foreign manufacture, the thing would be done at once—for no one would wear clumsy English boots when he could get French ones at a lower price; or British instead of Parisian gloves; or silk from Spitalfields rather than the less costly fabric of Lyons. The more honest of the free-traders make no scruple of announcing their views. They admit that the realisation of their maxim, to sell in the dearest and buy in the cheapest market, implies the ruin of every non-exporting trade, and they seem absolutely resolved to push their theory to the utmost. At present Sir Robert Peel has managed it so, that, without being absolutely annihilated, the poorer classes are ground down to the lowest point. We ask the shopkeepers, artisans, and smaller manufacturers, who have no connexion with the foreign market, whether this is not truly the case,—and if so, whether they are inclined to allow this cruel, selfish, and inhuman system to be carried any further—nay, whether they will not at once resolve to make determined head against it? But for the obstinate blindness of the political economists, we would appeal to that dearest of all considerations, their own safety. Do they really think it possible, even were it politic, to drive the whole operative industry of Britain into the compass of a few exporting trades. Can they make millions of men change their habits of a sudden, and walk from the country towns and villages,—wherein, before Sir Robert Peel introduced the foreigner to swamp them, they had supported themselves by the exercise of their craft,—to the factory or the mine, or the furnace, or the printing work, there to spend the remainder of their existence in twisting, digging, smelting, and stamping, for the benefit of Cobden and his confederates? The idea is absolute madness. Already we see the effects of false and unpatriotic legislation, in Chartist meetings and processions, in agitations for universal suffrage, in crime three-fold increased, and in augmented poor-rates. What are considerations of sanatory reform or of public instruction compared to these? Will men thank you for soap and tracts, even should these articles be gratuitous, if you take their labour away from them, and legislate for one class alone, as has been the case of late years? Can you expect to make them loyal and peaceable, whilst you deny them the means of obtaining a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s labour—whilst you not only encourage, but convert into an actual fact the idea that a large portion of the poor are oppressed, and drive them to seek a remedy in attempts to procure a more popular representation? Free trade has been the great incentive to Chartism, and, unless men return speedily to their senses, it may chance to be the terrible promoter of revolution.

But what is to be the real amount of the deficit? No man living can tell. Lord John Russell estimated it at about three millions, and subsequently Sir Charles Wood announced that, by sundry savings and sales of old stores—which latter source of revenue very much resembles the case of a gentleman parting with his body clothes to make up for his annual expenditure—it might be reduced to a million and a half. Since then we have received the official accounts of the trade of the kingdom for the six months ending 5th July 1848; and we very much fear, from a perusal of these, that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has understated his difficulties. Our exports, for the sake of which every other interest has been sacrificed, have fallen off to an alarming extent. During the corresponding six months of last year the declared value of our exports was £25,395,243: the whole amount for this period is £21,571,939, or very nearly FOUR MILLIONS less on the half year! Here is another staggering instance of the utter futility of free trade. The decrease of export for the year 1846, as compared with 1845, was about two millions—and now it is going on at the rate of four millions for half the time! Was there ever a more pregnant proof of the impossibility of forcing markets?

Looking to the imports, we find some very curious results. Lord John Russell took great credit for the increased consumption of sugar consequent on his West Indian experiments, which we shall presently have occasion to notice more minutely; and predicted a still further consumption and increase to the revenue. Let us see how that matter stands. The following is the total of sugar imported to this country for the first six months of the last three years respectively.

1846.

1847.

1848.

Sugar unrefined, cwts.,

2,956,986

3,967,686

2,960,430

Sugar Refined,

54,249

39,344

50,863

Sugar Candy,

1

1,025

507

Sugar Molasses,

202,264

411,263

191,531

3,213,500

4,419,318

3,203,331

So that we are absolutely importing less sugar in 1848 than we did in 1846, before Lord John Russell and his sapient colleagues chose to give the coup de grace to the colonists! So much for increased revenue from that source.

In the articles of raw material for manufacture there is a considerable increase; and, should money be obtainable at easy rates throughout the coming winter, this may be a source of real congratulation. But from recent symptoms, and the insanity of ministers in refusing to face the difficulties of the Bank Restriction Acts, we very much dread another recurrence of tightness, in which case industry must inevitably be paralysed as before. It is, however, comforting to know that we have a stock of raw material in hand, and that our condition in that respect has improved since last year, when the warehouses were nearly drained. The aggregate amount of cotton, wool, flax, hemp, and silk which have been imported for the last six months is in the ratio of 28,811,825, to 27,372,502 for the same period in 1847.

But the influx of foreign manufactures is the most singular feature of all; and we do entreat the most serious consideration of our readers to this very pressing point. What we have already said regarding the annihilation of the small trades in this country, by the total withdrawal of protection, receives the amplest confirmation from these official tables; and, if we are wise, something must be done, with the least possible delay, to remedy the evils which have been entailed upon us, through our blind submission to the pernicious doctrines of the free-traders. Do honourable members really believe, that by agitating the ballot, or bringing forward schemes for extended suffrage, they will give work to the unemployed, or put bread in the mouths of the starving? If, instead of attempting to gain a little transient popularity by advocating organic changes, they would seriously address themselves to the task of revising the tariffs, and so encouraging the home market, they would be of real use to the country at this momentous time. For momentous it is most certainly. The discovery of a deliberate plan for general incendiarism in Liverpool, the mobs in Glasgow, and the disturbances at Bradford, are all symptoms of disaffection, and all proceed from one cause—from the sacrifice of native industry at the shrine of the Moloch of free trade. Even now, while we are writing, intelligence has arrived of the arrest of armed Chartists in London and in Manchester; assassination has begun at Ashton, and every post brings in tidings of some new commotion. Is this a time for Parliament to separate without any remedial measure? Is this a time to allow our markets to be inundated with foreign produce; each fresh cargo displacing our own industry, and further adding to our embarrassment, by hastening on another monetary crisis by the exportation of bullion in exchange? This is the work commenced by Peel, and consummated by the incapable Whigs. God knows how it will end, if wiser, more unselfish, and more patriotic men are not speedily summoned to take the lead in her Majesty’s councils.

No account is given, as in former years, of the amount of foreign linen and woollen manufactures imported, or of several other important branches of trade upon which Sir Robert Peel abolished the duty. Why this omission has taken place we do not know, unless it be for the worst of all reasons, that the results were too startling for disclosure. But we shall take the statistics of the silk manufactured trade alone, from which it will be seen that, in two years after the relaxation of the duties, we have doubled our imports, thereby throwing immense numbers of our own operatives out of employment.

FOREIGN SILK MANUFACTURES, ENTERED UNDER TARIFF OF 1846.

1846.

1847.

1848.

Silk or satin broad stuffs,

64,269

lbs.

85,589

lbs.

141,179

lbs.

Silk ribbons,

79,541

95,906

95,881

Gauze or crape broad stuffs,

4,383

4,053

5,127

Gauze ribbons,

11,268

26,166

26,312

Gauze, mixed,

18

8

39

Mixed ribbons,

687

1,650

1,244

Velvet broad stuffs,

2,935

4,822

6,558

Velvet embossed ribbons,

4,183

3,141

10,530

167,284

lbs.

221,335

lbs.

286,870

lbs.

Now if, as it is fair to suppose, the same increase, or even half of it, has taken place in the importation of other articles upon which the duties were removed, but which have been quietly withdrawn from the official tables; these statistics are enough to condemn free trade before any tribunal in the world. Mark how the matter stands. Here is a doubled importation of foreign manufactured goods. One half at least of these goods have come in to displace your home manufacture. The other half would have come in as formerly to supply the rich, who would have had to pay a high duty for the gratification of their fancy. That duty, where reduced, is now lost to the revenue. Who is the gainer, then? No one, save the rich consumer; whilst, on the other hand, the revenue has suffered, and home industry has received a prostrating blow. But—say men of the Cobden school—though the silk weaver, and embroiderer, and milliner, and plaiter, and shoemaker, and tailor, may have suffered, the country is no loser, because WE export goods in return for the articles of import. Do you, gentlemen? Let us turn to the export tables, and see how your account stands. Recollect, you have undertaken to show us a corresponding export of your goods to meet the influx of foreign manufactures. Unless you can do this, your case is utterly worthless, and you stand as detected impostors.

EXPORT OF PRINCIPAL MANUFACTURES FROM THE UNITED KINGDOM.

1846.

1847.

1848.

Cotton manufactures,

£8,899,272

£9,248,835

£8,023,825

Ditto yarn,

3,523,793

2,628,616

2,214,431

Linen manufactures,

1,389,520

1,502,770

1,413,819

Ditto yarn,

410,277

315,196

236,076

Silk manufactures,

421,910

494,806

263,798

Woollen yarn,

377,160

444,797

291,985

Ditto manufactures,

3,143,550

3,564,754

2,578,470

£18,165,482

£18,199,774

£15,022,404

The result is a loss on these articles alone of THREE MILLIONS in six months, and we are to set that against doubled imports, free of duty, and displacing British employment! Here are the glorious effects of Sir Robert’s commercial legislation!

What, then, has gone out to meet the import which is rapidly promoting Chartism among us, by impoverishing the poorer classes? Just what we predicted long ago—GOLD; the idol without which men must starve, but which free trade periodically sweeps from out our grasp. The lowered tariffs have operated peculiarly unfavourably at the present crisis—not perhaps so much in the branch of silk manufactures as in others; for it is remarkable that the increase of import in 1847, over that of 1846, is quite as large as the increase of the present over the former year; and had Lord John Russell been alive to the duties of his situation, or capable of comprehending the effects which a glut of foreign goods must produce on the home market, he ought instantly to have brought in a bill augmenting the customs duties, and hurried it through Parliament without a moment’s unnecessary delay. The madness of encouraging increased imports, whilst exports are falling, is utterly inconceivable to any who have not eaten and drunk with Cobden; and it is quite possible that some who have been admitted to that precious privilege, may agree with us if they will take the trouble to consider the foregoing tables. We are not the only sufferers. America is beginning to understand that increased imports are by no means decisive symptoms of a healthy commercial state; and the following extract from Transatlantic correspondence, which we copy from the money article in the Sun newspaper of 16th August last, is pregnant with meaning in the present posture of affairs.

“The whole of Europe is in a terrible condition, and our only hope is, that Great Britain may escape the blast which has swept from one end of the Continent to the other with such devastating effect. If England escape, we shall continue to find extensive markets for our products, and our prosperity will be partially preserved. Our markets on the Continent have almost become extinct, so that the worst in that particular has already been realised; but, every week or month, consumption in that section of the world is restricted or limited—so much the more injurious must be the revolution causing such a state of things. With the exception of Great Britain, our European export trade has been literally annihilated; but unfortunately, our import trade with these countries has not met with a similar fate, but on the contrary, has rather increased than otherwise. Importers and speculators in this country have taken advantage of the financial embarrassments growing out of the Revolution, which the manufacturers of France and Europe generally have laboured under, and have purchased of them for cash, goods at one half their cost, and have filled our markets. A portion of the specie which has been shipped from this port within the last four months went abroad for this purpose; and while our exports had become reduced to the lowest limit, and exchange drawn upon previous shipments of produce was coming back protested, millions of dollars of gold and silver were going forward to purchase goods which could not be obtained on the usual credit. In this way, our whole foreign trade has become deranged, and we have thus far borne the brunt of the commercial revulsions and political revolutions in Europe.”

What is to be said of a system which swamps our home market, whilst at the same time it promotes a drain of gold? What is to be said of the system which makes a drain of gold almost tantamount to national bankruptcy?

Having hitherto dealt with the subjects of the currency and finance, let us now glance for a moment at the new legislation for our colonies. We need not repeat the tale of the disasters into which the West Indies have been plunged, or the ruin which has befallen many of our own most respectable citizens, who, to their misfortune, had embarked their capital and fortunes in sugar-growing estates, trusting to British faith and protection for at least an adequate return. The veriest zealot could not have wished to have seen the crime of slavery more bitterly avenged; but in what a manner! Great Britain, after having made a sacrifice of twenty millions to emancipate the slave population in her own colonies,—a sacrifice to her, though not an adequate compensation to the planters,—after having declared to the whole world her determination no longer to participate in the profits of forced labour,—after having made treaties, and equipped armaments for the suppression of the slave-trade,—suddenly changed her policy, admitted slave-grown sugar from foreign states, first, at a high, and, latterly, at so low a duty, that her own colonies, already impoverished, could no longer afford to defray the cost of production. Here, again, the principle of free trade has been triumphant and ruinous; here, again, the exporting trades have carried their point, not only against the interests of the colonists, but against those of benevolence and Christianity. The cause of the Blacks has been abandoned for the tempting bribe of cheap sugars, of an augmented demand for cottons and blankets to supply the gangs of Cuba, and of machinery for Brazil, to enable the planter more utterly to prostrate Jamaica.

In February last we reviewed with great care all the evidence which we could collect regarding the West Indian interest. The conclusion to which we arrived was contained in the following paragraph:—“And what is it that our colonists ask? What is the extravagant proposal which we are prepared to reject at the cost of the loss of our most fertile possessions, and of nearly two hundred millions of British capital? Simply this, that in the meantime such a distinctive duty should be enforced as will allow them to compete on terms of equality with the slave-growing states. Let this alone be granted, and they have no wish to interfere with any other fiscal regulation. And what would be the amount of differential duty required? Not more, as we apprehend, than ten shillings the hundredweight.” Having hazarded this statement so early, it was certainly gratifying to find that an impartial committee of the House of Commons, reporting four months later, had, after a full investigation of the whole case,—and of course with official documents before them, the correctness of which could not admit of a doubt,—arrived at precisely the same result. The proposition for a differential duty of ten shillings, which was finally agreed to by the committee, was actually made by a member whose general opinions are understood to lean towards the side of free trade,—we mean Sir Thomas B. Birch, one of the representatives for Liverpool.

This resolution of course implied a direct condemnation of the Whig Act of 1846, which the West Indians bitterly complained of as a flagrant breach of faith, and as having put the coping-stone on their misfortunes. It was the resolution of an independent and intelligent parliamentary committee, founded upon a mass of evidence derived from every quarter; and in a matter of this sort, wherein so vast an interest as that of our most valuable colonies was concerned, it might have been expected that the report would be treated with deference, even though it might in some degree impugn the sagacity of a prime minister, by exposing the results of his former reckless legislation. Such was not the case. Had the seven wise men of Greece sate upon that committee, their report would have been utterly indifferent to Lord John, who immediately came forward with a counter-scheme, which had not even the merit of consistency to give it colour. He proposed a new sliding-scale of duties, the result of which will be, that next year the colonists will have a protection against the slave-owners of seven shillings in the article of clayed, and five-and-sixpence in that of muscovado sugar,—the boon to taper away annually, until, in 1854, the protective duty will be reduced to three shillings on the one article, and two shillings upon the other. This is the doom of the West Indies,—and we expect nothing less than an immediate stoppage of the supplies for the maintenance of the colonial governments. Robbed as they have been, ruined as they are, and all through a course of most reckless and unprovoked legislation, it is in vain to hope that any further capital will be embarked in the cultivation of these islands. For the benefit of economists at home, and the clamourers for cheap sugar, it may be as well to record that this new sliding-scale is to be accompanied with a loan of £500,000, in addition to £160,000 already guaranteed this session, for the purposes of promoting immigration, and that at a period when the annual deficit was originally calculated at three millions! The amendment of Sir John Pakington, founded upon the resolutions of the committee, was negatived in a full house by the small majority of fifteen.

This has been by far the most important debate of the session; and at one time it was confidently expected that ministers would have been defeated. Sir Robert Peel, however, came to their rescue at the last stage. Oleaginous and plausible as ever, the wily baronet began his speech by deploring the misfortunes of the West Indians, repudiating mere pecuniary considerations, and calling to mind old struggles, in which these colonies had stood by the side of the mother country. This sympathetic introduction boded little mercy for the parties it seemed to favour. Sir Robert had acquiesced in the Act of 1846, and it was now rather difficult to back out from that position. But soothing measures might be adopted, the salaries of governors defrayed by the mother country, and perhaps, if, after due consideration, it should be found expedient to remove the blockading squadron from the coast of Africa, part of the sums so saved might be devoted to colonial purposes. Then came a discourse upon the merits of irrigation, which would have done credit to a lecturer in an agricultural society. Finally, Sir Robert rested his future hopes for the Indies upon other, and what appear to us peculiarly objectionable considerations. He has no confidence in the tranquillity of Cuba and Brazil, and he hints at an insurrection of the slaves being probable, if emancipation is not granted. We shall not comment more than lightly upon the decency of such a hint. Desirable as emancipation may be, it is, to say the least, questionable whether it would be cheaply bought by so terrible a catastrophe as a general rising of the black barbarian population against the whites; and in the event of such a misfortune occurring either in the above slave colonies or in the United States, it is extremely problematical whether our own dearly bought emancipation would effectually prevent the contagion from spreading to the free colonies. But we will tell Sir Robert a fact of which he ought to be fully cognisant. The greatest enemies and obstacles to emancipation, in the Spanish and South American States, have been himself and his free-trading allies. It is well known to many here, and notorious in the West Indies, that at the very time when the ill-advised Act permitting slave-grown sugar to be introduced into this country was produced, negotiations were actually pending in Cuba for the immediate emancipation of the slaves. The results of that Act were the instant abandonment of such an idea, the withdrawal of the slaves from the coffee plantations to the sugar-fields, double work rigorously enforced, and an enormously increased importation of human beings from the coast of Africa. With such a bonus held out to the Cuban planter, such a huge increase of consumption in this country as Lord John Russell gloatingly contemplates, it would be utter insanity to expect that emancipation can take place through any other means than blood, rapine, plunder, and incendiarism. Sir Robert and the free-traders have effectually precluded any milder method. Had they been true to the principles professed by this country at the time of our own emancipation, there is every human reason to believe that by this time Cuba would have been a free colony. Had that event taken place, slavery, and of course the slave-trade, would have received its death-blow. But now when we have given, and continue to give, a direct premium to the abhorred system, when we have shown that we love its produce so much, as to hold the welfare of our own colonies as nothing in comparison, it is mere Jesuitry to cant about the probability of voluntary freedom. This is the worst and most indefensible argument, if, indeed, it can be brought within the category of arguments, which has yet been advanced from any quarter in support of the false legislation and determined opposition of ministers to the just claims of the colonists.

In the course of the debate a singular discussion arose, which tends to throw some light upon the management of the Colonial Office. A most important despatch upon the state of Jamaica had been received from Governor Grey, and this was withheld from the select committee then sitting, although Mr Hawes, the Under-secretary for the Colonies, was directly questioned as to its existence. We do not wish to enter into the details of this matter, or to cast any imputation upon the probity of Mr Hawes, who, in explanation, was fain to take shelter under the plea of a mistake. But the circumstance certainly did look awkward, and the doubts, not only of the House but of the country, were far from being removed by the extreme acrimony displayed by the Premier, in his injudicious defence of his subordinate. Never in our recollection has a Prime Minister shown so remarkable a want of temper and of courtesy to a political opponent, as was exhibited by Lord John Russell in his reply to Lord George Bentinck. We should be glad, for the sake of the utterer, that the speech could be erased from the pages of Hansard, even were we to lose, at the same time, the brilliant and withering reply which it elicited from Mr D’Israeli. A suppression certainly had occurred, whether through mistake or otherwise; and the matter was thought so serious that Earl Grey volunteered an explanation in the Upper House. He had better have let it alone. New charges of suppression were preferred; and finally Earl Grey admitted that, on one occasion at least, he had quoted passages from a Jamaica memorial in support of his argument, totally and purposely omitting to read other sentences, which gave a different construction to the meaning intended to be conveyed! This is popularly said to be the method adopted by a certain personage, who shall be nameless, whenever he has occasion to quote Scripture, and yet it is practised and defended by a high official functionary! We copy the remarks of our contemporary the Spectator, as very apposite on this occasion.

“The personal dispute about the conduct of Lord Grey and Mr Hawes, and the strictures of Lord George Bentinck, which began on Friday last, have usurped a large share of the week’s debates; not altogether to so little purpose as most personal squabbles, since it throws considerable light on the administration of colonial affairs. The general impression, when all sides have had their say, is, that Mr Hawes and Lord Grey did not intend to cheat Lord George Bentinck’s committee by the deliberate suppression of evidence; but the very statements made by ministers, in defence, unveil reprehensible practices. It seems that the routine of the Colonial Office is such as to preclude any security against ‘mistakes’ so grave as the withholding of most important despatches. And Lord Grey claims, as an admitted official privilege, to pick out bits of evidence in his exclusive possession, that make for a particular view, although those bits may be torn from a context that should perfectly refute that particular view! In effect, he upholds the doctrine that a government is not bound to lay before parliament all the information that reaches the departments, even though that information be not of a secret kind, but may select such parts as go to bolster up the preconceived crotchets of the minister for the time being. In this case, Lord Grey had preconceived crotchets hostile to the West Indian colonies, whom he treated as if he were the Attorney-General prosecuting a state criminal. He has carried beyond its usual bounds the spirit of the Anti-Colonial Office, in Downing Street. With this spirit of animosity the Secretary for the Colonies coupled the most singular exhibition of personal trifling, and self-worship. He appealed to the name of his father, as a reason for not accusing himself! and pointed to the ‘awful warning across the Channel,’ as a reason for not preferring charges calculated to weaken English statesmen. ‘Don’t talk of inefficiency or dishonesty,’ cries he—‘it is dangerous; for such talk has upset governments abroad.’ Yes, shaky and dishonest governments; but what is Lord Grey afraid of?”

As for the sugar duties, we do not by any means believe that this is a final settlement of the question. If free trade, indeed, should continue to progress, there is not much hope for the colonists; but, to the observant eye, there are unmistakeable symptoms of reaction apparent in this country, and a very general sympathy for the case of the West Indians. Our greatest fear is, that irretrievable mischief will be wrought before there is an opportunity of applying a remedy. It seems cruel mockery, after all that has happened, to exhort the planters to persevere, and to prevent those valuable islands from lapsing into a state of wilderness: and yet there seems no alternative between such perseverance and abandonment. This only we can say, that should the commercial principles, which we have advocated throughout, be again recognised and adopted—should true and not hollow Conservatism once more triumph over Whig effrontery and weakness, this mighty grievance will assuredly be the earliest redressed.

Referring again to the speech from the throne as the text for the parliamentary campaign, we find the Navigation Laws specially marked out either for modification or repeal. This subject having been fully dealt with in our July Number, we offer no further remarks upon the policy which dictated such a plan; indeed, no remarks are necessary, for since then the measure has been postponed. This is a sorry result for ministers; for although they plead, in justification, that other important business had prevented them from forcing on the consideration of this very serious question, their protestations do not seem to satisfy the gentlemen who are most clamorous against the shipping interest of Britain. It has been more than hinted in certain quarters, that this postponement is a small stroke of Whig policy or prudence, for the purpose of keeping alive as long as possible a theme of dissension among the Conservatives. We offer no opinion as to this conjecture, which may be substantially true or not. Certain it is that the proposal for the repeal of those laws has been encountered, outside of the House of Commons, with a storm of disapprobation; and that, if the feeling of the public, as opposed to the interests of the exporters, has any weight with the legislature, the ministerial bill will be strangled before it can receive the royal assent. So great was the anxiety displayed, that on the day after it became known in Glasgow that the bill was not to be pushed forward this session, every vessel in the Clyde was decorated with flags, in token of thankfulness for the respite. We hope that every advantage will be taken in the interval to force upon the attention of parliament the resolution of the well-affected people of this country, to maintain intact that law which has been the source of our naval supremacy, and which was declared, by no less an authority than Adam Smith, to be as wise as if it had been dictated by the most deliberate wisdom.

A considerable number of minor bills have been quietly allowed to drop. This is not matter of lamentation, for, as far as we could comprehend the principle of most of them, they were utterly worthless and uncalled for. The Bill for the Removal of the Jewish Disabilities was, we rejoice to say, thrown out in the House of Lords, the peers being of opinion that the British Legislature should continue a Christian assembly. Lord John, in the plenitude of his zeal for the Sanhedrim, gave notice of a motion for altering the form of the oaths required to be taken by each member of Parliament at his admission, and so introducing the Jew by a convenient little postern. But somehow or other, as the session progressed, the ardour of the Premier cooled, and Baron Rothschild is at present left with as little chance of adorning the benches of St Stephens as ever. Mr Joseph Hume and his party have got up a radical alliance, for the extension of the suffrage and various other organic schemes, and it was understood that Sir Joshua Walmsley was to have the honour of leading the movement. Unfortunately, however, before the day of debate had arrived, Sir Joshua had been unseated in consequence of certain acts of bribery which had taken place in connexion with the borough of Leicester, so that the purists had to march to battle under the chieftainship of the veteran of Montrose. They were beaten hollow: but at a later period of the session, the carelessness of ministers gave a temporary triumph to the same parties, resolutions in favour of the ballot having been passed by a small majority. This vote is of no importance whatever, save in so far as it demonstrates the utter helplessness of the Whigs when left to their own resources.

Whilst upon the subject of shelving, let us remark that the Scottish Registration and Marriage Bills have shared a similar fate. Of this we are devoutly glad. Not a single petition has been presented in their favour; and though no doubt the registration of births, and a stricter law of marriage, may be desirable, we think it might be quite possible to accomplish both objects, without creating a new and expensive staff of functionaries, or holding forth a prospect of entire immunity to seduction. Possibly at a later period we may take an opportunity of examining these postponed measures in detail.

Two more questions remain, and then the history of the session is ended. They are of vast importance—Ireland, and our foreign policy.

The opening of the session found Ireland in a state of agrarian outrage. Agitation was doing its work, and murder was rife on every hand. Foremost in stirring up the people, most determined in hounding them on, were the Roman Catholic priesthood; and we trust that this fact will not be forgotten by those who are now meditating to buy their silence. Individuals were openly denounced from the altar, and next day shot down by the assassin. The most seditious language was used by these cassocked traitors towards the British government; and even the higher dignitaries of their church sought to stimulate the passions of the populace by the most barefaced and impudent misrepresentation. Hear Archdeacon Laffan at Cashel, upon a Sunday, surrounded by some fifteen thousand of the peasantry, and backed by that notable worthy, Mr John O’Connell, and three other members of Parliament—“The Saxon scoundrel, with his bellyful of Irish meat, could very well afford to call his poor, honest, starving fellow-countrymen savages and assassins; but if in the victualling department John Bull suffered one-fifth of the privations to which the Tipperary men were subject, if he had courage enough, he would stand upon one side, and shoot the first man he could meet with a decent coat on his back—(Cheers.) But the Saxon had not courage to do any thing like a man; he growls out like a hungry tiger!” At the time when this expositor of the Christian doctrine was raving to his miserable flock, the following was the condition of the Established clergy. One of them, writing from King’s County, described his position—“For nearly twenty years I have been a minister of the Established Church; and during that time I have had nothing whatever to do with tithes, for my benefice is a chapelry of £90 a-year, and is paid partly out of land set apart for the purpose, and partly by the ecclesiastical commissioners of Ireland, from a fund bequeathed to small livings by Primate Boulter.” He had devoted much attention to the employment of the poor; had never shown favour or partiality to any one sect; had lived simply, and attended to his duties; had never brought an ejectment, or taken any other law proceedings, against a tenant. “What, then,” continued he, “was my surprise and horror to find an assassin lying in wait for me for three successive days; and—for this is still more horrifying—that most of the people of the neighbourhood where I live have been so far from expressing joy at the escape I have made, that they show evident disappointment at my not being shot!”

We have often marvelled what must be the impression of foreigners after reading such speeches as are usually delivered at an Irish assembly, by men who cannot plead utter ignorance in extenuation of the language they employ. They must, we presume, imagine that “the Saxon” has taken forcible possession of the whole of Ireland; that the natives are no better than serfs—unprotected by any laws, and liable to be beaten, plundered, and massacred at the pleasure of the invaders; that, on the approach of each harvest, hordes of the Saxons repair to the fertile fields of the Celt, reap them with a sickle in the one hand and a musket in the other, and then carry off the produce, without leaving a single doit in reparation. He would imagine that the women are forced, the men defrauded, and the houses pillaged at pleasure; that the Roman Catholics are hunted down like wild beasts, by armies of bloodthirsty Protestants; that the exercise of their faith is denied them; and that they are allowed no voice whatever in the national representation. Some such conception as this he must form from the harangues which have constituted the staple of Conciliation Hall for more years than we care to reckon. But what would be his amazement were he told that Ireland is governed by precisely the same laws as the sister country; that property is equally protected, and life endangered only by the brutality of the Celtic assassin; that Ireland is specially exempted from several of the taxes which press most heavily upon the industrious classes of Great Britain; that on the last occasion of famine, upwards of nine millions of public, and a vast amount of private money, was given for the support of her poor; that Roman Catholic colleges have been munificently endowed; that Ireland has her full share of representation in the imperial Parliament, and that upwards of one half of the time of the House of Commons is occupied with measures tending to the amelioration of the Irish people! If he were told all this—and it is no more than the naked truth—what would be his astonishment? And yet so it is. Ireland has persisted, and is persisting, in her course of sedition without a grievance, of murder without provocation, of black and brutal ingratitude without even the shadow of an excuse!

It is impossible to find language too strong to characterise the guilt of the individuals, lay or clerical, who have spent the better part of their mean and mischievous existence in misleading their rude and ignorant fellow-countrymen. They are the moral nuisances who have always stood in the way of Ireland’s progression and happiness. But for them, there would have been no absenteeism, no heart-burning between the landlord and the tenant. The people would gradually have learned habits of industry and providence, and instead of whooping through the country like maniacs, shouting and yelling for repeal, which if granted, would make an utter hell of Ireland, they would be tilling the ground, or usefully employed in the development of that capital which no one dare hazard at present in their mad and turbulent districts. For all these things we do not blame, but execrate O’Connell and his tribe. The grasping selfishness of that family has for the last few years been the greatest curse to Ireland; and the crimes of other and inferior agitators shrink into insignificance, compared with the moral turpitude of the men who have deliberately fattened upon their country’s ruin.

Mr John O’Connell, having previously declared his intention of dying on the floor of the House of Commons rather than permit the passing of a Coercion Bill to restrain his countrymen from murder, did in effect make his appearance in St Stephens, but by no means with a suicidal intention. One of his earliest speeches is worth preserving, as it exhibits, in a most extraordinary degree, the hereditary power of mendicancy. “If they had a reverence for human life, let them extend it to the people of Ireland. Give money. He asked for money. He heard the laughter of honourable gentlemen; but he could tell them that they ought to give money, and that it was their duty to do so. Charge them for the money if they liked, but at all events let them save the lives of the people. He did not expect to be met otherwise than with laughter; and he was bound to say that he never saw in that House one single real thought for the interest of Ireland. (Great laughter.) He begged to say, that he had made that remark hastily and hotly, but now he repeated it deliberately and coolly. Whenever the interests of Ireland came into competition with those of England, they were invariably sacrificed. And if he did ask money, had he not a right to do so? In a few nights a motion would come on, and then he would prove that they owed it!” No man certainly ever did more credit to his profession. Brought up under the most able instructor of his age in the art of begging, John O’Connell exhibited on this occasion talents of the highest order, which would have made his fortune on the highway, unless some stray traveller should have mistaken the intentions of the suppliant, and been over ready with his pistol to prevent an anticipated robbery. The vile ingratitude of this man is almost equal to his audacity. Great Britain, without the slightest hope of any return, had impoverished herself for the support of the Irish, and yet here was the whole acknowledgment! Even on the score of policy it would have been wiser for Mr O’Connell to have mitigated his tone.

The Irish Crime and Outrage Bill was introduced by ministers at an early stage of the session, with the general concurrence of all parties. No one could doubt that it was especially needed, but few were sanguine that it would suffice to cure the spirit of disaffection which was abroad. In fact, Irish agitation has been allowed to proceed to such a point, that the evil is utterly incurable. What chance is there of putting a stop to physical force demonstrations, or, in other words, to open rebellion, whilst another gang of demagogues is permitted to preach sedition under the guise of moral force, and to fill the minds of their deluded victims with every species of misrepresentation and wild hostility to Great Britain? Our system of government towards Ireland has been timid and weak, and we are now paying the penalty. Our charities have been given with far too liberal a hand. Ireland has but had to ask, in order to be relieved by the public money: and this process has been so often repeated, that what at first was an extraordinary boon, is now considered in the light of an indefeasible claim. The Irish peasant will not work, will do nothing to better his own position, because he believes that, in his hour of need, he will be supported by British alms. We wish we could believe that this scandalous and sordid spirit was confined to the peasantry alone. It is not so. A general scramble takes place on each fresh issue of bounty, and rich and poor, high and low, among the repealers, press clamorously forward for their share. Never was money more absurdly, more mischievously misapplied, than the great government grants on occasion of the famine. Had the proposals of Lord George Bentinck been agreed to, and the money given by way of loan for construction of the Irish railroads, not only would the government have held some security for repayment, or, at all events, a vested interest in the works, but a useful improvement would have been effected in the heart of the country, and a new element of civilisation introduced. But the scheme was rejected, for no other reason, we believe, than because it was suggested by a political opponent, and the millions granted by Britain have been squandered in making good roads bad, in trenching mosses, draining waste lands, and what not. The expenditure has been lost to this country, and has not had the effect of awakening the slightest spark of gratitude or respect for the quarter whence it came. Ireland must be disabused on one point. These grants are not annual, and cannot be continued. The time has come when Ireland must be put upon precisely the same footing of taxation with the sister kingdoms—she must be forced to forego pauperism, and in future to rely on her industry, and on her own resources. Ireland is at least four times as fertile in soil as Scotland, and there can be no reason whatever why she should be exempt from burdens which apply to the latter, and moreover, like a sturdy beggar, be for ever vociferous for relief.

The Crime and Outrage Bill in some degree fulfilled its purpose; for open murder and assassination, if not extinguished, were somewhat diminished throughout the winter. Still the work of sedition progressed. Old and Young Ireland, ruffians both, were at loggerheads—the older section finding a profit in the shape of the weekly rent, the younger and more conscientious one thirsting for the hour when the dogs of rebellion might be let loose. The French revolution found Ireland in this state, and no doubt aided to precipitate the crisis. The visions of mere repeal gradually faded before the more brilliant and daring aspiration of an Irish republic! France would probably sympathise with Erin; and a deputation was sent over to wait upon Lamartine, then in the zenith of his popularity, for the double purpose of ascertaining the chances of assistance, and of taking a flying lesson in the art of constructing barricades. But the members of the French Provisional Government showed no alacrity in recognising the Irish patriots, and distinctly refused to interfere. Then it became apparent, that if the Irish party were determined to rebel, they must do so without foreign aid and intervention; and on their own ground, and with their own weapons, be prepared to cope with the Saxon.

It is but fair, in justice to the unfortunate men who, since that time, have suffered for their almost incredible folly, to state that others, too crafty or pusillanimous to approach within grasp of the law, were at least equally guilty in promoting agitation after revolution had been triumphant in France. John O’Connell thus wrote from Paris a few days after Louis Philippe had been driven from his throne:—“Speak out, people of Ireland! Speak from every city—every valley—every hill—every plain! THE TIME IS COME! The hour has arrived when it is our instant right! when it is England’s directest and most imperative interest that we should manage our own affairs in our own Parliament at home!” It matters not, in a moral point of view, though it might be convenient for sheltering purposes, that this note of sedition was accompanied with advice to abstain from crime and bloodshed. Such advice goes for nothing with the million, as O’Connell well knows; and, furthermore, he knows this, that of all the phantoms ever conjured up by designing rogues and mountebanks, this one of Irish repeal is the most unlikely of realisation. What, then, did the man mean by these words, “The time is come!” save to stir up the people to some demonstration, the issue of which must have been massacre and bloodshed?

We need hardly allude to the effect of those appeals upon the more hot-headed and determined of the confederates. They no longer preserved even the semblance of loyalty, but, with a daring wholly unexampled, gloried in the name of traitors. At public meetings they recommended the immediate arming of the people—descanted, in terms of gloating fondness, upon that “queen of weapons” the pike—and the only point of hesitation was the precise period of the rising—whether it ought to take place immediately, or be postponed “until French steamers were letting off their steam in Falmouth and Portsmouth.” John Mitchell, in the United Irishman, and his coadjutors in the Nation, seconded these views in a series of the most inflammatory and villanous articles. They propounded deliberate plans for barricading the streets of Dublin; displayed the most hellish ingenuity in devising implements to be used against the troops; attempted to persuade their dupes, that, in the event of a rising, the army would be found on their side; and, in short, set every law, human and divine, at defiance. At this crisis, ministers failed to act with that decision which was clearly their duty. They should at once have suspended the Habeas Corpus Act, and arrested the whole of the leading agitators. Such a course would have struck terror into the insurgents, before, emboldened by impunity, and relying upon the want of unanimity almost sure to prevail among Irish juries, they had dragged other misled individuals into a participation of their guilt.

March, and a portion of April, passed away before ministers took courage to introduce the Crown and Government Security Bill, under which Mitchell was ultimately convicted. In the discussions which took place, Lord John Russell was evidently sorely hampered by the opinions which he had expressed when in opposition, and the manifest discrepancy of his measures with the principles of the Whiggish creed. He showed a disposition to truckle, when he came to that portion of the bill which declared that open and advised speaking, of treasonable nature, should henceforward be treated as felony, and took it merely as a temporary provision. A bolder front, at such a time, would better have become a British statesman.

Smith O’Brien and Meagher, two of the most daring leaders of the faction, were tried at Dublin in the month of May, and escaped, the jury being in neither case unanimous. These trials may be memorable in the history of the jurisprudence of Ireland, for they distinctly prove that the present system of trial is utterly unsuited for that country. Nothing could be clearer than the evidence against both parties. O’Brien had recommended the formation of an Irish brigade in the United States. Meagher’s recommendation was “up with the barricades, and invoke the god of battles.” Yet in the face of this, the jury could not agree upon their verdict. Mitchell was the first person convicted under the new Act. On the 27th of May, he was found guilty, and sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation.

No effort whatever was made, on the part of the populace, to rescue this misguided man. He had proclaimed himself a felon, and he was sent forth to undergo the punishment of his crime. But this example, stringent as it was, had no effect whatever in repressing the spirit of treason. The arming went on rapidly as before, or rather in an augmented ratio. Cargoes of muskets, and other fire-arms, were openly shipped for Dublin, and exposed for sale; their destination and use were openly admitted, and yet ministers did not seem to consider it their duty to interfere! The newspaper war continued. Fresh journals sprang up to replace the United Irishman, and the favourite doctrines of Mitchell were enforced with a ferocity and earnestness almost equal to his own. Clubs, after the fashion of those in Paris, were organised throughout the country: drilling began, and at length rebellion assumed a tangible shape, the confederate forces having been reviewed by Smith O’Brien at Cork. On the 21st of July, Dublin was proclaimed by the Lord Lieutenant; and immediately thereafter, and not a moment too soon, ministry were compelled to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act in Ireland.

As we are not writing a history of this most abortive rebellion, we need not follow its leaders throughout their ignominious, and even cowardly career. That a bubble, deemed so gigantic, should have burst with so miraculously small an explosion, may hereafter be a source of wonder to the chronicler; at present our only feeling should be gratitude to the Almighty that this affair has as yet been accompanied with so little loss of human life. So far, it is well; but it would be absolute madness to suppose that the spirit of rebellion has been extinguished. The Irish people have been guilty of a great crime. A large portion of them are, without any doubt, rebels in their hearts; and they must submit to be treated as such, until we are satisfied that their stubborn disposition is removed. Great credit, it seems, is now given in certain quarters to the Roman Catholic clergy, for the part they took in suppressing the late disturbances; and we anticipate an immediate burst of laudation, and perhaps a promise of reward, in return for their disinterested exertions. If to foster rebellion in every possible manner, whilst there is the least chance of its success, and to preach it down from the very moment when the cause appears obviously desperate, be an acceptable course, we freely admit the claims of the priesthood to the heartfelt gratitude of Britain: upon no other ground whatever can we see a reason for their recognition. Let any man consider seriously and impartially the history and proceedings in Ireland for the last six months, and he cannot fail, we think, to arrive at the conclusion, that clerical connivance is visible in every scene of the drama. Smith O’Brien and Mitchell, being both of them Protestants, may have raised the banner too early, and may have been sacrificed with little scruple; but we repeat, that we have no faith in that interference which comes so very late, and which, without any hyperbole, may be said to have been forced at the point of the bayonet.

As regards ministers, we think their later measures have been taken with a fair regard for the interests of the imperial crown. Much they might have done earlier; but, on the whole, we are not inclined to quarrel with their conduct. Lord John Russell, in the course of late events, has received a more wholesome lesson in the practical science of legislation than was ever vouchsafed him before. His Lordship’s eyes are now, we hope, opened to the fallacy of some of the cherished Whig propositions. He has learned that there are times when a government must have recourse to extraordinary measures, if it is sincere in its wish to maintain the integrity of the crown and the constitution: and that although the liberty of the subject, and the freedom of the press, are undoubtedly most excellent things, and capital toasts at Whig propaganda banquets, neither of them can be allowed to go so far as to achieve a violent revolution. If some slight tinge should be apparent on the cheek of the Premier as he reviews his past career, and reflects on the inconsistency of his former speeches with his present more energetic conduct, we are willing to attribute the blush to the most amiable, and certainly the most honourable of possible motives—the acknowledgment of a cherished error.

But while we accord with satisfaction this meed of praise to ministers, it is impossible to forget that the Whig party, by playing into the hands of O’Connell and his followers, have given a pernicious incentive to the agitation which has ended in the late revolt. There has been far too much coquetting and trafficking with the repealers,—far too little consideration shown for the really loyal and peaceable portion of the Irish people. Is it possible to expect that any credence will be given to the idea that the Whigs are sincere and determined in their opposition to the repeal doctrines, when a high official functionary like Sir William Somerville, Chief Secretary of State for Ireland, is found subscribing to the fund raised for defending the return of Mr Reynolds, the member for Dublin? Is it, we say, decent that a man in the position of the honourable baronet should be allowed to identify not only himself, but the government to which he belongs, with a party so diametrically opposed to the best interests of the British empire? If the Whigs are determined to put down agitation in Ireland—and put down it must be, at whatever cost—let them show their sincerity by dropping all connexion with the agitators. These are not times for truckling—least of all for party purposes and pretension.

If there is an immediate return to the old system of conciliation—if that unhappy country is to be left under the impression that Britain is bound to support her, we may look for another projected rebellion at no very distant period. Ireland must be taught to depend thoroughly upon herself. The wages of idleness must no longer be given her under any circumstances whatever. We are satisfied that the social misery of Ireland proceeds mainly from the injudicious system of eleemosynary support, to which she has been so long accustomed; for nowhere else in the known world is there a land so rich in resources, with a population so utterly improvident. An end also must be put, by the strong arm of power, to agitation of every kind. Jury trial requires remodelment; and we hope that the very first Irish measure which is introduced, will be one for assimilating the system of jury trial in criminal cases there with that which has worked so well and satisfactorily in Scotland. Let fifteen men be impanelled, and let the opinion of the majority be the verdict. This would effectually prevent those allegations about packing, which do certainly detract from the moral weight of such convictions as that of Mitchell: it would strengthen the hands of justice, and be especially useful as a further preventive of crime. The weal or the continued misery of Ireland will depend very much upon the character and complexion of the measures which may be introduced during the next session of Parliament.

The progress of the revolutions abroad has been any thing but peaceful. On the Continent, the treaty of Vienna has become a dead letter—a mere antiquated sheet of parchment, hardly to be appealed to by any of the conflicting powers. War has broken out in more than one point; and though, during the last month, there has been some prospect of compromise, it is in vain to hope that Europe will immediately subside into its former tranquillity. Hitherto, whatever may be said regarding the internal economy of France, that country has manifested no aggressive spirit. Paris, the centre-point of the volcanic eruption, has kept, and may keep for some time, the soldiery in full employment; and we are sincerely of opinion that General Cavaignac, now at the head of affairs in France, has no personal disposition to undertake a war of conquest. But the position of Germany is very peculiar, and her affairs so complicated, that we may justly feel alarm as to the issue.

We shall say little of the experiment, so rashly undertaken by a number of untried constitution craftsmen, for welding together into one indissoluble mass the political existence of the different Teutonic tribes. It is a project which, at first sight, may appear sufficiently imposing; but when we examine it more closely, it seems fraught with insuperable difficulties. To constitute a Regent for all Germany, in whose hands is to be lodged the sovereign administration of affairs, is in fact to dethrone and mediatise the whole of the reigning potentates. It may be freely conceded that a number of the smaller states might be absorbed, and their names removed from the map of Europe, without causing any disturbance of the balance of power; but, with regard to the larger ones, the case is very different. Will Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, and Saxony, submit to surrender their independence? Will the kings allow themselves to be stripped of their authority—of the power to make laws, to proclaim war and peace, and to levy and command their own armies? We do not believe it. Austria may not object at this peculiar juncture, both because she is deeply engaged in war for the recovery of Lombardy, and because the present Regent is a prince of her imperial family. Prussia can hardly be the first to dissent, because her monarch had the credit of originating the idea of German unity, under the illusion that he would be nominated as the head. But unity is not popular in Prussia, any more than it is in Bavaria, and the moment is fast approaching when this bubble also must explode. We might look upon the whole experiment with feelings of pure curiosity, were it not that incipient unity has been signalised by an act of the most flagrant aggression. We allude to the occupation of Schleswig-Holstein by the Germans.

Denmark is one of those small states in which the nationality is of the most invincible kind. Circumscribed in territorial space, the Danish people are possessed of a courage and energy which for centuries has continued undiminished; and the more powerful northern states are bound, if not by treaty, at least by the strongest ties of policy and relationship, to assist their gallant neighbours in maintaining their original position. Russia and Sweden have already declared themselves open allies of Denmark, and resolute to maintain her against the forces of Germany. The disposition of England, and, we are glad to say, of France also, tends towards the same point; and such being the case, we have great hopes that the Germans will not be mad enough to persevere in their unjustifiable course. A war in the north of Europe, in which so many great nations would be engaged, must be a hideous calamity; and Germany, if wise, should be the last country to provoke it. But, as if to complicate matters, the parliament at Frankfort have manifested an intention of embroiling themselves with Holland for one of the ceded duchies.

It is no purpose of ours to speculate upon events, and therefore we leave the Danish question without further comment. It will be extremely gratifying if, after all the demonstration which has been made, and the actual collision between the Danes and the Germans, peace can be re-established without having recourse to the armed interference of a northern confederation; and it would be still more gratifying if this desirable result should be the effect of British mediation. But, looking to the south of Europe, we cannot approve of the policy which Great Britain has since pursued, or the attitude which Lord Palmerston has chosen to assume towards a friendly foreign power.

Our readers will not have forgotten the surprise and suspicion which was excited, about a year ago, by the absence of a cabinet minister, who was understood to be perambulating Italy with a sort of roving commission. The intention may have been friendly, but the fact was both unusual and degrading, and gave rise at the time to a multitude of unpleasant suspicions. Whether Lord Minto travelled in the capacity of constitution-maker for Italy we know not; but if so, as has more than once been broadly alleged, his attempts have been utter failures. We hope it was not by his advice that Charles Albert has done his best to light up the flames of general war by that ungenerous attack upon Austria, which has ended so disastrously for himself. Baffled on every hand—after having sacrificed his army, and squandered his treasure—the King of Sardinia has been driven back into his own country, amidst the execrations of those whom he professedly came to emancipate, and without a hope left of gaining the diadem for which he had perilled so much. The papal constitution at Rome has by no means fulfilled the hopes of the liberal advocates. Pius, lately so popular, is trembling in the Vatican, and the inhabitants of the Eternal City are in as much terror as if Attila were again at its gates. We repeat that we do not know how much share British councils may have had in promoting these untoward events; but this we know, that it would have been far better if Lord Minto had remained at home. For, in the matter of Naples at least, we have chosen to take a direct part, which throws suspicion upon the tendency of our whole negotiations with the Peninsula.

Sicily has chosen to cast off its allegiance to the crown of Naples, and to elect a sovereign of its own. This is strictly a domestic contest, and one in which we had no title whatever to interfere. But mark what has taken place. No sooner was Naples—a country which has also felt the revolutionary shock—quieted by the granting of a constitution, than King Ferdinand, desirous of quelling rebellion in Sicily, is intimidated from sending his squadron for that purpose, by the appearance of a British fleet off his own territory. Against this unjustifiable demonstration the King of Naples has protested, declaring that he will hold any armed interference between himself and his subjects as tantamount to a declaration of war on the part of the British government. Lord Stanley—whose conduct throughout the session, on all questions connected with foreign or colonial affairs, has been pre-eminently distinguished for temperance, rectitude, and ability, and who has exhibited, in a remarkable degree, every qualification requisite for the leader of a great and national party—brought the whole subject before the consideration of the House of Lords: but the explanations given by Lord Lansdowne are not calculated to improve our character for good faith, whilst they may afford a ready apology to other states for any act of aggression whatever. Also, at a later period of the session, Mr D’Israeli, in one of those brilliant speeches for which he is unrivalled, again demanded explanation from the Foreign Secretary, and took occasion to comment, with sarcastic felicity, on the Minto pilgrimage to Rome. We shall presently allude to the reply which Lord Palmerston thought proper to make.

The facts of the case, as admitted by Lord Lansdowne, are shortly these:—Britain was never asked to mediate formally between the conflicting parties. The Sicilians stood in the position of rebels, victorious perhaps on their own soil, but not, on that account, released from an allegiance which had been formally recognised by Europe. They proceeded, as all insurgents do, to debate upon some form of government; and at this point, it seems, the Foreign Office thought fit to use its influence. Lord Palmerston became a party to the discussions of the revolted Sicilians, to the extent at least of advising them to select a monarchical instead of a republican form of government; with an assurance that, in that event, Britain would recognise the prince who might be elected by the people.

This is neither more nor less than a recognition of the right of revolt; and we should like to know upon what principle of the law of nations it can be defended. It is one thing to acknowledge the right of a nation to change the character of its institutions,—as for example, in the case of France, which from a monarchy has become a republic. Were we to undergo the same organic change, France, doubtless, would recognise us, and continue the same relations with us under the altered form of government. But what if France had chosen to espouse the cause of the Irish confederates? What if—supposing our troops had been defeated by a general rising, and Smith O’Brien had been proclaimed not only King of Munster, but of Ireland—General Cavaignac should have assured the rebels, that he would recognise the descendant of Brian Boru as the prince elected by the people? Would not that negotiation, that assurance, be treated by England as an open declaration of hostility,—an interference which no circumstances could palliate, and for which no explanation could suffice? We apprehend there can be no difficulty in answering the question, and yet our position with regard to Naples was precisely similar.

No official recognition of the independence of Sicily has as yet taken place. Her Britannic Majesty has accredited no ambassador to that court, nor does she know any thing more of the King of Sicily than her royal predecessor did of Theodore King of Corsica. In all Sicilian matters, as yet, this country nominally recognises the supremacy of King Ferdinand, who has in no way incurred a forfeiture. Yet at the very moment when that potentate has completed his preparations for coercing his rebel subjects, a British fleet appears off his shores, and no explanation has been vouchsafed of the reasons which have brought it there.

In answer to Lord Malmesbury, who reiterated the question originally put by Lord Stanley, “Is the fleet of Admiral Parker to interfere with any expedition which his Neapolitan Majesty may send against his subjects in Sicily?” Lord Lansdowne distinctly refused explanation. So did Lord Palmerston in answer to Mr D’Israeli; and he further added, “that it is not the practice of the government of this country to announce to parliament what the intentions of the government are.” All that we shall say upon that point is, that, even during the present session of parliament, ministers have more than once been particularly eager to parade their intentions, without even the formality of a question. Such answers are very apt to make distrustful people recollect that Naples is but a small state, and not so formidable as some others which have led the van of revolution. But even supposing that the Whig government are not prepared to go the length of violating treaties, and breaking alliances by a direct and forcible interference, this concealment is peculiarly unwise at a moment when neutrality is of the last importance. Apart from this question of Sicilian interference, no one wants to know why Admiral Parker’s fleet is there. It is not alone Lord Stanley or Mr D’Israeli whose curiosity requires to be gratified. The King of Naples believes this armament is sent with intentions hostile to him, and he has a right to know whether Britain proposes to throw an impediment betwixt him and his revolted dominions. Are ministers aware of the effect which such ambiguous answers may have upon the future policy of France? General Oudinot, we know, is at the head of a large army on the southern frontier of France, and Charles Albert has notoriously solicited assistance from that quarter. What if the French, drawing their own deduction from the fact of the fleet being there, and all explanation refused, should choose to assume that we have exceeded the bounds of neutrality, and are now coercing the King of Naples?—what if they should march an army to the support of the Piedmontese, again make Lombardy a field of battle, and throw all Europe into irretrievable confusion, by engaging in hostilities with Austria? Is that contingency so remote that we can afford to indulge in mysteries, and peril the fair fame of England’s open dealing for a paltry Palmerston intrigue?

If we contemplate seriously the whole course of our foreign policy, in so far as regards Italy, we cannot fail to be impressed with the idea that the Whigs have given undue countenance to the late insurrectionary movements. Great Britain might have come forward honourably at the commencement of the Lombardy campaign to stop the effusion of blood and the horrors of war, by the offer of a timely mediation; but no such step was taken. On the contrary, our Cabinet remained quiescent and looked on approvingly, so long as success appeared to favour the Sardinian arms: it is only after the invader has been beaten back, and driven within the frontiers of his own kingdom—after Austria has redeemed by force all her Lombard territory, that Lord Palmerston, and his new ally Cavaignac, have thought fit to tender their good offices. We may safely ask—what good purpose can be achieved by this very late intervention? Who are the parties whose quarrel is to be taken up? Mr D’Israeli put the matter well when he asked,—First, what was to be the principle of this mediation; secondly, what was to be the motive of the mediation; and thirdly, what was the end proposed to be attained by the mediation? The motive, we are assured, is the preservation of peace, and we fully subscribe to its importance; but on all other matters we are left as thoroughly in the dark as ever. Really this mystery is, to say the least of it, tantalising; and we would fain know whether Austria is the party who has taken the initiative, in securing the advice of two peace-makers like Palmerston and Cavaignac. Austria has recovered the possessions guaranteed her by the faith of the leading states of Europe, has put down insurrection, and driven back in rout and terror the invading Sardinian over his own frontier. There remains no body of her revolted subjects in a position to ask for mediation. As for Charles Albert, he is not, we presume, either King of Italy or Lord of Lombardy, neither have we heard of any other claim, save that of sympathy, which could entitle him to enter into the contest. Personally he had no wrong to avenge; but having chosen to espouse the cause of the rebels, and to encounter the risks of war, he is surely not entitled, especially after defeat, to insist upon any conditions. If Austria shall choose, of her own free will and accord, to cede possession of Lombardy, it will be a mere act of grace, which cannot be demanded from her by any state in Europe. But she is clearly entitled to dictate, and not to receive conditions; and any interference with her guaranteed and fully recovered rights, either on the part of England or of France, would be tantamount to a declaration of war.

From first to last, therefore, we condemn the course which has been pursued by the British foreign minister with reference to the affairs of Italy, as undignified, unconstitutional, and mischievous. It has naturally lowered the estimate of our character in the eyes of the Italian people, whose own fondness for intrigue does not prevent them from despising that system, when pursued on the part of a strong and powerful nation. Minto jobbing has proved an utter failure. It may not indeed have been unproductive in results, for it has materially stimulated sedition, but certainly it has not tended to the preservation of peace, or the consolidation of government in Italy.

Lord Palmerston has not been happy for the present year in his foreign relations. Some gratuitous advice to Spain, which he no doubt tendered with the best possible intentions, was ignominiously returned upon his hand; and this affront was followed up by another still more serious, for our ambassador at Madrid was dismissed. Such are the results of constant meddling with the institutions of foreign states, or prying into their domestic arrangements, and of everlastingly tendering unsolicited and unpalatable advice. We do Lord Palmerston the justice to believe, that he is the last man in the world who would brook such conduct at the hands of others. Why then will he persist in acting the part of Mentor to all the states of Europe, at the risk of attracting insult to himself, and of materially endangering the character and position of his country?

Whether we regard the conduct of the present ministry at home or abroad, in domestic or in foreign relations, we find little to praise, and much which we must conscientiously condemn. Late events do not seem to have conveyed to them any important lesson. Diminished exports, want of reciprocity, and the disorganisation of affairs on the Continent, have effected as yet no change in their commercial policy. They are still determined to persevere in the course which they have unfortunately adopted, and to neglect the home and colonial markets for the desperate chance of pushing exportation further. By delaying to make any provision for the relaxation of the odious Bank Restriction Acts—by placing upon the committee of the House of Commons men whose financial reputation depended upon the maintenance of these measures—they have again exposed the country to a recurrence of that crisis which, in November last, was so near a fatal termination. Who shall answer for it that a fresh drain of bullion will not take place this autumn? If the harvest shall prove deficient, such undoubtedly may be the case, and the mercantile world will be left without the means of accommodation at the moment of its utmost need.

When we look at the long period of tranquillity which this country has enjoyed since the peace—when we reflect upon the extension of trade, the increase of our colonies, the apparent accumulation of wealth at home, the development of industry, and the enormous social improvements which have resulted from the progress of science—it seems almost miraculous that any combination of circumstances should so rapidly have involved us in financial embarrassments. Those embarrassments are marked by the price of money and its fluctuations, by the difficulty of accommodation, by the unprecedented decline in the value of every kind of property, by the amount of unemployed labour in the market, and by the long list of bankruptcies. We ask for an explanation of these phenomena, and we are referred to a failure of the potato crop! The political economists will not acknowledge the share they have had in the production of such lamentable results—but, fortunately, they cannot alter dates; and one thing at least is incontestible, that the commencement of the period of decline corresponds exactly with that of Sir Robert Peel’s fiscal and currency measures. It may have been that we were previously in danger from the want of these, but the country neither knew nor felt it. The change was made, and since then our prospects have been dark and gloomy.

Parliament has utterly failed, during last session, to suggest any remedy for the general distress. It must fail so to do, until it is called together under the auspices of a Cabinet imbued with patriotic principles, aware of the responsibility of their situation, and thoroughly resolved to release themselves from the trammels of a system which has fraud and selfishness for its foundation, and which seeks to aggrandise a few at the sacrifice of the industrious many. May Heaven grant that such men may speedily be called to the supreme councils of the nation, and that this may be the last session, the futilities of which it is our duty to record, under the imbecile and slovenly administration of the Whigs!

TO A CAGED SKYLARK, REGENT’S CIRCUS, PICCADILLY.

BY B. SIMMONS.

The city’s stony roar around!

The city’s stifling air!

The London May’s distracting sound,

And dust, and heat, and glare!

She sings to-night who puts to shame

Her fabled sisters’ syren-fame;

And, swarming through one mighty street,

From all opposing points they meet;

And hurrying, whirling, madd’ning on,

The crashing wheels and battling crowd

Are coming still, and still are gone—

The Thunder and the Cloud.

But the gush of faint odours

From apple-tree blooms—

The dew-fall by starlight

In green mossy glooms—

The sob of low breezes

Through hill-lifted pines

Looking miles o’er lone moorlands

While evening declines—

The dying away

Of far bleats at the shealing,

The hum of the night-fly

Where streamlets are stealing—

All are floating, this moment, or mournfully heard,

(Distinct as lutes mid trumpets) round thy cage, heart-breaking Bird!

They heed, nor hear—that seething mass—

But storm and brawl and burst along,

Porter and Peer—the City class—

And high-born Beauty shrined in glass—

The pale Mechanic and his lass—

Thick as the scythe-awaiting grass,

In one discordant throng.

While, loud with many a clanging bell,

Some annual joy the steeples tell,

And waggons’ groan and drivers’ yell

The loud hubbub and riot swell;

Yet still the stunn’d ear drinks, through all, that liquid song.

And far sinks the tumult,

And takes the soft moan

Of billows that shoreward

Are lapsingly thrown,

When the stars o’er the light-house

Set faintly and few,

And the waves’ level blackness

Is trembling to blue.

Wing’d Darling of Sunrise!

How oft at that hour,

Where the grassy lea lovingly

Tufted thy bower,

Thy friends the meek cowslips

Still folded in sleep,

Didst thou burst, and meet Morning

Half way from the deep,

And circle and soar

Till thy small rosy wing

Seem’d a sparkle the far-coming

Splendour might fling!

How lavishly then

On the night-hidden hill

Didst thou rain down thy carol

Deliciously shrill—

Still mounting to Heaven,

As thou didst rejoice

To be nearer the Angels,

Since nearest in voice!

And thy wild liquid warbling,

Sweet Thing! after all,

Leaves thee thus aching-breasted,

A captive and thrall.

For the thymy dell’s freshness and free dewy cloud

A barr’d nook in this furnace-heat and suffocating crowd.

No pause even here to list thy lay;

The human ferment working

Must on with unresisted sway

In bubbling thousands swept away,

Nor near thy cage be left ONE HERMIT-HEARER lurking.

Twin minstrels were ye

Once in sunshine and shade

With thy hymns to the Love-star,

His rhymes to the Maid.

How sweet was it then,

As he linger’d at noon

Beneath trees dropping diamonds

In shower-freshen’d June,

Beloved of the Rainbow!

To mark thee on high,

Where violet and amber

Were arching the sky;

And to deem thou wert singing

Of comfort to him—

Of some Bow yet to brighten

His destiny dim!

From thy Cloud and his Dream

Long the glory is gone,

And the dungeon remains

To each desolate one:

And as vainly as thine would his spirit up-spring,

Beating against his prison-bar with faint and baffled wing.

SONNET.—TO DENMARK.

Again the trumpet-blast of war is blown:

Again the cannon booms along the sea.

Now, may the God of Battles stand by thee,

True-hearted Denmark! struggling for thine own,

For right, and loyalty, and King, and throne,

Against the weight of frantic Germany!

Old Honour is not dead whilst thou art free—

Oh be thou faithful to thy past renown!

May the great spirit of thy heroes dead

Be as a bulwark to thine ancient shore:

And, midst the surge of battle rolling red,

Still be thy banner foremost as of yore;

Prouder than when it waved, to winds outspread,

On the broad bastion-keep of Elsinore!

LIFE IN THE “FAR WEST.”

PART IV.

We have said that La Bonté was a philosopher: he took the streaks of ill luck which checkered his mountain life in a vein of perfect carelessness, if not of stoical indifference. Nothing ruffled his danger-steeled equanimity of temper; no sudden emotion disturbed his mind. We have seen how wives were torn from him without eliciting a groan or grumble, (but such contretemps, it may be said, can scarcely find a place in the category of ills;) how the loss of mules and mustangs, harried by horse-stealing Indians, left him in the ne-plus-ultra of mountain misery—“afoot;” how packs and peltries, the hard-earned “beaver” of his perilous hunts, were “raised” at one fell swoop by freebooting bands of savages. Hunger and thirst, we know, were commonplace sensations to the mountaineer. His storm-hardened flesh scarce felt the pinging wounds of arrow-point or bullet; and when in the midst of Indian fight, it is not probable that any tender qualms of feeling would allay the itching of his fingers for his enemy’s scalp-lock, nor would any remains of civilised fastidiousness prevent his burying his knife again and again in the life-blood of an Indian savage.

Still, in one dark corner of his heart, there shone at intervals a faint spark of what was once a fiercely-burning fire. Neither time, that corroder of all things, nor change, that ready abettor of oblivion, nor scenes of peril and excitement, which act as dampers to more quiet memory, could smother this little smouldering spark, which now and again—when rarely-coming calm succeeded some stirring passage in the hunter’s life, and left him, for a brief time, devoid of care and victim to his thoughts—would flicker suddenly, and light up all the nooks and corners of his rugged breast, and discover to his mind’s eye that one deep-rooted memory clung there still, though long neglected; proving that, spite of time and change, of life and fortune,

“On revient toujours à ses premiers amours.”

Often and often, as La Bonté sat cross-legged before his solitary camp-fire, and, pipe in mouth, watched the blue smoke curling upwards in the clear cold sky, a well-remembered form appeared to gaze upon him from the vapoury wreaths. Then would old recollections crowd before him, and old emotions, long a stranger to his breast, shape themselves, as it were, into long-forgotten but now familiar pulsations. Again he felt the soft subduing influence which once, in days gone by, a certain passion exercised over his mind and body; and often a trembling seized him, the same he used to experience at the sudden sight of one Mary Brand, whose dim and dreamy apparition so often watched his lonely bed, or, unconsciously conjured up, cheered him in the dreary watches of the long and stormy winter nights.

At first he only knew that one face haunted his dreams by night, and the few moments by day when he thought of any thing, and this face smiled lovingly upon him, and cheered him mightily. Name he had quite forgotten, or recalled it vaguely, and, setting small store by it, had thought of it no more.

For many years after he had deserted his home, La Bonté had cherished the idea of again returning to his country. During this period he had never forgotten his old flame, and many a choice fur he had carefully laid by, intended as a present for Mary Brand; and many a gâge d’amour of cunning shape and device, worked in stained quills of porcupine and bright-coloured beads—the handiwork of nimble-fingered squaws—he had packed in his possible sack for the same destination, hoping a time would come when he might lay them at her feet.

Year after year wore on, however, and still found him, with traps and rifle, following his perilous avocation; and each succeeding one saw him more and more wedded to the wild mountain life. He was conscious how unfitted he had become again to enter the galling harness of conventionality and civilisation. He thought, too, how changed in manners and appearance he now must be, and could not believe that he would again find favour in the eyes of his quondam love, who, he judged, had long since forgotten him; and inexperienced as he was in such matters, yet he knew enough of womankind to feel assured that time and absence had long since done the work, if even the natural fickleness of woman’s nature had lain dormant. Thus it was that he came to forget Mary Brand, but still remembered the all-absorbing feeling she had once created in his breast, the shadow of which still remained, and often took form and feature in the smoke-wreaths of his solitary camp-fire.

If truth be told, La Bonté had his failings as a mountaineer, and—sin unpardonable in hunter law—still possessed, in holes and corners of his breast seldom explored by his inward eye, much of the leaven of kindly human nature, which now and again involuntarily peeped out, as greatly to the contempt of his comrade trappers as it was blushingly repressed by the mountaineer himself. Thus, in his various matrimonial episodes, he treated his dusky sposas with all the consideration the sex could possibly demand from hand of man. No squaw of his ever humped shoulder to receive a castigatory and marital “lodge-poling” for offence domestic; but often has his helpmate blushed to see her pale-face lord and master devote himself to the feminine labour of packing huge piles of fire-wood on his back, felling trees, butchering unwieldy buffalo—all which are included in the Indian category of female duties. Thus he was esteemed an excellent parti by all the marriageable young squaws of Blackfoot, Crow, and Shoshone, of Yutah, Shian, and Arapaho; but after his last connubial catastrophe, he steeled his heart against all the charms and coquetry of Indian belles, and persevered in unblessed widowhood for many a long day.

From the point where we left him on his way to the waters of the Columbia, we must jump with him over a space of nearly two years, during which time he had a most uninterrupted run of good luck; trapping with great success on the head streams of the Columbia and Yellow Stone—the most dangerous of trapping ground—and finding good market for his peltries at the “North-west” posts—beaver fetching as high a price as five and six dollars a “plew”—the “golden age” of trappers, now, alas, never to return, and existing only in the fond memory of the mountaineers. This glorious time, however, was too good to last. In mountain language, “such heap of fat meat was not going to ‘shine’ much longer.”

La Bonté was at this time one of a band of eight trappers, whose hunting ground was about the head waters of the Yellow Stone, which we have before said is in the country of the Blackfeet. With him were Killbuck, Meek, Marcelline, and three others; and the leader of the party was Bill Williams, that old “hard case” who had spent forty years and more in the mountains, until he had become as tough as the parflêche soles of his mocassins. They were all good men and true, expert hunters, and well-trained mountaineers. After having trapped all the streams they were acquainted with, it was determined to strike into the mountains, at a point where old Williams affirmed, from the “run” of the hills, there must be plenty of water, although not one of the party had before explored the country, or knew any thing of its nature, or of the likelihood of its affording game for themselves or pasture for their animals. However, they packed their peltry, and put out for the land in view—a lofty peak, dimly seen above the more regular summit of the chain, being their landmark.

For the first day or two their route lay between two ridges of mountains, and by following the little valley which skirted a creek, they kept on level ground, and saved their animals considerable labour and fatigue. Williams always rode ahead, his body bent over his saddle-horn, across which rested a long heavy rifle, his keen gray eyes peering from under the slouched brim of a flexible felt-hat, black and shining with grease. His buckskin hunting-shirt, bedaubed until it had the appearance of polished leather, hung in folds over his bony carcass; his nether extremities being clothed in pantaloons of the same material, (with scattered fringes down the outside of the leg—which ornaments, however, had been pretty well thinned to supply “whangs” for mending mocassins or pack-saddles,) which, shrunk with wet, clung tightly to his long, spare, sinewy legs. His feet were thrust into a pair of Mexican stirrups, made of wood, and as big as coal-scuttles; and iron spurs of incredible proportions, with tinkling drops attached to the rowels, were fastened to his heel—a bead-worked strap, four inches broad, securing them over the instep. In the shoulder-belt which sustained his powder-horn and bullet-pouch, were fastened the various instruments essential to one pursuing his mode of life. An awl, with deer-horn handle, and the point defended by a case of cherry-wood carved by his own hand, hung at the back of the belt, side by side with a worm for cleaning the rifle; and under this was a squat and quaint-looking bullet-mould, the handles guarded by strips of buckskin to save his fingers from burning when running balls, having for its companion a little bottle made from the point of an antelope’s horn, scraped transparent, which contained the “medicine” used in baiting the traps. The old coon’s face was sharp and thin, a long nose and chin hob-nobbing each other; and his head was always bent forward, giving him the appearance of being hump-backed. He appeared to look neither to the right nor left, but, in fact, his little twinkling eye was everywhere. He looked at no one he was addressing, always seeming to be thinking of something else than the subject of his discourse, speaking in a whining, thin, cracked voice, and in a tone that left the hearer in doubt whether he was laughing or crying. On the present occasion he had joined this band, and naturally assumed the leadership, (for Bill ever refused to go in harness,) in opposition to his usual practice, which was to hunt alone. His character was well known. Acquainted with every inch of the Far West, and with all the Indian tribes who inhabited it, he never failed to outwit his Red enemies, and generally made his appearance at the rendezvous, from his solitary expeditions, with galore of beaver, when numerous bands of trappers dropped in on foot, having been despoiled of their packs and animals by the very Indians through the midst of whom old Williams had contrived to pass unseen and unmolested. On occasions when he had been in company with others, and attacked by Indians, Bill invariably fought manfully, and with all the coolness that perfect indifference to death or danger could give, but always “on his own hook.” His rifle cracked away merrily, and never spoke in vain; and in a charge—if ever it came to that—his keen-edged butcherknife tickled the fleece of many a Blackfoot. But at the same time, if he saw that discretion was the better part of valour, and affairs wore so cloudy an aspect as to render retreat advisable, he would first express his opinion in curt terms, and decisively, and, charging up his rifle, would take himself off, and “cache”[2] so effectually that to search for him was utterly useless. Thus, when with a large party of trappers, when any thing occurred which gave him a hint that trouble was coming, or more Indians were about than he considered good for his animals, Bill was wont to exclaim—

“Do ’ee hyar now, boys, thar’s sign about? this hos feels like caching;” and, without more words, and stoically deaf to all remonstrances, he would forthwith proceed to pack his animals, talking the while to an old, crop-eared, raw-boned Nez-percé pony, his own particular saddle-horse, who, in dogged temper and iron hardiness, was a worthy companion of his self-willed master. This beast, as Bill seized his apishamore to lay upon its galled back, would express displeasure by humping its back and shaking its withers with a wincing motion, that always excited the ire of the old trapper; and no sooner had he laid the apishamore smoothly on the chafed skin, than a wriggle of the animal shook it off.

“Do ’ee hyar now, you darned crittur!” he would whine out, “can’t’ee keep quiet your old fleece now? Isn’t this old coon putting out to save ’ee from the darned Injuns now, do ’ee hyar?” And then, continuing his work, and taking no notice of his comrades, who stood by bantering the eccentric trapper, he would soliloquise—“Do ’ee hyar, now? This niggur sees sign ahead—he does; he’ll be afoot afore long, if he don’t keep his eye skinned,—he will. Injuns is all about, they ar’: Blackfoot at that. Can’t come round this child—they can’t, wagh!” And at last, his pack animals securely tied to the tail of his horse, he would mount, and throwing the rifle across the horn of his saddle, and without noticing his companions, would drive the jingling spurs into his horse’s gaunt sides, and muttering, “Can’t come round this child—they can’t!” would ride away; and nothing more would be seen or heard of him perhaps for months, when they would not unfrequently, themselves bereft of animals in the scrape he had foreseen, find him located in some solitary valley, in his lonely camp, with his animals securely picketed around, and his peltries safe.

However, if he took it into his head to keep company with a party, all felt perfectly secure under his charge. His iron frame defied fatigue, and, at night, his love for himself and his own animals was sufficient guarantee that the camp would be well guarded. As he rode ahead, his spurs jingling, and thumping the sides of his old horse at every step, he managed, with admirable dexterity, to take advantage of the best line of country to follow—avoiding the gullies and cañons and broken ground, which would otherwise have impeded his advance. This tact appeared instinctive, for he looked neither right nor left, whilst continuing a course as straight as possible at the foot of the mountains. In selecting a camping site, he displayed equal skill: wood, water, and grass began to fill his thoughts towards sundown, and when these three requisites for a camping ground presented themselves, old Bill sprang from his saddle, unpacked his animals in a twinkling, and hobbled them, struck fire and ignited a few chips, (leaving the rest to pack in the wood,) lit his pipe, and enjoyed himself. On one occasion, when passing through the valley, they had come upon a band of fine buffalo cows, and, shortly after camping, two of the party rode in with a good supply of fat fleece. One of the party was a “greenhorn” on his first hunt, and, fresh from a fort on Platte, was as yet uninitiated in the mysteries of mountain cooking. Bill, lazily smoking his pipe, called to him, as he happened to be nearest, to butcher off a piece of meat and put it in his pot. Markhead seized the fleece, and commenced innocently carving off a huge ration, when a gasping roar from the old trapper caused him to drop his knife.

“Ti-yah,” growled Bill, “do ’ee hyar, now, you darned greenhorn, do ’ee spile fat cow like that whar you was raised? Them doin’s won’t shine in this crowd, boy, do ’ee hyar, darn you? What! butcher meat across the grain! why, whar’ll the blood be goin’ to, you precious Spaniard? Down the grain I say,” he continued in a severe tone of rebuke, “and let your flaps be long, or out the juice’ll run slick—do ’ee hyar, now?” But this heretical error nearly cost the old trapper his appetite, and all night long he grumbled his horror at seeing “fat cow spiled in that fashion.”

When two or three days’ journey brought them to the end of the valley, and they commenced the passage of the mountain, their march was obstructed by all kinds of obstacles; although they had chosen what appeared to be a gap in the chain, and what was in fact the only practicable passage in that vicinity. They followed the cañon of a branch of the Yellow Stone, where it entered the mountain; but from this point it became a torrent, and it was only by dint of incredible exertions that they reached the summit of the ridge. Game was exceedingly scarce in the vicinity, and they suffered extremely from hunger, having, on more than one occasion, recourse to the parflêche soles of their mocassins to allay its pangs. Old Bill, however, never grumbled; he chewed away at his shoes with relish even, and as long as he had a pipeful of tobacco in his pouch, was a happy man. Starvation was as yet far off, for all their animals were in existence; but as they were in a country where it was difficult to procure a remount, each trapper hesitated to sacrifice one of his horses to his appetite.

From the summit of the ridge, Bill recognised the country on the opposite side to that whence they had just ascended as familiar to him, and pronounced it to be full of beaver, as well as abounding in the less desirable commodity of Indians. This was the valley lying about the lakes now called Eustis and Biddle, in which are many thermal and mineral springs, well known to the trappers by the names of the Soda, Beer, and Brimstone Springs, and regarded by them with no little awe and curiosity, as being the breathing places of his Satanic majesty—considered, moreover, to be the “biggest kind” of “medicine” to be found in the mountains. If truth be told, old Bill hardly relished the idea of entering this country, which he pronounced to be of “bad medicine” notoriety, but nevertheless agreed to guide them to the best trapping ground.

One day they reached a creek full of beaver sign, and determined to halt here and establish their headquarters, while they trapped in the neighbourhood. We must here observe, that at this period—which was one of considerable rivalry amongst the various trading companies in the Indian country—the Indians, having become possessed of arms and ammunition in great quantities, had grown unusually daring and persevering in their attacks on the white hunters who passed through their country, and consequently the trappers were compelled to roam about in larger bands for mutual protection, which, although it made them less liable to open attack, yet rendered it more difficult for them to pursue their calling without being discovered; for, where one or two men might pass unseen, the broad trail of a large party, with its animals, was not likely to escape the sharp eyes of the cunning savages.

They had scarcely encamped when the old leader, who had sallied out a short distance from camp to reconnoitre the neighbourhood, returned with an Indian mocassin in his hand, and informed his companions that its late owner and others were about.

“Do ’ee hyar now, boys, thar’s Injuns knocking round, and Blackfoot at that; but thar’s plenty of beaver too, and this child means trapping any how.”

His companions were anxious to leave such dangerous vicinity; but the old fellow, contrary to his usual caution, determined to remain where he was—saying that there were Indians all over the country for that matter; and as they had determined to hunt here, he had made up his mind too—which was conclusive, and all agreed to stop where they were, in spite of the Indians. La Bonté killed a couple of mountain sheep close to camp, and they feasted rarely on the fat mutton that night, and were unmolested by marauding Blackfeet.

The next morning, leaving two of their number in camp, they started in parties of two, to hunt for beaver sign and set their traps. Markhead paired with one Batiste, Killbuck and La Bonté formed another couple, Meek and Marcelline another; two Canadians trapped together, and Bill Williams and another remained to guard the camp: but this last, leaving Bill mending his mocassins, started off to kill a mountain sheep, a band of which animals was visible.

Markhead and his companion, the first couple on the list, followed a creek, which entered that on which they had encamped, about ten miles distant. Beaver sign was abundant, and they had set eight traps, when Markhead came suddenly upon fresh Indian sign, where squaws had passed through the shrubbery on the banks of the stream to procure water, as he knew from observing a large stone placed by them in the stream, on which to stand to enable them to dip their kettles in the deepest water. Beckoning to his companion to follow, and cocking his rifle, he carefully pushed aside the bushes, and noiselessly proceeded up the bank, when, creeping on hands and knees, he gained the top, and, looking from his hiding-place, descried three Indian huts standing on a little plateau near the creek. Smoke curled from the roofs of branches, but the skin doors were carefully closed, so that he was unable to distinguish the number of the inmates. At a little distance, however, he observed two or three squaws gathering wood, with the usual attendance of curs, whose acuteness in detecting the scent of strangers was much to be dreaded.

Markhead was a rash and daring young fellow, caring no more for Indians than he did for prairie dogs, and acting ever on the spur of the moment, and as his inclination dictated, regardless of consequences. He at once determined to enter the lodges, and attack the enemy, should any be there; and the other trapper was fain to join him in the enterprise. The lodges proved empty, but the fires were still burning and meat cooking upon them, to which the hungry hunters did ample justice, besides helping themselves to whatever goods and chattels, in the shape of leather and mocassins, took their fancy.

Gathering their spoil into a bundle, they sought their horses, which they had left tied under cover of the timber on the banks of the creek; and, mounting, took the back trail, to pick up their traps and remove from so dangerous a neighbourhood. They were approaching the spot where the first trap was set, a thick growth of ash and quaking-ash concealing the stream, when Markhead, who was riding ahead, observed the bushes agitated, as if some animal was making its way through them. He instantly stopped his horse, and his companion rode to his side, to inquire the cause of this abrupt halt. They were within a few yards of the belt of shrubs which skirted the stream; and before Markhead had time to reply, a dozen swarthy heads and shoulders suddenly protruded from the leafy screen, and as many rifle barrels and arrows were pointing at their breasts. Before the trappers had time to turn their horses and fly, a cloud of smoke burst from the thicket almost in their faces. Batiste, pierced with several balls, fell dead from his horse, and Markhead felt himself severely wounded. However, he struck the spurs into his horse; and as some half-score Blackfeet jumped with loud cries from their cover, he discharged his rifle amongst them, and galloped off, a volley of balls and arrows whistling after him. He drew no bit until he reined up at the camp-fire, where he found Bill quietly dressing a deer-skin. That worthy looked up from his work; and seeing Markhead’s face streaming with blood, and the very unequivocal evidence of an Indian rencontre in the shape of an arrow sticking in his back, he asked,—“Do’ee feel bad now, boy? Whar away you see them darned Blackfoot?”

“Well, pull this arrow out of my back, and may be I’ll feel like telling,” answered Markhead.

“Do ’ee hyar now! hold on till I’ve grained this cussed skin, will ’ee! Did ’ee ever see sich a darned pelt, now? it won’t take the smoke any how I fix it.” And Markhead was fain to wait the leisure of the imperturbable old trapper, before he was eased of his annoying companion.

Old Bill expressed no surprise or grief when informed of the fate of poor Batiste. He said it was “just like greenhorns, runnin’ into them cussed Blackfoot;” and observed that the defunct trapper, being only a Vide-pôche, was “no account anyhow.” Presently Killbuck and La Bonté galloped into camp, with another alarm of Indians. They had also been attacked suddenly by a band of Blackfeet, but, being in a more open country, had got clear off, after killing two of their assailants, whose scalps hung at the horns of their saddles. They had been in a different direction to that where Markhead and his companion had proceeded, and, from the signs they had observed, expressed their belief that the country was alive with Indians. Neither of these men had been wounded. Presently the two Canadians made their appearance on the bluff, galloping with might and main to camp, and shouting “Indians, Indians,” as they came. All being assembled, and a council held, it was determined to abandon the camp and neighbourhood immediately. Old Bill was already packing his animals, and as he pounded the saddle down on the withers of his old Rosinante, he muttered,—“Do ’ee hyar, now! this coon ’ull câche, he will.” So mounting his horse, and leading his pack mule by a lariat, he bent over his saddle-horn, dug his ponderous rowels into the lank sides of his beast, and, without a word, struck up the bluff and disappeared.

The others, hastily gathering up their packs, and most of them having lost their traps, quickly followed his example, and “put out.” On cresting the high ground which rose from the creek, they observed thin columns of smoke mounting into the air from many different points, the meaning of which they were at no loss to guess. However, they were careful not to show themselves on elevated ground, keeping as much as possible under the banks of the creek, when such a course was practicable; but, the bluffs sometimes rising precipitously from the water, they were more than once compelled to ascend the banks, and continue their course along the uplands, whence they might easily be discovered by the Indians. It was nearly sundown when they left their camp, but they proceeded during the greater part of the night at as rapid a rate as possible; their progress, however, being greatly retarded as they advanced into the mountain, their route lying up stream. Towards morning they halted for a brief space, but started again as soon as daylight permitted them to see their way over the broken ground.

The creek now forced its way through a narrow cañon, the banks being thickly clothed with a shrubbery of cottonwood and quaking-ash. The mountain rose on each side, but not abruptly, being here and there broken into plateaus and shelving prairies. In a very thick bottom, sprinkled with coarse grass, they halted about noon, and removed the saddles and packs from their wearied animals, piqueting them in the best spots of grass.

La Bonté and Killbuck, after securing their animals, left the camp to hunt, for they had no provisions of any kind; and a short distance beyond it, the former came suddenly upon a recent mocassin track in the timber. After examining it for a moment, he raised his head with a broad grin, and, turning to his companion, pointed into the cover, where, in the thickest part, they discerned the well-known figure of old Bill’s horse, browsing upon the cherry bushes. Pushing through the thicket in search of the brute’s master, La Bonté suddenly stopped short as the muzzle of a rifle-barrel gaped before his eyes at the distance of a few inches, whilst the thin voice of Bill muttered—

“Do ’ee hyar now, I was nigh giving ’ee h——: I was now. If I didn’t think ’ee was Blackfoot, I’m dogged now.” And not a little indignant was the old fellow that his câche had been so easily, though accidentally, discovered. However, he presently made his appearance in camp, leading his animals, and once more joined his late companions, not deigning to give any explanation as to why or wherefore he had deserted them the day before, merely muttering, “do ’ee hyar now, thar’s trouble comin’.”

The two hunters returned after sundown with a black-tailed deer; and after eating the better part of the meat, and setting a guard, the party were glad to roll in their blankets and enjoy the rest they so much needed. They were undisturbed during the night; but at dawn of day the sleepers were roused by a hundred fierce yells, from the mountains enclosing the creek on which they had encamped. The yells were instantly followed by a ringing volley, the bullets thudding into the trees, and cutting the branches near them, but without causing any mischief. Old Bill rose from his blanket and shook himself, and exclaimed “Wagh!” as at that moment a ball plumped into the fire over which he was standing, and knocked the ashes about in a cloud. All the mountaineers seized their rifles and sprang to cover; but as yet it was not sufficiently light to show them their enemy, the bright flashes from the guns alone indicating their position. As morning dawned, however, they saw that both sides of the cañon were occupied by the Indians; and, from the firing, judged there must be at least a hundred warriors engaged in the attack. Not a shot had yet been fired by the trappers, but as the light increased, they eagerly watched for an Indian to expose himself, and offer a mark to their trusty rifles. La Bonté, Killbuck, and old Bill, lay a few yards distant from each other, flat on their faces, near the edge of the thicket, their rifles raised before them, and the barrels resting in the forks of convenient bushes. From their place of concealment to the position of the Indians—who, however, were scattered here and there, wherever a rock afforded them cover—was a distance of about a hundred and fifty yards, or within fair rifle-shot. The trappers were obliged to divide their force, since both sides of the creek were occupied; but such was the nature of the ground, and the excellent cover afforded by the rocks and boulders, and clumps of dwarf pine and hemlock, that not a hand’s-breadth of an Indian’s body had yet been seen. Nearly opposite La Bonté, a shelving glade in the mountain side ended in an abrupt precipice, and at the very edge, and almost toppling over it, were several boulders, just of sufficient size to afford cover to a man’s body. As this bluff overlooked the trapper’s position, it was occupied by the Indians, and every rock covered an assailant. At one point, just over where La Bonté and Killbuck were lying, two boulders lay together, with just sufficient interval to admit a rifle-barrel between them, and from this breastwork an Indian kept up a most annoying fire. All his shots fell in dangerous propinquity to one or other of the trappers, and already Killbuck had been grazed by one better directed than the others. La Bonté watched for some time in vain for a chance to answer this persevering marksman, and at length an opportunity offered, by which he was not long in profiting.

The Indian, as the light increased, was better able to discern his mark, and fired, and yelled every time he did so, with redoubled vigour. In his eagerness, and probably whilst in the act of taking aim, he leaned too heavily against the rock which covered him, and, detaching it from its position, down it rolled into the cañon, exposing his body by its fall. At the same instant, a wreath of smoke puffed from the bushes which concealed the trappers, and the crack of La Bonté’s rifle spoke the first word of reply to the Indian challenge. But a few feet behind the rock, fell the dead body of the Indian, rolling down the steep sides of the cañon, and only stopped by a bush at the very bottom, within a few yards of the spot where Markhead lay concealed in some high grass.

That daring fellow instantly jumped from his cover, and, drawing his knife, rushed to the body, and in another moment held aloft the Indian’s scalp, giving, at the same time, a triumphant whoop. A score of rifles were levelled and discharged at the intrepid mountaineer; but in the act many Indians incautiously exposed themselves, every rifle in the timber cracked simultaneously, and for each report an Indian bit the dust.

But now they changed their tactics. Finding they were unable to drive the trappers from their position, they retired from the mountain, and the firing suddenly ceased. In their retreat, however, they were forced to expose themselves, and again the whites dealt destruction amongst them. As the Indians retired, yelling loudly, the hunters thought they had given up the contest; but presently a cloud of smoke rising from the bottom immediately below them, at once discovered the nature of their plans. A brisk wind was blowing up the cañon, and, favoured by it, they fired the brush on the banks of the stream, knowing that before this the hunters must speedily retreat.

Against such a result, but for the gale of wind which drove the fire roaring before it, they could have provided—for your mountaineer never fails to find resources on a pinch. They would have fired the brush to leeward of their position, and also carefully ignited that to windward, or between them and the advancing flame, extinguishing it immediately when a sufficient space had thus been cleared, and over which the fire-flame could not leap, and thus cutting themselves off from it both above and below their position. In the present instance, they could not profit by such a course, as the wind was so strong that, if once the bottom caught fire, they would not be able to extinguish it; besides which, in the attempt, they would so expose themselves that they would be picked off by the Indians without difficulty. As it was, the fire came roaring before the wind with the speed of a race-horse, and, spreading from the bottom, licked the mountain sides, the dry grass burning like tinder. Huge volumes of stifling smoke rolled before it, and, in a very few minutes, the trappers were hastily mounting their animals, driving the packed ones before them. The dense clouds of smoke concealed every thing from their view, and, to avoid this, they broke from the creek and galloped up the sides of the cañon on to the more level plateau. As they attained this, a band of mounted Indians charged them. One, waving a red blanket, dashed through the cavallada, and was instantly followed by all the loose animals of the trappers, the rest of the Indians following with loud shouts. So sudden was the charge, that the whites had not power to prevent the stampede. Old Bill, as usual, led his pack mules by the lariat; but the animals, mad with terror at the shouts of the Indians, broke from him, nearly pulling him out of his seat at the same time.

To cover the retreat of the others with their prey, a band of mounted Indians now appeared, threatening an attack in front, whilst their first assailants, rushing from the bottom, at least a hundred strong, assaulted in rear. “Do ’ee hyar, boys!” shouted old Bill, “break, or you’ll go under. This child’s goin’ to câche!” and saying the word, off he went. Sauve-qui-peut was the order of the day, and not a moment too soon, for overwhelming numbers were charging upon them, and the mountain resounded with savage yells. La Bonté and Killbuck stuck together: they saw old Bill, bending over his saddle, dive right into the cloud of smoke, and apparently make for the creek bottom—their other companions scattering each on his own hook, and saw no more of them for many a month; and thus was one of the most daring and successful bands broken up that ever trapped in the mountains of the Far West.

It is painful to follow the steps of the poor fellows who, thus despoiled of the hardly-earned produce of their hunt, saw all their wealth torn from them at one swoop. The two Canadians were killed upon the night succeeding that of the attack. Worn with fatigue, hungry and cold, they had built a fire in what they thought was a secure retreat, and, rolled in their blankets, were soon buried in a sleep from which they never awoke. An Indian boy tracked them, and watched their camp. Burning with the idea of signalising himself thus early, he awaited his opportunity, and noiselessly approaching their resting-place, shot them both with arrows, and returned in triumph to his people with their horses and scalps.

La Bonté and Killbuck sought a passage in the mountain by which to cross over to the head waters of the Columbia, and there fall in with some of the traders or trappers of the North-west. They became involved in the mountains, in a part where was no game of any description, and no pasture for their miserable animals. One of these they killed for food; the other, a bag of bones, died from sheer starvation. They had very little ammunition, their mocassins were worn out, and they were unable to procure skins to supply themselves with fresh ones. Winter was fast approaching, the snow already covered the mountains, and storms of sleet and hail poured incessantly through the valleys, benumbing their exhausted limbs, hardly protected by scanty and ragged covering. To add to their miseries, poor Killbuck was taken ill. He had been wounded in the groin by a bullet some time before, and the ball still remained. The wound, aggravated by walking and the excessive cold, assumed an ugly appearance, and soon rendered him incapable of sustained exertion, all motion even being attended with intolerable pain. La Bonté had made a shanty for his suffering companion, and spread a soft bed of pine branches for him, by the side of a small creek at the point where it came out of the mountain and followed its course through a little prairie. They had been three days without other food than a piece of parflêche, which had formed the back of La Bonté’s bullet-pouch, and which, after soaking in the creek, they eagerly devoured. Killbuck was unable to move, and sinking fast from exhaustion. His companion had hunted from morning till night, as well as his failing strength would allow him, but had not seen the traces of any kind of game, with the exception of some old buffalo tracks, made apparently months before by a band of bulls crossing the mountain.

The morning of the fourth day La Bonté, as usual, rose at daybreak from his blanket, and was proceeding to collect wood for the fire during his absence while hunting, when Killbuck called to him, and in an almost inarticulate voice desired him to seat himself by his side.

“Boy,” he said, “this old hos feels like goin’ under, and that afore long. You’re stout yet, and if thar was meat handy, you’d come round slick. Now, boy, I’ll be under, as I said, afore many hours, and if you don’t raise meat you’ll be in the same fix. I never eat dead meat[3] myself, and wouldn’t ask no one to do it neither; but meat fair killed is meat any way; so, boy, put your knife in this old niggur’s lights, and help yourself. It’s ‘poor bull,’ I know, but maybe it’ll do to keep life in; and along the fleece thar’s meat yet, and maybe my old hump ribs has picking on ’em.”

“You’re a good old hos,” answered La Bonté, “but this child ain’t turned niggur yet.”

Killbuck then begged his companion to leave him to his fate, and strive himself to reach game; but this alternative La Bonté likewise generously refused, and faintly endeavouring to cheer the sick man, left him once again to look for game. He was so weak that he felt difficulty in supporting himself, and knowing how futile would be his attempts to hunt, he sallied from the camp convinced that a few hours more would see the last of him.

He had scarcely raised his eyes, when, hardly crediting his senses, he saw within a few hundred yards of him an old bull, worn with age, lying on the prairie. Two wolves were seated on their haunches before him, their tongues lolling from their mouths, whilst the buffalo was impotently rolling his ponderous head from side to side, his bloodshot eyes glaring fiercely at his tormentors, and flakes of foam, mixed with blood, dropping from his mouth over his long shaggy beard. La Bonté was transfixed; he dared scarcely to breathe lest the animal should be alarmed and escape. Weak as it was, he could hardly have followed it, and, knowing that his own and companion’s life hung upon the success of his shot, he scarcely had strength to raise his rifle. By dint of extraordinary exertions and precautions, which were totally unnecessary, for the poor old bull had not a move in him, the hunter approached within shot. Lying upon the ground, he took a long steady aim, and fired. The buffalo raised its matted head, tossed it wildly for an instant, and, stretching out its limbs convulsively, turned over on its side and was dead.

Killbuck heard the shot, and crawling from under the little shanty which covered his bed, saw, to his astonishment, La Bonté in the act of butchering a buffalo within two hundred yards of camp. “Hurraw for you!” he faintly exclaimed; and exhausted by the exertion he had used, and perhaps by the excitement of an anticipated feast, fell back and fainted.

However, the killing was the easiest matter, for when the huge carcass lay dead upon the ground, our hunter had hardly strength to drive the blade of his knife through the tough hide of the old patriarch. Then having cut off as much of the meat as he could carry, eating the while sundry portions of the liver, which he dipped in the gall-bladder by way of relish, La Bonté cast a wistful look upon the half-starved wolves, who now loped round and round, licking their chops, only waiting until his back was turned to fall to with appetite equal to his own, and capabilities of swallowing and digesting far superior. La Bonté looked at the buffalo, and then at the wolves, levelled his rifle and shot one dead, at which the survivor scampered off without delay.

Arrived at camp, packing in a tolerable load of the best part of the animal—for hunger lent him strength—he found poor Killbuck lying on his back, deaf to time, and to all appearance gone under. Having no sal-volatile or vinaigrette at hand, La Bonté flapped a lump of raw fleece into his patient’s face, and this instantly revived him. Then taking the sick man’s shoulder, he raised him tenderly into a sitting posture, and invited, in kindly accents, “the old hos to feed,” thrusting at the same time a tolerable slice of liver into his hand, which the patient looked at wistfully and vaguely for a few short moments, and then greedily devoured. It was nightfall by the time that La Bonté, assisted by many intervals of hard eating, packed in the last of the meat, which formed a goodly pile around the fire.

“Poor bull” it was in all conscience: the labour of chewing a mouthful of the “tender loin” was equal to a hard day’s hunt; but to them, poor starved fellows, it appeared the richest of meat. They still preserved a small tin pot, and in this, by stress of eternal boiling, La Bonté contrived to make some strong soup, which soon restored his sick companion to marching order. For himself, as soon as a good meal had filled him, he was strong as ever, and employed himself in drying the remainder of the meat for future use. Even the wolf, bony as he was, was converted into meat, and rationed them several days. Winter, however, had set in with such severity, and Killbuck was still so weak, that La Bonté determined to remain in his present position until spring, as he now found that buffalo frequently visited the valley, as it was more bare of snow than the lowlands, and afforded them better pasture; and one morning he had the satisfaction of seeing a band of seventeen bulls within long rifle-shot of the camp, out of which four of the fattest were soon laid low by his rifle.

They still had hard times before them, for towards spring the buffalo again disappeared; the greater part of their meat had been spoiled, owing to there not being sufficient sun to dry it thoroughly; and when they resumed their journey they had nothing to carry with them, and had a desert before them without game of any kind. We pass over what they suffered. Hunger, thirst, and Indians assaulted them at times, and many miraculous and hairbreadth escapes they had from such enemies.

The trail to Oregon, followed by traders and emigrants, crosses the Rocky Mountains at a point known as the South Pass, where a break in the chain occurs of such moderate and gradual elevation as to permit the passage of waggons with tolerable facility. The Sweet Water Valley runs nearly to the point where the dividing ridge of the Pacific and Atlantic waters throws off its streams to their respective oceans. At one end of this valley, and situated on the right bank of the Sweet Water, a huge isolated mass of granitic rock rises to the height of three hundred feet, abruptly from the plain. On the smooth and scarped surface presented by one of its sides, are rudely carved the names and initials of traders, trappers, travellers and emigrants, who have here recorded the memorial of their sojourn in the remote wilderness of the Far West. The face of the rock is covered with names familiar to the mountaineers as those of the most renowned of their hardy brotherhood; while others again occur, better known to the science and literature of the Old World than to the unlearned trappers of the Rocky Mountains. The huge mass is a well-known landmark to the Indians and mountaineers; and travellers and emigrants hail it as the half-way beacon between the frontiers of the United States and the still distant goal of their long and perilous journey.

It was a hot sultry day in July. Not a breath of air relieved the intense and oppressive heat of the atmosphere, unusual here where pleasant summer breezes, and sometimes stronger gales, blow over the elevated plains with the regularity of trade-winds. The sun, at its meridian height, struck the dry sandy plain and parched the drooping buffalo-grass on its surface, and its rays, refracted and reverberating from the heated ground, distorted every object seen through its lurid medium. Straggling antelope, leisurely crossing the adjoining prairie, appeared to be gracefully moving in mid-air; whilst a scattered band of buffalo bulls loomed huge and indistinct in the vapoury distance. In the timbered valley of the river deer and elk were standing motionless in the water, under the shade of the overhanging cottonwoods, seeking a respite from the persevering attacks of swarms of horseflies and mosquitos; and now and then the heavy splash was heard, as they tossed their antlered heads into the stream, to free them from the venomous insects that buzzed incessantly about them. But in the sandy prairie, beetles of an enormous size were rolling in every direction huge balls of earth, pushing them with their hind legs with comical perseverance; cameleons darted about, assimilating the hue of their grotesque bodies with the colour of the sand: groups of prairie-dog houses were seen, each with its inmate barking lustily on the roof; whilst under cover of nearly every bush of sage or cactus a rattlesnake lay glittering in lazy coil. Tantalising the parched sight, the neighbouring peaks of the lofty Wind River Mountains glittered in a mantle of sparkling snow, whilst Sweet Water Mountain, capped in cloud, looked gray and cool, in striking contrast to the burned up plains which lay basking at its foot.

Resting their backs against the rock, (on which, we have said, are now carved the names of many travellers,) and defended from the powerful rays of the sun by its precipitous sides, two white men quietly slept. They were gaunt and lantern-jawed, and clothed in tattered buckskin. Each held a rifle across his knees, but—strange sight in this country—one had its pan thrown open, which was rust-eaten and contained no priming; the other’s hammer was without a flint. Their faces were as if covered with mahogany-coloured parchment; their eyes were sunken; and as their jaws fell listlessly on their breasts, their cheeks were hollow, with the bones nearly protruding from the skin. One was in the prime of manhood, with handsome features; the other, considerably past the middle age, was stark and stern. Months of dire privation had brought them to this pass. The elder of the two was Killbuck, of mountain fame; the other hight La Bonté.

The former opened his eyes, and saw the buffalo feeding on the plain. “Ho, boy,” he said, touching his companion, “thar’s meat a-runnin.”

La Bonté looked in the direction the other pointed, stood up, and hitching round his pouch and powder-horn, drew the stopper from the latter with his teeth, and placing the mouth in the palm of his left hand, turned the horn up and shook it.

“Not a grain,” he said—“not a grain, old hos.”

“Wagh!” exclaimed the other, “we’ll have to eat afore long,” and rising, walked into the prairie. He had hardly stepped two paces, when, passing close to a sage bush, a rattlesnake whizzed a note of warning with its tail. Killbuck grinned, and taking the wiping-stick from his rifle-barrel, tapped the snake on the head, and, taking it by the tail, threw it to La Bonté, saying, “hyar’s meat, any how.” The old fellow followed up his success by slaying half a dozen more, and brought them in skewered through the head on his wiping-stick. A fire was soon kindled, and the snakes as soon roasting before it; when La Bonté, who sat looking at the buffalo which fed close to the rock, suddenly saw them raise their heads, snuff the air, and scamper towards him. A few minutes afterwards a huge shapeless body loomed in the refracted air, approaching the spot where the buffalo had been grazing. The hunters looked at it and then at each other, and ejaculated “Wagh!” Presently a long white mass showed more distinctly, followed by another, and before each was a string of animals.

“Waggons, by hos and beaver! Hurrah for Conostoga!” exclaimed the trappers in a breath, as they now observed two white-tilted waggons, drawn by several pairs of mules, approaching the very spot where they sat. Several mounted men were riding about the waggons, and two on horseback, in advance of all, were approaching the rock, when they observed the smoke curling from the hunters’ fire. They halted at sight of this, and one of the two, drawing a long instrument from a case, which Killbuck voted a rifle, directed it towards them for a moment, and then, lowering it, again moved forward.

As they drew near, the two poor trappers, although half-dead with joy, still retained their seats with Indian gravity and immobility of feature, turning now and then the crackling snakes which lay on the embers of the fire. The two strangers approached. One, a man of some fifty years of age, of middle height and stoutly built, was clad in a white shooting-jacket, of cut unknown in mountain tailoring, and a pair of trousers of the well-known material called “shepherd’s plaid;” a broad-brimmed Panama shaded his face, which was ruddy with health and exercise; a belt round the waist supported a handsome bowie-knife, and a double-barrelled fowling-piece was slung across his shoulder.

His companion was likewise dressed in a light shooting-jacket, of many pockets and dandy cut, rode on an English saddle and in boots, and was armed with a superb double rifle, glossy from the case, and bearing few marks of use or service. He was a tall, fine-looking fellow of thirty, with light hair and complexion; a scrupulous beard and mustache; a wide-awake hat, with a short pipe stuck in the band, but not very black with smoke; an elaborate powder-horn over his shoulder, with a Cairngorm in the butt as large as a plate; a blue handkerchief tied round his throat in a sailor’s knot, and the collar of his shirt turned carefully over it. He had, moreover, a tolerable idea of his very correct appearance, and wore Woodstock gloves.

The trappers looked at them from head to foot, and the more they looked the less could they make them out.

“H—!” exclaimed La Bonté emphatically.

“This beats grainin’ bull-hide slick,” broke from Killbuck as the strangers reined up at the fire, the younger dismounting, and staring with wonder at the weather-beaten trappers.

“Well, my men, how are you?” he rattled out. “Any game here? By Jove!” he suddenly exclaimed, seizing his rifle, as at that moment a large buzzard, the most unclean of birds, flew into the topmost branch of a cottonwood, and sat, a tempting shot. “By Jove, there’s a chance!” cried the mighty hunter; and, bending low, started off to approach the unwary bird in the most approved fashion of northern deer-stalkers. The buzzard sat quietly, and now and then stretched its neck to gaze upon the advancing sportsman, who on such occasions threw himself flat on the ground, and remained motionless, in dread of alarming the bird. It was worth while to look at the countenance of old Killbuck, as he watched the antics of the “bourgeois” hunter. He thought at first that the dandy rifleman had really discovered game in the bottom, and was nothing loth that there was a chance of his seeing meat; but when he understood the object of such manœuvres, and saw the quarry the hunter was so carefully approaching, his mouth grinned from ear to ear, and, turning to La Bonté, he said, “Wagh! he’s some—he is!”

Nothing doubting, however, the stranger approached the tree on which the bird was sitting, and, getting well under it, raised his rifle and fired. Down tumbled the bird; and the successful hunter, with a loud shout, rushed frantically towards it, and bore it in triumph to the camp, earning the most sovereign contempt from the two trappers by the achievement.

The other stranger was a quieter character. He, too, smiled as he witnessed the exultation of his younger companion, (whose horse, by the way, was scampering about the plain,) and spoke kindly to the mountaineers, whose appearance was clear evidence of the sufferings they had endured. The snakes by this time were cooked, and the trappers gave their new acquaintances the never-failing invitation to “sit and eat.” When the latter, however, understood what the viands were, their looks expressed the horror and disgust they felt.

“Good God!” exclaimed the elder, “you surely cannot eat such disgusting food?”

“This niggur doesn’t savy what disgustin’ is,” gruffly answered Killbuck; “but them as carries empty paunch three days an’ more, is glad to get ‘snake-meat,’ I’m thinkin.”

“What! you’ve no ammunition, then?”

“Well, we haven’t.”

“Wait till the waggons come up, and throw away that abominable stuff, and you shall have something better, I promise,” said the elder of the strangers.

“Yes,” continued the younger, “some hot preserved soup, hotchpotch, and a glass of porter, will do you good.”

The trappers looked at the speaker, who was talking Greek (to them.) They thought the bourgeois were making fun, and did not half like it, so answered simply, “Wagh! h—’s full of hosh-posh and porter.”

Two large waggons presently came up, escorted by some eight or ten stout Missourians. Sublette was amongst the number, well known as a mountain trader, and under whose guidance the present party, which formed a pleasure expedition at the expense of a Scotch sportsman, was leisurely making its way across the mountains to the Columbia. As several mountaineers were in company, Killbuck and La Bonté recognised more than one friend, and the former and Sublette were old compañeros. As soon as the animals were unhitched, and camp formed on the banks of the creek, a black cook set about preparing a meal. Our two trapping friends looked on with astonishment as the sable functionary drew from the waggon the different articles he required to furnish forth a feed. Hams, tongues, tins of preserved meats, bottles of pickles, of porter, brandy, coffee, sugar, flour, were tumbled promiscuously on the prairie; whilst pots and pans, knives, forks, spoons, plates, &c. &c. displayed their unfamiliar faces to the mountaineers. “Hosh-posh and porter” did not now appear such Utopian articles as they had first imagined; but no one can understand the relish, but those who have fared for years on simple meat and water, with which they accepted the invitation of the Capen (as they called the Scotchman,) to “take a horn of liquor.” Killbuck and La Bonté sat in the same position as when we first surprised them asleep under the shadow of Independence Rock, regarding the profuse display of comestibles with scarce-believing eyes, and childishly helpless by the novelty of the scene. Each took the proffered half-pint cup, filled to the brim with excellent brandy—(no tee-totallers they!)—looked once at the amber-coloured surface, and with the usual mountain pledge of “here’s luck!” tossed off the grateful liquor at a breath. This prepared them in some measure for what was yet in store for them. The Scotchman bestirred the cook in his work, and soon sundry steaming pots were lifted from the fire, and the skillets emptied of their bread—the contents of the former poured in large flat pans, while pannikins were filled with smoking coffee. The two trappers needed no second invitation, but, seizing each a panful of steaming stew, drew the butcher knives from their belts, and fell to lustily—the hospitable Scotchman plying them with more and more, and administering corrective noggins of brandy the while; until at last they were fain to cry enough, wiped their knives on the grass, and placed them in their sheaths—a sign that human nature could no more. How can pen describe the luxury of the smoke that followed, to lips which had not kissed pipe for many months, and how the fragrant honey-dew from Old Virginia was relishingly puffed!

But the Scotchman’s bounty did not stop here. He soon elicited from the lips of the hunters the narrative of their losses and privations, and learned that they now, without ammunition and scarcely clothed, were on their way to Platte Fort, to hire themselves to the Indian traders in order to earn another outfit, wherewith once more to betake themselves to their perilous employment of trapping. What was their astonishment to see their entertainer presently lay out upon the ground two piles of goods, each consisting of a four-point Mackinaw, two tin canisters of powder, with corresponding lead and flints, a pair of mocassins, a shirt, and sufficient buckskin to make a pair of pantaloons; and how much the more was the wonder increased when two excellent Indian horses were presently lassoed from the cavallada, and with mountain saddle, bridle, and lariats complete, together with the two piles of goods described, presented to them “on the prairie” or “gift-free,” by the kindhearted stranger, who would not even listen to thanks for the most timely and invaluable present.

Once more equipped, our two hunters, filled with good brandy and fat buffalo meat, again wended on their way; their late entertainers continuing their pleasure trip across the gap of the South Pass, intending to visit the Great Salt Lake, or Timponogos, of the West. The former were bound for the North Fork of the Platte, with the intention of joining one of the numerous trapping parties which rendezvous at the American Fur Company’s post on that branch of the river. On a fork of Sweet Water, however, not two days after the meeting with the Scotchman’s waggons, they encountered a band of a dozen mountaineers, mounted on fine horses, and well armed and equipped, travelling along without the usual accompaniment of a mulada of pack-animals, two or three mules alone being packed with meat and spare ammunition. The band was proceeding at a smart rate, the horses moving with the gait peculiar to American animals, known as “pacing” or “racking,” in Indian file—each of the mountaineers with a long heavy rifle resting across the horn of his saddle. Amongst them our two friends recognised Markhead, who had been of the party dispersed months before by the Blackfeet on one of the head streams of the Yellow Stone, which event had been the origin of the dire sufferings of Killbuck and La Bonté. Markhead, after running the gauntlet of numerous Indians, through the midst of whose country he passed with his usual temerity and utter disregard to danger, suffering hunger, thirst, and cold—those every-day experiences of mountain life—riddled with balls, but with three scalps hanging from his belt, made his way to a rendezvous on Bear River, whence he struck out for the Platte in early spring, in time to join the band he now accompanied, who were on a horse-stealing expedition to the Missions of Upper California. Little persuasion did either Killbuck or La Bonté require to join the sturdy freebooters. In five minutes they had gone “files-about,” and at sundown were camping on the well-timbered bottom of “Little Sandy,” feasting once more on delicate hump-rib and tender loin.

For California, ho!

Fourteen good rifles in the hands of fourteen mountain men, stout and true, on fourteen strong horses, of true Indian blood and training—fourteen cool heads, with fourteen pairs of keen eyes in them, each head crafty as an Indian’s, directing a right arm strong as steel, and a heart as brave as grizzly bear’s. Before them a thousand miles of dreary desert or wilderness, overrun by hostile savages, thirsting for the white man’s blood; famine and drought, the arrows of wily hordes of Indians—and, these dangers past, the invasion of the civilised settlements of whites, the least numerous of which contained ten times their number of armed and bitter enemies,—the sudden swoop upon their countless herds of mules and horses, the fierce attack and bloody slaughter;—such were the consequences of the expedition these bold mountaineers were now engaged in. Fourteen lives of any fourteen enemies who would be rash enough to stay them, were, any day you will, carried in the rifle barrels of these stout fellows; who, in all the proud consciousness of their physical qualities, neither thought, nor cared to think, of future perils; and rode merrily on their way, rejoicing in the dangers they must necessarily meet. Never a more daring band crossed the mountains; a more than ordinary want of caution characterised their march, and dangers were recklessly and needlessly invited, which even the older and more cold-blooded mountaineers seemed not to care to avoid. They had, each and all, many a debt to pay the marauding Indians. Grudges for many privations, for wounds and loss of comrades, rankled in their breasts; and not one but had suffered more or less in property and person at the hands of the savages, within a few short months. Threats of vengeance on every Redskin they met were loud and deep; and the wild war-songs round their nightly camp-fires, and grotesque scalp-dances, borrowed from the Indians, proved to the initiated that they were, one and all, “half-froze for hair.” Soon after Killbuck and La Bonté joined them, they one day suddenly surprised a band of twenty Sioux, scattered on a small prairie and butchering some buffalo they had just killed. Before they could escape, the whites were upon them with loud shouts, and in three minutes the scalps of eleven were dangling from their saddle-horns.

Struggling up mountains, slipping down precipices, dashing over prairies which resounded with their Indian songs, charging the Indians wherever they met them, and without regard to their numbers; frightening with their lusty war-whoops the miserable Diggers, who were not unfrequently surprised while gathering roots in the mountain plains, and who, scrambling up the rocks and concealing themselves, like sage rabbits, in holes and corners, peered, chattering with fear, as the wild and noisy troop rode by. Scarce drawing rein, they passed rapidly the heads of Green and Grand Rivers, through a country abounding in game and in excellent pasture; encountering in the upland valleys, through which meandered the well-timbered creeks on which they made their daily camps, many a band of Yutahs, through whom they dashed at random, caring not whether they were friends or foes. Passing many other heads of streams, they struck at last the edge of the desert, lying along the south-eastern base of the Great Salt Lake, and which extends in almost unbroken sterility to the foot of the range of the Sierra Nevada—a mountain chain, capped with perpetual snow, that bounds the northern extremity of a singular tract of country, walled by mountains and utterly desert, whose salt lagoons and lakes, although fed by many streams, find no outlet to the ocean, but are absorbed in the spongy soil or thirsty sand, which characterise the different portions of this deserted tract. In the “Grand Basin,” it is reported, neither human nor animal life can be supported. No oases cheer the wanderer in the unbroken solitude of the vast wilderness. More than once the lone trapper has penetrated, with hardy enterprise, into the salt plains of the basin; but no signs of beaver or fur-bearing animal rewarded the attempt. The ground is scantily covered with coarse unwholesome grass that mules and horses refuse to eat; and the water of the springs, impregnated with the impurities of the soil through which it percolates, affords but nauseating draughts to the thirsty traveller.

In passing from the more fertile uplands to the lower plains, as they descended the streams, the timber on their banks became scarcer, and the groves more scattered. The rich buffalo or grama grass was exchanged for a coarser species, on which the hard-worked animals soon grew poor and weak. The thickets of plum and cherry, of box-alder and quaking-ash, which had hitherto fringed the creeks, and where the deer and bear loved to resort—the former to browse on the leaves and tender shoots, the latter to devour the fruit—now entirely disappeared, and the only shrub seen was the eternal sage bush, which flourishes every where in the western regions in uncongenial soils where other vegetation refuses to grow. The visible change in the scenery had also a sensible effect on the spirits of the mountaineers. They travelled on in silence through the deserted plains; the hi-hi-hiya of their Indian chants was no longer heard enlivening the line of march. More than once a Digger of the Pi-yutah tribe took himself and hair, in safety, from their path, and almost unnoticed; but as they advanced they became more cautious in their movements, and testified, by the vigilant watch they kept, that they anticipated hostile attacks even in these arid wastes. They had passed without molestation through the country infested by the bolder Indians. The mountain Yutes, not relishing the appearance of the hunters, had left them unmolested; but they were now entering a country inhabited by the most degraded and abject of the western tribes; who, nevertheless, ever suffering from the extremities of hunger, have their brutish wits sharpened by the necessity of procuring food, and rarely fail to levy a contribution of rations, of horse or mule flesh, on the passenger in their inhospitable country. The brutish cunning and animal instinct of these wretches is such, that although arrant cowards, their attacks are more feared than those of bolder Indians. These people—called the Yamparicas or Root-Diggers—are, nevertheless, the degenerate descendants of those tribes which once overran that portion of the continent of North America now comprehended within the boundaries of Mexico, and who have left such startling evidences in their track of a comparatively superior state of civilisation. They now form an outcast tribe of the great nation of the Apache, which extends under various names from the Great Salt Lake along the table-lands on each side the Sierra Madre to the tropic of Cancer, where they merge into what are called the Mexican Indians. The whole of this nation is characterised by most abject cowardice; and they even refuse to meet the helpless Mexicans in open fight—unlike the Yutah or Camanche, who carry bold and open warfare into the territories of their civilised enemy, and never shrink from hand to hand encounter. The Apaches and the degenerate Diggers pursue a cowardly warfare, hiding in ambush, and shooting the passer-by with arrows; or, dashing upon him at night when steeped in sleep, they bury their arrow to the feather in his heaving breast. As the Mexicans say, “Sin ventaja, no salen;” they never attack without odds. But they are not the less dangerous enemies on this account; and by the small bands of trappers who visit their country, they are the more dreaded by reason of this coward and wolfish system of warfare.

To provide against surprise, therefore, as the hunters rode along, flankers were extended en guerilla on each side, mounting the high points to reconnoitre the country, and keeping a sharp look-out for the Indian sign. At night the animals were securely hobbled, and a horse-guard posted round them—a service of great danger, as the stealthy cat-like Diggers are often known to steal up silently, under cover of the darkness, towards the sentinel, shoot him with their arrows, and, approaching the animals, cut the hobbles and drive them away unseen.

One night they encamped on a creek where was but little of the coarsest pasture, and that little scattered here and there; so that they were compelled to allow their animals to roam farther than usual from camp in search of food. Four of the hunters, however, accompanied them to guard against surprise; whilst but half of those in camp laid down to sleep, the others, with rifles in their hands, remaining prepared for any emergencies. This day they had killed one of their two pack mules for food, game not having been met with for several days; but the animal was so poor, that it scarcely afforded more than one tolerable meal to the whole party.

A short time before the dawn of day an alarm was given; the animals were heard to snort violently; a loud shout was heard, followed by the sharp crack of a rifle, and the tramp of galloping horses plainly showed that a stampede had been effected. The whites instantly sprang to their arms, and rushed in the direction of the sounds. The body of the cavallada, however, had luckily turned, and, being headed by the mountaineers, were surrounded and secured, with the loss of only three, which had probably been mounted by the Indians.

Day breaking soon after, one of their band was discovered to be missing; and it was then found that a man who had been standing horse-guard at the time of the attack, had not come into camp with his companions. At that moment a thin spiral column of smoke was seen to rise from the banks of the creek, telling but too surely the fate of the missing mountaineer. It was the signal of the Indians to their people that a “coup” had been struck, and that an enemy’s scalp remained in their triumphant hands.

“H——!” exclaimed the trappers in a breath; and soon imprecations and threats of revenge, loud and deep, were showered upon the heads of the treacherous Indians. Some of the party rushed to the spot where the guard had stood, and there lay the body of their comrade, pierced with lance and arrow, the scalp gone, and the body otherwise mutilated in a barbarous manner. Five were quickly in the saddle, mounted upon the strongest horses, and flying along the track of the Indians, who had made off towards the mountains with their prize and booty. We will not follow them in their work of bloody vengeance, save by saying that they followed the savages to their village, into which they charged headlong, recovered their stolen horses, and returned to camp at sundown with thirteen scalps dangling from their rifles, in payment for the loss of their unfortunate companion.[4]

In their further advance, hunger and thirst were their daily companions; they were compelled to kill several of their animals for food, but were fortunate enough to replace them by a stroke of good luck in meeting a party of Indians returning from an excursion against one of the Californian settlements with a tolerably large band of horses. Our hunters met this band one fine morning, and dashed into the midst at once; half a dozen Indians bit the dust, and twenty horses were turned over from red to white masters in as many seconds, which remounted those whose animals had been eaten, and enabled the others to exchange their worn-out steeds for fresh ones. This fortunate event was considered a coup, and the event was celebrated by the slaughter of a fat young horse, which furnished an excellent supper that night—a memorable event in these starveling regions.

They were now devouring their horses and mules at the rate of one every alternate day; for, so poor were the animals, that one scarcely furnished an ample meal for the thirteen hungry hunters. They were once more reduced to the animals they rode on; and after a fast of twenty-four hours’ duration, were debating on the propriety of drawing lots as to whose Rosinante should fill the kettle, when some Indians suddenly appeared making signs of peace upon the bluff, and indicating a disposition to enter the camp for the purpose of trading. Being invited to approach, they offered to trade a few dressed elk-skins; but being asked for meat, they said that their village was a long way off, and they had nothing with them but a small portion of some game they had lately killed. When requested to produce this, they hesitated, but the trappers looking hungry and angry at the same moment, an old Indian drew from under his blanket several flaps of portable dried meat which he declared was bear’s. It was but a small ration amongst so many; but, being divided, was quickly laid upon the fire to broil. The meat was stringy, and of whitish colour, altogether unlike any flesh the trappers had before eaten. Killbuck was the first to discover this. He had been quietly masticating the last mouthful of his portion, the stringiness of which required more than usual dental exertion, when the novelty of the flavour struck him as something singular. Suddenly his jaws ceased their work, he thought a moment, took the morsel from his mouth, looked at it intently, and dashed it into the fire.

“Man-meat, by G—!” he cried out; and at the words every jaw stopped work: the trappers looked at the meat and each other.

“I’m dog-gone if it ain’t!” cried old Walker, looking at his piece, “and white meat at that, wagh!” (and report said it was not the first time he had tasted such viands;) and the conviction seizing each mind, every mouthful was quickly spat into the fire, and the ire of the deceived whites was instantly turned upon the luckless providers of the feast. They saw the storm that was brewing, and without more ado turned tail from the camp, and scuttled up the bluffs, where, turning round, they fired a volley of arrows at the tricked mountaineers, and instantly disappeared.

However, the desert and its nomade pilferers were at length passed; the sandy plains became grass-covered prairies; the monstrous cottonwood on the creeks was replaced by oak and ash; the surface of the country grew more undulating, and less broken up into cañons and ravines; elk and deer leaped in the bottoms, and bands of antelope dotted the plains, with occasional troops of wild horses, too wary to allow the approach of man. On the banks of a picturesque stream called the San Joaquim, the party halted a few days to recruit themselves and animals, feasting the while on the fattest of venison and other game. They then struck to the south-east for two days, until they reached a branch of the “Las Animas,” a clear stream running through a pretty valley, well timbered and abounding in game. Here, as they wound along the river-banks, a horseman suddenly appeared upon the bluff above them, galloping at a furious rate along the edge. His dress approached in some degree to civilised attire. A broad-brimmed sombrero surmounted his swarthy face; a coloured blanket, through a slit in which his head was thrust, floated in the air from his shoulders; leathern leggings encased his lower limbs; and huge spurs jingled on his heels. He rode in a high-peaked Mexican saddle, his feet thrust in ponderous stirrups, and in his hand swung a coil of ready lasso, his only offensive arm. One of the trappers knew a little Spanish, and instantly hailed him.

“Compadre,” he shouted, “por onde va?” The Californian reined in suddenly, throwing the horse he rode on its very haunches, and darting down the bluff, galloped unhesitatingly into the midst of the hunters.

“Americanos!” he exclaimed glancing at them; and continued, smiling—“Y caballos quieren, por eso vienen tan lejitos. Jesus, que mala gente!” “It’s horses you want, and for this you come all this way. Ah, what rogues you are!”

He was an Indian, employed at the Mission of San Fernando, distant three days’ journey from their present position, and was now searching for a band of horses and mules which had strayed. San Fernando, it appeared, had once before been visited by a party of mountain free-traders, and the Indian therefore divined the object of the present one. He was, he told them, “un Indio, pero mansito:” an Indian, but a tame one;[5] “de mas, Christiano;” a Christian moreover, (exhibiting a small cross which hung round his neck.) There were many people about the mission, he said, who knew how to fight, and had plenty of arms; and there were enough to “eat up” the “Americanos, sin frijoles,” without beans, as he facetiously observed. For his part, however, he was very friendly to the Americanos; he had once met a man of that nation who was a good sort of fellow, and had made him a present of tobacco, of which he was particularly fond. Finding this hint did not take, he said that the horses and mules belonging to the mission were innumerable—“like that,” he added, sweeping his hand to all points of the compass over the plain, to intimate that they would cover that extent; and he could point out a large herd grazing nearer at hand than the mission, and guarded but by three vaqueros. Regaled with venison, and with a smoke of his coveted tobacco, he rode off, and made his way to the mission without delay; conveying the startling intelligence that a thousand Americans were upon them.

The next morning the thirteen doughty mountaineers quietly resumed their journey, moving leisurely along towards the object of their expedition.

It will not be out of place here to digress a little, in order to describe the singular features of the establishments formed in those remote regions by the Catholic church, as nuclei round which to concentrate the wandering tribes that inhabit the country, with a view to give them the benefit of civilised example, and to wean them from their restless nomadic habits.

The establishment of missions in Upper California is coeval with the first settlement of Southern Mexico. No sooner had Spanish rule taken a firm foothold in the Aztec empire, than the avowed primary object of the military expedition began to be carried into effect. “To save the souls” of the savage and barbarous subjects of their most Catholic majesties was ever inculcated upon the governors of the conquered country as the grand object to be sought after, as soon as tranquillity was partially restored by the submission of the Mexicans; and the cross, the sacred emblem of the Catholic faith, was to be upraised in the remotest corners of the country, and the natives instructed and compelled to worship it, in lieu of the grotesque images of their own idolatrous religion.

To carry into effect these orthodox instructions, troops of pious priests, of friars and monks of every order, and even of saintly nuns, followed in the wake of the victorious armies of Cortez; and girding up their loins with zealous fervour and enthusiasm, and with an enterprise and hardihood worthy of buccaneers, they pushed their adventurous way far into the bowels of the land, preaching devoutly and with commendable perseverance to savages who did not understand a syllable of what they so eloquently discoursed; and returning, after the lapse of many months passed in this first attempt, with glowing accounts of the “muy buen indole,” the very ductile disposition of the savages, and of the thousands they had converted to “la santa fé catolica.”

Ferdinand and Isabel, of glorious memory, at once beat up for volunteers. Crowds of Franciscan monks, greasy Capuchinos, and nuns of orthodox odour, joined the band; and saints even of the feminine gender, long since canonised and up aloft amongst the goodly muster of saints and martyrs, put foot once more on terra firma, and, rosary in hand, crossed the seas to participate in the good work. As proof of this latter fact, one Venabides, a Franciscan, whose veracity is beyond impeachment, declared that, while preaching in the regions now known as New Mexico, one million Indians from the “rumbo” known as Cibolo, a mighty nation, approached his temporary pulpit on the Rio Grande, and requested in a body the favour of being baptised. Struck with the singularity of this request from Indians with whom he had as yet held no communication, and with conscientious scruple as to whether he would be justified in performing such ceremony without their having received previous instruction, he hesitated a few moments before making an answer. At this juncture, the Indians espied a medallion which hung around his neck, bearing the effigy of a certain saint of extraordinary virtue. At sight of this they fell on their knees before it; and it was some time before they found words (in what language does not appear) to explain to the holy father that the original of that effigy, which hung pendant from his neck, had been long amongst them instructing them in the elements of the Christian religion, and had only lately disappeared; informing them that certain reverend men would shortly appear in the land, who would finish the good work she had devoutly commenced, and clench the business by baptising the one million miserable sinners who now knelt before El Padre Venabides.

“Valgame Dios!” reverently exclaimed that worthy man, “qui milagro es este;” [what a miracle is this I hear;] and casting up his eyes, and speaking slowly, as if he weighed every word, and taxing his memory of the historical calendar of saints, continued,—

“Se murió—aquella—santissima—muger—en el ano 175—es decir—ya hacen—mil—quatro—cientos—anos.” [That most holy woman died in the year 175, that is to say, one thousand four hundred years ago.]

“Oh, what a strange thing is this!” the padre continues devoutly. “After so many ages spent in heaven in company of the angels, of most holy men, and of virgins the most pure; and, perhaps, also in the company of my worthy and esteemed friend and patron Don Vincente Carvajal y Calvo, who died a few years ago in San Lucar of Xeres, (bequeathing me certain arrobas of dry wine, of a class I greatly esteem,—for which act he deserved to be canonised, and, I have no doubt, is,) the said Don Vincente Carvajal y Calvo being, moreover, a man of the purest and holiest thoughts, (Dios mio! what a puchero that man always had on his table!) this holy woman comes here—to these wild and remote regions; this holy woman, (who died fifteen hundred years ago,) abandoning the company of angels, of holy men, and sanctified women and virgins, and also of Don Vincente Carvajal y Calvo, (that worthy man!)—comes here, I say, where there are neither pucheros, nor garbanzos, nor dry wine, nor sweet wine, neither of Xeres, nor of Val de Peñas, nor of Peralta; where” (sobbed the padre, and bellowed the last word) “there is—nothing either to eat or to drink. Valgame Purissima Maria! And what is the name of this holy woman? the world will ask,” continues Venabides. “Santa Clara of Carmona is her name, one well known in my native country, who leaves heaven and all its joys, wends her way to the distant wilds of New Spain, and spends years in inducting the savage people to the holy faith. Truly a pious work, and pleasing to God!”[6]

Thus spoke Venabides the Franciscan, and no doubt he believed what he said; and many others in Old Spain were fools enough to believe it too, for the shaven heads flocked over in greater numbers, and the cry was ever “still they come.”

Along the whole extent of the table-lands, not an Indian tribe but was speedily visited by the preaching friars and monks; and, in less than a century after the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards, these hardy and enthusiastic frayles had pushed their way into the inhospitable regions of New Mexico, nearly two thousand miles distant from the valley of Anahuac. How they succeeded in surmounting the natural obstacles presented by the wild and barren deserts they traversed; how they escaped the infinite peril they encountered at every step, at the hands of the savage inhabitants of the country, with whose language they were totally unacquainted, is sufficient puzzle to those who, in the present day, have attempted a journey in the same regions.

However, it is impossible not to admire the hardihood of these holy pioneers of civilisation, who, totally unfitted by their former mode of life for undergoing such hardships as they must have anticipated, threw themselves into the wilderness with fearless and stubborn zeal.

For the most part, however, they found the Indians exceedingly hospitable and well disposed; and it was not until some time after—when, receiving from the missionary monks glowing, and not always very truthful accounts of the riches of the country in which they had located themselves, the governors of Mexico despatched armed expeditions under adventurous desperadoes to take and retain possession of the said country, with orders to compel the submission of the native tribes, and enforce their obedience to the authority of the whites—that the simple and confiding Indians began to see the folly they had committed in permitting the residence amongst them of these superior beings, whom they had first looked upon as more than mortal, but who, when strong enough to do so, were not long in throwing off the mask, and proving to the simple savages that they were much “more human than divine.”

Thus, in the province of New Mexico, Fray Augustin Ruiz, with his co-preachers Marcos and Venabides, were kindly received by the native inhabitants, and we have seen how one million (?) Indians came from the “rumbo” of the Cibolo, ready and willing to receive the baptismal sacrament. This Cibolo, or Sivulo, as it is written in some old MSS., is, by the way, mysteriously alluded to by the monkish historians who have written on this region, as being a kingdom inhabited by a very superior class of Indians to any met with between Anahuac and the Vale of Taos—in the enjoyment of a high state of civilisation, inhabiting a well-built city, the houses of which were three stories high, and having attained considerable perfection in the domestic arts. This, notwithstanding the authority of Don Francisco Vasquez Coronado, who visited Cibolo, and of Solis and Venegas, who have guaranteed the assertion, must be received cum grano salis; but, at all events, the civilisation of the mysterious Cibolo may be compared to that of the Aztec empire, under Montezuma, at the time of the Spanish Conquest, both being egregiously exaggerated by the historians of the day. Cibolo was situated on a river called Tegue. At this day, neither name is known to the inhabitants of New Mexico. If pate-shaven Venabides had held his tongue, New Mexico might now be in the peaceful possession of the Catholic Missions, and the property of the Church of Mexico pretty considerably enhanced by the valuable placeres, or gold washings, which abound in that province. Full, however, of the wonderful miracle of Santa Clara of Carmona, which had been brought to light through the agency of the medallion at the end of his rosario, Fray Venabides must needs return to Spain, and humbug poor old Fernando, and even the more sensible Isabel, with wonderful accounts of the riches of the country he had been instrumental in exploring, and of the excellent disposition of the natives to receive the word of God. Don Juan Oñate was, therefore, quickly despatched to take possession; and in his train followed twelve Castilian families of sangre azul, to colonise the newly-acquired territory. The names of these still remain, disgraced by the degenerate wretches who now bear them, but in whom scarce a drop of blood remains which ever filtered from the veins of the paladins of Old Castile.

Then commenced the troublous times. The missions were upheld by dint of steel alone; and, on every occasion, the Indians rose, and often massacred their white persecutors. The colonists were more than once driven bodily from New Mexico, and were only reinstated by the aid of large bodies of armed men.

In California, however, they managed these things better. The wily monks took care to keep all interlopers from the country, established themselves in snug quarters, instructed the Indians in agriculture, and soon gained such an ascendency over them, that no difficulty was experienced in keeping them under proper and wholesome restraint. Strong and commodious missions were built and fortified, well stored with arms and ammunition, and containing sufficient defenders to defy attack. Luxuriant gardens and thriving vineyards soon surrounded these isolated stations: the plains waved with golden corn; whilst domestic cattle, thriving on the rich pasture, and roaming far and near, multiplied and increased a hundred-fold.

Nothing can be more beautiful than the appearance of one of these missions, to the traveller who has lately passed the arid and barren wilderness of the North-west. The adobe walls of the convent-looking building, surmounted by cross and belfry, are generally hidden in a mass of luxuriant vegetation. Fig-trees, bananas, cherry, and apple, leaf-spreading platanos, and groves of olives, form umbrageous vistas, under which the sleek monks delight to wander; gardens, cultivated by their own hands, testify to the horticultural skill of the worthy padres; whilst vineyards yield their grateful produce to gladden the hearts of the holy exiles in these western solitudes. Vast herds of cattle roam half-wild on the plains, and bands of mules and horses, whose fame has even reached the distant table-lands of the Rocky Mountains, and excited the covetousness of the hunters—and thousands of which, from the day they are foaled to that of their death, never feel a saddle on their backs—cover the country. Indians (Mansitos) idle round the skirts of these vast herds, (whose very numbers keep them together,) living, at their own choice, upon the flesh of mule, or ox, or horse.

THE CAXTONS.—PART VI.

CHAPTER XVIII.

“I don’t know that,” said my father.

“What is it my father does not know? My father does not know that happiness is our being’s end and aim.”

And pertinent to what does my father reply, by words so sceptical, to an assertion so little disputed?

Reader, Mr Trevanion has been half-an-hour seated in our little drawing-room. He has received two cups of tea from my mother’s fair hand; he has made himself at home. With Mr Trevanion has come another old friend of my father’s, whom he has not seen since he left college—Sir Sedley Beaudesert.

Now, you must understand that it is a warm night, a little after nine o’clock—a night between departing summer and approaching autumn—the windows are open—we have a balcony, which my mother has taken care to fill with flowers—the air, though we are in London, is sweet and fresh—the street quiet, except that an occasional carriage or hackney cabriolet rolls rapidly by—a few stealthy passengers pass to and fro noiselessly on their way homeward. We are on classic ground—near that old and venerable Museum, the dark monastic pile, with its learned treasures, which the taste of the age had spared then—and the quiet of the temple seems to hallow the precincts; Captain Roland is seated by the fireplace, and though there is no fire, he is shading his face with a handscreen; my father and Mr Trevanion have drawn their chairs close to each other in the middle of the room; Sir Sedley Beaudesert leans against the wall near the window, and behind my mother, who looks prettier and more pleased than usual, since her Austin has his old friends about him; and I, leaning my elbow on the table, and my chin upon my hand, am gazing with great admiration on Sir Sedley Beaudesert.

O rare specimen of a race fast decaying!—specimen of the true fine gentleman, ere the word dandy was known, and before exquisite became a noun substantive—let me here pause to describe thee! Sir Sedley Beaudesert was the contemporary of Trevanion and my father; but, without affecting to be young, he still seemed so. Dress, tone, look, manner—all were young—yet all had a certain dignity which does not belong to youth. At the age of five-and-twenty, he had won what would have been fame to a French marquis of the old regime, viz.—he was “the most charming man of his day”—the most popular with our sex—the most favoured, my dear lady reader, with yours. It is a mistake, I believe, to suppose that it does not require talent to become the fashion; at all events, Sir Sedley was the fashion, and he had talent. He had travelled much, he had read much—especially in memoirs, history, and belles-lettres—he made verses with grace and a certain originality of easy wit and courtly sentiment—he conversed delightfully—he was polished and urbane in manner—he was brave and honourable in conduct; in words he could flatter—in deeds he was sincere.

Sir Sedley Beaudesert had never married. Whatever his years, he was still young enough in looks to be married for love. He was high-born, he was rich; he was, as I have said, popular; yet on his fair features there was an expression of melancholy; and on that forehead—pure from the lines of ambition, and free from the weight of study—there was the shadow of unmistakeable regret.

“I don’t know that,” said my father; “I have never yet found in life one man who made happiness his end and aim. One wants to gain a fortune, another to spend it—one to get a place, another to build a name; but they all know very well that it is not happiness they search for. No Utilitarian was ever actuated by self-interest, poor man, when he sate down to scribble his unpopular crochets to prove self-interest universal. And as to that notable distinction—between self-interest vulgar and self-interest enlightened—the more the self-interest is enlightened, the less we are influenced by it. If you tell the young man who has just written a fine book or made a fine speech, that he will not be any happier if he attains to the fame of Milton, or the power of Pitt, and that, for the sake of his own happiness, he had much better cultivate a farm, live in the country, and postpone to the last the days of dyspepsia and gout, he will answer you fairly,—‘I am quite as sensible of that as you are. But I am not thinking whether or not I shall be happy. I have made up my mind to be, if I can, a great author or a prime minister.’ So it is with all the active sons of the world. To push on is the law of nature. And you can no more say to men and to nations than to children,—‘Sit still, and don’t wear out your shoes!’”

“Then,” said Trevanion, “if I tell you I am not happy, your only answer is, that I obey an inevitable law.”

“No! I don’t say that it is an inevitable law that man should not be happy; but it is an inevitable law that a man, in spite of himself, should live for something higher than his own happiness. He cannot live in himself or for himself, however egotistical he may try to be. Every desire he has links him with others. Man is not a machine—he is a part of one.”

“True, brother, he is a soldier, not an army,” said Captain Roland.

“Life is a drama, not a monologue,” pursued my father. “Drama is derived from a Greek verb, signifying to do. Every actor in the drama has something to do, which helps on the progress of the whole: that is the object for which the Author created him. Do your part, and let the Great Play get on.”

“Ah!” said Trevanion briskly, “but to do the part is the difficulty! Every actor helps to the catastrophe, and yet must do his part without knowing how all is to end. Shall he help the curtain to fall on a tragedy or a comedy? Come, I will tell you the one secret of my public life—that which explains all its failure (for, in spite of my position, I have failed) and its regrets—I want conviction!”

“Exactly,” said my father; “because to every question there are two sides, and you look at them both.”

“You have said it,” answered Trevanion, smiling also. “For public life a man should be one-sided; he must act with a party; and a party insists that the shield is silver, when, if it will take the trouble to turn the corner, it will see that the reverse of the shield is gold. Wo to the man who makes that discovery alone, while his party are still swearing the shield is silver, and that not once in his life, but every night!”

“You have said quite enough to convince me that you ought not to belong to a party, but not enough to convince me why you should not be happy,” said my father.

“Do you remember,” said Sir Sedley Beaudesert, “an anecdote of the first Duke of Portland? He had a gallery in the great stable of his villa in Holland, where a concert was given once a-week, to cheer and amuse his horses! I have no doubt the horses thrived all the better for it. What Trevanion wants is a concert once a-week. With him it is always saddle and spur. Yet, after all, who would not envy him? If life be a drama, his name stands high in the playbill, and is printed in capitals on the walls.”

“Envy ME!” cried Trevanion—“ME!—no, you are the enviable man—you who have only one grief in the world, and that so absurd a one, that I will make you blush by disclosing it. Hear, O sage Austin!—O sturdy Roland!—Olivares was haunted by a spectre, and Sedley Beaudesert by the dread of old age!”

“Well,” said my mother seriously, “I do think it requires a great sense of religion, or, at all events, children of one’s own, in whom one is young again, to reconcile one’s-self to becoming old.”

“My dear ma’am,” said Sir Sedley, who had slightly coloured at Trevanion’s charge, but had now recovered his easy self-possession, “you have spoken so admirably that you give me courage to confess my weakness. I do dread to be old. All the joys of my life have been the joys of youth. I have had so exquisite a pleasure in the mere sense of living, that old age, as it comes near, terrifies me by its dull eyes and gray hairs. I have lived the life of the butterfly. Summer is over, and I see my flowers withering; and my wings are chilled by the first airs of winter. Yes, I envy Trevanion; for, in public life, no man is ever young; and while he can work he is never old.”

“My dear Beaudesert,” said my father, “when St Amable, patron saint of Riom, in Auvergne, went to Rome, the sun waited upon him as a servant, carried his cloak and gloves for him in the heat, and kept off the rain, if the weather changed, like an umbrella. You want to put the sun to the same use; you are quite right; but then, you see, you must first be a saint before you can be sure of the sun as a servant.”

Sir Sedley smiled charmingly; but the smile changed to a sigh as he added, “I don’t think I should much mind being a saint if the sun would be my sentinel instead of my courier. I want nothing of him but to stand still. You see he moved even for St Amable. My dear madam, you and I understand each other; and it is a very hard thing to grow old, do what one will to keep young.”

“What say you, Roland, of these two malcontents?” asked my father. The Captain turned uneasily in his chair, for the rheumatism was gnawing his shoulder, and sharp pains were shooting through his mutilated limb.

“I say,” answered Roland, “that these men are wearied with marching from Brentford to Windsor—that they have never known the bivouac and the battle.”

Both the grumblers turned their eyes to the veteran: the eyes rested first on the furrowed, care-worn lines on his eagle face—then they fell on the stiff, outstretched cork limb—and then they turned away.

Meanwhile my mother had softly risen, and, under pretence of looking for her work on the table near him, bent over the old soldier, and pressed his hand.

“Gentlemen,” said my father, “I don’t think my brother ever heard of Nichocorus, the Greek comic writer; yet he has illustrated him very ably. Saith Nichocorus, ‘the best cure for drunkenness is a sudden calamity.’ For chronic drunkenness, a continued course of real misfortune must be very salutary!”

No answer came from the two complainants; and my father took up a great book.

CHAPTER XIX.

“My friends,” said my father, looking up from his book, and addressing himself to his two visitors, “I know of one thing, milder than calamity, that would do you both a great deal of good.”

“What is that?” asked Sir Sedley.

“A saffron bag, worn at the pit of the stomach!”

“Austin, my dear!” said my mother reprovingly.

My father did not heed the interruption, but continued gravely,—“Nothing is better for the spirits! Roland is in no want of saffron, because he is a warrior; and the desire of fighting, and the hope of victory, infuse such a heat into the spirits as is profitable for long life, and keeps up the system.”

“Tut!” said Trevanion.

“But gentlemen in your predicament must have recourse to artificial means. Nitre in broth, for instance—about three grains to ten—(cattle fed upon nitre grow fat); or earthy odours—such as exist in cucumbers and cabbage. A certain great lord had a clod of fresh earth, laid in a napkin, put under his nose every morning after sleep. Light anointing of the head with oil, mixed with roses and salt, is not bad; but, upon the whole, I prescribe the saffron bag at the”—

“Sisty, my dear, will you look for my scissors?” said my mother.

“What nonsense are you talking! Question, question!” cried Mr Trevanion.

“Nonsense!” exclaimed my father, opening his eyes; “I am giving you the advice of Lord Bacon.—You want conviction—conviction comes from passion—passion from the spirits—spirits from a saffron bag. You, Beaudesert, on the other hand, want to keep youth. He keeps youth longest who lives longest. Nothing more conduces to longevity than a saffron bag, provided always it is worn at the”—

“Sisty, my thimble!” said my mother.

“You laugh at us justly,” said Beaudesert, smiling; “and the same remedy, I dare say, would cure us both!”

“Yes,” said my father, “there is no doubt of that. In the pit of the stomach is that great central web of nerves called the ganglions; thence they affect the head and the heart. Mr Squills proved that to us, Sisty.”

“Yes,” said I; “but I never heard Mr Squills talk of a saffron bag.”

“Oh, foolish boy! it is not the saffron bag—it is the belief in the saffron bag. Apply BELIEF to the centre of the nerves, and all will go well,” said my father.

CHAPTER XX.

“But it is a devil of a thing to have too nice a conscience!” quoth the member of Parliament.

“And it is not an angel of a thing to lose one’s front teeth!” sighed the fine gentleman.

Therewith my father rose, and, putting his hand into his waistcoat, more suo, delivered his famous

SERMON UPON THE CONNEXION BETWEEN FAITH AND PURPOSE.

Famous it was in our domestic circle. But as yet, it has not gone beyond. And since the reader, I am sure, does not turn to the Caxton memoirs with the expectation of finding sermons, so to that circle let its fame be circumscribed. All I shall say about it is, that it was a very fine sermon, and that it proved indisputably, to me at least, the salubrious effects of a saffron bag applied to the great centre of the nervous system. But the wise Ali saith, that “a fool doth not know what maketh him look little, neither will he hearken to him that adviseth him.” I cannot assert that my father’s friends were fools, but they certainly came under this definition of Folly.

CHAPTER XXI.

For therewith arose not conviction but discussion; Trevanion was logical, Beaudesert sentimental. My father held firm to the saffron bag. When James the First dedicated to the Duke of Buckingham his Meditation on the Lord’s Prayer, he gave a very sensible reason for selecting his grace for that honour,—“For,” (saith the king) “it is made upon a very short and plaine prayer, and, therefore, the fitter for a courtier, for courtiers are for the most part thought neither to have lust nor leisure to say long prayers; liking best courte messe et long disner.” I suppose it was for a similar reason that my father persisted in dedicating to the member of parliament and the fine gentleman, this “short and plaine” morality of his—to wit, the saffron bag. He was evidently persuaded, if he could once get them to apply that, it was all that was needful; that they had neither lust nor leisure for longer instructions. And this saffron bag,—it came down with such a whack, at every round in the argument! You would have thought my father one of the old plebeian combatants in the popular ordeal, who, forbidden to use sword and lance, fought with a sand-bag tied to a flail: a very stunning weapon it was when filled only with sand; but a bag filled with saffron,—it was irresistible! Though my father had two to one against him, they could not stand such a deuce of a weapon. And after tuts and pishes innumerable from Mr Trevanion, and sundry bland grimaces from Sir Sedley Beaudesert, they fairly gave in, though they would not own they were beaten.

“Enough,” said the member, “I see that you don’t comprehend me; I must continue to move by my own impulse.”

My father’s pet book was the Colloquies of Erasmus; he was wont to say that those Colloquies furnished life with illustrations in every page. Out of the Colloquies of Erasmus he now answered the member:—

“Rabirius, wanting his servant Syrus to get up,” quoth my father, “cried out to him to move. ‘I do move,’ said Syrus. ‘I see you move,’ replied Rabirius, ‘but you move nothing.’ To return to the saffron bag,—”

“Confound the saffron bag!” cried Trevanion in a rage; and then, softening his look as he drew on his gloves, he turned to my mother, and said, with more politeness than was natural to, or at least customary with him:—

“By the way, my dear Mrs Caxton, I should tell you that Lady Ellinor comes to town to-morrow, on purpose to call on you. We shall be here some little time, Austin; and though London is so empty, there are still some persons of note to whom I should like to introduce you, and yours—”

“Nay,” said my father, “your world and my world are not the same. Books for me, and men for you. Neither Kitty nor I can change our habits, even for friendship; she has a great piece of work to finish, and so have I. Mountains cannot stir, especially when in labour; but Mahomet can come to the mountain as often as he likes.”

Mr Trevanion insisted, and Sir Sedley Beaudesert mildly put in his own claims; both boasted acquaintance with literary men, whom my father would, at all events, be pleased to meet. My father doubted whether he could meet any literary men more eloquent than Cicero, or more amusing than Aristophanes; and observed, that if such did exist, he would rather meet them in their books than in a drawing-room. In fine, he was immovable; and so also, with less argument, was Captain Roland.

Then Mr Trevanion turned to me.

“Your son, at all events, should see something of the world.”

My mother’s soft eyes sparkled.

“My dear friend, I thank you,” said my father, touched; “and Pisistratus and I will talk it over.”

Our guests had departed. All four of us gathered to the open window, and enjoyed in silence the cool air and the moonlight.

“Austin,” said my mother at last, “I fear it is for my sake that you refuse going amongst your old friends: you knew I should be frightened by such fine people, and—”

“And we have been happy for more than eighteen years without them, Kitty! My poor friends are not happy, and we are. To leave well alone is a golden rule worth all in Pythagoras. The ladies of Bubastis, my dear, a place in Egypt where the cat was worshipped, always kept rigidly aloof from the gentlemen in Athribis, who adored the shrewmice. Cats are domestic animals,—your shrewmice are sad gadabouts: you can’t find a better model, my Kitty, than the ladies of Bubastis!”

“How Trevanion is altered!” said Roland, musingly—“he who was so lively and ardent!”

“He ran too fast up-hill at first, and has been out of breath ever since,” said my father.

“And Lady Ellinor;” said Roland, hesitatingly, “shall you see her to-morrow?”

“Yes!” said my father, calmly.

As Captain Roland spoke, something in the tone of his question seemed to flash a conviction on my mother’s heart,—the woman there was quick; she drew back, turning pale, even in the moonlight, and fixed her eyes on my father, while I felt her hand which had clasped mine tremble convulsively.

I understood her. Yes, this Lady Ellinor was the early rival whose name till then she had not known. She fixed her eyes on my father, and at his tranquil tone and quiet look she breathed more freely, and sliding her hand from mine rested it fondly on his shoulder. A few moments afterwards, I and Captain Roland found ourselves standing alone by the window.

“You are young, nephew,” said the Captain; “and you have the name of a fallen family to raise. Your father does well not to reject for you that opening into the great world which Trevanion offers. As for me, my business in London seems over: I cannot find what I came to seek. I have sent for my daughter; when she arrives I shall return to my old tower; and the man and the ruin will crumble away together.”

“Tush, uncle! I must work hard and get money; and then we will repair the old tower, and buy back the old estate. My father shall sell the red brick house; we will fit him up a library in the keep; and we will all live united, in peace, and in state, as grand as our ancestors before us.”

While I thus spoke, my uncle’s eyes were fixed upon a corner of the street, where a figure, half in shade half in moonlight, stood motionless. “Ah!” said I following his eye, “I have observed that man, two or three times, pass up and down the street on the other side of the way, and turn his head towards our window. Our guests were with us then, and my father in full discourse, or I should have—”

Before I could finish the sentence, my uncle, stifling an exclamation, broke away, hurried out of the room, stumped down the stairs, and was in the street, while I was yet rooted to the spot with surprise. I remained at the window, and my eye rested on the figure. I saw the Captain, with his bare head and his gray hair, cross the street; the figure started, turned the corner, and fled.

Then I followed my uncle, and arrived in time to save him from falling: he leant his head on my breast, and I heard him murmur,—“It is he—it is he! He has watched us!—he repents!”

CHAPTER XXII.

The next day Lady Ellinor called; but to my great disappointment without Fanny.

Whether or not some joy at the incident of the previous night had served to make my uncle more youthful than usual, I know not, but he looked to me ten years younger when Lady Ellinor entered. How carefully the buttoned up coat was brushed! how new and glossy was the black stock! The poor Captain was restored to his pride, and mighty proud he looked! With a glow on his cheek, and a fire in his eye; his head thrown back, and his whole air composed, severe, Mavortian and majestic, as if awaiting the charge of the French cuirassiers at the head of his detachment.

My father, on the contrary, was as usual (till dinner, when he always dressed punctiliously, out of respect to his Kitty) in his easy morning gown and slippers; and nothing but a certain compression in his lips which had lasted all the morning, evinced his anticipation of the visit, or the emotion it caused him.

Lady Ellinor behaved beautifully. She could not conceal a certain nervous trepidation, when she first took the hand my father extended; and, in touching rebuke of the Captain’s stately bow, she held out to him the hand left disengaged, with a look which brought Roland at once to her side. It was a desertion of his colours to which nothing, short of Ney’s shameful conduct at Napoleon’s return from Elba, affords a parallel in history. Then, without waiting for introduction, and before a word indeed was said, Lady Ellinor came to my mother so cordially, so caressingly—she threw into her smile, voice, manner, such winning sweetness, that I, intimately learned in my poor mother’s simple loving heart, wondered how she refrained from throwing her arms round Lady Ellinor’s neck, and kissing her outright. It must have been a great conquest over herself not to do it! My turn came next; and talking to me, and about me, soon set all parties at their ease—at least apparently.

What was said I cannot remember: I do not think one of us could. But an hour slipped away, and there was no gap in the conversation.

With curious interest, and a survey I strove to make impartial, I compared Lady Ellinor with my mother. And I comprehended the fascination the high-born lady must, in their earlier youth, have exercised over both brothers, so dissimilar to each other. For charm was the characteristic of Lady Ellinor—a charm indefinable. It was not the mere grace of refined breeding, though that went a great way; it was a charm that seemed to spring from natural sympathy. Whomsoever she addressed, that person appeared for the moment to engage all her attention, to interest her whole mind. She had a gift of conversation very peculiar. She made what she said like a continuation of what was said to her. She seemed as if she had entered into your thoughts, and talked them aloud. Her mind was evidently cultivated with great care, but she was perfectly void of pedantry. A hint, an allusion, sufficed to show how much she knew, to one well instructed, without mortifying or perplexing the ignorant. Yes, there probably was the only woman my father had ever met who could be the companion to his mind, walk through the garden of knowledge by his side, and trim the flowers while he cleared the vistas. On the other hand, there was an inborn nobility in Lady Ellinor’s sentiments that must have struck the most susceptible chord in Roland’s nature, and the sentiments took eloquence from the look, the mien, the sweet dignity of the very turn of the head. Yes, she must have been a fitting Orinda to a young Amadis. It was not hard to see that Lady Ellinor was ambitious—that she had a love of fame, for fame itself—that she was proud—that she set value (and that morbidly) on the world’s opinion. This was perceptible when she spoke of her husband, even of her daughter. It seemed to me as if she valued the intellect of the one, the beauty of the other, by the gauge of the social distinction or the fashionable éclat. She took measure of the gift, as I was taught at Dr Herman’s to take measure of the height of a tower—by the length of the shadow it cast upon the ground.

My dear father, with such a wife you would never have lived eighteen years, shivering on the edge of a great book!

My dear uncle, with such a wife you would never have been contented with a cork leg and a Waterloo medal! And I understand why Mr Trevanion, “eager and ardent” as ye say he was in youth, with a heart bent on the practical success of life, won the hand of the heiress. Well, you see Mr Trevanion has contrived not to be happy! By the side of my listening, admiring mother, with her blue eyes moist, and her coral lips apart, Lady Ellinor looks faded. Was she ever as pretty as my mother is now? Never. But she was much handsomer. What delicacy in the outline, and yet how decided in spite of the delicacy! The eyebrow so defined—the profile slightly aquiline, so clearly cut—with the curved nostril, which, if physiognomists are right, shows sensibility so keen; and the classic lip that, but for that dimple, would be so haughty. But wear and tear are in that face. The nervous excitable temper has helped the fret and cark of ambitious life. My dear uncle, I know not yet your private life. But as for my father, I am sure that, though he might have done more on earth, he would have been less fit for heaven, if he had married Lady Ellinor.

At last this visit—dreaded, I am sure, by three of the party, was over, but not before I had promised to dine at the Trevanions’ that day.

When we were again alone, my father threw off a long breath, and looking round him cheerfully, said, “Since Pisistratus deserts us, let us console ourselves for his absence—send for brother Jack, and all four go down to Richmond to drink tea.”

“Thank you, Austin,” said Roland. “But I don’t want it, I assure you!”

“Upon your honour?” said my father in a half whisper.

“Upon my honour.”

“Nor I either! So Kitty, Roland, and I will take a walk, and be back in time to see if that young Anachronism looks as handsome as his new London-made clothes will allow him. Properly speaking, he ought to go with an apple in his hand, and a dove in his bosom. But now I think of it, that was luckily not the fashion with the Athenians till the time of Alcibiades!”

CHAPTER XXIII.

You may judge of the effect that my dinner at Mr Trevanion’s, with a long conversation after it with Lady Ellinor, made upon my mind, when, on my return home, after having satisfied all questions of parental curiosity, I said nervously, and looking down,—“My dear father,—I should like very much, if you have no objection,—to—to—”

“What, my dear?” asked my father kindly.

“Accept an offer Lady Ellinor has made me, on the part of Mr Trevanion. He wants a secretary. He is kind enough to excuse my inexperience, and declares I shall do very well, and can soon get into his ways. Lady Ellinor says (I continued with dignity) that it will be a great opening in public life for me; and at all events, my dear father, I shall see much of the world, and learn what I really think will be more useful to me than any thing they will teach me at college.”

My mother looked anxiously at my father. “It will indeed be a great thing for Sisty,” said she timidly; and then taking courage she added—“And that is just the sort of life he is formed for—”

“Hem!” said my uncle.

My father rubbed his spectacles thoughtfully, and replied, after a long pause,—

“You may be right, Kitty: I don’t think Pisistratus is meant for study; action will suit him better. But what does this office lead to?”

“Public employment, sir,” said I boldly; “the service of my country.”

“If that be the case,” quoth Roland, “I have not a word to say. But I should have thought that for a lad of spirit, a descendant of the old De Caxtons, the army would have—”

“The army!” exclaimed my mother, clasping her hands, and looking involuntarily at my uncle’s cork leg.

“The army!” repeated my father peevishly. “Bless my soul, Roland, you seem to think man is made for nothing else but to be shot at! You would not like the army, Pisistratus?”

“Why, sir, not if it pained you and my dear mother; otherwise, indeed—”

“Papæ!” said my father interrupting me. “This all comes of your giving the boy that ambitious, uncomfortable name, Mrs Caxton; what could a Pisistratus be but the plague of one’s life? That idea of serving his country is Pisistratus ipsissimus all over. If ever I have another son, (Dii meliora!) he has only got to be called Eratostratus, and then he will be burning down St Paul’s; which I believe was, by the way, first made out of the stones of the temple of Diana! Of the two, certainly, you had better serve your country with a goose-quill than by poking a bayonet into the ribs of some unfortunate Indian;—I don’t think there are any other people whom the service of one’s country makes it necessary to kill just at present,—eh, Roland?”

“It is a very fine field, India,” said my uncle, sententiously. “It is the nursery of captains.”

“Is it? Those plants take up a great deal of ground, then, that might be more profitably cultivated. And, indeed, considering that the tallest captains in the world will be ultimately set into a box not above seven feet at the longest, it is astonishing what a quantity of room that species of arbor mortis takes in the growing! However, Pisistratus, to return to your request, I will think it over, and talk to Trevanion.”

“Or rather to Lady Ellinor,” said I imprudently: my mother slightly shivered, and took her hand from mine. I felt cut to the heart by the slip of my own tongue.

“That, I think, your mother could do best,” said my father, drily, “if she wants to be quite convinced that somebody will see that your shirts are aired. For I suppose they mean you to lodge at Trevanion’s.”

“Oh, no!” cried my mother. “He might as well go to college then. I thought he was to stay with us; only go in the morning, but, of course, sleep here.”

“If I know any thing of Trevanion,” said my father, “his secretary will be expected to do without sleep. Poor boy, you don’t know what it is you desire. And yet, at your age, I—” my father stopped short. “No!” he renewed abruptly, after a long silence, and as if soliloquising. “No, man is never wrong while he lives for others. The philosopher who contemplates from the rock, is a less noble image than the sailor who struggles with the storm. Why should there be two of us? And could he be an alter ego, even if I wished it? impossible!” My father turned on his chair, and, laying the left leg on the right knee, said smilingly, as he bent down to look me full in the face; “But, Pisistratus, will you promise me always to wear the saffron bag?”

CHAPTER XXIV.

I now make a long stride in my narrative. I am domesticated with the Trevanions. A very short conversation with the statesman sufficed to decide my father; and the pith of it lay in this single sentence uttered by Trevanion—“I promise you one thing—he shall never be idle!”

Looking back, I am convinced that my father was right, and that he understood my character, and the temptations to which I was most prone, when he consented to let me resign college and enter thus prematurely on the world of men. I was naturally so joyous, that I should have made college life a holiday, and then, in repentance, worked myself into a phthisis.

And my father, too, was right, that, though I could study, I was not meant for a student.

After all, the thing was an experiment. I had time to spare: if the experiment failed, a year’s delay would not necessarily be a year’s loss.

I am ensconced, then, at Mr Trevanion’s. I have been there some months—it is late in the winter—parliament and the season have commenced. I work hard—Heaven knows, harder than I should have worked at college. Take a day for a sample.

Trevanion gets up at eight o’clock, and in all weathers rides an hour before breakfast; at nine he takes that meal in his wife’s dressing-room; at half-past nine he comes into his study. By that time he expects to find done by his secretary the work I am about to describe.

On coming home, or rather before going to bed, which is usually after three o’clock, it is Mr Trevanion’s habit to leave on the table of the said study a list of directions for the secretary. The following, which I take at random from many I have preserved, may show their multifarious nature:—

1.

Look out in the Reports—Committee House of Lords for the last seven years—all that is said about the growth of flax—mark the passages for me.

2.

Do. do—“Irish Emigration.”

3.

Hunt out second volume of Kames’s History of Man, passage containing “Reid’s Logic”—don’t know where the book is!

4.

How does the line beginning “Lumina conjurent, inter” something, end? Is it in Gray? See!

5.

Fracastorius writes—“Quantum hoc infecit vitium, quot adiverit urbes.” Query, Ought it not to be—infecerit instead of infecit?—if you don’t know, write to father.

6.

Write the four letters in full from the notes I leave, i.e. about the Ecclesiastical Courts.

7.

Look out Population Returns—strike average of last five years (between mortality and births), in Devonshire and Lancashire.

8.

Answer these six begging-letters; “No”—civilly.

9.

The other six, to constituents—“that I have no interest with Government.”

10.

See, if you have time, whether any of the new books on the round table are not trash.

11.

I want to know ALL about Indian corn!

12.

Longinus says something, somewhere, in regret for uncongenial pursuits, (public life, I suppose)—what is it? N.B. Longinus is not in my London Catalogue, but is here I know—I think in a box in the lumber-room.

13.

Set right the calculation I leave on the poor-rates. I have made a blunder somewhere. &c. &c.

Certainly my father knew Mr Trevanion; he never expected a secretary to sleep! To have all the above ready by half-past nine, I get up by candle-light. At half-past nine I am still hunting for Longinus, when Mr Trevanion comes in with a bundle of letters.

Answers to half the said letters fall to my share. Directions verbal—in a species of short-hand talk. While I write, Mr Trevanion reads the newspapers—examines what I have done—makes notes therefrom, some for Parliament, some for conversation, some for correspondence—skims over the Parliamentary papers of the morning—and jots down directions for extracting, abridging, and comparing them, with others, perhaps twenty years old. At eleven he walks down to a Committee of the House of Commons—leaving me plenty to do—till half-past three, when he returns. At four, Fanny puts her head into the room—and I lose mine. Four days in the week Mr Trevanion then disappears for the rest of the day,—dines at Bellamy’s or a club—expects me at the House at eight o’clock, in case he thinks of something, wants a fact or a quotation. He then releases me—generally with a fresh list of instructions. But I have my holidays, nevertheless. On Wednesdays and Saturdays Mr Trevanion gives dinners, and I meet the most eminent men of the day—on both sides. For Trevanion is on both sides himself—or on no side at all, which comes to the same thing. On Tuesdays, Lady Ellinor gives me a ticket for the Opera, and I get there at least in time for the ballet. I have already invitations enough to balls and soirées, for I am regarded as an only son of great expectations. I am treated as becomes a Caxton who has the right, if he pleases, to put a De before his name. I have grown very smart. I have taken a passion for dress—natural to eighteen. I like every thing I do, and every one about me. I am over head and ears in love with Fanny Trevanion—who breaks my heart, nevertheless; for she flirts with two peers, a life-guardsman, three old members of parliament, Sir Sedley Beaudesert, one ambassador, and all his attachés, and, positively, (the audacious minx!) with a bishop, in full wig and apron, who, people say, means to marry again.

Pisistratus has lost colour and flesh. His mother says he is very much improved,—that he takes to be the natural effect produced by Stultz and varnished boots. Uncle Jack says he is “fined down.”

His father looks at him, and writes to Trevanion,—

“Dear T.—I refused a salary for my son. Give him a horse, and two hours a day to ride it. Yours, A. C.”

The next day I am master of a pretty bay mare, and riding by the side of Fanny Trevanion. Alas! alas!

CHAPTER XXV.

I have not mentioned my Uncle Roland. He is gone—abroad—to fetch his daughter. He has stayed longer than was expected. Does he seek his son still—there as here? My father has finished the first portion of his work, in two great volumes. Uncle Jack, who for some time has been looking melancholy, and who now seldom stirs out, except on Sundays, (on which days we all meet at my father’s and dine together)—Uncle Jack, I say, has undertaken to sell it.

“Don’t be over sanguine,” says Uncle Jack, as he locks up the MS. in two red boxes with a slit in the lids, which belonged to one of the defunct companies. “Don’t be over sanguine as to the price. These publishers never venture much on a first experiment. They must be talked even into looking at the book.”

“Oh!” said my father, “if they will publish it at all, and at their own risk, I should not stand out for any other terms. ‘Nothing great,’ said Dryden, ‘ever came from a venal pen!’”

“An uncommonly foolish observation of Dryden’s,” returned Uncle Jack: “he ought to have known better.”

“So he did,” said I, “for he used his pen to fill his pockets—poor man!”

“But the pen was not venal, master Anachronism,” said my father. “A baker is not to be called venal if he sells his loaves—he is venal if he sells himself: Dryden only sold his loaves.”

“And we must sell yours,” said Uncle Jack emphatically. “A thousand pounds a volume will be about the mark, eh?”

“A thousand pounds a volume?” cried my father. “Gibbon, I fancy, did not receive more.”

“Very likely; Gibbon had not an Uncle Jack to look after his interests,” said Mr Tibbets, laughing, and rubbing those smooth hands of his. “No! two thousand pounds the two volumes!—a sacrifice, but still I recommend moderation.”

“I should be happy, indeed, if the book brought in any thing,” said my father, evidently fascinated—“for that young gentleman is rather expensive; and you, my dear Jack;—perhaps half the sum may be of use to you!”

“To me! my dear brother,” cried Uncle Jack—“to me! why, when my new speculation has succeeded, I shall be a millionnaire!”

“Have you a new speculation, Uncle?” said I anxiously. “What is it?”

“Mum!” said my uncle, putting his finger to his lip, and looking all round the room—“Mum!! Mum!!!”

PISISTRATUS.—“A Grand National Company for blowing up both Houses of Parliament!”

MR CAXTON.—“Upon my life, I hope something newer than that; for they, to judge by the newspapers, don’t want brother Jack’s assistance to blow up each other!”

UNCLE JACK, mysteriously.—“Newspapers! you don’t often read a newspaper, Austin Caxton!”

MR CAXTON.—“Granted, John Tibbets!”

UNCLE JACK.—“But if my speculation made you read a newspaper every day?”

MR CAXTON, astounded.—“Made me read a newspaper every day!”

UNCLE JACK, warming, and expanding his hands to the fire.—“As big as the Times!”

MR CAXTON, uneasily.—“Jack, you alarm me!”

UNCLE JACK.—“And make you write in it, too,—a leader!”

MR CAXTON, pushing back his chair, seizes the only weapon at his command, and hurls at Uncle Jack a great sentence of Greek.—“Τους μεν γαρ ειναι χαλεπους, ὁσε λαι ανθροποφαγειν!”[7]

UNCLE JACK, nothing daunted.—“Ay, and put as much Greek as you like into it!”

MR CAXTON, relieved, and softening.—“My dear Jack, you are a great man,—let us hear you!”

Then Uncle Jack began. Now, perhaps my readers may have remarked that this illustrious speculator was really fortunate in his ideas. His speculations in themselves always had something sound in the kernel, considering how barren they were in the fruit; and this it was that made him so dangerous. The idea Uncle Jack had now got hold of will, I am convinced, make a man’s fortune one of these days; and I relate it with a sigh, in thinking how much has gone out of the family. Know, then, it was nothing less than setting up a daily paper on the plan of the Times, but devoted entirely to Art, Literature, and Science—Mental Progress in short; I say on the plan of the Times, for it was to imitate the mighty machinery of that diurnal illuminator. It was to be the Literary Salmoneus of the political Jupiter: and rattle its thunder over the bridge of knowledge. It was to have correspondents in all parts of the globe; every thing that related to the chronicle of the mind, from the labour of a missionary in the South Sea islands, or the research of a traveller in pursuit of that mirage called Timbuctoo, to the last new novel at Paris, or the last great emendation of a Greek particle at a German university, was to find a place in this focus of light. It was to amuse, to instruct, to interest—there was nothing it was not to do. Not a man in the whole reading public, not only of the three kingdoms, not only of the British empire, but under the cope of heaven, that it was not to touch somewhere, in head, in heart, or in pocket. The most crotchety member of the intellectual community might find his own hobby in those stables.

“Think,” cried Uncle Jack—“think of the march of mind—think of the passion for cheap knowledge—think how little quarterly, monthly, weekly journals can keep pace with the main wants of the age. As well have a weekly journal on politics, as a-weekly journal on all the matters still more interesting than politics to the mass of the public. My Literary Times once started, people will wonder how they had ever lived without it! Sir, they have not lived without it—they have vegetated—they have lived in holes and caves like the Troggledikes.”

“Troglodytes,” said my father mildly—“from trogle, a cave—and dumi, to go under. They lived in Ethiopia, and had their wives in common.”

“As to the last point, I don’t say that the Public, poor creatures, are as bad as that,” said Uncle Jack candidly; “but no simile holds good in all its points. And the public are not less Troggledummies, or whatever you call them, compared with what they will be when living under the full light of my Literary Times. Sir, it will be a revolution in the world. It will bring literature out of the clouds into the parlour, the cottage, the kitchen. The idlest dandy, the finest fine lady, will find something to her taste; the busiest man of the mart and counter will find some acquisition to his practical knowledge. The practical man will see the progress of divinity, medicine, nay, even law. Sir, the Indian will read me under the banyan; I shall be in the seraglios of the East; and over my sheets the American Indian will smoke the calumet of peace. We shall reduce politics to its proper level in the affairs of life—raise literature to its due place in the thoughts and business of men. It is a grand thought; and my heart swells with pride while I contemplate it!”

“My dear Jack,” said my father, seriously, and rising with emotion, “it is a grand thought, and I honour you for it! You are quite right—it would be a revolution! It would educate mankind insensibly. Upon my life, I should be proud to write a leader, or a paragraph. Jack, you will immortalise yourself!”

“I believe I shall,” said Uncle Jack, modestly; “but I have not said a word yet on the greatest attraction of all—”

“Ah! and that—”

“THE ADVERTISEMENTS!” cried my uncle, spreading his hands, with all the fingers at angles, like the threads of a spider’s web. “The advertisements—oh, think of them!—a perfect El Dorado. The advertisements, sir, on the most moderate calculation, will bring us in £50,000 a-year. My dear Pisistratus, I shall never marry, you are my heir. Embrace me!”

So saying, my Uncle Jack threw himself upon me, and squeezed out of breath the prudential demur that was rising to my lips.

My poor mother, between laughing and sobbing, faltered out—“And it is my brother who will pay back to his son all, all he gave up for me!”

While my father walked to and fro’ the room, more excited than ever I saw him before, muttering,—“A sad useless dog I have been hitherto! I should like to serve the world! I should indeed!”

Uncle Jack had fairly done it this time! He had found out the only bait in the world to catch so shy a carp as my father—“hæret lethalis arundo.” I saw that the deadly hook was within an inch of my father’s nose, and that he was gazing at it with a fixed determination to swallow.

But if it amused my father? Boy that I was, I saw no further. I must own I myself was dazzled, and perhaps, with childlike malice, delighted at the perturbation of my betters. The young carp was pleased to see the waters so playfully in movement, when the old carp waved his tail, and swayed himself on his fins.

“Mum!” said Uncle Jack, releasing me: “not a word to Mr Trevanion, to any one.”

“But why?”

“Why? God bless my soul. Why? If my scheme gets wind, do you suppose some one will not clap on sail to be before me? You frighten me out of my senses. Promise me faithfully to be silent as the grave—”

“I should like to hear Trevanion’s opinion too—”

“As well hear the town-crier! Sir, I have trusted to your honour. Sir, at the domestic hearth all secrets are sacred. Sir, I—”

“My dear Uncle Jack, you have said quite enough. Not a word will I breathe!”

“I’m sure you may trust him, Jack,” said my mother.

“And I do trust him—with wealth untold,” replied my uncle. “May I ask you for a little water—with a trifle of brandy in it—and a biscuit, or indeed a sandwich. This talking makes me quite hungry.”

My eye fell upon Uncle Jack as he spoke. Poor Uncle Jack, he had grown thin!

LIFE AND TIMES OF GEORGE II.[8]

It has been the fortune of England to have undergone more revolutions than any other kingdom of Europe. Later periods have made Revolution synonymous with popular violence; but the more effectual revolution is that which, being required by the necessities of a people, is directed by the national judgment. It is not the convulsion of a tempest, which, if it purifies the air, strips the soil; it is a change, not of temperature but of the seasons, gradual but irresistible; it is a great operation of moral Nature, in every change preparing for the more abundant provision of public prosperity.

It is an equally remarkable contrast to the condition of other kingdoms, that while their popular revolutions have almost always plunged the country into confusion, and been ultimately rectified only by the salutary despotism of some powerful master, the hazards of our revolutions have chiefly originated in personal ambition, and have been reduced to order by popular sentiment.

The Reformation was the first great revolution of England: it formed the national circle of light and darkness. All beyond it was civil war, arbitrary power, and popular wretchedness—all within it has been progress, growing vigour, increasing illumination, and more systematic liberty. Like the day, it had its clouds; but the sun was still above, ready to shine through their first opening. That sun has not yet stooped from its meridian, and will go down, only when we forget to honour the Beneficence and the power which commanded it to shine.

The accession of the Hanoverian line was one of those peaceful revolutions—it closed the era of Jacobitism. The reign of Anne had vibrated between the principles of the constitution and the principles of Charles II. Never was a balance more evenly poised, than the fate of freedom against the return to arbitrary power. Anne herself was a Jacobite—she had all the superstition of “Divine right.” By her nature she had the infirmities of the convent. She was evidently fitter to be an abbess than a queen: a character of frigidness and formality designated her for the cloister; and if the Hanoverian succession had not been palpably prepared before the national eye, to ascend the throne at the moment when the royal coffin sank into the vault, England might have seen the profligate son of James dealing out vengeance through a corrupted or terrified legislature; the Reformation extinguished by the Inquisitor; the jesuit at the royal ear, mass in Westminster Abbey, and the scaffold the instrument of conversion to the supremacy of Rome.

The expulsion of the Stuarts had left the throne to the disposal of the nation. By the Bill of Rights, it was determined that the succession should go to the heirs of William and Mary; and, in their default, to Anne, daughter of James. But the deaths of Mary, and of the Duke of Gloucester, awoke the hopes of Popery and the cabals of Jacobitism once more. The danger was imminent. William became deeply anxious for the Protestant succession, and a bill was brought into the House of Commons, declaring that the crown should devolve on the Electress Sophia, Duchess-dowager of Hanover, and her heirs,—the Electress of Hanover (or more correctly, of Brunswick and Luneburg) being the tenth child of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, daughter of James I., the only Protestant princess among the foreign relations of the line. The next in succession to Anne in the Roman Catholic line would have been the houses of Savoy, France, and Spain, through Henrietta, daughter of Charles I. This order of succession was made law by the 12th of William III., and confirmed in the next session by the Abjuration Act, (13th William,) so named from the oath abjuring the Pretender.

It is striking to observe how many high matters of legislation have seemed the work of casualty. The Habeas Corpus Act, confessedly the noblest achievement of British liberty since Magna Charta, was said to have been carried by a mistake in counting the votes of the House; the limitation to the Electress was proposed by a half-lunatic; the oath of abjuration was carried but by a majority of one; and the Reform Bill, which, though a measure as doubtful in its principles as disappointing in its promises, has yet exercised an extraordinary power over the constitution, was carried in its second reading by a majority of only one.

It is more important to observe how large a share of legislation, in the reign of Anne, was devoted to the security of the Protestant succession. The 4th, 6th, and 10th of Anne are occupied in devising clauses to give it force. It was guaranteed in all the great diplomatic transactions of the reign,—in the Dutch Treaty of 1706, in the Barrier Treaty of 1709, in the Guarantee Treaty of 1713, and in the Treaty of Utrecht of the same year, between England and France, and England and Spain.

This diligence and determination seem wholly due to the spirit of the people. The Queen was almost a Jacobite; her ministers carried on correspondences with the family of James; there was scarcely a man of influence in public life who had not an agent at St Germains. Honest scruples, too, had been long entertained among individuals of high rank. Six of the seven bishops who had so boldly resisted the arrogance of James, shrank from repudiating the claims of his son. It is true, that nothing could be feebler than their reasons; for nothing could be more evident than the treason of James to the oath which he had sworn at his coronation. Its violation was his virtual dethronement—his abdication was his actual dethronement; and the principles of his family, all Papists like himself, rendered it impossible to possess freedom of conscience, while any one of a race of bigots and tyrants retained the power to oppress. Thus the nation only vindicated itself, and used only the common rights of selfdefence; and used them only in the calm and deliberate forms of self-preservation.

This strong abhorrence of the exiled family arose alike from a sense of religion, and a sense of fear. The people had seen with disgust and disdain the persecution of Protestantism by the French King. They had seen the scandalous treachery which had broken all compacts, the ostentatious falsehood which had trafficked in promises, and the remorseless cruelty which had strewed the Protestant provinces with dead. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes gave a sanguinary and perpetual caution “not to put their trust in princes;” and the generous spirit of the people, doubly excited by scorn for the persecutor, and pity for his victims, was thenceforth armed in panoply alike against the arts and the menaces of Jacobitism and Popery. So it has been, and so may it ever be. The Stuarts have passed away—they mouldered from the sight of men; they have no more place or name on earth; they have been sunk in the mire of their monkism; their “drowned honour” is incapable of being plucked up even “by the locks;” but their principles survive, and against their corruption we must guard the very air we breathe.

The Electress, a woman of remarkable intelligence, died in 1714, in her 84th year. The Queen died in the August following. George I., Elector of Brunswick, son of Sophia, arrived in England in September, and was King of the fairest empire in the world. He was then fifty-four years old.

The habits of George I. were Continental—a phrase which implies all of laxity that is consistent with the etiquette of a court. His personal reign was anxious, troubled, and toilsome; but the nation prospered, and the era had evidently arrived when the character of the sitter on the throne had ceased to attract the interest, or influence the conduct of the nation. The King had no taste for the fine arts: he had no knowledge of literature. He had served in the army, like all the German princes, but had served without distinction. He loved Hanoverian life, and he was incapable of enjoying the life of England. He lived long enough to be easily forgotten, and died of apoplexy on his way to Hanover!

George II., the chief object of these Memoirs, only son of George I. and Sophia Dorothea, was forty-four at his accession. In 1705 he had married Caroline, daughter of the Margrave of Brandenburg Anspach.

The reign of George II. was the era of another revolution—the supremacy of ministers. A succession of ambitious and able men governed the country by parties. The King was intelligent and active, yet they controlled him, until he found his chief task to be limited to obedience. He was singularly fond of power, and openly jealous of authority, but his successive ministers were the virtual masters of the crown. His chief vexations arose from their struggles for office; and his only compensation to his injured feelings was, in dismissing one cabinet, to find himself shackled by another. He seems to have lived in a state of constant ebullition with the world—speaking sarcastically of every leading person of his own society, and on harsh terms with his family. His personal habits were incapable of being praised, even by flattery, and the names of the Walmodens, the Deloraines, and the Howards, still startle the graver sensibilities of our time.

But his public conduct forms a striking contrast to those painful scenes. He was bold in conception and diligent in business. He felt the honour of being an English king; and though he wasted time and popularity in his childish habit of making his escape to Hanover whenever he could, he offered no wilful offence to the feelings of the people. His letters on public affairs exhibit strong sense, and he had the wisdom to leave his finance in the hands of Walpole, and the manliness to suffer himself to be afterwards eclipsed by the lustre of Chatham. His reign, which had begun in difficulties, and was carried on in perils, closed in triumph.—The French navy was swept from the ocean; the battle of the Heights of Abraham gave him Canada; the battle of Plassy gave him India; and at his death, in 1760, at the age of seventy-seven, he left England in a blaze of glory.

The death of George I. had brought Walpole forward as the minister of his son. The story of Sir Spencer Compton has been often told, but never so well as in these Memoirs. The King died on the 11th of June 1727 at Osnaburg. The news reached Walpole on the 14th, at his villa in Chelsea. He immediately went to Richmond to acquaint the Prince of Wales with this momentous intelligence. The Prince was asleep after dinner, according to his custom; but he was awakened for the intelligence, which he appeared to receive with surprise. Yet, neither the sense of his being raised to a throne, nor the natural feelings of such an occasion, prevented the exhibition of his dislike to Walpole. On being asked, when it was his pleasure that the Council should be summoned, the King’s abrupt answer was, “Go to Chiswick, and take your directions from Sir Spencer Compton.” Sir Robert bore this ill-usage with his habitual philosophy, and went to Compton at once. There he acted with his usual address; told him that he was minister, and requested his protection; declaring that he had no desire for power or business, but wished to have one of the “white sticks,” as a mark that he was still under the shelter of the crown.

Lord Hervey delights in portraiture, and his portraits generally have a bitter reality, which at once proves the truth of the likeness and the severity of the artist. He daguerreotypes all his generation. He thus describes Sir Spencer: “He was a plodding, heavy fellow, with great application but no talents; with vast complaisance for a court; always more concerned for the manner of the thing than for the thing itself; fitter for a clerk to a minister than for a minister to a prince. His only pleasures were money and eating; his only knowledge forms and precedents; and his only insinuation bows and smiles.” Walpole and he went together to the Duke of Devonshire, President of the Council, but laid up with the gout. Lord Hervey’s sketch of him is certainly not flattering—but such is the price paid by personal feebleness for public station—“He was more able as a virtuoso than a statesman, and a much better jockey than a politician.”

At the council Sir Spencer took Walpole aside, and begged of him, as a speech would be necessary for the King in Council, that, as Sir Robert was more accustomed to that sort of composition than himself, he should go into another room, and make a draft of the speech. Sir Robert retired to draw up his paper, and Sir Spencer went to Leicester Fields, where the King and Queen were already, followed by all who had any thing to ask, or any thing to hope—a definition which seems to have included the whole of what, in later parlance, are called the fashionable world. Whether the present sincerity of court life is purer than of old may be doubtful, but the older manners were certainly the more barefaced. When the new premier was returning to his coach he walked through a lane of “bowers,” all shouldering each other to pay adoration to the new idol.

During the four days of the King’s remaining in town, Leicester House, which used to be a desert, was “thronged from morning till night, like the ‘Change at noon.’” But Walpole walked through those rooms “as if they had been empty.” The same people who were officiously, a-week before, crowding the way to flatter his prosperity, were now getting out of it to avoid sharing his disgrace. Horace Walpole says, that his mother could not make her way to pay her respects to the King and Queen between the scornful backs and elbows of her late devotees, nor could approach nearer to the Queen than the third or fourth row, until the Queen cried out,—“There, I am sure I see a friend.” The torrent then divided, and shrank to either side. In short, Walpole, with his brother Horace, ambassador to France, the Duke of Newcastle and Lord Townshend, the two Secretaries of State, were all conceived to be as much undone, as a pasha on the arrival of the janizary with the bowstring.

The evidences, it must be owned, seemed remarkably strong. The King had openly, and more than once, called Walpole “rogue and rascal;” he had called the ambassador “a scoundrel and a fool;” he had declared his utter contempt for the Duke, and his determination never to forgive him. Townshend fared still worse. The King looked on him to be no more an honest man than an able minister, and attributed all the confusion in foreign affairs to the heat of his temper and his scanty genius, to the strength of his passions and the weakness of his understanding. There can be no doubt that a minister of foreign affairs, with those qualities, might become a very mischievous animal.

On Compton’s receiving the speech drawn up by Walpole, he carried it, in his own handwriting, to the King. The King objected to a paragraph, which Sir Spencer Compton was either unwilling or unable to amend; and not being satisfied of his own powers of persuasion, he actually solicited Walpole to go to the King, and persuade him to leave it as it was! The Queen, who was the friend of Walpole, instantly took advantage of this singular acknowledgment of inferiority, and advised the King to retain the man whom his intended successor so clearly acknowledged to be his superior.

Nothing can be more evident than that Sir Spencer played the fool egregiously. To place a rival in immediate communication with the King was, at least, an unusual way of supplanting him; while, to give him the advantage of his authorship, by sending him to explain it to the King, would have been ridiculous under any circumstances. But there are no miracles in politics; and he was evidently so far convinced of his own security, that the idea of a rival was out of the question. Compton had been all his life a political personage. He had been Paymaster; he had been Speaker in three Parliaments; he was au fait in the routine of office; and he had evidently received the King’s order to make a ministry. But we have had such sufficient proof in our own time that princes and kings are different persons according to circumstances, that we can perfectly comprehend the cessation of the royal favouritism on one side, and of the royal aversion on the other. The civil list was still to be voted—the subject dearest to the royal heart. Walpole was noted for financial management, and Compton’s awkwardness in the preceding transaction might well have startled the monarch. The general result was, that Walpole remained minister, Compton was quietly put out of the way with a peerage, as Lord Wilmington, and an enormous civil list was carried, with but a single vote, that of Mr William Shippen, against it. The civil list was little less than £900,000 a-year, an immense revenue, when we consider that the value of money at that time probably made it equal to double the sum now. The present civil list would be practically not much more than a fourth of the amount in 1777. The Queen’s jointure was equally exorbitant; it was £100,000 a-year, besides Somerset House and Richmond Lodge, a sum amounting to double what any Queen of England had before.

Walpole was now paramount; he had purchased his supremacy by his official prodigality. Lord Hervey thinks that he was still hurt by two mortifications—the displacement of his son-in-law, Lord Malpas, and of Sir William Yonge, a Lord of the Treasury, and his notorious tool. But, contrasting those trifling changes with the plenitude of Walpole’s power, and recollecting the extraordinary wiliness of his nature, it seems not improbable that he either counselled or countenanced those dismissals, to escape the invidiousness of absolute power; for both Malpas and Yonge clung to the court, and, after a decent interval, were replaced in office. Walpole was, perhaps, one of the most singular instances of personal dexterity in the annals of statesmanship. Without eloquence in the House, or character out of it; without manners in the court, or virtue any where, he continued to hold supreme ministerial power for nearly a quarter of a century, under the most jealous of kings, with the weakest of cabinets, against the most powerful Opposition, and in the midst of the most contemptuous people. His power seems even to have grown out of those sinister elements. By constantly balancing them against each other, by at once awaking fears and exciting hopes, he deluded all the fools, and enlisted all the knaves of public life in his cause. The permanency of his office, however, wholly rested upon the Queen; and he had the dexterity to discover, from the moment of the Royal accession, that, insulted as she was by the King’s conduct, she was the true source of ministerial power. He accordingly adhered to her, in all the fluctuations of the court, appeared to consult her on all occasions, studied her opinions, and provided for her expenses. The want of money, or its possession, seem to have exerted an extraordinary influence on the higher ranks in those days; and one of the first acts of Walpole was to offer the Queen £60,000 a-year. Sir Spencer Compton had been impolitic enough to propose but £40,000, on the ground that this sum had been sufficient for Charles II.’s queen. The sum was at last settled at £50,000, and the donor was not forgotten.

But it seems impossible to doubt, that Walpole’s character was essentially corrupt; that he regarded corruption as a legitimate source of power; that he bribed every man whom he had the opportunity to bribe: that he laughed at political integrity, and did his best to extinguish the little that existed; that no minister ever went further to degrade the character of public life; and that the period of his supremacy is a general blot upon the reign, the time, and the people.

The celebrated Burke, in that magnanimous partiality which disposed him to overlook the vices of individuals in the effect of their measures, has given a high-flown panegyric on the administration of Walpole; but the whole is a brilliant paradox. He looked only to the strength of the Brunswick succession, and, taking his stand upon that height, from which he surveyed grand results alone, neglected or disdained to examine into the repulsive detail. Seeing before him a national harvest of peace and plenty, he never condescended to look to the gross and offensive material by which the furrow was fertilised. Nothing is more certain, than that the daily acts of Walpole would now stamp a ministry with shame—that no man would dare now to express the sentiments which form the maxims of the minister; and that any one of the acts which, though they passed with many a sneer, yet passed with practical impunity, in the days of George II., would have ruined the proudest individual, and extinguished the most powerful cabinet, of the last fifty years.

The arguments which Lord Hervey puts into the lips of the Queen are scarcely less corrupt in another style. She tells the King not merely that Walpole’s long experience and known abilities would make him the best minister, but that his simply being in power would make him the most submissive—that his having made a vast fortune already would make him less solicitous about his own interest—that new leeches would be more hungry, and that, Walpole’s fortune being made, he would have nothing in view but serving the King, and securing the government, to keep what he had got—closing all this grave advice with that maxim of consummate craft, that in royal breasts both enmity and friendship alike should always give way to policy. If such were to be regarded as the habitual rules of the highest rank, well might we remonstrate against their baseness. The bigotry of James, or the morals of Charles II., would be preferable to this scandalous selfishness. But those maxims have never found tolerance among the people of England. We are to recollect that they came from a despotic soil, that they were the wisdom of courts where the great corrective of state-craft, public opinion, was unknown; that they were the courage of the timid, and the integrity of the intriguing; and that the maxims, the manners, and the system, have alike been long since consigned to a deserved and contemptuous oblivion.

By much the best part of Lord Hervey’s authorship consists in his characters of public personages. No rank is suffered to shield any man. He exercises a sort of Egyptian judgment even upon kings, and pronounces sentence upon their faults with all the indignation of posthumous virtue. The King of France at that period had begun to exercise a powerful influence over Europe. France, always liable to great changes, had been for half a century almost prostrated before the great powers of Europe. The triumphs of Marlborough in the earliest years of the century had swept her armies from the field, as the close of the preceding century had desolated the industry of her southern provinces by persecution. The supremacy of the Regent had subsequently dissolved almost the whole remaining force of public character in a flood of profligacy, and the reigning King was perhaps the most profligate man in the most licentious nation of the world. The description of him in these volumes is equally disdainful and true. “I cannot,” says Lord Hervey, “by the best accounts I have had, and by what I have myself seen of this insensible piece of royalty, venture absolutely to say that he was of a good or bad disposition, for, more properly speaking, he was of no disposition at all. He was neither merciful nor cruel, without affection or enmity, without gratitude or resentment, and, to all appearance, without pleasure or pain.” His actions are described as resembling more the mechanical movements of an automaton, than the effects of will and reason. The state of his mind seemed to be a complete apathy, neither acting nor acted on. If he had any passion, it was avarice; and if he took pleasure in any amusement, it was in gaming. It is observed that he had not any share in the “epidemical gaiety that runs through the French nation.” He appeared to take as little pleasure as he gave, to live to as little purpose to himself as to any body else, and to have no more joy in being King, than his people had advantage in being his subjects.

It was the good fortune of France to be governed at this period by Cardinal Fleury, a man of no distinction for talents, yet possessing a plain, practical understanding, habitual prudence, and personal honesty. But his most important qualification was a remarkable absence of the passion for disturbing the world, which seems to have made him an exception to all Frenchmen since the days of Julius Cæsar. Fleury loved peace, and was so far an illustrious anomaly in French nature. Something of this singular contradiction to his countrymen may have arisen from his being eighty years old, from his habits as an ecclesiastic, and from his being fully acquainted with the fact, that France had not the power to go to war. The result of this policy was not merely tranquillising to Europe, but fortunate for France. Her task was to recover from the wasteful wars of Louis XIV., from the general corruption of the Regency, from the financial follies of the Mississippi scheme, and from the weak and rapacious ministry of the Duke of Bourbon. The administration of Cardinal Fleury met all her evils, and met them with patience, and thus with success. France has been always the great disturber of Europe, and will be so whenever she has the power to disturb; but the old Cardinal, conscious of her helplessness, applied himself to restrain her ambition, and taught her that the indulgence of vanity was no compensation for defeat, and that war was folly, at least until success was possible. Under this rational course of government, the public mind was turned to intellectual advancement and national industry. Paris, instead of being the centre of European profligacy, rapidly became the centre of European science. A succession of extraordinary men threw light upon every kingdom of nature and knowledge. The Continent actually basked in the beams of France; her language became universal, her literature the general model, her taste the leader of European refinement, her manners the standard of fashion to the world; and, at the accession of the unfortunate Louis XVI., Paris, the court, and the people, possessed an acknowledged supremacy over the opinions, the habits, and the accomplishments of Europe, to which no kingdom of the modern world has ever exhibited a parallel.

The closing period of the eighteenth century has already been given to the world by a historian equal to the magnitude of his subject. The “History of the French Revolution,” by Alison, will never be superseded. The extent of its information, the clearness of its details, the freshness and fidelity of its descriptions, and the force and vividness of its language, place it at the head of all contemporary annals. But we should wish also to see a History of the whole preceding portion of the century. The French Revolution was a result: we should desire to see the origin. It was a burst of gigantic violence, and gigantic strength: we should desire to have the primal myth of this assault of the Titans; the narrative of their growth, their passions, and their powers, until the moment when they moved against the battlements of all that was lofty, magnificent, and glittering in the land. There is nothing without a cause on earth,—accident is a name which has no place in the Providential supremacy of things. To investigate the sources of even the common events of nature, is a subject worthy of the philosopher. But there never was a time when it was more important to connect its mightier changes with the mystery in which they find their birth; to ascertain the laws of national convulsion; to fix the theory of moral storms and inundations. Such would be among the highest services, as they might administer to the most effective security of the social system.

It strikes us, that our chief historians have hitherto limited their view too much to England: a broader view would have been more productive. The combinations of this great country with the Continental kingdoms; the contrasts furnished by them all; the variety in their means of working out the same object of national power; their comparative tardiness; even their failures, would have supplied new conceptions of history, and have added alike to the illustration and the interest of that political science which is among the noblest bequests of a great nation to posterity. We are fully convinced that politics, rightly examined, will be found to constitute a system, as much as astronomy, and that a solitary kingdom would be as much a contradiction to nature as a solitary star.

We now glance over the pages of these volumes: they are very amusing. If they do not give the court costumes of a hundred years ago, they give the mental costumes. The witty and the wise, the great and the little, pass before the eye with the rapidity and the oddity of the figures in a show-box. Kings, queens, and courtiers are exhibited to the life; and, harsh as their physiognomies may sometimes seem, the exhibition is always amusing.

The King was generally regarded as being governed by his wife, and the opinion was not the less general because the King constantly boasted of his own independence. One day, alluding to this subject, he said, “Charles I. was governed by his wife, Charles II. by his mistresses, James by his priests, William by his men-favourites, and Anne by her women-favourites.” He then turned with a significant and satisfied air, and asked, “Who do they say governs now?” The political squibs of the time were, however, of a different opinion from the King. For example—

“You may strut, dapper George, but ‘twill all be in vain,

We know ’tis Queen Caroline, not you, that reign—

You govern no more than Don Philip of Spain.

Then, if you would have us fall down and adore you,

Lock up your fat spouse, as your dad did before you.”

The “dapper” was an allusion to the King’s figure, which was much under size. The locking up was an allusion to the imprisonment of the wife of George I., whom, by an atrocious act of cruelty, he had shut up in one of his castles for thirty-two years. It argues something in favour of the progress of public opinion, that in our day the most despotic or powerful sovereign of Europe would not dare to commit an act, which was then committed with perfect impunity by a little German Elector. Another of those squibs began—

“Since England was England there never was seen

So strutting a King, and so prating a Queen.”

The first of those brought Lord Scarborough into a formidable scrape; for, being taxed by the King with having seen it, evidently in private, the King demanded to know who had shown it to him. Scarborough declared that he was on his honour, not to reveal it. On this the King became furious, and said to him, “Had I been Lord Scarborough in this situation, and you king, the man should have shot me, or I him, who had dared to affront me in the person of my master, by showing me such insolent nonsense!” His Lordship replied, that he never told his Majesty it was a man from whom he had it. He consequently left the King, (who never spoke to him for three months after,) almost as much irritated against him as the author.

Lord Hervey’s portrait of the celebrated Chesterfield is a work of elaborate peevishness. It has all the marks of an angry rival, and all the caricature of a pen dipped in personal mortification. He allows him wit, but with an utter “mismanagement in its use;” talent without common-sense, and a ridiculous propensity to love-making, with an ungainly face and a repulsive figure. This character is new to those who have been so long accustomed to regard Chesterfield even on the more unfavourable side of his character. To his admirers the portrait is of course intolerable; but we must leave some future biographer to settle those matters with the ghost of his libeller.

An anecdote is given illustrative of the violence of Lord Townshend’s temper, and the cutting calmness of Walpole’s. Townshend was a man of considerable powers, but singularly irritable. He had been from an early period engaged in office, and was a constant debater in the House. His temper, however, made him so publicly disliked, and his selfishness so much alienated public men, that when he left office he did not leave a regret behind. He was followed only by epigrams, of which one is given—

“With such a head, and such a heart,

If fortune fails to take thy part,

And long continues thus unkind,

She must be deaf as well as blind,

And, quite reversing every rule,

Nor see the knave, nor hear the fool.”

Lord Townshend had been Foreign Secretary, and Walpole had to defend his blunders in the Commons. This made the latter anxious, and the former jealous. Another source of discontent was added, probably with still greater effect. Walpole, who had begun as a subordinate to Townshend, had risen above him. He had begun poor, and now exceeded him in fortune; and, as the last offence, he had built Houghton, a much handsomer mansion than Lord Townshend’s house at Raynham, which his lordship had once considered as the boast of Norfolk. Thus both were in a condition for perpetual squabble. The anecdote to which we have alluded was this:—One evening, at Windsor, on the Queen’s asking Walpole and Townshend where they had dined that day, the latter said that he had dined at home with Lord and Lady Trevor; on which Walpole said to her Majesty, smiling, “My lord, Madam, I think, is grown coquet from a long widowhood, and has some design upon my Lady Trevor; for his assiduity of late, in that family, is grown so much beyond common civility, that without this solution I know not how to account for it.” The burlesque of this not very decorous observation was obvious, for Lady Trevor was nearly seventy years old, and, besides being a woman of character, was of the “most forbidding countenance that natural ugliness, age, and small-pox, ever compounded.”

But Townshend, affecting to take the remark literally, replied with great warmth—“No, sir, I am not one of those fine gentlemen who find no time of life, nor any station in the world, preservatives against follies and immoralities that are hardly excusable when youth and idleness make us most liable,” &c., &c. In short, his lordship made a speech in which his voice trembled, and every limb shook with passion. But Walpole, always master of his temper, made him no other answer than asking him with a smile, and in a very mild tone of voice, “What, my lord, all this for Lady Trevor!”

The Queen grew uneasy, and, to avoid Townshend’s replying, only laughed, and turned the conversation.

An anecdote is told of the Duchess of Queensberry’s being forbid the court; which belongs to the literary history of the cleverest opera in our own or any other language—Gay’s famous production. Walpole, justly regarding himself as caricatured in the “Beggar’s Opera,” obtained the Duke of Grafton’s authority as Lord Chamberlain to suppress the representation of his next opera, “Polly.” Gay resolved to publish it by subscription, and his patroness, the Duchess of Queensberry, put herself at the head of the undertaking, and solicited every person she met, to subscribe. As the Duchess was handsome, a wit, and of the first fashion, she obtained guineas in all directions, even from those who dreaded to encourage this act of defiance. The Duchess’s zeal, however, increased with her success; and she even came to the drawing-room, and under the very eye of majesty solicited subscriptions for a play which the monarch had forbidden to be acted. When the King came into the drawing-room, seeing the Duchess very busy in a corner with three or four persons, he asked her what she was doing. She answered, “What must be agreeable, she was sure, to any body so humane as his Majesty, for it was an act of charity; and a charity to which she did not despair of bringing his Majesty to contribute.” This proceeding was so much resented, that Mr Stanhope, vice-chamberlain to the King, was sent in form to the Duchess to forbid her coming to court. The message was verbal; but she desired to send a written answer—wrote it on the spot—and thus furnished a document, whose style certainly exhibited more sincerity than courtiership.

“That the Duchess of Queensberry is surprised and well pleased that the King has given her so agreeable a command as to stay from court, where she never came for diversion, but to bestow a great civility on the King and Queen. She hopes that, by such an unprecedented order as this, the King will see as few as he wishes at his court, particularly such as dare to think or speak truth. I dare not do otherwise, and ought not, nor could have imagined that it would not have been the very highest compliment I could possibly pay the King, to endeavour to support truth and innocence in his house—particularly when the King and Queen both told me that they had not read Mr Gay’s play. I have certainly done right, then, to stand by my own words rather than his Grace of Grafton’s, who hath neither made use of truth, judgment, nor honour, through this whole affair, either for himself or his friends.

“C. QUEENSBERRY.”

When her Grace had finished this paper, drawn up, as Lord Hervey observes, “with more spirit than accuracy,” Stanhope requested of her to think again, and give him a more courtly message to deliver. The Duchess took her pen and wrote another, but it was so much more disrespectful, that he asked for the former one and delivered it.

There was, of course, a prodigious quantity of court gossip on this occasion: and, doubtless, though some pretended to be shocked, many were pleased at the sting of royalty, and many more were amused at the dashing oddity of the Duchess. But public opinion, on the whole, blamed the court. It certainly was infinitely childish in the King, to have inquired into what the Duchess was doing among her acquaintances in the drawing-room; it was equally beneath the natural notions of royal dignity that the King should put himself in a state of hostility with a subject, and in so trifling a matter as the subscription to an unpublished play; and it was equally impolitic, for the world was sure to range itself on the side of the woman, especially when that woman was handsome, eccentric, and rich. It produced some inconvenience, however, to the lady’s husband, as he, in consequence, gave up the office of Admiral of Scotland.

The history of the “Beggar’s Opera” is still one of those mysticisms which perplex the chroniclers of the stage. It has been attributed to the joint conception of Swift, Pope, and Gay. The original idea probably belonged to Swift, who, in that fondness for contrasts, and contempt of romance, which belonged to him in every thing, had observed, “What a pretty thing a Newgate pastoral would make!” Pope may have given hints for the epigrammatic pungency of the dialogue; while the general workmanship may have been left to Gay. It is scarcely possible to doubt the sharp and worldly hand of Swift in some of the scenes and songs. Pope may have polished the dialogue, or nerved some of the songs, otherwise it is difficult to account for the total failure of all those characters of sternness, sharpness, and knowledge of the world, in Gay’s subsequent and unassisted drama, “Polly.” For, as the note on the subject observes, nothing can be more dull and less sarcastic, or, in fact, less applicable to either public characters or public events than the latter opera, against which a prime minister levelled the hostilities of the Lord Chamberlain, and engaged the indignation of the King.

Gay had been a dependant on Mrs Howard,—a matter which, in the scandalous laxity of the time, was by no means disgraceful. He had been solicitor for some place under the court, and had been disappointed. But the “Beggar’s Opera” had been written before his disappointment. Of course, it is unlikely that he should have then thought of burlesquing the minister. His disappointment, however, may have given him new intentions, and a few touches from Swift’s powerful hand might have transformed Macheath, Peachum, and Lockit into the fac-similes of the premier and his cabinet. It is remarkable that Gay had never attempted any thing of the kind before, nor after. His solitary muse was the very emblem of feebleness, his ambition never soared beyond a salary, and his best authorship was fables.

As ours is the day when rioting is popular, and rebels in every country are modellers of government, it may be amusing to remember how those matters were managed in the last century. The history of the famous Excise scheme, which in its day convulsed England, and finally shook the most powerful of all ministers out of the most powerful of all cabinets, is amongst the curious anecdotes of a time full of eccentricity. Walpole was no more superior to the effects of prosperity than honester men. Long success had confirmed him in a belief of its perpetual power; and the idea that, with a court wholly at his disposal, with a Queen for his agent, a King almost for his subject, the peerage waiting his nod, and the commons in his pay, he could be cast down and shattered like a plaster image, seems never to have entered into his dreams. But in this plenitude of power, whether to exercise his supremacy, or for the mere want of something to do, it occurred to him to relieve the country gentlemen by reducing the land-tax to a shilling in the pound, turning the duty on tobacco and wine, then payable on importation, into inland duties,—that is, changing customs on those two commodities into excise. By which scheme, and the continuation of the salt-duty, he proposed to improve the revenue half a million a-year, so as to supply the abatement of the shilling in the pound. The plan seemed feasible, and it also appeared likely to attract popularity among the country gentlemen, who had frequently complained of the pressure of the land-tax—two shillings in the pound.

The result, however, showed that a man may govern a court who is unequal to govern a people. The very mention of excise raised a universal storm,—all kinds of exaggerations flew through the land. The subject, at no time popular, was converted into a source of frantic indignation. The orators alleged, that if excise was once to be made a substitute for the land-tax, it might be made a substitute for every tax; that if it was laid on wine and tobacco, it would soon be laid on corn and clothing; that every man’s house would be at the mercy of excise-officers, whose numbers would amount to a standing army, and of the most obnoxious kind, an army of tax-gatherers; that liberty must perish; Magna Charta be not worth its own parchment; parliament be voted useless; and the monarch, who could extract every shilling from the pockets of his subjects under the pretext of an excise, might soon ride roughshod over the liberties of England. Petition on petition, of course, showered into parliament; the boroughs angrily advised their representatives to vote against the measure; and the towns and cities haughtily commanded their parliamentary delegates to resist all extension of the excise, however qualified, corrected, or modelled by the minister.

Walpole was thunderstruck; but he still relied upon his fortune. His friends crowded round him with entreaties that he would abandon the measure. But his argument was the argument of infatuation—the old absurdity of exposing himself to immediate ruin, through fear of being ruined at some future time, which might never arrive. In fact, his flexibility, which often saves a minister, was suddenly exchanged for the stubbornness which is the ministerial road to ruin. At last the memorable day came, March 14, 1743, when the bill was to be presented to parliament. It was reported that thousands of the people would block up the House, and there was a general order for constables, peace-officers, and the Guards to be in readiness. The mob, however, were neither so numerous nor so unruly as was expected. The debate was long, and the question was carried for the excise scheme by a majority of 61—the numbers being 204 and 265. The King was so anxious on the subject, that he made Lord Hervey write to him from the House at five o’clock; and, when the debate broke up at one in the morning, and Lord Hervey came to St James’s to mention the result, the King carried him into the Queen’s bedchamber, and kept him there till three in the morning, (without having dined;) asking him ten thousand questions, not merely about the speeches, but the very looks of the speakers.

The memoirs of persons in high life have a certain use for those who will draw the true moral from them; which is, that the highest rank is by no means the happiest. The exterior glitters to the eye, and doubtless there are few pedestrians who would not rejoice to drive in a gilt coach, with a squadron of hussars prancing round them. But the Memoirs of George II. and his Queen, altogether independently of private character, give formidable evidence of the cares which haunt even thrones. Yet, perhaps, there was no more palmy state of public affairs than that which saw George and Caroline on the throne. The country was in profound peace, commerce was flourishing, there was no impediment to the wheels of society—neither famine nor pestilence, nor rebellion; and yet distress, vexation, and perplexity seem to be as frequent inmates of the palace as they could have been of the workhouse. Even the great minister himself, though the head and front of the whole immediate disturbance, and likely to suffer more severely than all the rest, bore the crisis with more equanimity than either of their majesties.

“This evening,” says Lord Hervey, “Sir Robert Walpole saw the King in the Queen’s apartment, and the final resolution was then taken to drop the bill; but as there was a petition to come from the city of London against it the next day, it was resolved that the bill should not be dropped till that petition was rejected, lest it should be thought to be done by the weight and power of the city.” Walpole, on coming from this conference, called on Lord Hervey to let him know what had passed. Sir Robert was extremely disconcerted. Lord Hervey told him that he had been twice that afternoon sent for by the King; but, not knowing in what strain to talk to him, as he was ignorant whether Sir Robert intended to go forward or retreat, and expecting that he should be asked millions of questions relating to what he saw, and what he heard, and what he thought; to avoid the difficulties which this catechism would lay him under, he kept out of the way.

In the mean time, Sir Robert had gone to the Queen, and told her, that the clamour had grown so great, that there were but two ways of trying to appease it, one by dropping the project, and the other by dropping the projector. The Queen chid him extremely “for thinking it possible she could act so cowardly a part.” When Lord Hervey went up to the drawing-room, he saw that her Majesty had been weeping very plentifully, and found her so little able to disguise what she felt, that she was forced to pretend headach and vapours, and break up her quadrille party sooner than the usual hour. When the drawing-room was over, the King called Lord Hervey into the Queen’s bedchamber, and began with great eagerness to ask him where he had been all day, whom he had seen, what he had heard, and how both friends and foes looked? To some of the replies, referring to the Opposition, the King said with great warmth, “It is a lie; those rascals in the Opposition are the greatest liars that ever spoke.” The city petition was presented the next morning, and attended by a train of coaches reaching from Temple Bar to Westminster. The prayer of the petition was, that they might be heard by counsel against the bill. After a debate till midnight the petition was rejected, but only by a majority of seventeen—214 to 197. Walpole was never more deeply smitten than by this defeat, for so small a majority was a virtual defeat. He stood for some time after the House was up, leaning against the table, with his hat pulled over his eyes, and some few friends, with melancholy countenances, round him. As soon as the whole was over, Pelham went to the King, and Hervey to the Queen, to acquaint them with what had passed. When Hervey, at his first coming into the room, shook his head and told her the numbers, the tears ran down her cheeks, and for some time she could not utter a word. At last she said, “It is over—we must give way; but pray tell me a little how it passed.”

On the next day, Walpole proposed the postponement of the tobacco bill for two months. On coming out of the House, the mob, who had increased in numbers, continued to insult the members. Walpole, though warned of the reception which he was likely to get, determined to face the mob, as he boldly said, “there was no end of flying from their menaces, and that meeting dangers of this kind was the only way to put an end to them.” With some friends, and to a certain degree protected by the constables, who made a passage for the members to go out, he at last worked his way through the mob; though there was a great deal of jostling, and the constables were obliged to make large use of their staves. Three of his friends (among whom was Lord Hervey) were hurt. The city had been filled with illuminations and bonfires the night before, when Sir Robert Walpole, with a fat woman, (meant for the Queen,) was burnt in effigy. It is singular that this triumph was carried as far as Oxford, where for three nights together, round the bonfires in the streets, the healths of Ormond, Bolingbroke, and James III. were publicly drunk!

Lord Hervey’s sketches of character are among the best specimens of his writing, and the most interesting portions of his book. They are always acute and forcible, natural though epigrammatic, and remorseless though polished. As the lives of Chancellors have been, of late, so frequently brought before the public, we give his sketch of Lord Chancellor King. Speaking of King as having risen from obscurity to the woolsack, without an obstruction in his career, and with the general approbation of all judges of legal merit, he observes that, from the moment of his presiding in Chancery, his reputation began to sink. But this is explained, not by any newly discovered deficiency of talent, but by deficiency of decision. “Expedition,” says Lord Hervey, “was never reckoned among the merits of the Court of Chancery; but while Lord King presided there, its delays became insupportable. He had such a diffidence of himself, that he dared not do right for fear of doing wrong. Decrees were always extorted from him; and, had he been left alone, he would never have given any suitor his due, for fear of giving him what was not so; never reflecting that the suspension of justice was almost as bad as the total privation of it. His understanding was of that balancing irregular kind, which gives people just light enough to see difficulties and form doubts, yet not enough to surmount the one, or remove the other. This sort of understanding, which was of use to him as a pleader, was a trouble to him as a judge, and made him make a great figure at the bar, but an indifferent one upon the bench. The Queen once said of him, very truly, as well as agreeably, that ‘he was just in the law, what he had formerly been in the gospel—making creeds of the one, without any steady belief, and judgments in the other, without any settled opinion. But the misfortune,’ said she, ‘for the public is, that though they can reject his silly creeds, they are forced to submit to his silly judgments.’” (Lord King had dabbled in divinity, and published a history of the Apostles’ Creed.) Complaints soon arose, that all the equity of the nation was at a stand. He afterwards nearly lost his senses by repeated attacks of apoplexy. He was at last induced to retire on a pension of £3000. He died in the next year, “little regretted by any body, but least of all by his Majesty, who saved £3000 a-year by it.”

The condition of the court seems to have been perpetual conflict. The King’s personal conduct was inexcusable; the Queen’s great object was the possession of power; and the Prince was an object of suspicion to both, as both were objects of vexation to the Prince. His case in short was this: “He had a father that abhorred him, a mother that despised him, sisters that betrayed him, a brother set up against him, and a set of servants that neglected him, and were neither of use to him, nor capable of being of use, nor desirous of being of use.”

The Opposition were in pretty much the same condition: they, too, were in a state of civil war. Lord Carteret and Bolingbroke had no correspondence at all; Pulteney and Bolingbroke hated each other; Carteret and Pulteney were jealous of each other; Sir William Wyndham and Pulteney the same; while Chesterfield had a little correspondence with them all, but was confided in by none.

The Princess’s marriage to the Prince of Orange had long engrossed the consideration of the court. The Princess was not ill-looking, but her figure was short, and inclined to be fat. She seems to have resembled both the King and the Queen in their better, and in their worst, qualities. She was quick, intelligent, and passionate; yet could be cool, callous, and ready to sacrifice every thing to power. The Prince of Orange was poor, having but £12,000 a-year, and he was deformed, having a humpback, and altogether exhibiting the least attractive object possible in the eyes of a princess as haughty as any in Christendom. The marriage was solemnised at seven in the evening: the chapel was splendidly fitted up; but the Queen and the Princesses exhibited so much undisguised concern, that the procession to the chapel, and the aspect of matters there, looked more like a sacrifice than a marriage. We cannot go any further into details which, however suitable to foreign manners, can only disgust the fortunate delicacy of the English mind. But Lord Hervey’s manner of consoling the philosophic Queen in her disdain and disgust, is capital, as a specimen at once of the man of the world and of the courtier.

His answer was, “Madam, in half a year all persons are alike; and the figure one is married to, like the prospect of the place one lives at, grows so familiar to one’s eyes, that we look at it mechanically, without regarding either the beauties or deformities that strike a stranger.” The Queen’s answer was clever: “One may, and I believe one does, grow blind at last; but you must allow, my dear Lord Hervey, that there is a great difference, as long as one sees, in the manner of one’s growing blind.” The sisters spoke much in the same style as the mother, with horror at his figure, and commiseration for his wife. The Princess Emily said, “nothing on earth should have induced her to marry the monster.” The Princess Caroline, in her soft sensible way, spoke truth and said, “She must own it was very bad, but that, in her sister’s situation, all things considered, she believed she should have come to the same resolution.”

From time to time, some traits of men and history oddly remind us of foreign courts in our own day. The Emperor of Germany, a personage in whom ambition and imbecility seem to have contended for the mastery, had commenced a war, which transferred hostilities into Italy. France, Sardinia, and Spain attacked him there, and pushed his army to the walls of Mantua. The position of Radetsky, while he continued constrained by a court which gave him little more than orders and counter-orders, was evidently the fac-simile of Austrian affairs in 1733. “Those affairs,” says Lord Hervey, “were so well managed, that with thirteen thousand men in Lombardy, and provisions for double the number, and ammunition in proportion, those essentials of war were so dispersed and scattered, that, wherever there were provisions there was no ammunition, and where there was ammunition there were no provisions, and where there were men there was neither ammunition nor provisions.”

The German war engaged a good deal of the public attention at this time; but much less in the nation than at the court. Prince Eugene, on the Rhine, marched to the relief of Philipsburg, while Marshal Berwick, with one hundred thousand men, carried on the siege. The high reputation of Prince Eugene had excited the King’s hope that Philipsburg would be relieved. It was, however, taken. This gave rise to a smart saying of the Princess Royal. She observed to Lord Hervey, after the drawing-room, shrugging up her shoulders, “Was there ever any thing so unaccountable as the temper of papa! He has been snapping and snubbing every mortal for this week, because he began to think that Philipsburg would be taken; and this very day, that he hears it is actually taken, he is in as good humour as ever I saw him in my life. But all this seems so odd, that I am more angry at his good humour than I was at his bad.” Lord Hervey said, with that sort of wit which was fashionable at the time, “that this was like David, who, when his child lived wore sackcloth, but when it was dead, shaved and drank wine.”—“It may be like David,” said the Princess, “but I am sure it is not like Solomon.”

The King had a foolish habit of talking of war, of imagining his genius made for renown, and of pronouncing himself infinitely unlucky in not being permitted by his minister to gain laurels in Germany. Walpole exhibited his power in nothing more effectually than in preventing the operation of this thirst for “glory.”—“He could not bear,” said the monarch, “that while he was engaged only in treaties, letters, and despatches, his booby brother, the brutal King of Prussia, should pass his time in camps and in the midst of arms,” neither desirous of the glory, nor fit for the employment.

Walpole, who saw the danger of involving England in this war, and probably the absurdity of going to war for the sake of any foreigners, reminded the King of the existence of the Pretender, and of the probability “that his crown would yet have to be fought for on British ground.” As to the Queen, Lord Hervey said, “the shadow of the Pretender would beat the whole German body.”

His lordship’s knowledge of the world appears to have extinguished all his ideas of its generosity: for he finds a personal motive in every thing. Thus, he assigns three reasons for Walpole’s pacific advice. One was, to avoid new clamour against his administration; the next was, to avoid the unpopularity of new taxes; and the third was, that military business might not throw his power into the hands of military men.

The Memoir then proceeds “to toss and gore” all the prominent public men in succession. It tells us “that the Duke of Newcastle, who always talked as his master talked,” echoed all the King’s “big words,” and expatiated for ever on regaining Italy for the Emperor, chastising Spain, and humbling the pride of France. Next comes the Duke of Grafton; of whom it is said, that loving to make his court as well as the Duke of Newcastle, he talked in the same strain, and for the same reason; but “could never make any great compliment to the King and Queen of embracing their opinions, as he never understood things enough to have one of his own.” Next comes Lord Grantham. “He was a degree still lower, and had the gift of reasoning in so small a proportion, that his existence was barely distinguished from a vegetable.” Then follows Lord Harrington. Of him it is said that, “with all his seeming phlegm, he was as tenacious of an opinion, when his indolence suffered him to form one, as any man living. His parts were of the common run of mankind. He was well bred, a man of honour, and fortunate, loved pleasure, and was infinitely lazy.” The Queen once in speaking of him said, “There is a heavy insipid sloth about that man, that puts me out of all patience: he must have six hours to dress, six more to dine, six more for his intrigues, and six more to sleep; and there, for a minister, are the four-and-twenty admirably disposed of; and if, now and then, he borrows six of those hours, to do any thing relating to his office, it is for something that might be done in six minutes, and ought to have been done six days before.”

We have then another instance of the discomforts of Royalty in those times. The day before the birthday, October 29, 1734, the court removed from Kensington to London, and the Queen, “who had long been out of order with a cough and a little lurking fever, notwithstanding she had been twice blooded, grew every hour worse and worse. However, the King forced her, the night she came from Kensington—the first of Farinelli’s performances—to the Opera, and made her the next day go through all the tiresome ceremonies of drawing-rooms and balls, the fatigues of heats and crowds, and every other disagreeable appurtenance to the celebration of a birthday.”

His lordship observes that “there was a strange affectation of an incapacity of being sick, that ran through the whole royal family. I have known the King to get out of his bed, choking with a sore throat, and in a high fever, only to dress and have a levee, and, in five minutes after it, undress and return to his bed, till the same ridiculous farce of health was to be presented the next day at the same hour. He used to make the Queen, in like circumstances, commit the same extravagances; but never with more danger than at this time. In the morning drawing-room, she found herself so near swooning, that she was forced to send Lord Grantham to the King, to beg he would retire, for that she was unable to stand any longer; notwithstanding which, at night, he brought her into a still greater crowd at the ball, and there kept her till eleven o’clock.”

The recollections of those times constantly bring the name of Lady Suffolk before the eye. We have no wish to advert to the grossnesses connected with the name; but the waning of her power gave a singular pungency to opinion in the palace. The Princesses were peculiarly candid upon the occasion. The Princess Emily “wished Lady Suffolk’s disgrace, because she wished misfortune to most people. The Princess Caroline, because she thought it would please her mother. The Princess Royal was for having her crushed; and, when Lord Hervey made some remonstrance, she replied, that Lady Suffolk’s conduct, with regard to politics, had been so impertinent, that she cannot be too ill used.” It must seem strange to us that such topics should have been in the lips of any women, especially women of such rank—but they seem to have been discussed with the most perfect familiarity; and a name and conduct which ought to have been suppressed through mere delicacy, appear to have furnished the principal conversation of the court.

The next affair was the quarrel with the Princess of Orange, from her reluctance to return to Holland. As she was about to be confined, her husband was desirous that his child should be born in Holland. To this the Princess demurred. However, they at length contrived to send her on board, and she sailed from Harwich; but after she had been some time at sea, she either grew so ill, or pretended to be so ill, that she either was, or pretended to be, in convulsions: we give his lordship’s rather ungallant surmise. On this, and the wind not being quite fair, she obliged the captain of the yacht to put back to Harwich. She then despatched a courier to London with letters, written, as it was supposed, by her own absolute command, from her physician, her accoucheur, and her nurse, to say that she was disordered with her expedition, and that she could not be stirred for ten days from her bed, nor put to sea again, without the hazard of her child’s life and her own. The King and Queen declined giving any orders. The Prince of Orange was written to, and he desired that his wife might go by France to Holland. The King, hating the bustle of a new parting, directed that she should cross the country from Harwich to Dover; but his Majesty, after having been informed that the roads were impassable at this time of the year in a coach, (how strangely this sounds in our day of universal locomotion!) permitted her to come to London and go over the bridge; but it was a positive command that she should not lie in in London, nor even come to St James’s. Accordingly, “after all her tricks and schemes, to avoid going to Holland, and to get back to London, she was obliged to comply with those orders; and had the mortification and disgrace to go, without seeing any of her family, over London Bridge to Dover.”

A note conjectures, that the Princess Royal might have had some expectation of ascending the throne of England, neither of her brothers being then married; a circumstance, which may account for the Princess’s anxiety to have her child born in this country.

The next scene is laid among the bishops. The bishopric of Winchester had been promised to Hoadly. Willis, the Bishop of Winchester, was seized with an apoplectic fit, and Lord Hervey instantly wrote to Hoadly, who was then Bishop of Salisbury, to come up to town and enforce his claim. The bishop wrote to the Queen and Sir Robert letters, which were to be delivered as soon as Willis was dead. The Queen, on presenting those letters, asked Lord Hervey if he did not blush for the conduct of his friend in this early and pressing application for a thing not yet vacant. While he was speaking, the King came in, and both King and Queen talked of Hoadly, in such a manner as plainly showed that they neither esteemed nor loved him. Potter, Bishop of Oxford, a great favourite of the Queen, strongly solicited Winchester, and would have obtained it, but for Walpole’s suggestion, that the engagements to Hoadly could not be broken without scandal. Hoadly at last obtained Winchester; and, as the Memoir observes, one of the best preferments in the church was conferred upon a man hated by the King, disliked by the Queen, and long estranged from the friendship of Walpole. Then all followed in the way which might have been anticipated; the King not speaking a word to the new bishop, either when he kissed his hand or did homage; the Queen, when she found it could not be helped, making the most of promoting him,—and Sir Robert taking the whole merit of the promotion to himself.

Another source of contention now arose. The Chancellor Talbot had recommended Rundle, a chaplain of his father, the late Bishop of Durham, for the see of Gloucester, which had been vacant a twelvemonth. Gibson, Bishop of London, objected to him, that fourteen or fifteen years before he had been heard to speak disrespectfully of some portions of Scripture, and Rundle was suspected of Arianism. This reason was certainly sufficient to justify inquiry.

Sir Robert, in his usual style, tried to mediate; begged of the Chancellor to give up his support of Rundle, offering him at the same time a deanery, or to give him the Bishopric of Derry in Ireland, then possessed by Henry Downes; of whom the Memoir speaks as a crazy old fellow with three thousand a-year. This affair ended in Benson’s being made Bishop of Gloucester, and Secker Bishop of Bristol, both formerly chaplains to the Chancellor’s father. Rundle was subsequently made Bishop of Derry, where he died, nine years after, in his sixtieth year, much regretted.

Walpole was now visibly approaching decline. He had become negligent of the claims of his friends, and solicitous only to conciliate his enemies. Of course, where he bought over one opponent, there were fifty others ready to fill up his place. This policy failed, and ought always to fail. At the close of the session, say the Memoirs, “the harvest of court favour was small, though the labourers were many.” The only things to give away were the Privy Seal, by the retirement of Lord Lonsdale, and the Secretaryship at War, by the dismissal of Sir William Strickland, “who was become so weak in mind and body, that his head was as much in its second infancy as his limbs.”

A new source of ministerial vexation was added to the mêlée, by the King’s sudden determination to run over to Hanover, in spite of all remonstrance—the royal answer being always “Pooh, stuff! You think to get the better of me, but you shall not.”

Walpole, who dreaded that the King, once in Hanover, would plunge the country into a war, tried to set the Queen against this untoward journey; but her Majesty, though she gave the minister fair words, was in favour of the freak. The reasons assigned by the Memoir for her conduct being those rather irreverent ones, on the part of his lordship—pride in the éclat of the regency; the ease of being mistress of her hours, which was not the case for two hours together, when the King was in England; and, “besides these agrémens, she had the certainty of being, for six months at least, not only free from the fatigue of being obliged to entertain him for twenty hours in the twenty-four, but also from the more irksome office of being set up to receive the quotidian sallies of a temper that, let it be charged by what hand it would, used always to discharge its hottest fire, on some pretence or other, upon her.”

But “one trouble arose from the King’s going to Hanover, which her Majesty did not at all foresee;” and which was his becoming, soon after his arrival, so much attached to a Madame Walmoden, “a married woman of the first fashion in Hanover,” that nobody in England talked of any thing but the declining power of the Queen.

They might justly have talked much more of the insult of this conduct to public morals; but we shall not go further into those details. They absolutely repel the common-sense of propriety, to a degree which, we hope, will never be endurable in England. The King, however, gave her Majesty, in the long succession of his correspondence, the complete history of his passion, its progress, and his final purchase of the lady for 1000 ducats! A proof, as Lord Hervey says, more of his economy than his passion.

The life of courts is stripped of its glitter a good deal by the indefatigable courtier who has here left us his reminiscences; but it requires strong evidence, to believe that the persons who constitute the officials of royal households can submit to the humiliations described in these volumes.

The Queen narrates a sort of quarrel which she had with Lady Suffolk, a woman so notoriously scandalous, that the wife of George II. ought not to have suffered her to approach her person. The quarrel was, as a note conceives it, not about holding a basin for the Queen to wash in, but about holding it on her knees. (What person of any degree of self-respect can discover the difference?) But Lady Suffolk, on this nice distinction, consulted the well-known Lady Masham, bedchamber woman to Queen Anne, as to the point of etiquette. This authority delivered her judgment of chambermaid duties, in the following style:—“When the Queen washed her hands, a page of the backstairs brought and set down upon a side-table the basin and ewer. Then the bedchamber woman set it before the Queen, and knelt on the other side of the table over against the Queen, the bedchamber lady only looking on. The bedchamber woman brought in the chocolate, and gave it kneeling.” Lady Suffolk, formerly Mrs Howard, had been bedchamber woman, and of course had performed this menialism! “We shall see by-and-by,” adds the note, “that, the lady of the bedchamber, though a countess, presented the basin for the Queen’s washing, on her knees.”

If such things were done, we must own that it wholly exceeds our comprehension how they could be exacted on the one side, or submitted to on the other. We are sure that there is not a scullion in England who would stoop to hold a basin for her mistress’s ablutions on her knees. Yet, however we may be surprised at the existence of such practices, it is impossible to feel the slightest sympathy for the persons whom their salaries tempt to the sufferance.

We have left ourselves but little room for the biography of Lord Hervey himself. He was born in 1696, the second son of the first Lord Bristol. He travelled; returned to solicit a commission; failed in his solicitation; became, of course, “a virtuous opponent of the court,” and attached himself to the Prince and Princess, who held a sort of Opposition court at Richmond. Hervey, young, handsome, and polished, became a general favourite. He won the most accomplished woman of her time; married; and, in 1723, became Lord Hervey by the death of his elder brother, a man of ability, but of habits remarkably profligate.

On the death of George I., Hervey changed his politics; abandoned Pulteney; leveed Walpole; obtained a pension of £1000 a-year; received another gilded fetter, in the office of vice-chamberlain, and became a courtier for life.

Whether to console himself for this showy slavery, or to indulge a natural taste for the sarcasm which is forbidden in the atmosphere of high life, he wrote the Memoirs, of which we have given a sketch. The prudence of his son, the third earl, kept them in secret. The marquis, nephew of that earl, probably regarding the time as past when they could provoke private resentment, has suffered them to emerge, and Mr Croker has edited them, for the benefit of the rising generation.

Whether the editor has done credit to himself or service to the public, by this employment of his hours of retirement, has been the subject of considerable question. That the volumes are amusing there can be no doubt; that they are flippant and frivolous there can be no question whatever; that they disclose conceptions of the interior of courts which may “make the rabble laugh and the judicious grieve,” that, though filtered through three generations of correctors, they yet remain miry enough still, requires no further proof than their perusal.

We say this in no favouritism for either the King or the Queen: the truth was probably told of both. Their foreign habits evidently clung to them; and the purer feelings of England, as evidently, had not the power to purify the practices of their foreign descent. But if Lord Hervey’s mind was exercised in giving the secret life of courts to the world, we think that a much more contemptuous subject for the pencil might be found, in the man who, earning his daily bread by his courtiership, pretended to independence of opinion; who, listening to every expression of royalty with a bow, and receiving every command with the submission of a slave, threw off the sycophant only to assume the satirist, and revenged his sense of servitude only by privately registering the errors of those, the dust of whose shoes he licked for twelve hours in every twenty-four.

But we must hope that the Memoirs of Lord Hervey will be the last with which the national curiosity is to be stimulated. We must have no further ill-natured overflowing on the absurdities of high life. If this fashion shall invade the shelves and scrinia of noble families, there is probably not a household of the higher ranks which may not furnish its tribute. We shall be overrun with feeble gossiping and obsolete scandal. No rational purpose can be held in view by indulging the posthumous malice of a discontented slave. No manly curiosity can be gratified by breaking up the tomb, showing us only the decay so long hidden by its marbles and escutcheons from the eye.—Requiescat.

THE GREAT TRAGEDIAN.

CHAPTER I.

Amidst a storm of applause the curtain fell. The applause continued, and the curtain rose once more; and the favourite actor, worn out with emotion and fatigue, reappeared to receive the homage which an enthusiastic multitude paid to his genius.

I saw a proud flush of triumph steal over his wan face, which lighted it for a moment with almost supernatural expression. As he passed behind the scenes, amidst the rustling dresses of the rouged and spangled crowd, I observed his face contracted by a pang, which struck me the more forcibly from its so quickly succeeding the look of triumph. He passed on to his room without uttering a word—there to disrobe himself of the kingly garments in which he had “strutted his brief hour on the stage;” and in a little while again passed me (as I was hammering out compliments, in voluble but questionable German, to the pretty little * * *) in his sober-suited black, and, stepping into his carriage, drove to the Behren Strasse.

I knew he was going there, as I had been earnestly pressed to meet him that very evening; so, collecting all my forces, I uttered the happiest thing my German would permit me, and accompanying it with my most killing glance, raised the tiny hand of * * * to my lips and withdrew, perfectly charmed with her, and perfectly satisfied with myself.

There was a brilliant circle that night at Madame Röckel’s. To use the received phrase, “all Berlin was there.” I found Herr Schoenlein, the great actor, surrounded by admirers, more profuse than delicate in their adulation. He was pale; looked wearied. He seemed to heed that admiration so little—and yet, in truth, he needed it so much! Not a muscle moved—not a smile answered their compliments; he received them as if he had been a statue which a senseless crowd adored. Yet, fulsome as the compliments were, they were never too fulsome for his greed. He had the fever-thirst of praise upon him now more than ever—now more than at any period of his long career, during which his heart had always throbbed at every sound of applause, did he crave more and more applause. That man, seemingly so indifferent, was sick at heart, and applause alone could cure him! Had he not applause enough? Did not all Germany acknowledge his greatness? Did not Berlin worship him? True; but that was not enough: he hungered for more.

I was taken up to him by Madame Röckel, and introduced as an “English admirer.” Now, for the first time, he manifested some pleasure. It was not assuredly what I said—(for although, of course, I am always “mistaken for a German,” so pure is my accent, so correct my diction!)—it was the fact of my being a foreigner—an Englishman—which made my praise so acceptable. I was a countryman of Shakspeare’s, and, of course, a discerning critic of Shakspearian acting. We rapidly passed over the commonplace bridges of conversation, and were soon engaged in a discussion respecting the stage.

With nervous energy, and a sort of feverish irritability, he questioned me about our great actors—our Young, Kean, Kemble, and Macready—which gave me an opportunity for displaying that nice critical discrimination which my friends are kind enough to believe I possess—with what reason it is not for me to say.

When I told him that, on the whole, I was more gratified with the performances of Shakspeare in Germany, he turned upon me with sudden quickness and asked—

“In what towns?”

“At Berlin and Dresden,” I answered.

“You have seen Franz, then?”

“I have.”

His lip quivered. I saw that I had made a mistake. I am not generally an ass—nay, I am believed to possess some little tact; but what demon could have possessed me to talk of an actor to an actor?

“Do you think Franz greater than any of your English actors?” he asked, fretfully.

“Why, I cannot say that exactly. But I was amazingly struck with his performance. My observation, however, principally applied to the general ‘getting-up.’”

“But Franz—Franz. I wish to hear your opinion of him.”

“He is young,” I replied; “has a fine figure, a noble voice, a grand carriage, and, although new to the stage, and consequently deficient in some technical matters, yet he has that undefinable something which men call genius.”

“Hm!” was the significant answer.

I then saw whither my stupidity had led me. This, however, I will say for myself, if ever I do get into a dilemma, I have generally readiness of mind enough to extricate myself. I do not say this out of conceit, for I am not at all conceited—I merely mention it as a fact. This is how I turned my blunder to account.

“Although,” said I, “he has not your mastery, yet he reminded me a great deal of you. I cannot pay him a higher compliment.”

To my surprise he did not see the flattery of this, but moved to another part of the room; and I did not speak with him again till supper.

This little incident excited my attention. I puzzled my brain for an explanation of the riddle which his conduct presented, and spoke to several of my friends about it, who could only tell me that Schoenlein was jealous of this new actor Franz.

Did you ever sup in Berlin, reader? If not, let me inform you that supper there is a most substantial affair. I had not read Miss Bremer’s novels when first I went there; so, not being prepared for the infinite amount of eating and drinking which is transacted in the north, I confess my astonishment was a little mingled with disgust to find a supper begin with white-beer soup, (capital soup, by the way,) followed by various kinds of fish, amongst them, of course, that eternal hideous carp—roast veal, poultry, pastry, and dessert. To see the worthy Berliners sup, you would fancy they had not dined, and to see them dine next day, you would fancy they had not supped, and breakfasted twice.

Eating is an art. It is also—and this fact we are prone to overlook—a habit. As a habit it may be enlarged to an indefinite extent; and lisping fraüleins have demonstrated the capacity of the human stomach to be such as would make our beauties stare.

It must not be supposed that I am a coxcomb, since nothing can be farther from the truth; nor must I be held to share with Lord Byron his horror at seeing women eat. In fact I like to see the darlings enjoy themselves: but—and I care not who knows it—to see German women eat, is more than I can patiently endure.

Let me cease this digression to remark that, except myself, the great tragedian was the only person at table who was not voracious—and that because he was unhappy. While knives and forks were playing with reckless energy he talked to me, but there was a coldness and constraint in his manner which plainly told me that my praises of Franz had deeply mortified him.

Poor Schoenlein! Unhappy he came to Madame Röckel’s; for, amidst the storm of applause which saluted him at the theatre, he heard the applause which was saluting his rival at Dresden; and he had left the theatre for a friendly circle of admirers only to hear his rival praised by an Englishman. All the applause of all Berlin weighed as nothing against one compliment paid to Franz!

It was nearly twelve, and the company had gradually departed. I was left alone with Madame Röckel; and, as usual, I stayed half-an-hour later than the others, to have a quiet chat with her. I wanted to ask her for an explanation of Schoenlein’s conduct. Much as I had seen of the vanity of actors—well as I knew their petty jealousy of each other—I was not prepared for what I had seen that night.

Madame Röckel had resumed her knitting—the never-failing accompaniment of a German lady—and I drew a chair close to the sofa, and told her what had passed.

“His story is a strange one,” she said; “and to understand him you must know it.”

“Can you not tell it me?”

“Willingly. Schoenlein is a man well born and well bred, who feels his profession is a disgrace.”

“A disgrace!”

“Very absurd, is it not? but that is his feeling. At the same time, just as the opium-eater, knowing the degradation of his vice, cannot resist its fascination—so this actor, with an intense feeling of what he regards as the sinfulness of the stage, cannot resist its fascination.”

“You astonish me!”

“He is an austere man—what you English would call a puritan—who looks upon the stage as the theatre of vice, and yet cannot quit it because it is the theatre of his triumphs!”

“But how came he to be an actor!”

“Why, thrown upon the stage when the stage seemed the only means of livelihood open to him—forced on it by necessity, success has chained him there. I have heard him say that every time he performs it is with the conviction that he is performing for the last time. But the fascination still continues—his heart is still greedy of applause—his mind still eager for its accustomed emotions. He goes on the stage sad, struggling, and repentant; to leave it with throbbing pulses and a wild-beating heart. He accepts no engagement, he only plays by the night. He has from time to time made vigorous efforts to quit the stage, but at the end of a fortnight he invariably returns. He once set out for Italy, thinking that if away from Germany he should be able to wean himself from the theatre; but he got no farther than Vienna, and there played for twenty nights.”

“But don’t you think there must be a great deal of humbug in all this?”

“Not a bit.”

“Do you really believe in his scruples?”

“I know him too well to doubt them. There are many men quite as inconsistent. He deludes himself with all sorts of sophistry. He persuades himself that he acts only to realise an independence for his son, and to secure his own old age. But the truth is, he acts because he has an irresistible impulse to act. It is a sort of intellectual dram-drinking which he cannot forego.”

“To be sure, men are strange bundles of contradictions; and I suppose one must give Schoenlein credit for being sincere.”

“He is his own dupe, for to no one but very intimate friends has he ever disclosed his real opinions.”

“Then his life must be a constant struggle?”

“It is. This it is which has made him prematurely old: the struggle of his conscience with his passions. But this it is also which gives such touching pathos to his acting—which makes his voice so mournful that it vibrates through your whole being. As the poet’s sufferings are sublimed into song, and become the delight of mankind, so from the ground of this tragedian’s despair springs the well of his inspiration, which makes him truly great.”

We were both silent for a few moments.

“I have said enough,” added Madame Röckel, “to explain how such a man must necessarily be, above all others, envious—how the success of another must be torture to him. Nothing but intense vanity could keep him on the stage. Hitherto he has really had no rival—he has stood alone; other tragedians have not been named beside him. But now, within the last few weeks, there has arisen this young Franz, who has only played at Leipsic and Dresden, yet whose fame has spread all over Germany.”

“But I have seen Franz, and I assure you he is not so great an actor as Schoenlein. To be sure, he has youth on his side.”

“It is not his success alone which is so exasperating; it is because the critics, as usual, will do nothing but compare the young Franz with the old Schoenlein; while the public, with its natural inconstancy, begins to discover that Schoenlein is no longer young. It is a sad thing,” she pursued, with a faint smile, “for those who have reigned supreme over audiences to feel their dynasty is drawing to a close—sad for those who have swayed all hearts, to feel that another is now to usurp their place. We women know what it is, in a slight degree, when we grow old. Do we ever grow old, and know it? When our glass still tells us we are young, that the bloom is still upon our cheeks, the lustre in our eyes, the witchery in our smiles, now as of yore—and yet what the glass tells us, what our feelings confirm, we do not see mirrored in the admiration of those around us! We also know what it is when we see our former adorers pass to newer beauties, and we perhaps overhear such a phrase spoken of us as, ‘Yes, she has been handsome!’ But even we cannot know the actor’s triumph or the actor’s humiliation. To feel that our presence is the signal for applause, that every word we utter is listened to with eager interest, that every part we play is an image which we engrave upon the minds of thousands, there to abide as a thing of beauty and of wonder—this is beyond us.”

“But, my dear Madame Röckel, I see no diminution of admiration for Schoenlein in Berlin. Surely no audience can be more enthusiastic. Why should he fear a rival?”

“You might as well ask a beauty,” she replied, “why she is jealous of a woman less pretty than herself. The why is not to be explained by logic, for envy does not calculate—it feels.”

“Yet, when Franz comes to Berlin, which will be next month, there will then be no possible doubt as to which is the finer actor.”

“Perhaps not. But the public will nevertheless applaud Franz; and however slightly they do so, to the envious ears of Schoenlein it will sound like thunder.”

The clock striking twelve warned me to depart, for in Berlin they keep early hours; and I went away thinking of what I had just heard, and feeling no small contempt for Schoenlein’s preposterous jealousy: “What a contemptible feeling is envy!—as if only one person in the world had a right to admiration!”

At that moment I stepped into a droschke, and was driving to my rooms, when I passed that miserable puppy Fürstenberg, whom, I am sorry to say, little * * * admires so much; though, for the life of me, I never could see wherefore. Yet this uncouth German, aping the dandy, usurps all her conversation, even when I am by!

It is not that I am jealous, for that is not my character; but I cannot bear to see so charming a girl so miserably deceived in any one as she is in Fürstenberg!

CHAPTER II.

Schoenlein did not play for a fortnight, and, as the time of Franz’s engagement was drawing near, I imagined he was sulking. I communicated my suspicions to Madame Röckel.

“I would wager fifty thalers,” she replied, “that he has gone to Dresden to see his dreaded rival, and judge for himself.”

It was as Madame Röckel said: goaded by irresistible jealousy, Schoenlein had set off for Dresden to see his rival play.

Arrived there, he was three days before he could summon resolution to enter the theatre. Franz’s name met him every where. At the table-d’hôte he heard nothing but praises of Franz: in the newspapers he read nothing but invidious comparisons between Franz and himself, in which the palm was awarded to his rival. “Franz,” it was said, “had all the energy of Schoenlein, with youth, and grace, and beauty in his favour. The same power of distinct conception and unexaggerated execution, without Schoenlein’s tendency to conventional ‘points.’” Strangers asked him if he had seen Franz. The very waiters at the hotel recommended him to go and see Franz!

Schoenlein never hated his profession so much as at that moment. Yet, such was his exasperation, that he was constantly tempted to appear on the stage at Dresden, and crush his rival by acting in the same theatre with him—constantly tempted to show the fickle public the genius of the actor they were fast forgetting.

It was the fourth day of his presence at Dresden. Hamlet was to be performed that evening, and Schoenlein had resolved to be there. As the hour drew near, he was seated at a table on that beautiful terrace, which no one who has visited Dresden can ever forget, and which the Hahn-Hahn has so graphically set before us in her Faustine. He was smoking a meditative cigar, gazing abstractedly at the promenaders, who, in their gay dresses, passed to and fro in light happy talk, while the sounds of a good orchestra in the Café came mellowed by the distance, and lent another charm to the exhilarating scene. His thoughts were not at all in harmony with that happy scene—they were fixed mournfully on his own condition. He felt the sadness of a fallen favourite.

There he sat, and saw the sun go down over the antique bridge—saw its last rays shimmering on the placid bosom of the Elbe, which winds its undulating course beneath the terrace—saw the groups of promenaders gradually disappear, and the tables all deserted. The calls for ices, for cigars, for “light,” were becoming rarer and rarer. The music had ceased—night had shut in. Still he sat there in the same mournful mood, tempted to go to the theatre, so close at hand, but repelled by the idea of hearing Franz applauded.

At the conclusion of the third act, several playgoers reappeared upon the terrace, to cool themselves in the evening air, and to take an ice. Their conversation, of course, turned but upon one man, and that man was Franz. They spoke of his Hamlet as the finest part he had yet played.

Three men seated themselves at Schoenlein’s table. In the midst of their enthusiastic criticism one of them remarked—

“Well, Franz is certainly very fine; but it is absurd to compare him with Schoenlein.”

“I think him better,” said another.

“Nonsense!—you would not say so if you could see them together. You will find that in a little while the public will come round to my opinion. Let them once get over the novelty, and they will judge correctly.”

A thrill ran through the actor’s frame as he heard this. He called the waiter; paid; rose; departed. In another instant he was in the parterre of the theatre, feverishly impatient for the curtain to rise.

The brief scene between the King and Queen, which opens the fourth act, seemed to that impatient man as if it never would end; and when Rosenkranz was heard within calling, “Hamlet, Lord Hamlet!” the perspiration burst from every pore, and he trembled like a leaf as Hamlet appeared, uttering the “Soft—what news? Who calls on Hamlet?”

Schoenlein heard no more. The tones of that voice raised a mist before his brain—stung and perplexed him with rage and astonishment. He heard nothing, saw nothing—his brain was in a whirl.

The Hamlet before him—Franz, the dreaded rival—was his son!

CHAPTER III.

It is necessary here to take a retrospective glance into Schoenlein’s history, that we may understand the horror which possessed him at the discovery of his son upon the stage.

We may readily conceive how his dislike to his profession made him very sedulous of keeping his child from all contact with it, lest its fascination should mislead him also. He had never permitted him to see a play. He brought him up strictly, religiously, austerely. He had no friends among actors: acting was never spoken of in his presence. Yet, by an inconsistency easily enough explained, the works most constantly read and talked about by him were those of Shakspeare, Molière, Göthe, and Schiller. These were his household gods. Young Franz was early initiated into their beauties, and would declaim, (in private,) with great gusto, all the long speeches.

Franz was sent to the university of Leipsic, where it was his father’s fond hope he would distinguish himself as a student of theology. For the first year he was assiduous enough; but theology grew inexpressibly wearisome, while poetry became irresistibly alluring to him. Göthe’s Wilhelm Meister fell into his hands, and was read with rapture. He fell in love with the actor’s life, and felt secret yearnings to quit the university, and throw himself upon the world in quest of adventure—especially in quest of a Marianne, a Philina, and a Mignon! He had not as yet dared to disobey his father’s strict commands—he had never ventured inside a theatre; but he had imbibed the dangerous poison—he had learned to look upon an actor’s life as a life of poetry. The seed was sown!

About this time my cousin William went to the Leipsic university, and became the fellow-student and companion of Franz. From him I learned most of these details. William was by no means a model of select virtue—in fact, was what, in the jargon of the day, is called “rather a fast man;” and he led Franz into many a debauch which would have driven Schoenlein wild, had he known it; but he could not persuade him to go to the theatre.

Franz was ready enough at a duel, and had spoiled the beauty of some half-dozen faces by the dexterous sword-cut which draws a line over the nose, and lays open the cheek. He was ready enough, too, with his beer—few youths of his age had more promising talents that way: and as to patriotic songs, energetically demanding of the universe where the German’s fatherland might be, or the probability of tyrants long crushing free hearts beneath their heels, together with frantic calls upon the sword, responded to by the clatter of beer-jugs—in these Franz was distinguished.

At last he did brush away his scruples, and accompanied William to the theatre. They played Schiller’s Don Carlos. Conceive his rapture at this first taste of the long-coveted forbidden fruit! He thought the Marquis of Posa a demigod. But words cannot express his adoration of the Princess Eboli, that night played by Madame Clara Kritisch. She was to him the “vision of loveliness and light,” which an actress always is to an impassioned youth, the first time he sees one. Her large voluptuous eyes, her open brow, her delicate nostrils, her full and not ungraceful figure, together with the dazzling beauty of her (theatrical) complexion, made a powerful impression on him. Her acting seemed to him the acting of an angel.

He left the theatre madly in love with her.

We all know what it is to be in love with an actress. We have all of us, in the halcyon days of boyhood, offered up the incense of our young hearts to some painted, plain, conventional, and perfectly stupid actress, round whose head we have thrown the halo and the splendour of our imaginations. We have had our Juliets, our Desdemonas, our Imogens, our Rosalinds, our Violas, our Cordelias, who, though in the flesh-and-blood reality they were good, honest, middle-aged women, mothers of families or disreputable demireps, to us were impersonations of the ideal—fairy visions, to whom we have written verses, whose portraits have hung over our beds!

Therefore, having known a touch of this “exquisite fooling,” we can sympathise with Franz. Never having seen an actress before, any hag painted for the heroine of the night would have charmed him. But Clara was by no means a hag: in fact, his passion was excusable, for on the stage she was charming.

Franz went again and again, only to return home more in love than before. He fancied she had remarked him in the pit; he fancied the smile on her ruddy lips was a smile of encouragement addressed to him. He wrote her a burning love-letter, which she quietly burned. He waited impatiently for an answer, and went to the theatre expecting to read it in her looks. He could read nothing there but her loveliness.

He wrote again; he wrote daily. He sent her quires of verses, and reams of “transcripts of his heart,” in the form of letters. He lived a blissful life of intense emotion. Fatherland was forgotten; the sword was no longer called upon; all tyrants were merged in the cruel one whom he adored.

At length he gained admittance behind the scenes; nay, more—he was introduced to Clara.

Alas! the shock his sense of loveliness received, when he beheld before him the fat, rouged, spangled woman, whom he had regarded as the incarnation of beauty! Her complexion—was this its red and white? were its roses and lilies gathered by the hare’s foot and the powder-puff?

He could not speak; the springs of his eloquence were frozen; the delicate compliments he had so laboriously prepared, faded away in an unmeaning stammer. The first illusion of his life was gone.

Perhaps there is nothing more striking to a young man than his first experience of the stage behind the scenes. That which, seen from the boxes, looks health and beauty, behind the scenes is weariness and paint; that which in the house is poetic, behind the scenes is horrible mechanism. What scene-painting is when looked at closely, that are actresses seen in the green-room.

Franz was staggered, but not cured. He could not divest his heart of her image, and began to see her again as he had always seen her. Growing accustomed to the reality, he again beheld it in its ideal light; and as on the stage Clara was always enchanting, she carried with her some of the enchantment when she left it. Poor fellow! how patiently he stood there, hungering for the merest word—the simplest look! He saw others—a privileged few—speaking to her boldly; jesting with her; admiring her; giving their opinions respecting her costume, as if she were an ordinary woman, while he could only stammer out some meaningless remark. What would he have given to feel himself at ease with her, to be familiar, so that he might be seen to advantage!

At last he thought of a plan for making himself better known to her. He wrote a play, in which the heroine was destined for her; and as hers was the only character in the piece which was effective, she pronounced it the finest thing which had been written since Schiller. Franz was in ecstasies. She read the play herself to the manager, and exerted all her eloquence in its behalf. But the manager saw well enough her motive,—knew that she was so delighted with the play merely because her part was the important one, and declined to produce it. The play gained its author’s end however. It had established him among Clara’s friends. She began to notice his love for her, began to recognise its seriousness. She knew how to distinguish between the real homage of a heart, and the lip-homage which others offered her.

There is something inexpressibly charming in knowing yourself possessed of a heart’s first love; and women—especially those who have passed the first flush of youth—are more gratified by the love of a boy, than by that of twenty men. A boy’s love has something in it so intense, so absorbing, so self-forgetting! It is love, and love only, unmixed with any thoughts of responsibilities; looking forward to no future, reflected by no past. There is a bloom on first love. Its very awkwardness is better than grace; its silence or imperfect stammerings more eloquent than eloquence; there is a mute appeal in its eyes, which is worth all the protestations in the world.

Clara, who had been accustomed to the admiration of roués, felt the exquisite charm of this boy’s love. In a few weeks he became her acknowledged lover; and excited no little envy among the habitués of the theatre, who could not for the life of them comprehend “what the devil she could see in that bumpkin.”

But if boys love intensely, they love like tyrants, and Clara was made a slave. Jealous of every one who approached her, he forced her to give up all her friends; she gave way to every caprice; she began to idolise him.

This connexion with an actress, as may easily be foreseen, led to Franz’s adopting the profession of the stage. Clara taught him in a few months that which ordinary actors take years to acquire; but this was owing to his hereditary dramatic talent more than to her instruction. His appearance on the stage, which would, he knew, profoundly hurt his father, was not the mere theatrical ambition which possesses most young men: it was stern necessity; it was the only profession open to him, for he had married Clara!

Yes! he, the boy of one-and-twenty, had married a woman of five-and-thirty! It was a mad act—the recklessness or delirium of a boy: but it was an act which has too many precedents for us to wonder at it. He had by this act separated himself, he feared, from his father for ever. His only hope of pardon was, as he fondly thought, dramatic success. Could his father but see him successfully following in his footsteps, he would surely forgive him. It was a proud moment—that boy’s triumphant debut; proud because he had succeeded, proud because his pardon was purchased—as he thought!

Franz had only played a few weeks, and Germany was ringing with his praises. So great was his success, that when a few critics and actors whose judgments were all traditional, objected that he could not be a good actor because he had not gradually worked his way upwards, they were speedily silenced by the incontestible fact that he was a great actor. A brilliant engagement had been offered him at Berlin; and he was about to appear on the same stage with his father, before that father had the faintest suspicion of his son’s ever having entered a theatre.

CHAPTER IV.

The curtain fell. Franz had reappeared to receive the enthusiastic homage of the audience, and was now in his room undressing, when the door opened, and his father stood before him.

Instead of rushing into his arms, Franz stood confused, blushing, trembling. The haggard sternness of his father’s face told but too plainly with what feelings he was regarded.

It was a moment of cruel silence.

The position was humiliating. With his clothes scattered about the room; with the paint still unwashed from his face; with his room in disorder;—swords, playbills, theatrical dresses, a wig, a rouge-pot, and washing-stand, lying about; himself in the undignified attitude of drawing on his stockings;—all combined to present the miserable and prosaic side of his profession to the angry glance of an incensed parent.

“So!” said the old man, “these are your theological studies! This is the end of all my care! you have disobeyed me. You have destroyed all my hopes, and gone upon the stage, for which you well know my detestation. I find you thus!”

Franz could make no answer.

“While I fondly believed you still at the university, pursuing an honourable career—a career useful to mankind and honourable to yourself—you were like a runaway apprentice taking to this odious life.”

“But, sir,—I have succeeded!”

“So much the worse!”

“Is not that my excuse?”

“No; it is your condemnation.”

“Surely, father, it proves that I have chosen right. It proves I have a vocation for the stage?”

“It only proves your disobedience. Vocation, indeed! Any man has a vocation for the stage: any man who has brains, and is not physically too weak to utter the thoughts of an author. Vocation! You might as well tell me you had a vocation for the highway—and if you had robbed a man, by placing a pistol to his head, and bidding him stand and deliver, that your success was your excuse!

“Is it not enough,” pursued Schoenlein, after a pause, “that there should be one actor in the family: one whose necessities have driven him on the stage, and who, once there, is forced to remain there?”

“But I, for my part, see nothing reprehensible in the life of an actor.”

“I do.”

Franz saw there was no appeal from such a decision, so he dressed himself in silence.

He was hurt, angry. He expected that his father would have been delighted with his performance, would have rejoiced in his success. To be treated like a schoolboy, to hear such tones and see such looks, irritated him.

“Come with me to my hotel,” said Schoenlein, as Franz completed his dressing.

They had not taken many steps before a stout middle-aged woman, enveloped in a fur cloak, said to Franz:

“Lieber Franz, the carriage is waiting.”

Schoenlein did not hear the whispered reply, but strode hastily onwards: his son followed.

“Who was that,” he inquired, as they came out into the street, “who called you Lieber Franz?”

“Oh! that—an actress—one of our company—Madame Kritisch.”

“Hm!” growled the old man; but he did not speak again till they reached the hotel. Arrived there, they went up into his room.

“Franz, my dear boy,” said Schoenlein, with great tenderness, “you must promise me to quit this life, and I will forget that you have ever disobeyed me. Let us look on it as a boyish freak, now over.”

Franz was silent.

“It is your father who speaks. Remember he is your best friend; and he earnestly implores you to quit a career which even success can only make a gilded disgrace. Will you promise me this?”

He felt very uncomfortable, and knew not what answer to make.

“You are young,” pursued his father; “young and hopeful. You look as yet only to the bright side of life, and see only the pleasures of the stage. You think it glorious to be applauded, to have your name in the mouths of men, your portrait in shop windows. In a little while all this applause will pall upon your ear; all these portraits will look like so many signs of your disgrace, and caricatures of yourself. The charm will pass away, and you will feel yourself to be a mountebank, painted to amuse a gaping crowd! Then the wear and tear of the profession, its thousand petty irritations and miserable anxieties, will be as stings of wretchedness, and you will curse the day you first trod upon a stage.

“Look at me!” he said, suddenly pausing in the angry walk which he was taking up and down the room. “Have I not been successful? have I not been flattered, envied? have I not known what it is to be a great tragedian, to dictate terms to managers, to sway audiences? Have I not known all this? And yet, since you can remember me, have you ever seen me happy? Is not my life an example? Does not my whole life cry out to you, Beware! Will you not profit by the bitter lessons of my experience?”

“But, my dear father, you forget one thing: you have always looked upon the profession with disgust. I do not.”

“You will learn to do so.”

“I cannot believe it. You are the only actor in Germany who thinks so. Besides, I have, as it seems to me, a real vocation.—You may sneer, but a vocation is necessary in this as in all other professions. It is quite clear that I have none for theology. I must get my bread somehow.”

“Your bread? Franz, listen to me. So fixed is my opinion, that if you will obey me, from this time forward you shall have the whole of my earnings. I have already saved enough to satisfy my own humble wants. I will devote every shilling to furthering and maintaining you in any profession you choose to select. You shall not say that necessity made you—as it has made me—an actor.”

“I cannot accept such a sacrifice.”

“It is none. I would sacrifice every thing rather than see you on the stage! Besides, in another year or two you may make a rich marriage. I have already agreed with our old friend Schmidt, that you should be united to his daughter Bertha, and her dowry will be very large.”

A deep, deep blush overspread Franz’s face, which was succeeded by a deathlike paleness, as his father mentioned marriage.

“How can I ever break my marriage to him!” was his mental exclamation.

“Will you promise me?”

“I cannot. Believe me, it distresses me thus to disobey you, but I cannot quit the stage.”

“I have failed to convince you then? You misapprehend my motives. You think, perhaps”—and here an affected laugh of irony gave tenfold force to the words—“that I am jealous of you?”

“Oh, father!” exclaimed Franz.

But his father’s words and tone had, as in a flash of light, suddenly revealed the real feeling in his heart: he was jealous, and his son perceived it.

Do not, however, suppose that the old man was aware of this feeling; he would have shuddered at the accusation. Blinding himself with all sorts of sophistications, he attributed his horror at Franz’s adoption of the stage to his very sincere disgust to that profession; and because he really did in his own person feel an actor’s life was disgraceful, even sinful, he fancied his objection to Franz’s being an actor was wholly derived from that feeling. But in the depths of his heart he was horribly jealous. He had learned to hate Franz as a rival, before he knew him to be his son. Critics had maddened him by their comparisons. Franz had been pointed out as the actor who was to eclipse him. And now that he found Franz was his son, instead of rejoicing in his success, instead of feeling proud that at any rate his rival was his son, and that the genius which dethroned him was derived from himself—instead of the consolation which another father would have received, he was assailed by the bitterest thoughts at the idea of his son being an actor! He was incensed at such disobedience, at such violation of all his wishes; and attributed to his anger all he really felt of jealousy.

There is something so painful in the idea of a father being jealous of his son, that many will be tempted to pronounce it impossible. Rare it fortunately is, but not impossible. Who has not known women jealous of their daughters: women preserving their beauty, and followed by homage, till their girls are old enough to dispute and bear away the palm from them? If this is not uncommon—and more than one instance must occur within every reader’s experience—what is to prevent the same principle applying in a man’s case? You have only to imagine the vanity pampered by flattery into an unhealthy condition, and then bring in a rival—no matter whom—and the thing is done. Either the father’s vanity will be caressed by the reflection of the child’s success, (and this, happily, is the commoner case,) or it will be irritated at the child’s interference with its claims.

In Schoenlein’s case must be added the strange but intense dislike with which he regarded the profession of an actor. Had there been no rivalry in the case, had Franz been only a tolerable actor, he would still have been excessively irritated. But for his son to be an actor, and for the public to prefer him as an actor to his father—this was agonising!

He grew eloquent in his exhortations. Finding it was in vain to make Franz share his religious opinions, he endeavoured to dissuade him by painting all the dangers of the profession—its pangs, its weariness, its disappointments—painted the disagreeable ordeal he himself had been forced to undergo; and speaking, as he thought, to accomplish his son’s welfare, he was eloquent.

This much is to be said for fathers who object to their sons following their own careers: the struggles by which they have won their way, the sorrows which have been forced upon them, the dangers they have escaped—these are all so vividly present to their minds, that they believe them inseparable from the career. Who shall say that another will escape these perils? All the delight, all the rapture of hope and of success are forgotten, or else weigh but as a feather in the scale against these perils. A father says:—

“It is true I escaped; but I was fortunate. Besides, I had genius,—I had rectitude,—I had strength of will. My poor boy, (and fathers are apt to look with a sort of compassion on their children: is it because the children have, from infancy upwards, looked to them for pity and protection?)—my poor boy will not be able to buffet with the world as I did! He will be led away by temptations; he will succumb beneath adversity!”

In proportion to the precariousness of the profession is the reluctance of the parent. Poets never wish their sons to be poets; certainly not to trust to poetry for their livelihood. Nor do artists desire their sons to be artists. Actors almost universally shudder at the idea of their children becoming actors.

So that Schoenlein’s remonstrances would have been vehement, even had he not been tormented with jealousy. But, from the moment Franz perceived the real state of his father’s mind, all compunction vanished. No arguments could have made him quit the stage; but now he felt his father’s arguments to be insults.

“I hope you do not misunderstand me,” said the old man. “You must know me well enough to believe that no one would more rejoice in your success—that to no one should I be so proud to transmit my laurel crown, if it were not lined with iron, which brands the forehead with disgrace. I am growing old, and am soon about to leave the stage for ever: to whom could I so fitly leave the inheritance of my renown, did I not perceive that it would entail lasting misery upon him, as it has entailed it upon me? No, no, you must relinquish this boyish notion,—you shall marry Bertha Schmidt, and quit the stage for ever.”

“Oh, do not ask it!”

“I do more than ask it—I command!”

“Do not—dear father—do not force me to disobey you.”

“You—you will not leave the stage?”

“I—I cannot! It would be hypocrisy in me to pretend it. I have a passion for the stage; and whether that passion lead me to happiness or to ruin, I must gratify it.”

“And think you Bertha will marry an actor?”

“Perhaps not.”

“Are you indifferent to that?”

“Why—the truth is—I cannot marry her.”

“You cannot? You shall!”

“I love another!”

“You love another!” angrily exclaimed his father; and then adding, with a sneer—

“Some actress, I presume!”

Franz coloured.

“It is so,” said his father. “Old Clara Kritisch, I shouldn’t wonder!”

A deeper blush overspread Franz’s face, and a look of anger shot from his eyes, as his father contemptuously let fall those words.

Franz loved his wife; but he knew the disparity between them. She was not old to him, for he loved her,—was happy with her; but although to him she was as young as a bride, he knew what others said of her—what others thought of her. For himself he felt that

“Age could not wither, nor custom stale

Her infinite variety;”

yet he trembled at his father’s knowing she was his wife.

Schoenlein, who had observed the blush on Franz’s countenance, walked up to him and, placing one hand upon his shoulder, said—

“Franz, Franz, beware! You are on the edge of an abyss: the worst temptations of our miserable profession beset you. Beware of that artful old woman:—do not frown, she is artful,—I have heard of her! She has ruined more young men than any woman now upon the stage. She has ensnared you;—do not attempt to deny it,—I see it in your countenance. She has flattered and cajoled you. She has lured you with languishing looks and sweet low words. You are already her dupe;—beware lest you become her victim!”

“I cannot,” said Franz, rising wrathfully, “I must not, I will not, hear this language of her.”

“You must and shall hear it. Why should I hesitate to utter the contempt I feel for that refuse of a hundred libertines!”

Franz was purple with suppressed passion, and, with terrible calmness, said:—

“You are speaking, sir, of MY WIFE!”

Schoenlein’s lower jaw fell; his eyes became glazed, and, slowly sinking on the sofa, he waved his hand for his son to withdraw.

CHAPTER V.

The following week Schoenlein was again in Berlin, and playing three nights a-week—a thing quite unprecedented with him. All his repertory was brought forward. A sort of rage possessed him. He was tormented with the idea of producing such an effect upon the public as should perfectly eclipse his rival and son.

With true actor’s ingenuity in such matters, he gave the preference to his son’s favourite parts. He hoped, by repeatedly performing them ere Franz arrived, he should weary the public of those plays, and so prevent large audiences welcoming the new actor. He hoped, also, that by this means the public would better appreciate the difference between his finished style and the crude energy of his rival. The consequence of this procedure he expected to be,—small audiences and unfavourable criticisms. By these he hoped to disgust his son, and so wean him from the stage.

Unhappily, he was so goaded by the desire to produce a greater effect than heretofore, as to act much worse than heretofore. He overdid every thing. He was too violent; his contrasts were too marked; the elaboration was painful. People lamented his exaggeration, and began to whisper that his day was gone.

Franz appeared. Young, handsome, ambitious, full of hope and energy—around him the charm which always belongs to novelty, and within him the inappreciable wealth of genius—how could he fail to produce a deep impression? The calculation of his rival turned out a mistake: so far from the public keeping away because they had so recently seen the pieces performed, they flocked to the house because they wished to compare the two rivals in the same parts. As in the case of all well-known plays, the attraction was in the actor, not in the piece.

Berlin never witnessed such a debut. Franz was called sixteen times before the curtain to receive their boisterous homage. The whole town was in a state of excitement. Every body talked about him; every body compared him with Schoenlein—to the general disadvantage of the latter; and the secret of the relationship soon transpired, which led to endless discussion. The actors mostly stood by Schoenlein: they do not like new favourites. But the public, undisguisedly, unequivocally preferred Franz.

Exasperated by what he called the fickleness of the public, Schoenlein went to Dresden, there to eclipse the remembrance of his son. He played to crowded houses. But if at Berlin he overacted, at Dresden he “tore the passion to tatters.” Instead of crushing Franz’s reputation he nearly ruined his own. One paper had the malice to recommend him to retire from the stage.

He did retire; but not till after a fearful struggle with himself, and many a bitter reflection on the world’s ingratitude, and the worthlessness of his efforts. He was deeply hurt. He secluded himself from every one. In the practices of devotion, and in brooding solitude, he endeavoured to forget the world and its frivolities. He tried to find occupation in study, and solace in religion. But to the one he did not bring a studious mind; to the other he did not bring a religious heart. Lacerated with envy and humiliation, his soul found no comfort in books. He could not forget the past; he could not shut the world from his heart. The solemn organ strains, which stirred his soul when in church, recalled to him the stage; still more so did the inflections of the preacher’s voice recall it to him; he could not refrain from criticising the preacher’s declamation.

He ceased to go to church, and tried the efficacy of lonely prayer. In vain! The stage was for ever present before his mind. He tried to renounce the world, but the world held possession of his heart. His renunciation was not prompted by weariness, but by rage: the world weighed not too heavily and sorely upon his spirit, making him weary, making him yearn “for the wings of the dove, to flee away and be at rest;” on the contrary, he was only angry at his unjust appreciation. His retreat was not misanthropy but sulking. He could not forget his defeat.

Months passed away in this unavailing struggle.

Suddenly he reappeared upon the stage. His reappearance created intense interest, and the theatre trembled with applause. The public was so glad to see its old favourite again! Schoenlein’s heart bounded, as of old, responsive to that thunder of applause; but the joy was transient: his pride was soon once more to be laid low. That very public, which had welcomed him so enthusiastically, grew indifferent by the end of the week. In truth his acting had lost its former grandeur. Flashes of the old genius there still were, from time to time, but they only served to make more obvious the indifference of the whole performance. People shook their heads, and said, “He was certainly grown too old for the stage.”

He never reappeared.

Meanwhile Franz continued his triumphant career. He played at almost every town in Germany; and even the old men thought him superior to the actors of “their day.” The greatest triumph an actor can achieve is to make the “laudator temporis acti” forget for a moment the illusions of his youth, and confess that, even seen through the magnifying mist which envelops and aggrandises the past, this living actor is as great as those who are no more.

But Franz, amidst his brilliant success, was far from happy. The stage was the scene of his triumphs, but home was the scene of his despair. He was in a false, a very false position. Petted and idolised by the loveliest women in Germany, he had learned to look upon his wife as what she was—a woman past her prime, faded in beauty, insignificant in mind. He began to blush for her! This is perhaps the cruellest torture a husband can know, because it affects his self-love as keenly as his love. It is a torture which generally results from such ill-assorted unions. Slowly had the conviction dawned upon him—but it had come. He struggled against it, but it would not be set aside; it pressed on and on, till at last it fairly gained admittance into his mind, and made him wretched.

For observe, it was not her faded beauty which made him blush—it was not that she was so much older—it was because this faded insignificant woman was fretful, jealous, ungenerous, and unprincipled. The perception of these faults of disposition opened his eyes to the perception of her faults of person; they raised the question in his mind—who is this whose jealousy irritates, whose fretfulness distresses me? He began to scrutinise her, and the scales fell from his eyes!

“My dear Clara,” he said to her one day, “what in heaven’s name has changed you so? You used to be cheerful—now you are unbearably peevish.”

“And what has changed you so, Franz?”

“I am not aware of any change!”

“No!” she said ironically.

“In what, pray?”

“You used to be fond and attentive, and now you are cold and neglectful.”

“If I am so, whose fault is it?”

“Lieschen Flemming’s. Oh, yes! pretend astonishment; but I see clearly enough. Your tenderness on the stage with her is so well acted, because you have so often rehearsed it in private.”

“Clara! Clara! this jealousy is insupportable!”

“Yes, yes—that is the answer I always receive; but it is no answer to my accusation.”

“Why, Lieschen is betrothed to Fechter!”

“What matters that? Are you not married to me—and does that interfere with your making love to her?”

“This is perfectly ridiculous! Last week you were jealous of Rosa Behr, because she played Juliet; now it is Lieschen Flemming, because she plays Gretchen. I presume every actress whom I have to make love to on the stage will come under your suspicions?”

“Every one to whom I see you making evident love. I know I am old. I have lost the charm I once had in your eyes.”

“This is not the way to regain it,” he said, as he put on his hat and angrily left the room.

He that day confessed to himself that she was old, that she had lost the charm which once had captivated him! But Franz was a man of honour; and although he found himself in this false position, he resolved to support his lot with courage. He was wedded to a woman too old for him, unsuited to him; but the wedding had been his act and desire. It had been the crown upon his hopes. He had loved her—been happy with her. He could not forget that. And although divorces are easily obtained in Germany, he could not bring himself to abandon her, to separate from her, now she was past her prime. He had offered her an independence if she wished to part from him; but she did not wish to part—she still clung to the idea of regaining his lost affection—and made home miserable as a means of regaining it!

For five years did Franz drag about with him this load of wretchedness.

To render his situation still more pitiable, he became conscious that he loved another. Madame Röckel’s youngest daughter—a sweet innocent girl of eighteen—had conceived a passion for the young tragedian, which her artless nature had but ill concealed. Franz read it in her eyes, in her tones, in her confusion; and reading it, he also read in his own heart that her passion was returned.

He left Berlin in two days after the discovery, with bitter curses on his youthful error, which had yoked him to a woman he could no longer love, and which had shut him for ever from the love of another.

Then, indeed, the thought of a divorce rose constantly before him; but he wrestled with the temptation, and subdued it. He resolved to bear his fate. His only hope was that death might interpose to set him free!

CHAPTER VI.

If in these brief sentences I have indicated the misery of Franz’s condition—the depth of the shadows which accompanied the lustre of his success—if I have truly presented the main outlines of his domestic history, the reader will imagine Franz’s feelings when a hand as friendly as that of death did interfere to set him free.

Clara ran away with the low comedian of the troop!

She had worn away in tears and fretfulness all the affection she once had felt for Franz, and having inspired a sort of passion in the breast of this comedian, lent a willing ear to his romantic proposal of an elopement. To a woman of her age an elopement was irresistible!

She fled, and left Franz at liberty.

The very day on which Franz received this intelligence he had to perform in Kotzebue’s Menschenhass und Reue (our “Stranger.”) He went to the theatre extremely agitated. Great as was his delight at being released from his wife, and released by no act of his own—he could not think without a shudder upon the probable fate which awaited her; and a remembrance of his former love and happiness with her returned to make him sad.

It happened that old Schoenlein had that night been seized with a sudden impulse to see his son act, and had gone privately into the parterre. It was the first time he saw his son acting—for on that Dresden night he saw nothing—a mist was before his eyes. He was now sufficiently calm to be critical.

Franz played the wronged husband with such intense feeling, such depth of passion, such thrilling intonation of voice, that the old man shared the rapture of the audience, and wept tears of joy and of pride as he confessed that his son was really a great actor.

The curtain had no sooner descended than Schoenlein, hurrying out of the house, went round to the stage-door, knocked at his son’s dressing-room, and in another instant had fallen on his shoulders, sobbing—“My boy! my dear, dear Franz! you have conquered me!”

“My dear father!” exclaimed Franz, pressing him convulsively to his heart.

“Franz, I retract all that I have said. I forgive you. You have a real vocation for the stage!”

This happy reconciliation was soon followed by the betrothal of Franz Schoenlein to Matilda Röckel; and the old man had not only the delight of seeing his son wedded to a woman worthy of him, but also to hear him announce his intention of retiring for ever from the stage. He had realised an independence, and the stage was connected with too many disagreeable associations for him not to quit it on this opening of a new era in his life.

THE MOSCOW RETREAT.

“It is scarcely necessary,” says Mr Rellstab, in the preface to an early edition of his romance of “1812,” “for the author to confess how largely he has availed himself of Ségur’s narrative of the Russian campaign. It will be evident to all readers that he has followed, at times almost word for word, the descriptions of that skilful historian.” Without taxing Mr Rellstab with exceeding the romance-writer’s legitimate privilege in thus largely helping himself from the pages of General Count Ségur, we may congratulate him on having had as a guide, in the historical portions of his book, so admirable a work as the Histoire de Napoleon et de la Grande Armée. As interesting as any romance, it at the same time conveys the conviction that the author has determined to merit the character of historian, and to avoid that of the retailer of campaigning gossip and anecdotes. Indeed one often feels disappointed and almost vexed at the extreme brevity with which the Count refers to all matters not strictly essential to the history of the grand army and great chief whose history, during the brief existence of the former and the first reverses of the latter, he undertakes to portray. He dismisses in three lines many an incident of strange romance or thrilling horror, whose details one would gladly see extended over as many pages. Mr Rellstab has cleverly availed himself of this dignified and military conciseness, improving upon hints, and filling up blanks. With a few bold dashes of his graphic pen, Count Ségur furnishes the rough sketch; this his German follower seizes, adds figures, tints, and names, and expands it into a picture. The account in “1812” of the retreat from Moscow to Wilna is, in fact, a poetical paraphrase of that given in Ségur’s history; and this paraphrase Mr Rellstab, seduced by the excellence of his text, allows somewhat to impede the progress of his plot; or rather it protracts the book after the plot has, in all essential respects, been wound up. Nevertheless, as we have already said, this paraphrase, which may be considered in some degree supplementary or parenthetical, is the best part of the work; and Mr Rellstab displays great power of pen, and artistical skill, in his handling and adaptation of the materials furnished by his French leader. The last strictly original chapters of the romance are those composing the eleventh book, commencing immediately after Ludwig is rescued by hostile peasants from death at the hands of his own friends. Here for a while we lose sight of the fugitive army, and abide amongst the Russians.

The chief ground of apprehension with the Russian nobles, upon Napoleon’s invasion of their country, was lest he should proclaim the emancipation of the serfs, and thus enlist in his behalf millions of oppressed peasants. The plan occurred, and was suggested to the French Emperor, but various considerations deterred him from attempting its realisation. He apprehended a frightful amount of license and excess amongst a barbarous people thus suddenly released from bondage. Tremendous destruction of property, and frightful massacres of the higher classes, were the almost certain results. He might succeed in raising the storm, but he could never hope to guide it. Moreover, although the child of revolution, his sympathies were not with the masses. The Russian landholders, however, did not reckon upon his forbearance, and took every means in their power to counteract any propagandist projects he might have in view. “In the first place,” says Ségur, “they worked upon the minds of their unfortunate serfs, brutalised by every kind of servitude. Their priests, in whom they are accustomed to confide, misled them by deceitful discourse, persuading these peasants that we were legions of demons, commanded by Antichrist,—infernal spirits, whose aspect excited horror, and whose contact polluted. Our prisoners perceived that when they had used a dish or vessel, their captors would not touch it again, but kept it for the most unclean animals. As we advanced into the country, however, it was natural that the clumsy fables of the priests should lose credit with their dupes. But, on our approach, the nobles recede with their serfs into the interior of the land, as from the advance of some mighty contagion. Riches, habitations, all that could delay them or serve us, are sacrificed. They place hunger, fire, the desert, between us and them; for it is as much against their serfs as against Napoleon that this great resolution is executed. It is not a mere war of kings, but a war of classes and of parties, a religious war, a national war, every kind of war united in one.” Stimulated to hatred of the intruding foreigners by those they most feared and respected—by their owners, namely, and their priests—the peasant-slaves of Russia perpetrated frightful cruelties upon those unfortunate Frenchmen who fell into their hands; cruelties admitted and abundantly illustrated by Mr Rellstab, although his predilections are upon the whole rather Russian than French. It is only justice to say, however, that in all the historical portions of his romance he displays great impartiality, and puts himself above national antipathies, taking a cosmopolitan view of the causes, conduct, and progress of the great struggle.

Led away by his captors to a bivouac of armed peasants in the glades of a vast forest, Ludwig at first almost regrets having escaped the volley of the French firing-party. A colossal Russian stretches out his hand to appropriate his prisoner’s foraging-cap, and, upon the imprudent resistance of the latter, raises a club to dash out his brains. Ludwig deems himself no better than a dead man, when suddenly a woman’s scream is heard, and a figure clad in costly furs rescues him from the fierce savage. A veil is thrown back, and Ludwig beholds Bianca, who possesses a castle in the neighbourhood, the same which the Polish lancers had surprised upon her wedding-night. It is not quite clear what has brought her into the forest among beastly Cossacks and bloodthirsty peasants, unless it were to meet Ludwig. The sights she there meets are not all of the most agreeable kind. Whilst the enraptured Ludwig kneels before her, kissing her hand and weeping, a horseman, whose noble steed and rich dress bespeaks the man of rank, dashes into the circle, and sternly inquires the reason of this strange scene between the lady and the captive dragoon. It is Count Dolgorow, who interrupts Bianca’s explanation by suddenly springing from his horse, and seizing the scoundrel Beaucaire, his former secretary, whom his quick eye has distinguished in the group of prisoners. By a strange fatality, his betrayer and his rescuer are together delivered into his hands. He gratifies revenge before showing gratitude, and has the traitor precipitated into one of the huge bivouac fires that blaze around. Before this we have met with a French grenadier impaled alive in a wood, and with a party of Russians setting up their captives as targets. There is no scarcity of the horrible in Mr Rellstab’s pages, but without it the retreat from Moscow could not be faithfully described. After Beaucaire has been roasted, Bianca recovered from her swoon, and Ludwig presented to the Count—who admits, but with no very good grace, his claims to gratitude and consideration—the other prisoners are sorted. The able-bodied are sent to the Count’s hunting-seat, thence to be forwarded to the mines. To those unfit to work, Russia, says Dolgorow, can afford no other nourishment than two ounces of lead. One man only is put aside as too old for labour. This is St Luces, Beaucaire’s employer and Ludwig’s persecutor.

“St Luces, not having understood the Count’s words, fancied that, from his appearance and fine linen, and from his clothes (of which, however, he was by this time pretty well stripped,) his captors had discovered him to belong to the higher classes. The pallid horror which had spread over his features since the terrible fate of Beaucaire, was replaced by a faint gleam of hope. He ventured to address the Count in French.

“‘I trust, sir,’ he said, ‘I shall be treated in conformity with those laws of war which all civilised nations respect. I am not a military man, but belong to the civil service; my rank—’

“‘You are a Frenchman,’ sternly interrupted Dolgorow—‘one of those vampires who have sucked the blood and marrow out of half the nations of Europe; more contemptible and odious than the soldier, for he, at least, fights with fair and open weapons.’

“‘They would willingly,’ persisted St Luces, again trembling with apprehension, ‘exchange me against Russian prisoners!’

“‘Prisoners! what prisoners have you?’ cried Dolgorow with bitter scorn. ‘Thousands, certainly are set down in your bulletins, but where can you show them? You do wrong to remind me of that. Think you we know not how your ruthless assassin bands have treated the few who fell into their hands? Think you we have not found them, lying with shattered skulls upon the roads in rear of your flying columns? Did we not meet with them shut up in churches, barns, and stables, dead in the pangs of famine? Away with ye! We shall find enough to exchange, when exchange we will.’”[9]

Discoveries and surprises now tread rapidly on each other’s heels. A German in the service of Count Dolgorow recognises Ludwig as the son, and St Luces as the murderer of his former master; whereupon Ludwig generously intercedes for the Frenchman’s life, but is sternly repulsed by the Count, and St Luces is forthwith shot. Then, upon their way to Bianca’s castle, Ludwig and his mistress stumble upon Bernard, lying senseless in the road. They pick him up and take him with them, in spite of danger from wolves and of the anger of Countess Dolgorow, impatient to proceed. At the castle Bernard and Bianca discover, by the somewhat hackneyed contrivance of identical rings, that they are brother and sister, and soon afterwards the Count becomes aware of the good understanding between them, and that Bianca knows she is not his daughter. These meetings and recognitions thwarting certain deep-laid plans, he resolves to forward Ludwig and Bernard to Siberia; but before he can do so, the two young men, with Bianca and Willhofen the German servant, make their escape by the aid of some French prisoners, and take the road to Smolensko, with the intention of joining the French army and seeking refuge in Germany.

Meanwhile Rasinski, with the shattered remnant of his gallant regiment, now reduced to a feeble squadron of sixty horses, forms part of the rear-guard under the hero Ney. We will give a specimen of Mr Rellstab’s adaptation of Ségur.

“‘Rasinski!’ suddenly exclaimed Jaromir, ‘do you see yonder on the rising ground?’

“‘Cossacks! And I wager my head they are not alone!’ replied Rasinski.

“Upon the heights appeared three horsemen, seemingly thrown forward to reconnoitre. They were soon remarked by all; and there occurred in the French ranks that restless stir and low murmur, betokening the expectation of an important event.

“‘Jump on your horse, Jaromir,’ said Rasinski, ‘and ride to the corner of the forest; thence you will see far over the country.’

“Jaromir, now the best mounted in the regiment, sped swiftly across the snow, in obedience to the order. But he returned even more rapidly, to announce that the entire heights were covered with Cossacks, and that infantry columns were debouching from the depths of the forest.

“Just then Colonel Regnard, who by the marshal’s order had also been out to reconnoitre, rode by. ‘This looks like work, Rasinski,’ he cried in passing; ‘the ball opens just like the day before yesterday. The wood is as full of Russians as an anthill of ants.’ The drums beat. The troops stood to their arms. The disorderly groups of weaponless stragglers and invalids formed themselves into a dense mass.

“‘For us the fight is a pleasure,’ exclaimed Rasinski; ‘but it is hard upon Boleslaw and the other wounded. We must do our best to shield them from harm. But who comes here?’

“A Russian officer was seen descending the hill, waving a white handkerchief.

“‘Useless trouble, sir,’ said Rasinski proudly to himself, as he distinguished the Russian’s object. ‘We shall not treat for peace so long as we can handle our arms.’

“The marshal was busy placing and ordering his troops. He galloped through the ranks, showing himself every where, directing and encouraging all. Rasinski sent an orderly to report to him the approach of a flag of truce. But before the message reached him, the Russian officer reached the outposts, and, on distinguishing the Polish uniform, summoned them in their own language to surrender to overpowering forces. Rasinski sprang forward like an incensed lion. ‘What!’ he shouted, ‘you would seduce our men, incite them to desert! That is not the duty of a flag of truce. You are my prisoner!’

“The alarmed officer would have turned his horse, but Rasinski already held the bridle, and his soldiers surrounded the Russian so quickly that resistance and flight were alike impossible.

“‘You will surely respect the sacred rights of a flag of truce!’ cried the Russian.

“‘You should have waited at proper distance, till you knew if it pleased us to receive you,’ replied Rasinski. ‘It is against all usage of war to approach an enemy’s army as you have done.’

“‘Take me to your commander,’ said the officer, ‘he will listen to my well-intended offers. The bravest must yield to impossibility. You have no alternative but capitulation.’

“‘We shall see that,’ answered Rasinski, well assured beforehand of the marshal’s decision. ‘Here comes our commander, Marshal Ney. That name may suffice to convince you that you will waste your words.’

“The marshal came; Rasinski rode to meet him and reported what had passed.

“‘You have done your duty as an officer and man of honour,’ replied Ney; ‘I should take shame to myself did I hesitate to confirm your words.’ And he rode forward and inquired the Russian’s pleasure.

“‘Marshal Kutusow sends me,’ began the officer. ‘He would not offend so renowned a warrior and general by asking him to lay down his arms, if any alternative remained open. Upon the surrounding heights stand eighty thousand men, and one hundred pieces of cannon. If you doubt my words, you are at liberty to send an officer, whom I will conduct through our ranks that he may count our strength.’

“‘I hope to get near enough to your army to count them myself,’ replied the marshal with flashing eyes. ‘Tell Prince Kutusow that Marshal Ney has never yet surrendered, and that the world’s history shall never record his having done so. Yonder is the goal which duty and honour assign me; I will break a road through your ranks, though your forests became armies.’

“‘They will do so,’ replied the Russian. The words had scarce left his lips, when the thunder of artillery echoed from the heights in front and on the left flank, and an iron hail crashed and rattled upon the icy surface of the plain.

“‘This is treachery!’ cried the marshal sternly, as he looked up and beheld the hills crowned on all sides with levelled guns, and dark masses of troops. ‘There is no parleying under fire! You are my prisoner!’

“The officer, confounded at being thus sacrificed by the imprudence or recklessness of his friends, gave up his sword.

“‘Take him to the rear!’ commanded the marshal. ‘General Ricard, forward! Attack the enemy with the bayonet. You shall have the honour of opening the road.’

“The general, at the head of fifteen hundred men, pressed resolutely forward.”

Everybody who has read Ségur, and those who have not had better begin immediately, knows how these fifteen hundred men were swept away by Kutusow’s artillery; how Ney in person headed the next charge; and how, after losing more than half his division, he retreated towards Smolensko, made a flank movement, again returned southwards, and at last struck the Dnieper, and crossed it with the remnant of his force, without a bridge, and on blocks of floating ice, to find, upon the further bank, Platoff and his Cossacks, with their Scythian tactics and sledge-mounted artillery, to which he had no cannon to oppose,—the six guns wherewith he had audaciously returned the fire of Kutusow’s tremendous batteries having been left, of course, on the north bank of the river. But, after braving and escaping from the whole Russian army, Ney was not to be intimidated by a horde of ill-disciplined savages; and he forced his way, fighting incessantly, to the neighbourhood of Orcha, where Eugene received him with open arms. There are only five short days’ marches from Smolensko to Orcha; but in that little section of the long and terrible retreat, Ney, whilst losing thousands of men daily, gathered enough laurels to shade the brows of half a dozen heroes. We do not envy the feelings of those, be they Russians, English, or of what country they may, who can read, without profound emotion and admiration, the history of Marshal Ney during the Russian campaign, and especially during its latter and most disastrous portion. When those who previously ranked as the bravest gave in—when pride and thirst for glory were obliterated by extremity of suffering, and by the instinct of self-preservation—when the soldier’s most powerful incentives, discipline, honour, and gain, were forgotten and lost sight of, and even the iron veterans of the Old Guard, no longer sustained by their Emperor’s presence, renounced the contest and lay down to die—when his fellow-marshals, with rare exceptions, showed weariness and discouragement, and even the stern Davoust complained that the limits of human suffering were exceeded,—where was Ney, what was his aspect, what his words and actions? In rear of the army, a musket in his hand, a smile of confidence on his lips, the fire of his great soul and of his own glory flashing from his eyes, he exposed his life each minute in the day, as freely as ever he had done when he had but life to lose, before his valour had given him riches and rank, family and fame. Surely, so long as valour is appreciated, the name of NEY will be borne in glorious remembrance. And surely those men who subsequently pronounced his sentence of death, must since have sometimes felt remorse at their share in the untimely fate of so great a warrior. “I have saved my eagles!” joyously exclaimed Napoleon, when he learned, at two leagues from Orcha, that Ney was safe, although he brought with him but the ghost of his fine division. “I would have given three hundred millions to avoid the loss of such a man.” Although Napoleon, in some things the most magnificent charlatan upon record, dealt largely in speeches of this sort, we may believe that in this instance the cry came from the heart. What would the Emperor have said, had he then been told that three years later, on the 7th December 1815, the anniversary of one of those days when Ney so bravely breasted the Muscovite torrent, an execution would take place in an alley of the Luxemburg gardens, and that there, by sentence of a French chamber and the bullets of French soldiers, a premature end would be put to the glorious career of him he had surnamed the Bravest of the Brave!

Previously to the junction of Ney and Eugene, Colonel Rasinski, whilst reconnoitring in the gray of the morning, falls in with a sledge containing three persons muffled in furs, whom he at first takes for Russians, but who prove to be Ludwig and his two companions. Upon the occasion of so happy a meeting, M. Rellstab is of course profuse in tears and embraces; Jaromir and Boleslaw are summoned to assist at the jubilee, and thenceforward the three Poles, the two Germans, Bianca, her waiting-maid Jeannette, and the faithful Willhofen, keep together as far as Wilna, save and except those amongst them whom death snatches by the way. The party is soon increased by an infant, the daughter of Colonel Regnard, and of a French actress, of which Bianca takes charge. Here again the author of “1812” has made good and effective use of an incident thus briefly recorded by Ségur.

“At the gates of the town (Smolensko) an infamous act struck all witnesses with a horror that still survives. A mother abandoned her son, a child of five years old; in spite of his cries and tears she repulsed him from her overloaded sledge, wildly exclaiming that ‘he had not seen France! he would not regret it! But as to her, she knew France! she must see her country again!’ Twice did Ney have the poor child replaced in its mother’s arms, thrice she threw it upon the frozen snow. But amongst a thousand instances of sublime and tender devotedness, this solitary crime was not left unpunished. This unnatural parent was herself abandoned upon the snow, whence her victim was raised and confided to another mother. At the Beresina, at Wilna, and Kowno, the orphan was seen, and he finally escaped all the horrors of the retreat.”

In the romance the child is first fostered by a wounded veteran, and a compassionate canteen woman, but is separated from them when traversing the Dnieper, and receives the tenderest care from Bianca. On the northern bank of the Beresina we find the principal personages of the tale assembled, at the moment when the Russian cannon pour their murderous contents into the dense mass of fugitives, and these, crowding to the bridge, fall by hundreds into the water. A round-shot suddenly shatters the front of the vehicle in which Bianca, her maid, and the child are seated. The scene that ensues is spiritedly and naturally told.

“The frightened horses reared furiously, and would have upset the carriage had not the pole and fore-axle been in splinters. Willhofen sprang forward to hold them; Ludwig and Bernard hurried to his assistance. With streaming hair, Jeannette had already leaped from the cart, and Bianca, unconscious of what she did, followed her example, still closely clasping the infant.

“‘Is it alive?’ cried a voice, and at the same moment she felt herself seized from behind. She turned, and Regnard stood before her, his right arm in a sling: he had just made his way through the crowd of carts. ‘Oh! I have you then at last,’ he tenderly exclaimed, kissing and caressing his child as she lay in the arms of Bianca, who, stunned with terror and the recent shock, scarce thought of wondering at his unexpected appearance.

“‘You here, colonel?’ cried Bernard. ‘How and whence came you?’

“‘From the fight up yonder,’ replied Regnard. ‘’Tis awful work; our fellows stand like the walls of Troy, but all must soon be overthrown, for the Russians bury us under their bullets.’

“‘Did you see Rasinski? Is he alive? And Boleslaw and Jaromir?’

“‘They fight like lions, like devils, those Poles; but it’s all in vain, we cannot hold out another hour. And this defile over the bridge looks about as tempting as the jaws of hell.’

“‘You are wounded, colonel?’

“‘My right arm shattered. My horse was knocked over by a shell; I dragged myself as far as Studianka to seek a doctor, and found ashes and corpses, no longer of use in the fight. I thought I would have a trial to cross the bridge. I saw these carriages from above; I knew you had driven up here yesterday. If I could only find you, I thought, and get a last look at my little daughter! Laugh at me, if you like, but the thought came like a whisper from heaven. ‘Perhaps it is the last wish you will see fulfilled,’ said I to myself. And as if some invisible guide had led me, I made my way to your very carriage, just as the twelve-pounder played you the trick. Only see now how hearty the child is; it grows like its mother! Ah! if I only had something for you, poor darling! Were we but in Paris, that I might give you a pocketful of bonbons!’

“And in fondling and chattering with the infant, he forgot both his crushed arm and the destruction that raged so actively around. The storm of shot had no terrors for him; twenty battles had accustomed him to it. But the sweet emotions of paternal love were new to him, and a secret voice seemed to warn him that he would not long enjoy them.

“Ludwig now came up and greeted the colonel. Bianca gave the child to Jeannette, for Regnard, with only one arm, could not hold it, and she felt that her strength was giving way amidst this complication of horrors. She leaned against the wheel of the carriage. Bernard observed her faltering, and encircling her tenderly with his arm, he kissed her pale cheek.

“‘See yonder woman,’ he said; ‘take pattern by her; see, dearest sister! how calm she is amidst the ravages of death.’

About twenty paces off, a tall female figure sat upon a horse, a child of three years old in her arms, and gazed steadily at the tumult. A black veil was twined round her head, but left her noble and striking countenance exposed. She could but just have arrived, otherwise her appearance was too remarkable not to have attracted attention, even in that hour of confusion when few thought of any thing but their danger.

“‘Calm?’ said Bianca, after a long look, ‘calm, say you? Petrified, you should say. See you not the tears that roll over her rigid countenance, and the despairing gaze she directs to heaven? Alas, poor woman!’

“‘She is the widow of Colonel Lavagnac,’ said Regnard; ‘her husband fell three weeks ago at Wiazma; the child in her lap is her daughter.’

“All eyes were fixed in pity on the mourning figure, when a cannon-ball boomed through the air, and struck her and her horse to the ground. A cry of horror escaped the bystanders. The unhappy woman had disappeared. One could not see her for the throng. Bernard, Ludwig, and Regnard forced a passage through the mob of men and horses, but with all their efforts their progress was slow. Bianca followed them, led partly by pity and partly by fear of separation from her protectors.

“Silent and uncomplaining, the lady sat upon the ensanguined snow, her tall, dignified form supported against an overturned cart, her child clasped in her arms. The shot had shattered both her feet, but her infant appeared unhurt, and anxiously clasped its mother’s neck with its little hands. None thought of succouring the poor creatures; all were too engrossed with their own selfish misery, and few vouchsafed her more than a passing glance as they struggled onwards. She would hardly have escaped being trampled under foot, had not her wounded horse, lashing out convulsively in the agonies of death, cleared a space around her. Whilst Bernard supported his trembling sister, Ludwig and Regnard attempted to climb over the cart which intervened between them and the wounded lady. But at that moment the noble sufferer took a strong hair-chain from her neck, twisted it, before any could stay her hand, around her infant’s throat, and with a sudden exertion of strength drew it tight. The little creature drooped its head and fell strangled on its mother’s knees. In a last frantic convulsion, the unhappy parent clasped her child to her bosom, gave an agonised sigh, a glance to heaven, and fell back, dead. At that moment Ludwig and Regnard reached her, but it was too late. Bianca hid her face in her brother’s bosom.”

A fragment of a shell knocks over the faithful Willhofen. The fire from the Russian batteries becomes more terrible than ever, the crowd more agitated and frantic.

“‘Let us keep together!’ cried Regnard—‘once separated, we shall never meet again.’ And he stretched out his hand to grasp that of Ludwig, when a ball passed between them, overthrowing the colonel.

“‘Regnard!’ cried Ludwig, springing to his assistance, ‘are you badly hit?’

“Bernard raised the wounded man by the shoulders, and bent over him.

“‘I have got my allowance,’ said Regnard, faintly. ‘Where is my little daughter?’

“Shuddering, but with resolute step, Bianca came forward, the child in her arms. She kneeled beside the dying soldier and held it out to him. Regnard looked mournfully at the little creature so soon to be an orphan.

“‘Farewell!’ he said, kissing it for the last time. ‘You have no longer a father—but a mother—has she not?’ added he, imploringly to Bianca. ‘Greetings to Rasinski, if he still lives to receive them. Long live the Emperor!’

“Upon this last exclamation, uttered in a hoarse soldier-like tone, the final breath of the dying man was expended. The next instant his soul had fled.”

From the heights of Studianka the beaten French now pour down, and Bianca loses her female attendant, who perishes miserably, crushed by a gun-carriage. It will be seen that there is a considerable accumulation of horrors at this part of the romance; but tender-hearted persons, whom narratives of human suffering too painfully affect, will naturally avoid a book founded on such a campaign as that of 1812. The passage of the Beresina has been too often described to be worth dwelling upon here; and the more so as Mr Rellstab very judiciously has not attempted to alter or improve upon the reality, of itself sufficiently extraordinary and harrowing. He makes Rasinski execute the famous feat of Jacqueminot, Oudinot’s aide-de-camp, who, after swimming the Beresina in spite of the piercing cold and of the floating blocks of ice that bruised and cut his horse’s chest and flanks, galloped after the stragglers from Tchaplitz’s retreating column, caught one, disarmed him, put him before him on his horse and swam back with him to Napoleon, who had expressed a wish for a prisoner from whom to get information.

Hopeless of crossing the crowded bridge, where a fearful struggle for precedence now goes on amongst the mob of desperate fugitives, Bianca and her two companions take their course up stream, still bearing with them Regnard’s orphan daughter, and hoping to find rest and shelter by passing themselves off as Russians. At last, seeing no signs of house or village, they sit down in despair upon the snow and await their fate; when, in accordance with Mr Rellstab’s practice of bringing about opportune meetings, Rasinski and his handful of lancers ride up to them, and after the due amount of kisses and tears, a Lithuanian peasant guides them to a ford, and they get through the river in safety. At Zembin they procure a small sledge, and Bernard and Ludwig urge Bianca to hurry forward to Wilna. Neither of them offer to accompany her, which they might with great propriety have done, seeing that they are dismounted and useless, but propose confiding her to a wounded dragoon, a proposal which she naturally enough declines, and declares she will stick to the ship—in other words to the regiment—and rough it with the rest. After which plucky decision there is no more talk of parting company till they reach Wilna. Before getting there, however, there is much to be gone through. For winter sets in, and the tortures of cutting cold are added to those previously endured, slaying the sick and wounded by hundreds of a night. Overpowered by the fatigues of the day, they lie down to sleep beside their watchfires, and in the morning are stiff and cold. The north-west wind suddenly surrounds the harassed Frenchmen with the terrible atmosphere of the north pole, the air is filled with an icy dust, lips and cheeks crack and blister, the eyes are inflamed by the glittering whiteness of the snow. The horses die from extreme cold, and it is just as well for their riders, who would otherwise be frozen in their saddles. Thus Rasinski and his comrades find themselves dismounted, and Bianca’s sledge becomes useless. They pursue their way on foot, amidst scenes of inconceivable suffering and woe. Few of those around them show fortitude in this extremity of misery. In some instances despair and madness lead to violence and shameful excesses. Bianca, whose courage rises with the necessity for exertion, is walking supported by Ludwig’s arm, and Bernard follows at a short distance, carrying the infant, who, unconscious of the danger, smiles cheerily in his face, when the following incident occurs.

“At this moment a hoarse firm voice was heard in rear of Bernard.

“‘Stop, dog!’ it exclaimed. ‘Your cloak, or I shoot you dead!’

“Bernard stopped and looked round. A soldier, scantily attired in wretched rags, his features distorted, his beard long and tangled, his face black with earth and smoke, his eyes, frightfully inflamed, rolling wildly in their orbits, stood before him and covered him with his musket.

“‘What would you, wretched man?’ cried Bernard, horror-struck and stepping backwards. The child screamed with terror, clasped its arms around him, and hid its little head in his breast.

“‘Your warm cloak, or I shoot you down!’ shouted the frantic soldier. ‘No more comrades here; I’ve as good a right to save myself as you.’

“Bernard saw himself almost alone with the assassin; although thousands were within hail, the bullet would be quicker than their aid, supposing even that one amongst them had sufficient pity for another’s peril to turn aside for a moment, and thus lengthen his journey and sufferings by a few painful paces. There was nothing for it but to yield to the menace and give up his warm wrapper, although he well knew that with it he gave up his life.

“‘You would murder a comrade to prolong your own life?’ said Bernard, in a tone of dignified determination; ‘be it so, but you will profit little by the deed. Your hour will overtake you the sooner.’

“‘Quick, death gripes me already!’ cried the madman, his musket still levelled and his bloodshot eyes wildly rolling.

“Bernard stooped to put down the child, which impeded him in pulling off his coat; as he did so, he heard a loud cry, and turning, he beheld Bianca, who threw herself weeping at the feet of the furious soldier.

“‘Take this gold, these jewels!’ she exclaimed; ‘this warm cloak is yours, but let my brother live!’ And, with the quickness of thought, she tore the rich chain from her neck and the furs from her shoulders, leaving her arms and delicate frame exposed with slight covering to the rigour of that horrible climate. The soldier gazed at her for a moment with fixed and straining eyes, then his arms slowly sank; letting the musket fall to the ground, he pressed both hands to his face, and broke out in loud weeping and whimpering. By this time Ludwig came up, and he and Bernard lifted up Bianca, who was still kneeling on the frozen ground, and extending her arms with the proffered gifts.

“‘Wild beast that I am!’ suddenly exclaimed the stranger; ‘no, I cannot survive this shame. Forgive me; you knew me once a better man, before suffering drove me mad! But no matter; I know my duty.’

“He stooped to pick up his musket. Bernard kept his eyes fixed upon him, and racked his memory for the features, which, wild and distorted though they now were, still seemed familiar to him.

“‘Where have I known you?’ he asked, as the man resumed his erect position.

“‘I don’t wonder you’ve forgotten me,’ was the gloomy reply; ‘I have forgotten myself. Alive, I am no longer worthy of the Order!’ cried he wildly, tearing from his rags the ribbon of the Legion of Honour and throwing it upon the snow. ‘I will try to earn it again, that you may lay it upon my body. I am my own judge, and I show no favour.’

“Setting the butt of his musket firmly on the earth, he pressed his breast against the muzzle and touched the trigger with his foot. The piece went off, and its unfortunate owner fell heavily to the ground.

“‘Gracious God!’ exclaimed Bianca, sinking senseless into Ludwig’s arms.

“Bernard was at the side of the fallen man, supporting his head. A last spark of life still remained. ‘If you get to France,’ gasped the suicide, ‘a word to my wife and children—Sergeant Ferrand—of Laon,’ and the spirit departed. As he closed his eyes, Bernard remembered him. It was the same Sergeant Ferrand whose humanity saved him and Ludwig from perishing during their imprisonment at Smolensko. Military honour was the condition of the veteran’s existence; he thought himself degraded beyond redemption by the murderous aggression to which misery, pain, and despair, had driven him; a woman had surpassed him in courage, and that was more than he could bear. A rigorous judge, he had pronounced his own doom, and executed it with his own hand.

“Deeply moved, Bernard knelt beside the body; he gathered up the scrap of tarnished ribbon which the departed soldier had prized above all earthly goods, and laid it upon the breast of the corpse.

“‘Who shall deprive you of it?’ he said. ‘May it adorn you beyond the grave, amidst the throng of the valiant who have preceded you!’

“And they continued their journey, for the times admitted not of delay.”

That night they have to fight for their quarters in the village of Malodeczno, and use their artillery for the last time, being compelled to abandon it for the want of horses. Boleslaw is killed in the action. Soon afterwards, the Emperor leaves the army, and his departure dispirits even those who admit its propriety. Things get worse and worse. Often, after a fatiguing day’s march, no shelter is obtainable, and Bianca and her tender charge are fain to brave the inclemency of the bivouac, whilst the men watch by turns to keep off wolves and marauders. One night, when performing this duty, Jaromir is startled by a loud laugh, sounding strangely horrible in that scene of misery and desolation.

“From out of the surrounding darkness a grim figure stalked into the circle of fire-light. It was a gigantic cuirassier, wrapped in a tattered cloak, a bloody cloth bound round his head beneath his helmet. In his hand he carried a young fir tree, as a staff to support his steps.

“‘Good evening,’ he said, in a hollow voice to Jaromir. ‘Good evening, comrade. You seem merry here.’

“‘What seek you?’ demanded Jaromir, amazed at this hideous apparition! ‘There is no place for you here. Begone!’

“The cuirassier stared at him with his hollow eyes, twisted his mouth into a frightful grin, and gnashed his teeth like some infuriated beast.

“‘Ha, ha, ha!’ he laughed, or rather yelled; ‘Sleep you then so sound, ye idlers?’ And as he spoke he stamped with his foot on a frozen corpse upon which he stood. ‘Awake, awake!’ he cried, ‘and come with me!’

“For a moment he stood as if listening to some distant sound, then tottered painfully forward to the fire.

“‘Back!’ cried Jaromir, ‘Back, or I shoot you on the spot!’ And he drew a pistol; but his hand, trembling with fever, had not strength to level it.

“The lunatic stared at him with stupified indifference, his sunken features varying in their expression from a ghastly smile to the deepest misery. Jaromir gazed at him in silent horror. The huge figure stretched its lean arms out from under the cloak, and made strange and unintelligible gestures.

“‘Ho! I am frozen!’ howled the human spectre at last, and shook himself. Then he clutched at the flames with his fingers, like an infant, and staggered nearer and nearer till he stood close to the circle of sleepers, far within which he extended his arms. For the first time he now seemed to feel the warmth of the fire. A low whining noise escaped him, then he suddenly exclaimed, in tones between laughing and crying, ‘To bed! to my warm bed!’ tossed his fir-tree staff far from him, stumbled forwards over the sleeping soldiers, and threw himself, in his raging madness, into the centre of the glowing pile.

“‘Help, help!’ cried Jaromir, his hair erect with horror, and seizing Rasinski, he shook him with all his remaining strength.

“‘What is it?’ cried Rasinski, raising himself.

“‘There, there!’ stammered his friend, pointing to the flames, in which the unhappy cuirassier lay writhing and bellowing with agony. Rather conjecturing than comprehending what had occurred, Rasinski started up to rescue the sufferer. But it was too late. The heat had already stifled him; he lay motionless, the flame licking greedily round his limbs, and a thick nauseous smoke ascending in clouds from his funeral faggots. Rasinski stepped shudderingly backward, and turned away his face to conceal his emotion; then he observed that all around him lay buried in a deathlike sleep. Not one had been aroused by the terrible catastrophe that had occurred in the midst of so many living men.”

After those long days of hunger and fatigue, the bonds of slumber were of iron strength, and difficult to loosen. And it was even more dangerous than difficult to rob the survivors of the Grand Army of that brief repose, often their sole solace and refreshment during the twenty-four hours. In his turn overtaken by delirium, Jaromir’s cries and complaints at last awoke the whole party round the fire. A low murmur arose amongst the soldiers, and rapidly increased. Soon they cast ominous and threatening glances at the young Pole, and at last their discontent found a voice.

“‘Who is the madman, and what ails him?’ savagely exclaimed a bearded grenadier. ‘He robs us of our precious sleep! Thrust him from the fire—let him freeze if he cannot be still!’

“‘Ay, thrust him out!’ was the universal cry; and several sprang to accomplish the barbarous deed. Bianca uttered a cry of terror; Ludwig caught her in his right arm, and with his left kept off the assailants. Rasinski, who at once saw the greatness of the peril, left Jaromir in Bernard’s care, and leaped with flashing eyes into the midst of the circle. Ever prompt and decided, he snatched a half consumed branch from the fire, waved it above his head, and shouted with that lion’s voice so often heard above the thunder of the battle, ‘Back, knaves! The first step forward costs one of you his life.’

“The angry soldiers hesitated and hung back, yielding to Rasinski’s moral ascendency as much as to his threat of punishment. But then the grenadier drew his sabre and furiously exclaimed:—

“‘What, dastards, are ye all afraid of one man? Forward! Down with the Polish dogs!’

“‘Down thyself, inhuman ruffian!’ thundered Rasinski, and sprang to meet his foe. Adroitly seizing the soldier by the wrist of his uplifted arm, so that he could not use his weapon, he struck him over the head with the burning branch so violently, that the charred wood shivered, and a cloud of sparks flew out. But the blow, heavy as it was, was deadened by the thick bearskin cap, and served only to convert the angry determination of the grenadier into foaming fury. Of herculean build, and at least half the head taller than his opponent, he let his sabre fall, and grappled Rasinski with the intention of throwing him into the flames. The struggle lasted but for a moment before Rasinski tottered and fell upon his knees. To all appearance his doom was sealed, the hero succumbed before the overpowering strength of the brute, when Ludwig flew to his assistance, dragged the soldier backwards, and fell with him to the ground. Rasinski picked up the sabre, with his left hand dashed the bearskin from the head of the fallen grenadier, and with the right dealt him a blow that clove his skull in twain. Then, erecting his princely form, he advanced, with the calm dignity that characterised him, into the midst of the astounded bystanders. ‘Throw the corpse into the snow,’ commanded he: ‘lie down again and sleep. It matters no more than if I knocked a wolf upon the head.’

“As if he had no longer occasion for it, he threw the sabre contemptuously from him. None dared to murmur, but two soldiers obediently raised the bloody corpse of the fallen man, carried it a few paces, and threw it upon the snow-covered ground.”

The following evening the little band of friends reached Wilna, but without Jaromir, who had expired on the road. Wilna, the first inhabited town the French army had seen since their entrance into Russia, had been looked forward to by the fugitives who escaped from the terrible passage of the Beresina, as a refuge and a resting-place. There they fondly expected shelter from the cold, food for the famishing, bandages and medicine for the wounded and the sick. But their arrival took the Lithuanian capital by surprise. The inhabitants were still without any certain accounts of the disasters of the French, when suddenly they beheld their streets invaded by forty thousand ragged wretches, in whom it was impossible to recognise the remains of those magnificent troops which had passed through with Napoleon in the previous month of July. The very impatience of the men to get into the comfortable quarters they had promised themselves (but which few of them found, for the inhabitants shut their doors, and the commissaries, although their stores were crammed with bread and meat, refused to serve out those much needed provisions without a host of formalities rendered impossible by the general disorganisation) was the destruction of thousands. They all rushed in at one entrance,—the narrow suburb became blocked up with men, horses, and vehicles, and numbers perished of cold and of suffocation. When the survivors got through, their despair was terrible on finding themselves every where repulsed, from hospital and barracks, from the provision-store and the private dwelling. The hospitals and barracks, where there were neither beds or straw, were converted into charnel-houses, heaped with human bodies. “At last,” says Ségur, “the exertions of certain chiefs, such as Eugene and Davoust, the pity of the Lithuanians and the avarice of the Jews, opened places of refuge. Then it was strange to behold the astonishment of these unfortunates on finding themselves at last in inhabited houses. What delicious food a loaf of bread appeared, what inexpressible pleasure did they find in eating it seated, and with what admiration were they struck by the sight of a single weak battalion, still armed and uniformly clothed. They seemed to return from the extremity of the world, so completely had the violence and duration of their sufferings detached them from all their former habits.”

Bianca, her brother and friends, skirt the town to avoid the throng, and get in by an unencumbered entrance. In the streets, however, Rasinski is separated from his three companions, who find shelter in the house of a former servant of Bianca, and there meet with Ludwig’s sister Marie, and the Countess Micielska, a widowed sister of Rasinski, whom we have not had occasion previously to mention, although she is a fine enthusiastic character, and plays no unimportant part in the earlier scenes of the book. On learning, by letters from their brothers, the burning of Moscow and probability of retreat, the two ladies braved the severity of a Lithuanian winter, and left Warsaw for Wilna, where their arrival coincides with that of Napoleon’s disordered cohorts. Their joy at meeting Ludwig and Bernard is greatly overcast by the loss of Jaromir and Boleslaw, and by the absence of Rasinski, whom the two young Germans vainly seek in the crowded town, until at last, overcome with weariness, they retire to rest, dissembling, for his sister’s sake, their uneasiness touching his fate. Scarcely in bed, however, they are aroused by Paul, their host, who calls their attention to groans and lamentations in the street without. Arming themselves, they hurry forth to investigate the cause.

“Paul, bearing a lantern, preceded them to the spot whence the piteous sounds proceeded. It was a narrow lane, running parallel to the city wall, and inhabited entirely by Jews. Just as they turned into it they were challenged by a manly and well-known voice in their rear. ‘Who goes there? What is this disturbance?’

“‘Rasinski!’ exclaimed Ludwig. Paul turned, and, as the light fell upon the face of the new comer, the features of the noble Pole were revealed to his friends.

“‘Rasinski! you here, and alive!’ cried Ludwig, throwing himself into the Count’s arms.”

Here follows, of course, more Rellstab, half a page of tender embraces and gratulations. Then, the groans and lamentations continuing, the friends again move forward.

“The lane was narrow and crooked, so that they could not see far before them. On passing an abrupt bend, they distinguished several figures, which fled noiselessly before them, like night-birds frightened by the sudden light, keeping close in the shadow of the wall.

“‘Who goes there?’ cried Rasinski in Russian. ‘Stand, or I fire!’

“But the shadows flew onwards, grazing the wall, and gliding over the snow. Rasinski rushed after them, stumbled over an object in his path, fell, and, in his fall, his pistol went off. Ludwig and Bernard, close at his heels, would have stopped to help him up—

“‘Forward, forward!’ he cried: ‘follow and catch them.’

“They hurried on, but only one figure was now visible. They called to him to stop; he heeded them not. A shot fired by Bernard missed its mark, but the whistle of the bullet discomposed the fugitive, who, in stooping his head, slipped and fell. Ludwig was upon him in an instant, inquiring who he was, and why he fled. The stranger, who wore a sort of long black caftan, replied in piteous and terrified tones.

“‘God of my fathers!’ he cried: ‘have compassion, gracious sir! Why persecute the poor Jew, who does harm to no one?’

“‘Paul, a light!’ cried Bernard, who just then came up. ‘Let us see who it is that is in such haste to crave mercy. His conscience seems none of the best.’

“Paul lifted the lantern, casting the light full on the Jew’s visage.

“‘The devil!’ cried Bernard. ‘I should know that face. Where have I seen the accursed mask? To be sure, those red-bearded Lithuanians are all as like each other as bullets. But I greatly err, Jew, or you are the spy with whom we have an account to settle, that has stood over for the last five months.’

“A shout from Rasinski interrupted the speaker.

“‘Hither, friends!’ he cried; ‘your help here!’ The three hastily obeyed the summons, dragging the Jew with them in spite of his struggles and cries.

“‘Here has been the most villanous crime the world ever witnessed!’ exclaimed Rasinski, pale with horror and indignation, as his friends joined him. ‘Behold our comrades, driven out naked in this deadly cold, plundered, strangled, hurled from the windows! Inhuman monster!’ he cried in a terrible voice to the trembling Jew, ‘if you have shared in this work, I will have you torn by dogs. See! here they lie. Horrible, horrible!’

“In a nook formed by the recession of a house from the line of street, lay eight human bodies, half naked, some with only a shirt or a few miserable rags to cover them. Over one of these unfortunates, who was still alive, Rasinski had thrown his furred cloak, to protect him from the piercing cold. Ludwig and Bernard shuddered at this lamentable spectacle.

“‘God of Abraham!’ cried the Jew, ‘to thee I lift up my right hand, and swear that I am innocent of this deed. May I be accursed with my children and my grandchildren if I know aught of it! May the ravens pick out my eyes, and the flesh of my hand wither, if I speak not the truth.’

“‘He was amongst the murderers,’ the wounded man faintly gasped out: ‘he was about to cut my throat, when the fall from the window did not kill me, and because I called for help. Only your arrival saved me.’

“‘Fiend, inhuman fiend! the unspeakable misery that might draw tears from a demon could not touch you.’ Thus spoke Rasinski between his set teeth, and raised his sabre to split the skull of the Jew. In convulsions of terror the miserable wretch embraced his knees, and prayed for pity.

“‘God—Jehovah—mercy, noble Count, mercy!’

“Ludwig held back Rasinski’s arm. ‘Sully not your good blade with the monster’s blood,’ he said, earnestly and solemnly. ‘Leave him to the justice of an omnipotent Avenger.’

“‘You are right,’ replied Rasinski, quickly resuming his habitual composure. ‘Think you I have forgotten?’ said he, with an expression of the deepest loathing, to the Jew, who still clasped his feet in agony of fear. ‘I know you well for the base and double traitor who once already escaped well-merited death. Nothing could save you now, were it not that even a villain like yourself may be made useful. Begone, and warn your fellow-assassins, that if to-morrow I find a single dead body, a single mark of violence in one of their houses, I lay the whole quarter in ashes,—men, women, and habitations; and I myself will be the first to hurl the sucking-babe into the devouring flames! Away, dog! Yet will I mark thee, that thou mayest not escape.’

“And raising his foot, he stamped thrice upon the face of the prostrate Jew, who bellowed like a wild beast, whilst his blood reddened the snow. Nevertheless, the murderer managed to scramble to his feet, and reach an adjacent house door, where he stood knocking and calling upon his fellow Israelites for help and compassion.”

Count Ségur tells us, that the Jews enticed the unfortunate wounded into their houses to despoil them, and afterwards, in sight of the Russians, threw them, naked and dying, out of the doors and windows, leaving them to perish of cold.

We approach the final chapters of Mr Rellstab’s romance. Bianca, whose quality of a Russian noble suffices to protect her and her attendants, remains with Ludwig, Marie, and her brother at Wilna, after the French leave it. They then post to Germany without further adventure. Their last sight of Rasinski is when, mounted on a Cossack horse, by the side of Marshal Ney, he heads a scanty but determined band, covering the retreat of the French. He subsequently falls at Leipzig, fighting with his wonted gallantry under the orders of his countryman Poniatowski.

From the glimpses of the plot and numerous extracts we have given, the reader will have small difficulty in forming his own estimate of the faults and merits of “1812.” We have already commented upon both: upon the spirit and power often conspicuous in the dialogue and description, as well as upon the excess of forced coincidences, and upon the occasional long-windedness and super-sentimentality. However the interest may here and there, by reason of prolixity, be found to flag, the book, when once begun, is not likely to be laid aside unfinished. This alone is saying much for a historical romance in four very long volumes. There are not many German writers, in that style, of whose works we would venture the like prediction. And just at present Mr Rellstab need not apprehend fresh rivals. The year 1848 is unfavourable to German literature. The country is far too busy revolutionising to care about belles-lettres. Fictions are ousted by realities, novels by newspapers, trim octavos by uncouth twopenny pamphlets, polemical and satirical, attacking and defending, supporting and tearing to pieces, the numerous schemes afoot for the regeneration of Fatherland. In due time it will be seen whether the literature of the country is to share the general improvement so sanguinely anticipated from the recent changes in a system, under which Germany undeniably has long enjoyed a very large share of tranquillity and happiness.

WHAT WOULD REVOLUTIONISING GERMANY BE AT?

Many a confirmed wanderer upon Continental highways and byways may have been long since wearied by the conceitedly-vulgar airs in which old Father Rhine has indulged himself in latter years, and heartily tired of his bald vineyards, his melodramatic old ruins, and the make-believe majesty of his so-called mountains. But still there remained a sort of spurious halo about his very name; some kindly reminiscence of the time when, as an enthusiastic youth just escaped from the supposed commonplace of England, one gazed for the first time upon this famed show-stream of the Continent, and wondered, and admired, and poetised in spite of one’s-self, may have cast a charm of early memory upon its overrated allurements; and, of a surety, there must have been brought a comfortable glow of pleasure to the heart of any one, except that nearly-exploded animal, the exclusive exquisite, either male or female, in witnessing the happy gaping faces of the touristic hordes, who paddled up and down the well-known old banks—a feeling of ease, comfort, and even homeishness, in the modern luxuries of the hundred palace-hotels of the Rhenish towns and villages, in the contented aspect of the thriving landlord, welcoming the guests who brought him wealth, and in the ready alertness of the active and obsequious waiters. Well, Germany has taken into its head to follow in the lead which distracted France gave, when it madly beckoned with frantic finger to all the Continent to follow in its wild dance. Germany has caught the St Vitus of revolution, and danced off, if not as distractedly, at all events in less connected step, and less defined figure, than its neighbour: and in this revolutionary frenzy Germany has assumed so ungenial an aspect—a manner so doubtful, so unpromising, so uncertain, as regards the next step it may be inclined to take in the jerkings of its abrupt and unregulated dance—that the gentle tourist-seekers of ease and pleasure have turned away in disgust from this heavy Meg Merrilees, who has forgotten even her scraps of song, and her long-pretended spirit of romance, and declined to visit her until she shall have somewhat recovered from her drunken fit of revolution, and become more decently behaved. The Rhine, then, has lost the last charm of foreign bustle and movement, with which he decked his old head, as with a crown of wild flowers, not unbecoming his gray hairs. He looks sad, sober, discontented, disappointed, mourning his lost old joys, and his lost glories, of which young Germany, in its revolutionary excitement, has despoiled him. His hotels are empty; landlords, too, have a forlorn air, and take to rattling their last groschen in their pockets; and unhappy waiters get fat upon their inactivity, but, at the same time, pale with ill-humour at their diminished trinkgelder, and apprehension of losing their places altogether. Travellers’ visits have grown, like those of angels, “few and far between;” and as angels do the poor scanty tourists appear to be regarded—as munificent beings, in fact, from whom too much cannot be demanded and expected; for the Rhenish hotel-keepers, in pursuance of the system adopted by Parisian shopkeepers, in these days of revolutionary scarcity and destitution, seem determined to make those unhappy beings, who fall into their clutches, redeem the debt they appear to consider due to them from those absent tourists, who have not come to enjoy all the splendours prepared for them. Since Germany, with its newborn cry for imperial unity, has appeared inclined to turn back again, in new revolutionary spirit, to old feudal times, the Rhenish hotel-keepers seem to think that they ought to appear in the characters of the old robber-knights. This consideration, perfectly personal to a poor tourist, who has lately paid his löse-geld at many a modern robber’s stronghold on the Rhine, brings him round, however, to the question which he has been putting to himself, at every step he has been taking in Germany—“What would revolutionising Germany be at?”

What would revolutionising Germany be at? It is a question easily put, but very difficult to answer. The old joke, lately “freshed-up” to be applied to the French—namely, that “they don’t know what they want, and won’t be easy till they get it,” may, with still deeper truth, be applied to the Germans. In spite of much inquiring conversation with all men of all ranks, and in all positions of life, it has been quite impossible for an unimaginative English understanding to discover exactly, in the midst of all the vague rhapsody, florid discourse, and poetical politics with which it has been assailed, “what they want.” To judge by the fermenting spirit every where prevalent, the bombastic and unpractical dreams—for plans they are not—formed as regards the future, it would be difficult also not to suppose that “they won’t be easy till they get it.”

What would revolutionising Germany be at? In spite of all one sees and hears, or rather does not hear, it is impossible not to recur to the question again and again; for, after all, in Germany we are among thinking men, and, children as they may be in political life, thinking men they are; and, surely, thinking men must have some definite end and aim to which their thoughts, their hopes, their aspirations, and their efforts are directed. All the Utopian schemes, all the unpractical theories of all parties, who put themselves forward in the revolutionary movement, be their tendencies monarchic, constitutional, or republican, aspire, then, to the setting up of the ill-defined idol of modern German political fancies—“German unity”—“One great and powerful united Germany”—“One great united German Empire”—or whatever name, designation, or varied shade of name the idol, whose pedestal is “Union,” may bear. This was the great fancied panacea for all evils, for which men clamoured, when, in imitation of that distracted city of Paris—so worthy of imitation, forsooth!—they got up revolutions, and tried their hands at building barricades. This has been, in truth, long since the watchword of the German student, when, in the recesses of his beer-cellar at the university, he collected a set of fellow fancied enthusiasts around the beer-jugs, imagined this species of club to be a wonderful conspiracy, because he designated it by the forbidden name of “Burschenschaft,” and deemed himself a notable and formidable conspirator, because he drank off his krug of beer to the cry of “Perish all Princes—es lebe hoch das Deutsche Vaterland!” The princes, by the way, were highly complimentary to such conspirators, in considering them dangerous, and forbidding the existence of the Burschenschaften, which were pretty safety-valves enough to let off the exuberance of studentic steam. Whether the cry for a “United Germany” first proceeded again from the mouths of these fantastic enthusiasts, who, when they found out, to their surprise, that the parts they had been acting in their mimic dramas of the beer-cellars might be acted to the life and under the open sky of heaven, became in most parts of Germany the leaders of the mobs, or the heroes of the barricades, matters but little; nothing is more like a flock of sheep—although the term of “a pack of wolves” might often appear more applicable—than the general herd of men in moments of revolutionary excitement; whatever conclusion, however far-fetched and fantastic, any old revolutionary bell-wether may jump at, the flock is sure to follow and jump after him. It matters, then, but little how or by whom the cry of “United Germany” was first raised—the whole revolutionary flock immediately set up the same “baa!” and in each convulsion of each German State, great or small, in which a revolution may be said to have taken place, among the grievances which mobs, deputations, or delegates laid before German princes, as necessary to be forthwith amended and rectified, was the immediate and indispensable want of a “United Germany.” A somewhat more decided and definite step towards the possible realisation of this tolerably vague and indefinite desideratum, in the amendment of people’s wrongs, was taken by the call for the meeting of one united German parliament, for the purpose of considering and regulating the affairs of all Germany in this revolutionary crisis; but more especially of effecting that union in one empire, under one head, or under one form of government, which appeared to be the great desire of those who now put themselves forward as the expression of the will of all the German nation, either as a whole, or in its parts; and which seemed to be considered as the great unknown remedy for all evils, real or imaginary. The meeting of the first illegal and self-constituted body, which, in its impatience to be ruling the destinies of the nation, assembled at Frankfort under the name of a Vor-Parlement, or preliminary parliament, and, although originally only emanating from a club of revolutionary spirits at Heidelberg, contrived to impose itself upon Germany and its princes, and sway the destinies of the land, in opposition to the old German Diet assembled in the same place—the proceedings of the Ausschuss, or select committee, which the members of this Vor-Parlement left behind them, to follow up their assumed authority, when they themselves dispersed,—the constitution of the present National Assembly, sanctioned by most of the German princes, and acknowledged as fully legal and supreme in its authority, its members being elected by universal suffrage,—and its meeting in time to put a stop to the wild democratic tendencies and reckless proceedings of the Ausschuss, are all matters of newspaper history, and need here no further detail; they are mentioned only to show what revolutionising Germany fancies and pretends it would be at, as far as any idea can be formed from its actions—and the means it would employ to arrive at its ends. We have got thus far, then, in the solution of our question. Revolutionising Germany desires, above all things, one great and powerful union of all its several parts,—the how, when, where, &c., being as yet very indefinite and unintelligible; and the General National Assembly is there to settle those important preliminaries. Let us content ourselves awhile with this very vague and uncertain answer, and return to old Father Rhine and his neighbourhood, to have some further idea of the physiognomy of the country under the present revolutionary auspices, and with the soothing hopes of the realisation of the grand desideratum of union before the country’s eyes. After taking this superficial survey of the “outward man,” and judging as far as we can of his character and temper therefrom, we may then speculate, perhaps, a little upon his tendencies in his present course; and even go so far as to attempt to take his hand, and try a trick or two of palmistry in fortune-telling—not pretending, however, in true gipsy spirit, to infallibility in foretelling the future, however knowingly and mysteriously we may shake our heads in so doing.

Although the Germans cannot be said to have the capabilities of acting any new part, that they may pretend to take upon themselves, to the life—and even to the death—with all that reality and energy for which the French have such an inborn talent, yet they may be looked up to as a still more symbol-loving people than the latter; and although perhaps not quite so much “up to” correctness of costume, at least quite as fond of parading the dress of the new part upon all occasions. The first thing, consequently, that strikes the tourist, on entering the Germany of 1848, is the ostentatious display of the new-old imperial, so-called national cockade, the red, black, and gold colours of the old German empire. It is not only upon the caps of vapouring students, who begin to consider themselves more or less the masters of the world, or upon the hats of hot-headed, soi-disant-enthusiastic, poetico-political young men that the new cockade is now to be seen; it stares you in the face from the head and breast of almost every man you meet—gray-beard, middle-aged, or youngster. It is generally from the centre of the cap or hat, and thus just upon the forehead, that it glares upon you, like the dark, red, gleaming eye of a new race of Cyclops: almost every male individual looks like a political Polyphemus. The soldiers are, one and all, adorned with two cockades, the one of the colours of the individual country they serve, the other of those of Imperial United Germany. They have thus two staring, distorted, and unmatched eyes, one over the other, in the centre of their foreheads. With their two eyes they ought, one would suppose, to see farther in the mist of the political storm than other people. The military, however, influenced perhaps by the example of their aristocratic young officers, have shown themselves, generally speaking, and markedly so in Prussia, where the revolutionary movement has been the most decided, recalcitrant towards the so-called progress of the day, anti-popular in their sympathies, attached only to the king and individual country they serve, disdainful of the new central power, the authority of which they do not and will not comprehend, and of its representatives, whom they regard as a herd of insolent schwätzer, or chatterers—in fact, anti-revolutionary, or, as it is called in the pet political phrases of the day, which the Germans have, now more than ever, shown themselves so foolishly eager to borrow of the French—retrograd and reactionär.

This position of the military, which appears, generally speaking, to be the same all over the country, is, to say the best, a very ticklish and equivocal one, and promises but little for the future internal peace of United Germany. Orders, however, have been given by such authorities as still are,—and in the first instance by weak, uncertain, vacillating, and now disappointed Prussia,—that the military should do their homage to the ideas of the day, by wearing the imperial cockade, if not in lieu of, at all events in addition to, that which they had heretofore considered as their national symbol: and the double Polyphemus eye of the soldier is one of the most striking and startling evidences of the unsteady and contending spirit of the times, that meet the eye of the tourist in Germany of to-day. Even more than the students—who are still, however, sufficiently remarkable both in costume and manner in these days of unrestricted movement and opinion—you will find a certain set of men, whose physiognomy of race is so strongly marked by some indescribable peculiarity of type, whatever be their colour or form of feature, as to render them unmistakeable, and who make the most flaring display of the imperial national colours, now so strangely converted into the symbol of a revolutionary spirit, be it in cockade, or band, or button-hole decoration. These are the Jews. They are positively lavish in their display of ribbon. Ever since the revolution has begun its dubious and unsteady course throughout Germany, it has been, invariably and everywhere, the Jews who have displayed the strongest revolutionary spirit, the most decided republican tendencies, the most acrimonious hatred against the “powers that be,” and the most virulent efforts towards the subversion of the existing state of things. What may have been the cause of the outburst of this spirit in an essentially trading and money-getting people, whose commercial advantages, in whatever branch they may lie, must be so completely compromised, if not altogether ruined, by revolutionary movements and their consequences, it would be difficult in a superficial sketch to say: it may be conjectured to have arisen simply from a spirit of revenge against the exclusive upper classes of Germany, who have so long treated their sect, proud of its wealth, and seeking influence from its power, with cutting repulsion and contempt. The fact, however, is as stated; the most active revolutionary spirits engaged in the task of pulling down and destroying, as far as was possible, have been every where the Jews; the avowed republicans may chiefly be found among men of their persuasion; the clamour, the attack, and the denunciation, chiefly still proceed from Jewish mouths and Jewish pens. Those who now march forward, then, the most boldly, hand in hand in strange conjunction, along the precipitous path of revolutionary movement, are the students and the Jews. If you unwisely allow one of the latter to lay hold of an unlucky button of your coat in a steamboat, he will be sure to endeavour, with his peculiar twang, to insinuate into you all the wildest ultra-revolutionary doctrines: the former will keep more apart from you, and herd in knots; but, when they get drunk, instead of vapouring vague, incomprehensible, soi-disant Kantian philosophy, as of yore, they will bellow still more vague and incomprehensible political theories about United Germany. It is these two classes of beings, then, who make the most ostentatious parade of the national cockades that flash across our eyesight.

The fate of this cockade has been a very strange one, by the way, in latter years. The red, black, and gold combination was long formally proscribed in universities, as deleterious and dangerous, and typical of the forbidden Burschenschaften: it was worn only in secret and by stealth, by recalcitrant would-be revolutionary students. All on a sudden it has been raised on high in flag and banner, waving not only in revolutionary procession, but from palace walls, and tops of public buildings. The cockade has not only been authorised, but enjoined; and in a late reactionary movement in Berlin,—when, out of jealousy and spite towards a central power, that had chosen its executive head from southern and not northern Germany, a considerable public feeling was exhibited against the imperial national flag, and in favour of the Prussian colours exclusively—the government, or rather the king himself, was obliged, for fear of an outbreak of the students, to command the resumption of those colours in flag and cockade, which, but a little while ago, he himself had proscribed. The pride of the young soi-disant heroes at being openly able to parade that symbol which they cherished only heretofore as fancied conspirators, may be easily conceived: and, now these boy-men find that they can dictate to the princes of the earth, not only upon the matter of flags and cockades, but upon matters of far graver note, there is no knowing to what height of presumption this pride may not still further lead them.

If, now, we look around us to note the general physiognomy of the people, we shall find many other little traits, that mark these revolutionary times in Germany. The common people, more especially upon the Rhine, and in many parts of the duchy of Baden—the common people, formerly so smiling, so ready, so civil, perhaps only too obsequious in their signs of respect, have grown insolent and rude: ask them a question, and they will scarcely deign to bestow upon you an answer: in many instances they will shrug their shoulders, laugh in your face, and then turn their back upon you. On the contrary the public officials, the government beamten, have considerably lowered that arrogance of tone for which they formerly possessed a not unmerited evil repute, and will answer your inquiries with civil words and smiling faces. Such, however, is the natural see-saw movement of manners in revolutionary times, in the lower and lower-middle classes; and as far as regards the latter effect of revolutionary movement, no tourist in Germany will be disposed to complain of the change.

Over the middle and upper classes, at the same time, there has fallen a very visible gloom. That uncertainty of the future, which is proverbially far more difficult for moral strength to bear than any certain evil, has had the very evident effect, to the least observant eye, of depressing the spirits of “all manner of men.” The hope appears to exist only in the theoretical fancies of the excited liberal politician,—the enthusiasm only in the wild dreams of the declaiming student. The prevailing impression is one of all the dulness of doubt and the stupor of apprehension. Talk to people of the state of the country, and they will either shake their heads with a grunt, or openly express their fears about the future: and those fears are none the less active because they are so vague—none the less depressing because they wear the mysterious, visionary, and consequently awful form which the dim distance of complete uncertainty imparts.

Another change, again, in the manners of the people, is in the politicising spirit, so uncongenial in times gone by to the Germans, which, in most great towns, seems now to have so completely absorbed them. It is to be found not only in the low clubs, and in the insensate pothouse debates, but in the eagerness to crowd round the revolutionary addresses, which are posted by ultra-liberals at street corners, in the anxiety to read the last revolutionary disquisition of the new radical journal, in all its glory of large sheet and full columns, which has taken the place of the innocent and patriarchal little Volks-blatt, that was before the study and delight of the humble burgher; and in the malicious enjoyment with which the political caricature, railing at prince or men in power, is studied at the shop window, and the feverish importance that is attached to it.

All these characteristic signs and changes will meet the eye of the tourist if he even go no farther than the confines of the Rhine, and the old city of Cologne. There at once is that depression visible to which allusion has already been made. It is visible in the aspect of the fallen half-ruined shopkeeper, of the disconsolate master of the hotel, and, above all, of the anxious labourer upon the progress of that mighty work, the completion of which evil times seem again to render an impossible task—the Cologne cathedral. Funds for the further progress of the great undertaking already begin to fail; and these are not times to seek them from the munificence either of states or private individuals. The Baumeister, who has spent the greater part of a life upon the wonderful task of working out the completion of this miracle of Gothic art,—whose whole soul has been concentrated upon this one object,—the breath of whose very existence seems to depend upon the growth of this foster-child of his fancy, for which alone he has lived,—now shakes his head, like the consumptive man whose presentiments tell him that his last hour is nigh, and who despairs of escaping his doom. The revolutionary wind has blown like the plague-blast over the land: he feels that his hand must soon fall powerless before the neglect, or even ill-will of the newborn age of revolutionary liberty, and that he must disperse abroad that band of artist-workmen whom he has fashioned and educated to the noble work, and whom, in their completeness of artistic intelligence, none perhaps, in future years, may be able again to collect together. The cathedral, however, has proceeded to a certain point, at which the whole interior may be enclosed; and there, in all probability, the progress of the works will be checked for the present. The consecration of the new part of the building, in this state, has already taken place; but, even in these ceremonies, the revolutionary modern spirit of Germany has not forgotten to assert its influence: the deputation sent to them by the Prussian Assembly refused to join to itself a Catholic ecclesiastic; and yet it was seriously proposed at the same time, by the arrangers of the ceremonial programme, that the monarchs who were expected to be present upon the occasion should mount upon the roof of the cathedral, and there take an oath to preserve the unity of Germany, which oath was to be blessed and ratified by the Pope, who was to be invited to come over to Cologne for the purpose. The Pope has had other deeds and other revolutionary tendencies to bless or to ban in his own dominions; but this little trait, culled from the first programme of the consecration of the Cologne cathedral, may be taken, at the same time, as a slight specimen of the wild poetico-political freaks of theoretically revolutionising Germany.

Let us wend our way a little farther. Without attempting to take any precise survey of Prussia and Austria, the continued fermenting and agitated state of which countries is the topic of every-day newspaper notice, and consequently without venturing upon any description of the poisonous and ulcerating sores continually breaking out upon the face of the fair and once healthy cities of Berlin and Vienna, the ignorant tumult of the parliamentary meetings assembled in them, the noisy fermentation of the ultra-revolutionary and republican clubs, the symbolical but dangerous demonstrations of hot-headed students and other unripe and unquiet spirits, the continual struggle and clash of parties accusing each other reciprocally of utterly subversive or counter-revolutionary and reactionary tendencies, and the constantly threatened danger of fresh convulsions, with further ruin to trade, and consequently to the well-being of the country at large—without, then, painting to ourselves a well-known and notorious picture, let us cast our eyes over the outward aspect of some of the smaller states.

Nothing, in the first place, can be more uneasy and disquieting than the appearance of the Duchy of Baden. In Heidelberg, ultra-revolutionary students have come to a total schism with their moderately and vaguely revolutionary professors; and it is at present difficult to see how any understanding is to be effected between teacher and scholar, so as to render the university a seat of learning of any other kind than that of subversive principles. In this part of Germany the revolutionary fermentation appears far more active, and is far more visible in the manner, attitude, and language of the lower classes, than even in those hotbeds of revolutionary movement, Austria and Prussia. To this state of things the confinity with agitated France, and consequently a more active affinity with its ideas, caught like a fever from a next-door neighbour’s house, the agency of the emissaries from the ultra-republican Parisian clubs, who find an easier access across the frontiers—not without the cognisance, and, it would now seem, as was long suspected, with the aid also of certain influential members of the Provisional Government of France—and the fact also that the unhappy duchy has been, if not the native country, at least the scene of action of the republican insurgents Hecker and Struve—have all combined to contribute. It is impossible to enter the duchy and converse with the peasant population, formerly and proverbially so peacefully disposed in patriarchal Germany, without finding the poison of these various influences gathering and festering in all their ideas, words, and actions. The prostration of spirit, generally speaking, among the middle and trading classes, the discouragement, the uncertain fear, are even still more apparent here than on the lower Rhine; and the gloom appears the greater, from all we see and hear, the higher we mount upon the social ladder. The proud and exclusive German nobility, who have so long slept cradled in the pride and exclusiveness of their courtly prerogatives and privileges, now waken to see an abyss before and behind them, a precipice at every step. How far they may have merited the terrors of utter ruin to their fortunes as well as their position, by their long contemptuous exclusion from their intercourse and society of all who had not the magic key to secure admission to them, in the shape of the privileged particle denoting nobility, whatever was the talent and the worth of the despised unprivileged—and to this state of things, even up to the present day, there have been very few exceptions at German courts, and much less in German high society—how far they have themselves prepared the way for their present position, by their wilful blindness to the progress of ideas in the world, are not questions to be discussed here. Their present apprehension and consternation are very apparent in every word and action, however much the younger generation, and especially those of it who may be military men, may bluster and talk big, and defy: they fly away to their country houses, if they have them, economise, retrench, and pinch, in preparation for that change in circumstances and position which seems to be approaching them like a spectre. The little capitals of Carlsruhe and Stuttgardt, with their small ducal and royal courts, certainly never exhibited any picture of great animation or bustle even in their most flourishing times; but the gloom that now hangs over them is assuredly very different from the peaceful, although somewhat torpid quietude in which they heretofore reposed: their dulness has become utter dreariness; their lady-like old-maidish decent listlessness a sort of melancholy bordering upon despair. Princes and people look askance at one another: people suffer; and princes think right to retrench. The theatres of these little capitals are about to be closed, because they are considered to be too expensive popular luxuries in the present state of things, and onerous appendages to court charges. Sovereigns cut down their households and their studs; and queens shut themselves close up in their summer residences, declaring themselves too poor to visit German watering-places, and support the expenses of regal toilette. In Stuttgardt these symptoms are all peculiarly visible. Spite of the long-acquired popularity of the King of Wurtemberg, as a liberal, well-judging, and rightly-minded monarch towards his subjects, the wind of revolution, that has blown in such heavy gusts in other parts of Germany, has not wholly spared that kingdom; and before accomplishing the intention attributed to him of retiring, in order to avoid those revolutionary demands which, in spite of his best intentions, he declares himself unable conscientiously to meet, the present king puts in practice those measures of retrenching economy, which add to the gloom of his capital and the disconsolate look of the court-attached and commercial portion of his subjects. It is scarcely possible, however, to suppose that the King of Wurtemberg can seriously think of abdicating in favour of a son whose youthful actions have always rendered him highly unpopular, all the more so as he is married to a Russian archduchess, whose birth must render her suspecte to the liberals of the day. Another cause, which contributes to the melancholy and deserted air of these capitals of the smaller German courts, is the retirement of the ambassadors and diplomatic agents of the other German courts, who, if not already recalled from their posts, will probably shortly be so, to meet the views of German unity, which needs but one representative in common. This unhappy look of the little German capitals is one of the most melancholy signs of the times in these smaller states. In Hanover and Brunswick the apparent resolution of their present rulers, to resist the power of the new Central Government of would-be united Germany, occasions agitation, uncertainty, and fear, which make themselves as fully apparent in outward symptoms as elsewhere. Bavaria alone appears to preserve an exceptional position. Bavaria also has had her revolution, to be sure; but, strange to say, the revolution was occasioned by the manœuvres of the anti-liberal, or, in that country, Jesuitical party, against the liberal tendencies of a wild woman’s influence over the mind of the king; and, singular as was the nature and cause of this revolution, singular has remained the situation of Bavaria, quiet, unagitated, and seemingly contented, in the midst of the convulsive hurly-burly passing every where around it.

After this cursory survey of the outward aspect of a great part of Germany, let us turn our eyes to Frankfort, the present central point of all interest and attention; for there sits the General National Assembly; there is to be brewed, by whatever recipe, or in whatever manner it may be, that fancied panacea for all evils, the Union of Germany: there, then, we may probably best learn what revolutionising Germany would be at, or, at all events, best see the means employed to arrive at something like a consummation. Let us first look at the cooks at their work; and then taste the nature of the brew, as far as their political culinary efforts have gone to “make the medley slab and good.”

Let us enter, then, that plain, dry, and harsh-looking circular building, which is the Lutheran Church of St Paul; it is there the Assembly holds its sittings. The interior arrangement has been fashioned entirely upon the plan of the French Chambers. The President’s tribune, the lower tribune of the orator before it, the gradually rising and diverging amphitheatre of seats for the members, are all entirely French in their plan. Completely French also, and with similar designation, is the political shading of the members according to their seats; the Droit, the Centre in its variety of progressing nuances, and the Gauche and Extreme Gauche have the same signification in the German Assembly as in the French. Nor does the resemblance cease here; the constitution of the Assembly, in its various elements, has a strong affinity to that of the present French National Assembly. The majority of the members are evidently concentrated in the different shades of the Centre. The old conservatives of the right have but little influence, except as a make-weight against the ultra-liberals. The centre consists chiefly of the old liberals, and opposition leaders in the different chambers of such of the German states as possessed constitutions of one modification or another—men who have now, in turn, in their position towards the ultra-revolutionary spirits, that tendency which may be called liberal conservative: they are the men of progress, who, in the present hurricane of revolutionary ideas, endeavour to guide the helm so as to avoid the very rocks they have had so great a hand in raising, and to restrain the very waves which their own breath has so greatly contributed to lash into fury! They are the Odillon Barrots, and suchlike old liberals of Germany. They find that the task before them is one of far ruder difficulty than in their theoretical fancies they had first imagined; and many of them there may be, who cannot but acknowledge to themselves, however little they may be inclined to acknowledge it to the world, that the business of a vast nation is not to be conducted by inexperienced heads, however talented, however well they may have conducted the business of a counting-house, or taught theories from a professor’s chair—in fact, that theory and practice will not walk hand in hand without a long process of amalgamating experience. The left is occupied by the men of revolutionary utopics and crude subversive opinions; and in its extreme by the ardent republicans and tribunes of the people, whom the revolution has caused to spring out of the political soil like mushrooms. These are the men who complain, in speech or in journal, that the Assembly is wasting its time in vain vapid disputations—an accusation, by the way, by no means unfounded—and yet themselves, when ever they mount into the tribune, indulge, more than any others, in declamatory would-be poetical phrases, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” and containing not one practical idea, or feasible proposal. They seem to think that, by ringing the changes upon certain pet words, such as “patriotism” and “nationality,” they have said great things and done great deeds for the good of the country; and, as far as such clap-trap efforts to gain popular applause go, they may fairly be said to obtain their ends. In this again they have a strong “cousin-german” resemblance with the French ultras in a similar position—and no less so in their endeavours to overawe and browbeat the majority of the Assembly by noisy exclamations, and even uproarious riot. The German ultras, however, have succeeded, to a great extent, in a manœuvre in which their French brethren have failed, although supported in it, at first, by a certain reckless member of the Provisional Government—that is to say, in packing the public galleries with acolytes, said to be paid, who, while they applaud all ultra-revolutionary speeches “to the echo,” endeavour to put down the conservative orators by tumult, or violent hissings, and are of course vaunted forth in the ultra-liberal journals as “the expression of the will of the nation.” Be it said, at the same time, en passant, that this manner of applauding by the clapping of hands, and expressing disapproval by hissing, has been borrowed from a habit of the members of the Assembly themselves, which has certainly a very unparliamentary appearance and sound to English eyes and ears. This use of the public galleries, which, in spite of the regulations of the Assembly, it has been found impossible altogether to put down, has assuredly a certain influence in overawing and intimidating some of the members of the majority. Two causes, however, have contributed to preserve the Assembly from utter anarchy and confusion. The first of these, a negative one, consists in the fact that Frankfort is not a great noisy stirring capital of a great country, where a mob is always at hand to be used as a tyrannical influence by the leaders of the people, and that there are no suburbs filled with a working population, whence, as in Paris, an insurgent army may be suddenly recruited to work mischief, when it may have no other work to do. The second, a direct and active one, arises from the personality of the President of the Assembly; and certainly it is in the personal qualities and physical advantages of the Herr von Gagern, as much as in his position, and from the esteem in which he is held, that his power to dominate, control, and will to order, very greatly consists.

The President Gagern, long known as the most talented and leading opposition member of the Darmstadt Chamber, has passed his life in his energetic attempts to further those constitutional liberties, which he would now check with powerful hand, that they may not go too far. Disappointed and disgusted with his fruitless efforts to promote what he considered the interests of his country, the Herr von Gagern had retired, for some time past, into private life, when, upon the breaking forth of the revolutionary storm, he was called upon by his prince to take the helm of affairs, and, as minister, to steer the bark along the current by which he might avoid the Scylla of ultra-democracy as much as the Charybdis of resistance to the progress of the age. In this new character he again appeared upon the stage of the political world; and he has only retired from his post, as he has since refused to accept office as minister of the new central executive power of all Germany, in order to maintain the position, to which he was raised by acclamation, as the controlling head of that Assembly which was to decide the destinies of the country, and from the councils of which he himself had fondly hoped to see emanate the welfare of united Germany.

Tall and stout, with a face which possesses a decision and firmness of character, much aided by a pair of very broad black brows, Herr von Gagern has, at the same time, a bold dignity of manner and gesture, which is well calculated to rule an Assembly, and a powerful voice, which knows how to make itself heard in a storm: a ready and simple eloquence, and a clear good sense, which fastens upon the right point at the right moment, are combined with these advantages of exterior appearance; and as he rises, in cases of emergency, to display a vigour of energy, rather than that system of conciliation so fatally used in France, and so impracticable amidst all the clashing party opinions of a revolutionary Assembly, he shows himself to be the man of the moment, and of the place. He may be said to be the saviour of the German National Assembly, inasmuch as his personal influence may be considered to have rescued it from that state of anarchy and confusion which now disgraces the French chamber, and into which the German Assembly, with its conflicting elements, and its still greater inexperience, seemed at first about to fall.

As it is, the German National Assembly can by no means be looked upon as a model of parliamentary order: it is still noisy, ill-regulated, and uncertain in its movements. It cannot be denied, at the same time, that sufficient individual talent may be found among its members. Among the rising men of the day, the orators of Prussia and the smaller northern states, (for Southern Germany has as yet produced but little striking talent,)—along with those young, ardent, and energetic men who, the conspirators and insurgents of a few months ago, have gone over to the liberal conservative majority, and the people’s orators, who aim at being the O’Connells of Germany, as their phraseology goes, and who, in spite of the impracticable nature of their tenets, and the frequently vapid nature of their declamation, have a certain, rude ready eloquence, that strives to be poetical—there are also a few practised statesmen, a few wary old men of action, and several well-known authors and poets, such as old Uhland, whose democratic ardour still keeps, him upon the benches of the left, and the Count Auersperg, well known under the name of Anastatius Grün, whom disappointments in his position, in society are supposed also to have driven into the ultra-democratic ranks. But there seems to be an utter want of purpose in most of the speeches which emanate from the lips of these men of talent. Proverbially vague in their philosophical theories, even when they make most pretensions to clearness, the Germans show themselves still more so in their political views. The speeches not only of the ultra-liberals, but of the would-be statesmen of the centre, appear mere compilations of “words, words, words,” without any tangible argument or practical proposal: it is rarely that it is possible to sift from the readily flowing, but generally most muddy stream, a sand of gold, that may be used as one of sterling worth in the crown of unity which the hands of the Assembly would be forging. In all that emanates from the Assembly, either in debate or in decree, there is generally a lamentable want of correctly defined purpose: and, in fact, to return to the point from which we have started, it is as difficult to discover from the vague, wavering, boggling proceedings of the Assembly, as from any other quarter, or from any other movement, precisely what revolutionising Germany would be at. Up to the present time, like the Provisional Government of France, it has rather attempted to rule aristocratically itself, than to prepare the way, as was its object, for the future definitive constitution of Germany. The only definite step it has yet taken towards that vague desideratum, a “United Germany,” has been in the appointment of a Provisional Executive Head, and of a cabinet of ministers at its direction.

Except in as far as regards the jealousy of Prussia, disappointed in its hopes of itself giving the head to the Imperial government, and inclined in consequence to quarrel with the dictates of that central power, for which it clamoured, and which it at least accepted not ungraciously, as long as it thought, with true Prussian conceit, that the head must necessarily emanate from itself—a jealousy to which reference will be made further on—the choice of the Austrian Archduke John, as Administrator or Protector of the Government of United Germany, whatever his charge may be called, (for the German term “Reichs Verweser” expresses in itself both these attributive designations,) cannot be looked upon as one of any political weight. As a prince, enjoying for many years past a certain popularity, more perhaps from a feeling of opposition, because he was considered as living upon ill terms with the Imperial court of Austria, than from any personal attachment to himself, the Archduke John may be considered to be well selected as a popular and generally accepted head of Germany: whether he possesses either the talent or the energy to fill so strange and awfully responsible a post in the present disturbed state of Germany is another question, which only those who have known him in the retirement of private life can answer. The political writer who designated him as the Duke of Sussex of Austria, made a happy hit in thus classifying him. The Archduke John has rendered himself popular by his patronage and furtherance of scientific institutions: but he has been too little known, otherwise than as the discarded and disgraced of the Imperial family, to be called in any way “the man of the people.” The marriage, which was the cause of his disgrace, was thus, likewise, the cause of his popularity, such as it was: the union of an Imperial prince with a girl of comparatively humble birth—a union about the origin of which so many absurdly fabulous tales have been told—flattered the instincts of the middle and lower classes. The Archduchess, however, who now finds herself elevated still more, to a pinnacle to which her wildest dreams could scarcely have led her, and who is now flattered, caressed, and done homage to, as she was before set aside, is said to reveal nothing of any humble origin, and to be as lady-like as sensible in manner. Upon the whole, then, it is not in the wholly provisional and most unstable appointment of the Archduke John as “Reichs Verweser” that we shall find any solution to the inquiry as to the more certain revolutionary tendencies of Germany.

Assuredly more ought to be gathered from the appointment of the new central cabinet, and more especially of its Minister for Foreign Affairs and leading member, Prince Leiningen: and naturally we look to the recent manifesto of the prince as a document from which we may best learn “what revolutionising Germany would be at.” Sensible and clear, or at all events as little confused as is possible in the present confused state of all theories, plans, and reasonings in Germany, the manifesto, in doing no more than pointing out two methods towards effecting the reconstruction of Germany, leaves every thing as regards the future in as vague and uncertain a state as before. It only states a dilemma—it does not attempt to resolve it. It puts Germany in a cleft stick, or rather, at the division of two paths, the greater merit or practicability of either of which it does not attempt to show very decisively, by its concluding words, “Entweder, Oder! choose!” In fact, it does no more than ask with ourselves, “What would revolutionising Germany be at?”

It may be surmised, certainly, from the manifesto of Prince Leiningen, that he himself is really inclined towards the going forward in the uncertain course of doing something towards the effectuation of the desired union, although he by no means pretends to recommend how this is to be done. He seems—and his acceptation of office would in itself appear to confirm the fact—a partisan of what he defines somewhat confusedly as “an actual union of all the component parts of the whole, in such a manner as to avert the possibility of any dispute between the whole and the parts;” for he adds, “If any other course be pursued, not singleness or unity, but discord and separation will be established.” But in the alternative which he places before Germany, of either returning to the past, or of realising the uncertain and as yet undefined desideratum of a great union for the future, it would seem, whatever be the prince’s own meaning, or whatever may be supposed to be the means used by the Assembly to produce a united whole, that he only places before it at the same time the alternative of a civil war, at which he himself hints, or a republican constitution, which must appear to be the result of the progress in its present sense, of revolutionising Germany.

When we hear that “to retrograde to a confederation of states, or to establish a weak federal state, by a powerfully impressed independence of the individual states, would only be to create a mournful period of transition to fresh catastrophes and new revolutions;” that from such a course of proceeding would result the danger “of harbouring in Germany revolutionary movements, or perchance civil war, for a series of years;” that the nation would arrive at “the most undesirable consummation of rendering itself ridiculous for ever by trumpeting to the world German unity and German power, and presenting in reality a spectacle the very reverse”—when we hear that “no dynastic interests can be taken into consideration if the nation wills unity;” that “to construct a new empire, and at the same time to permit an organisation tending to an inevitable contest for the supreme sovereignty between the individual states, would be to sow disunion instead of unity, to create weakness instead of power;” and that, consequently, “the imperial power must, in a degree, absorb in itself the sovereignty of the individual states, abolish the diplomatic intercourse of the individual states at home and abroad, and concentrate it in its own hands, appropriate to itself the unconditional disposal of the national forces, and not allow governments or their constituent State Assemblies to occupy themselves with affairs appertaining to the National Assembly alone, since a perfectly established central state, in which other perfectly established states are encased, would be virtually a monstrosity,”—when we hear all these things, and weigh the tendency of their views, we can see in them no other result than the abasement of the individual sovereigns, an absorption of their power, which would leave them no more than useless and ridiculous puppets, and, consequently, their inevitable overthrow in the course of time, and the establishment of republican institutions, whatever the name given to the new form of republic, whatever the title bestowed upon its head, be it even Emperor, or Reichs Verweser, Regent, Protector, Administrator, or President.

On the other hand, when we are told—although “jealousies between individual states, and revilings of the northern by the southern parts of the empire” are stigmatised as “criminal absurdities”—that, “if the many collateral and coexistent interests are too preponderant to be sacrificed to German unity, if the old spirit of discord and separation is still too powerfully at work, if the jealousy between race and race, between north and south, is still too strongly felt, the nation must convince itself of the fact, and return to the old federal system,” already hinted at as impossible without fresh revolutions or long civil wars; and when we know, at the same time, that these jealousies between state and state not only do exist, but continue to increase and ferment still more in the present state of things,—that in fact, the old spirit of discord and separation is still more powerfully at work than ever,—what can we look forward to? Only the other alternative to which we have alluded—those civil wars which the manifesto of Prince Leiningen itself hints at so cautiously.

Since, from the very first commencement of the revolution in Germany, the jealous spirit between the northern and southern states broke out in a decided form, it has only increased instead of diminishing. When the vacillating but ambitious King of Prussia, desirous of coming forward as the “man of Germany” of the day, but “infirm of purpose,” attempted to direct the revolutionary movement in his own states by accepting the call for a United German Empire, and by placing himself, although unavowedly, at its head, the Austrian Official Gazette immediately fulminated a severe, damning, and, under the circumstances, almost cruel manifesto against the ambitious Prussian monarch; in Bavaria, the young men of the upper classes burnt his majesty in effigy in the public market-place of Munich; at Stuttgardt, the picture of the offending sovereign was as publicly hung by the neck to a gallows. Southern Germany was indignant at the thought that an upstart King of Prussia should attempt to lead the movement for a new United Empire of Germany, and presume even to dream of being its future emperor. But when, in the course of events, the provisional head of the newly constituted central power was chosen by the assembly from among the princes of Southern Germany, it was the turn of Prussia to exhibit its spite and anger: its jealousy was not to be concealed. The result of the disappointed ambition of Prussia was exhibited, as already alluded to, in a reactionary feeling against that central power, which it would have accepted probably with acclamation, and been the first to applaud and support, had it emanated from its own country. The exhibition of this feeling in some violent outbreak was so much dreaded upon the occasion of the military homage appointed to be shown to the Reichs Verweser at Berlin, that the ceremony, as is well known, was obliged to be countermanded. The feeling is now still continuing to be shown in a constant exhibition of mistrust on the part of Prussia towards the National Assembly, and as well as in the counter-accusation of that new and vaguely defined political crime “reaction,” laid by the journals of the moderate party, as well as by the ultra-liberals, to the charge of Prussia. With all these conflicting elements at work between the various parts of Germany, and again between these various parts and the central power, placed in the hands of the Assembly, it is very difficult to look clearly as yet towards any possible constitution of that unity which would appear to be the most vague end and aim of the revolution in Germany. To those who attempt to look into the mist of the future, and see visions, and dream dreams—for, in the present state of the cloudy and wavering political horizon, it would seem that all political foresight can pretend to no better name than that—the nearer of the two alternatives to be deduced from Prince Leiningen’s manifesto, would appear to be the disunion, the total rupture, the civil war.

The other alternative, however, seems not without its chances; for, although the old liberals of republican tendencies, the suspected and imprisoned, have now been brought round, for the most part, into the ranks of the moderately progressive party, in the natural course of revolutionary changes, or even been called to the councils of the kings and princes who rejected and persecuted them; yet, on the other hand, the exertions of the moderate party, in spite of the clog that they would now put upon the too rapid course of ultra-democracy, appear to tend, in the efforts made, and the views entertained respecting the unity of Germany, towards the very republican institutions which they disavow, and suppose themselves endeavouring to avoid. The real republicans, at the same time, although without any present weight among the political spirits of the day, are yet composed, as elsewhere, of the young, hot-headed, reckless, active, stirring elements of the time, and are always ready to make up, by violence and headlong precipitation, for what they want in importance and experience. They are aided also in their views by a certain party of the liberal press, which is always preaching the imitation of French institutions and the conduct of the present leading men in France,—as if France and the French did not hold up a lesson and a warning instead of models for imitation—and consoling Germany with the idea, that although it does not possess such enviable men or measures, the men must shortly rise upon the political surface, and that the measures will follow behind them. By a great portion of the press, even that of the moderate party also, a continual irritation of suspicion and mistrust is being kept up against the still reigning sovereigns of Germany; and the cry of that very vague accusation “reaction,” the name of which alone, however, is considered sufficiently damning, is constantly raised upon every movement, of whatever nature it may be, which those sovereigns may make. The moderate party may be acquitted of republican tendencies in their hearts; but they seem to ignore the old proverb, “give a dog a bad name,” and the consequences; and they will make “sad dogs” out of the sovereigns, until at last the consequences will threaten more and more nearly.

Between these two alternatives, however, Germany seems to think that it may find a middle course, and establish its theoretical and vaunted unity without exciting civil dissension, or plunging into the depths of republicanism. May it prove right in its as yet uncertain hopes; but certainly the means by which this desired consummation is to be arrived at, are not in the least degree visible: it remains as yet the vaguest of vague fancies—the how, the where, the when, and even the why, are as yet matters of doubt: not only deeds but principles, not only principles but plans, to this intent, are as yet utterly absent. In fact our question, after all, remains unanswered; and, beyond the main point of “unity,” to be effected somehow or other, revolutionising Germany seems utterly unable to tell us, as we vainly endeavour to find out definitively, “what it would be at?”

Printed by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh.

1. See our No. for March 1848.

2. Hide—from cacher.

3. Carrion.

4. In Frémont’s expedition to California, on a somewhat similar occasion, two mountaineers, one the celebrated Kit Carson, the other a St Louis Frenchman named Godey, and both old trappers, performed a feat surpassing the one described above, inasmuch as they were but two, who charged into an Indian village to rescue some stolen horses, and avenge the slaughter of two New Mexicans who had been butchered by the Indians; both which objects they effected, returning to camp with the lost animals and a couple of propitiatory scalps.

5. The Mexicans call the Indians living near the Missions and engaged in agriculture, mansos, or mansitos, tame.

6. From a manuscript obtained in Santa Fé of New Mexico, describing the labours of the missionaries Fray Augustin Ruiz, Venabides, and Macos, in the year 1585.

7. “Some were so barbarous as to eat their own species.” The sentence refers to the Scythians, and is in Strabo. I mention the authority, for Strabo is not an author that any man engaged on a less work than the History of Human Error is expected to have by heart.

8. Memoirs of the Reign of George II., from his Accession to the Death of Queen Caroline. By JOHN LORD HERVEY. Edited, from the original MSS. at Ickworth, by the Right Hon. J. W. CROKER. 2 vols. Murray, London: 1848.

9. “Upon the evening of this long day’s march, the imperial column approaching Gjatz was surprised to find upon the road the bodies of Russians quite recently slain, all with their heads cloven in the same manner, and with their brains scattered around. It was known that two thousand prisoners preceded the column, escorted by Spaniards, Portuguese, and Poles. Various opinions were emitted; some were indignant, others approved or remained indifferent, according to the character of each. Around the Emperor these different impressions found no voice, until Caulaincourt burst out and exclaimed, ‘that it was an atrocious cruelty. This, then, is the civilisation we bring to Russia! What effect would this barbarity have upon the enemy? Did we not leave him our wounded and a host of prisoners? Would he lack the opportunity of horrible reprisals?’ Napoleon maintained a gloomy silence, but upon the morrow these murders had ceased. The unfortunate prisoners were allowed to die of hunger in the enclosures into which, at night, they were huddled like cattle. Doubtless it was still a barbarity; but what could be done? Exchange them? The enemy refused. Set them free? They would have hastened to proclaim our destitution, and soon they would have returned with their companions to harass our march. In this unsparing war, to have given them life would have been to sacrifice ourselves. We were cruel from necessity. The fault was, to have ever placed ourselves in so terrible an alternative.

“On the other hand, during our march into the interior of Russia, our captive soldiers were not treated more humanely, although the Russians had not imperious necessity for an excuse.”—SÉGUR, vol. ii. p. 149.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

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young follow, caring no more for Indians

young fellow, caring no more for Indians

- Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.

- Used numbers for footnotes, placing them all at the end of the last chapter.

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Table of Contents

BLACKWOOD’S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE. No. CCCXCV. SEPTEMBER, 1848. Vol. LXIV.

CONTENTS.

A REVIEW OF THE LAST SESSION.

TO A CAGED SKYLARK, REGENT’S CIRCUS, PICCADILLY.

SONNET.—TO DENMARK.

LIFE IN THE “FAR WEST.”

PART IV.

THE CAXTONS.—PART VI.

CHAPTER XVIII.

CHAPTER XIX.

CHAPTER XX.

CHAPTER XXI.

CHAPTER XXII.

CHAPTER XXIII.

CHAPTER XXIV.

CHAPTER XXV.

LIFE AND TIMES OF GEORGE II.[8]

THE GREAT TRAGEDIAN.

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

THE MOSCOW RETREAT.

WHAT WOULD REVOLUTIONISING GERMANY BE AT?

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