CHAPTER II.

BLACKWOOD'S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

NO. CCCCXXXIII. NOVEMBER, 1851. VOL. LXX.

CONTENTS.

THE DRAMAS OF HENRY TAYLOR, 505

A LEGEND OF GIBRALTAR, 522

GERMAN LETTERS FROM PARIS, 543

THE SUBMARINE TELEGRAPH, 562

MY NOVEL; OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE. PART XV., 573

THE MASTER THIEF. A NORSE POPULAR TALE, 595

DAY-DREAMS OF AN EXILE, 604

AUTUMN POLITICS, 607

EDINBURGH:

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & 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. CCCCXXXIII. NOVEMBER, 1851. VOL. LXX.

THE DRAMAS OF HENRY TAYLOR.

There is no living writer whose rank in literature appears to be

more accurately determined, or more permanently secured to him, than

the author of _Philip Van Artevelde_[1]. Not gifted with the ardent

temperament, the very vivid imagination, or the warmth of passion which

are supposed necessary to carry a poet to the highest eminences of his

art, he has, nevertheless, that intense reflection, that large insight

into human life, that severe taste, binding him always to a most

select, accurate, and admirable style, which must secure him a lofty

and impregnable position amongst the class of writers who come next in

order to the very highest.

[1] _Philip Van Artevelde_: _A Dramatic Romance._----_Edwin the Fair:

An Historical Drama; and Isaac Comnenus: A Play_----_The Eve of the

Conquest, and other Poems._ By HENRY TAYLOR.

There have been greater poems, but in modern times we do not think

there has appeared any dramatic composition which can be pronounced

superior to the masterpiece of Henry Taylor. Neither of the

_Sardanapalus_ of Lord Byron, nor the _Remorse_ of Coleridge, nor the

_Cenci_ of Shelley, could this be said. We are far from asserting

that Taylor is a greater poet than Byron, or Coleridge, or Shelley;

but we say that no dramatic composition of these poets surpasses, as

a whole, _Philip Van Artevelde_. These writers have displayed, on

various occasions, more passion and more pathos, and a command of more

beautiful imagery, but they have none of them produced a more complete

dramatic work; nor do any of them manifest a profounder insight, or a

wider view of human nature, or more frequently enunciate that _pathetic

wisdom_, that mixture of feeling and sagacity, which we look upon as

holding the highest place in eloquence of every description, whether

prose or verse. The last act of Shelley's drama of the _Cenci_ has left

a more vivid impression upon our mind than any single portion of the

modern drama; but one act does not constitute a play, and this drama

of the _Cenci_ is so odious from its plot, and the chief character

portrayed in it is, in every sense of the word, so utterly monstrous,

(for Shelley has combined, for purposes of his own, a spirit of piety

with the other ingredients of that diabolical character, which could

not have co-existed with them,) that, notwithstanding all its beauty,

we would willingly efface this poem from English literature. If one

of those creatures, half beautiful woman and half scaly fish, which

artists seem, with a traditional depravity of taste, to delight in,

were really to be alive, and to present itself before us, it would

hardly excite greater disgust than this beautifully foul drama of the

_Cenci_.

The very fact of our author having won so distinct and undisputed a

place in public estimation, must be accepted as an excuse for our

prolonged delay in noticing his writings. The public very rapidly

passed its verdict upon them: it was a sound one. The voice of

encouragement was not needed to the author; nor did the reading world

require to be informed of the fresh accession made to its stores. If

we now propose to ourselves some critical observations on the dramas

of Mr Taylor, we enter upon the task in exactly the same spirit that

we should bring to the examination of any old writer, any veritable

ancient, of established celebrity. We are too late to assist in

creating a reputation for these dramas, but we may possibly throw out

some critical suggestions which may contribute to their more accurate

appreciation.

In _Philip Van Artevelde_, the great object of the author appears to

have been to exhibit, in perfect union, the man of thought and the man

of action. The hero is meditative as Hamlet, and as swift to act as

Coriolanus. He is pensive as the Dane, and with something of the like

cause for his melancholy; but so far from wasting all his energies in

moody reflection, he has an equal share for a most enterprising career

of real life. He throws his glance as freely and as widely over all

this perplexing world, but every footstep of his own is planted with a

sure and certain knowledge, and with a firm will. His thoughts may seem

to play as loose as the air above him, but his standing-place is always

stable as the rock. Such a character, we need not say, could hardly

have been selected, and certainly could not have been portrayed with

success, by any but a deeply meditative mind.

It is often remarked that the hero is the reflection of the writer.

This could not be very correctly said in instances like the present. A

writer still lives only in his writings, lives only in his thoughts,

whatever martial feats or bold enterprises he may depict. We could not

prophesy how the poet himself would act if he had been the citizen

of Ghent. It is more accurate to content ourselves with saying that

the delineation of his hero has given full scope to the intellectual

character of the author, and to his own peculiar habits of thought.

For if the great citizen of Ghent combines in an extraordinary degree

the reflective and the energetic character, our author unites, in a

manner almost as peculiar, two modes of thinking which at first appear

to be opposed: he unites that practical sagacity which gives grave,

and serious, and useful counsels upon human conduct, with that sad

and profound irony--that reasoned despondency--which so generally

besets the speculative mind. All life is--vanity. Yet it will not do

to resign ourselves to this general conclusion, from which so little,

it is plain, can be extracted. From nothing, nothing comes. We must go

back, and estimate by comparison each form and department of this human

life--which, as a whole, is so nugatory. Thus, practical sagacity is

reinstated in full vigour, and has its fair scope of action, though

ever and anon a philosophic despondency will throw its shadow over the

scene.

As it is a complete man, so it is a whole life, that we have portrayed

in the drama of _Philip Van Artevelde_. The second part is not what is

understood by a "continuation" of the first, but an essential portion

of the work. In the one we watch the hero rise to his culminating

point; in the other we see him sink--not in crime, and not in glory,

but in a sort of dim and disastrous twilight. We take up the hero from

his student days; we take him from his philosophy and his fishing-line,

and that obstinate pondering on unsolvable problems, which is as much

a characteristic of youth as the ardent passions with which it is

more generally accredited; we take him from the quiet stream which he

torments, far more by the thoughts he throws upon it, than by his rod

and line.

"He is a man of singular address

In catching river-fish,"

says a sarcastic enemy, who knew nothing of the trains of thought for

which that angling was often a convenient disguise. A hint given in

the drama will go far to explain what their hue and complexion must

have been. The father of Philip had headed the patriotic cause of the

citizens of Ghent; it had triumphed in his person; the same citizens of

Ghent had murdered him on the threshold of his door. When he was a boy,

the stains of his father's blood were still visible on that threshold:

the widowed mother would not suffer them to be removed, and, nursing

her revenge, loved to show them to the child. There was something here

to colour the thoughts of the young fisherman.

But passion and the world are now knocking at the heart of the

meditative student. Love and ambition are there, and, moreover,

the turbulent condition of the city of Ghent seems to forbid the

continuance of this life of quietude. The passions of the world crave

admittance. Shall he admit them? The great theatre of life claims its

new actor. Shall he go? Shall he commit himself once and for ever

to the turmoil and delusions of that scene--delusions that will not

delude, but which will exercise as great a tyranny over him as if they

did? Yes; he will go. As well do battle with the world without, as

eternally with his own thoughts; for this is the only alternative youth

presents to us. Yes, he will go; but deliberately: he will not be borne

along, he will govern his own footsteps, and, come what may, will be

always master of himself.

Launoy, one of Ghent's bravest patriots, has been killed. The first

reflection we hear from the lips of Artevelde is called forth by this

intelligence. It does not surprise him.

"I never looked that he should live so long.

He was a man of that unsleeping spirit,

He seemed to live by miracle: his food

Was glory, which was poison to his mind

And peril to his body. He was one

Of many thousand such that die betimes,

Whose story is a fragment, known to few.

Then comes the man who has the luck to live,

And he's a prodigy. Compute the chances,

And deem there's ne'er a one in dangerous times

Who wins the race of glory, but than him

A thousand men more gloriously endowed

Have fallen upon the course; a thousand others

Have had their fortunes foundered by a chance,

Whilst lighter barks pushed past them; to whom add

A smaller tally, of the singular few

Who, gifted with predominating powers,

Bear yet a temperate will, and keep the peace.

The world knows nothing of its greatest men."

If ambition wears this ambiguous aspect to his mind, it is not because

he is disposed to regard the love of woman too enthusiastically.

"It may be I have deemed or dreamed of such.

But what know I? We figure to ourselves

The thing we like, and then we build it up

As chance will have it, on the rock or sand:

For thought is tired of wandering o'er the world,

And home-bound fancy runs her bark ashore."

Yet Artevelde is at this time on his way to Adriana to make that

declaration which the Lady Adriana is so solicitous to hear. This a

lover! Yes; only one of that order who hang over and count the beatings

of their own heart.

Launoy being destroyed, and the people of Ghent having lost others of

their leaders, and growing discontented with the stern rule of Van

Den Bosch, some new captain or ruler of the town is looked for. The

eyes of men are turned to Philip Van Artevelde. He shall be captain

of the Whitehoods, and come to the rescue of the falling cause; for,

of late, the Earl of Flanders has been everywhere victorious. Van

Den Bosch himself makes the proposal. It is evident, from hints that

follow, that Artevelde had already made his choice; he saw that the

time was come when, even if he desired it, there was no maintaining a

peaceful neutrality. But Van Den Bosch meets with no eager spirit ready

to snatch at the perilous prize held out to him. He is no dupe to the

nature of the offer, nor very willing that others should fancy him to

be one--

"Not so fast.

Your vessel, Van Den Bosch, hath felt the storm:

She rolls dismasted in an ugly swell,

And you would make a jury-mast of me,

Whereon to spread the tatters of your canvass."

It is worth noticing how the passion of revenge, like the others, is

admitted to its post; admitted, yet coldly looked upon. He will revenge

his father. Two knights, Sir Guisebert Grutt and Simon Bette, (we

wish they had better names,) were mainly instrumental in his murder.

These men have been playing false, by making treacherous overtures to

the Earl of Flanders; they will be in his power. But they cannot, he

reflects, render back the life they have destroyed--

----"Life for life, vile bankrupts as they are,

Their worthless lives for his of countless price,

Is their whole wherewithal to pay the debt.

_Yet retribution is a goodly thing_,

And it were well to wring the payment from them,

Even to the utmost drop of their heart's blood."

Still less does the patriotic harangue of Van Den Bosch find an

enthusiastic response. He was already too much a statesman to be a

demagogue; not to mention that his father's career had taught him a

bitter estimate of popularity, and of all tumultuary enthusiasm:--

"_Van Den Bosch._ Times are sore changed, I see. There's none in Ghent

That answers to the name of Artevelde.

Thy father did not carp or question thus

When Ghent invoked his aid. The days have been

When not a citizen drew breath in Ghent

But freely would have died in Freedom's cause.

_Artevelde._ With a good name thou christenest the cause.

True, to make choice of despots is some freedom,

The only freedom for this turbulent town,

Rule her who may. And in my father's time

We still were independent, if not free;

And wealth from independence, and from wealth

Enfranchisement will partially proceed.

The cause, I grant thee, Van Den Bosch, is good;

And were I linked to earth no otherwise

But that my whole heart centred in myself,

I could have tossed you this poor life to play with,

Taking no second thought. But as things are,

I will resolve the matter warily,

And send thee word betimes of my conclusion.

_Van Den Bosch_. Betimes it must be; for some two hours hence

I meet the Deans, and ere we separate

Our course must be determined.

_Artevelde_. In two hours,

If I be for you, I will send this ring

In token I have so resolved."

He had already resolved. Such a man would not have suffered himself to

be hemmed in within the space of two hours to make so great a decision;

but he would not rush precipitately forward; he would feel his own

_will_ at each step. He had already resolved; but his love to Adriana

troubles him at heart: he must first make all plain and intelligible

there, before he becomes captain of the Whitehoods. From this interview

he goes to Adriana; and then follows a dialogue, every sentence of

which, if we were looking out for admirable passages for quotation,

would offer itself as a candidate. We quote only, from a drama so well

known, for the purpose of illustrating the analytic view we would

present of its chief hero; but the passages selected for this purpose

can hardly fail of being also amongst the most beautiful in themselves.

Artevelde is alone, waiting for the appearance of Adriana--

"There is but one thing that still harks me back.

To bring a cloud upon the summer day

Of one so happy and so beautiful,--

It is a hard condition. For myself,

I know not that the circumstance of life

In all its changes can so far afflict me

As makes anticipation much worth while.

... Oh she is fair!

As fair as Heaven to look upon! as fair

As ever vision of the Virgin blest

That weary pilgrim, resting by the fount

Beneath the palm, and dreaming to the tune

Of flowing waters, duped his soul withal.

It was permitted in my pilgrimage

To rest beside the fount, beneath the tree,

Beholding there no vision, but a maid

Whose form was light and graceful as the palm,

Whose heart was pure and jocund as the fount,

And spread a freshness and a verdure round."

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

thus:--

"Be calm;

And let me warn thee, ere thy choice be fixed,

What fate thou may'st be wedded to with me.

Thou hast beheld me living heretofore

As one retired in staid tranquillity:

The dweller in the mountains, on whose ear

The accustomed cataract thunders unobserved;

The seaman, who sleeps sound upon the deck,

Nor hears the loud lamenting of the blast,

Nor heeds the weltering of the plangent wave,--

These have not lived more undisturbed than I:

But build not upon this; the swollen stream

May shake the cottage of the mountaineer,

And drive him forth; the seaman, roused at length,

Leaps from his slumber on the wave-washed deck:

And now the time comes fast when here, in Ghent,

He who would live exempt from injuries

Of armed men, must be himself in arms.

This time is near for all,--nearer for me:

I will not wait upon necessity,

And leave myself no choice of vantage-ground,

But rather meet the times where best I may,

And mould and fashion them as best I can.

Reflect then that I soon may be embarked

In all the hazards of these troublesome times,

And in your own free choice take or resign me.

_Adri._ Oh, Artevelde, my choice is free no more."

And now he is open to hear Van Den Bosch. That veteran in war and

insurrection brings him news that the people are ready to elect him for

their captain or ruler.

"_Artev._ Good! when they come I'll speak to them.

_Van Den B._ 'Twere well.

* * * * *

Canst learn to bear thee high amongst the commons?

Canst thou be cruel? To be esteemed of them,

Thou must not set more store by lives of men

Than lives of larks in season.

_Artev._ Be it so.

_I can do what is needful._"

The time of action is at hand. We now see Van Artevelde in a suit of

armour; he is reclining on a window-seat in his own house, looking out

upon the street. There is treason in the town; of those who flock to

the market-place, some have already deserted his cause.

"_Artev._ Not to be feared--Give me my sword! Go forth,

And see what folk be these that throng the street.

[_Exit the page._

Not to be feared is to be nothing here.

And wherefore have I taken up this office,

If I be nothing in it? There they go.

(_Shouts are heard._)

Of them that pass my house some shout my name,

But the most part pass silently; and once

I heard the cry of 'Flanders and the Lion!'

* * * * *

That cry again!

Sir knights, ye drive me close upon the rocks,

And of my cargo you're the vilest bales,

So overboard with you! What, men of blood!

Can the son better auspicate his arms

Than by the slaying of who slew the father?

Some blood may flow because that it needs must,

But yours by choice--I'll slay you, and thank God.

(_Enter Van Den Bosch._)

_Van Den B._ The common bell has rung! the knights are there;

Thou must come instantly.

_Artev._ I come, I come.

_Van Den B._ Now, Master Philip, if thou miss thy way

Through this affair we're lost. For Jesus' sake

Be counselled now by me; have thou in mind----

_Artev._ Go to, I need not counsel; I'm resolved.

Take thou thy stand beside Sir Simon Bette,

As I by Grutt; take note of all I do,

And do thyself accordingly. Come on."

They join the assembly; they take their stand each by one of the

traitor knights; the debate on the proposal of the Earl proceeds; three

hundred citizens are to be given up to him, and on this, and other

conditions, peace is to be granted. Artevelde addresses the assembly,

and then turning to these knights, he continues:--

"Your pardon, sirs, again!

(_To Grutt and Bette._)

You are the pickers and the choosers here,

And doubtless you're all safe, ye think--ha! ha!

But we have picked and chosen, too, sir knights--

What was the law for I made yesterday--

What! is it you that would deliver up

Three hundred citizens to certain death?

Ho! Van Den Bosch! have at these traitors--ha!--

(_Stabs Grutt, who falls._)

_Van Den B._ Die, treasonable dog!--

(_Stabs Bette._)"

He can do "what is needful." It is admirable; everything that is said

and done is admirable; but an involuntary suspicion at times creeps

into the mind, that such a man as Philip Van Artevelde never lived,

or could live. No man could move along such a line of enterprise with

such a weight of reflection on all the springs of action. We see the

calm statesman at the head of a tumultuary movement; and the meditative

man, to whom revenge is the poorest of our passions, striking a blow

from which an old warrior might shrink. Could a man be really impelled

along a path of life like this by passions that are admitted, indeed,

into the bosom, but watched like prisoners? The suspicion, we say,

creeps involuntarily into the mind; but we will not entertain it--we

will not yield to it. That the reflective and energetic characters are,

in certain degrees, combined together, we all know; and who shall say

within what degrees only this is possible? And why may not an ideal

perfection of this kind be portrayed as well as an ideal patriot, or

an ideal monk, or an ideal warrior? We throw the suspicion aside, and

continue our analysis.

There is a passage which is often quoted for its great beauty: we quote

it also for its great appropriateness. Philip Van Artevelde is master

of the city; he is contemplating it at night-time from the tower of St

Nicholas. The reflection here put into the mouth of the anxious captain

brings back to us, in the midst of war and the cares of government, the

meditative man:--

"There lies a sleeping city. God of dreams!

What an unreal and fantastic world

Is going on below!

Within the sweep of yon encircling wall

How many a large creation of the night,

Wide wilderness and mountain, rock and sea,

Peopled with busy transitory groups,

Finds room to rise, and never feels the crowd!"

The famous scene, which has for its place the summit of this tower,

between Artevelde and Van Den Bosch, is fresh in the recollection

of every reader: we must pass it by, and the admirable and pathetic

description of the famine that is raging in Ghent, and proceed to

the last act of this part of the drama. Artevelde has stimulated the

citizens to make one brave effort more--to sally from the walls, and

meet the Earl in battle before Bruges. He has arranged in order of

battle his lean and famine-stricken, but desperate little army. He

knows the extreme peril in which they stand: no food in the camp;

fearful odds to be encountered; yet the only hope lying in immediate

battle. He does not delude himself for a moment; he sees the danger

clear, and entertains it with a certain sarcastic levity. He does not

hope, but he acts as if he did. He is not a man given to hope, but he

has a tempered despondency, which sits with him at the council-board,

and rides with him to the field, and which he compels to do the

services of hope.

"_Artev._ I would to God

The sun might not go down upon us here

Without a battle fought!

_Van Den B._ If so it should,

We pass a perilous night,

And wake a wasted few the morrow morn.

_Van Muck._ We have a supper left.

_Artev._ My lady's page,

If he got ne'er a better, would be wroth,

And burn in effigy my lady's steward.

* * * * *

_Van Den B._ We'll hope the best;

But if there be a knave in power unhanged,

And in his head a grain of sense undrowned,

He'll be their caution not to----

_Artev._ Van Den Bosch,

Talk we of battle and survey the field,

For I _will_ fight."

We like this last expression. What in another man would have been a

mere petulance, is in Artevelde an assumed confidence--consciously

assumed, as the only tone of mind in which to pass through the present

crisis. Nor can we omit to notice the following passage, which, to our

apprehension, is very characteristic of our contemplative politician

and warrior; it shows the sardonic vein running through his grave and

serious thoughts:--

_Art._ (_to Van Ryk._) I tell thee, eat,

Eat and be fresh. _I'll send a priest to shrive thee.

Van Muck, thou tak'st small comfort in thy prayers,

Put thou thy muzzle to yon tub of wine._"

The battle is fought and a victory won. Justice is executed with stern

and considerate resolve on the villains of the piece, and we leave Van

Artevelde triumphant in his great contest, and happy in the love of

Adriana.

The subordinate characters who are introduced into this first part of

the drama, we have no space to examine minutely. The canvass is well

filled, though the chief figure stands forward with due prominence.

Adriana is all that an amiable and loving woman should be. The

lighter-hearted Clara is intended as a sort of contrast and relief. Her

levity and wit are not always graceful; they are not so in the early

scene where she jests with the page: afterwards, when in presence of

her lover, she has a fitter and more genial subject for her playful

wit, and succeeds much better. In the course of the drama, when the

famine is raging in Ghent, she appears as the true sister of Philip Van

Artevelde. At her first introduction she is somewhat too hoydenish for

the mistress of the noble D'Arlon. D'Arlon is all that a knight should

be, and Gilbert Matthew is a consummate villain.

Between the first and second parts is a poem in rhyme, called "The Lay

of Elena." This introduces us to the lady who is to be the heroine of

the second part of the drama. All the information it gives, might, we

think, have been better conveyed in a few lines of blank verse, added

to that vindication of herself which Elena pours forth in the first

act, when Sir Fleureant of Heurlée comes to reclaim her on the part of

the Duke of Bourbon. This poem is no favourite of ours; but the worst

compliment we would pay it implies, in one point of view, a certain

fitness and propriety--we were glad to return to the blank verse of our

author, in which we find both more music and more pathos than in these

rhymes.

If we are tempted to suspect, whilst reading the first part of this

drama, that the character of Philip Van Artevelde combines in a

quite ideal perfection the man of thought with the man of action,

we, at all events, cannot accuse the author, in this second part, of

representing an ideal or superhuman happiness as the result of this

perfect combination. It is a very truthful sad-coloured destiny that

he portrays. The gloomy passionate sunset of life has been a favourite

subject with poets; but what other author has chosen the clouded

afternoon of life, the cheerless twilight, and the sun setting behind

cold and dark clouds? It was a bold attempt. It has been successfully

achieved. But no amount of talent legitimately expended on it could

make this second part as attractive as the first. When the heroic man

has accomplished his heroic action, life assumes to him, more than to

any other, a most ordinary aspect: his later years bring dwarfish hopes

and projects, or none at all; they bring desires no longer "gay," and

welcomed only for such poor life as they may have in them. Philip Van

Artevelde is now the Regent of Flanders, and, like other regents, has

to hold his own: Adriana he has lost; her place is supplied by one

still fair but faded, and who, though she deserved a better fate, must

still be described as lately the mistress of the Duke of Bourbon. It is

the hero still, but he has descended into the commonplace of courts and

politics.

That it is the same Philip Van Artevelde we are in company with,

the manner in which he enters into this new love will abundantly

testify. He has been describing to Elena his former wife, Adriana. The

description is very beautiful and touching. He then proceeds with his

wooing thus:--

"_Artev._ ... Well, well--she's gone,

And I have tamed my sorrow. Pain and grief

Are transitory things no less than joy,

And though they leave us not the men we were,

Yet they do leave us. You behold me here

A man bereaved, with something of a blight

Upon the early blossoms of his life

And its first verdure, having not the less

A living root, drawing from the earth

Its vital juices, from the air its powers:

And surely as man's health and strength are whole,

His appetites regerminate, his heart

Reopens, and his objects and desires

Shoot up renewed. What blank I found before me,

From what is said you partly may surmise;

How I have hoped to fill it, may I tell?

_Elena._ I fear, my lord, that cannot be.

_Artev._ Indeed!

Then am I doubly hopeless....

_Elena._ I said I feared another could not fill

The place of her you lost, being so fair

And perfect as you give her out."

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

already achieved.

"_Elena._ I cannot--no--

I cannot give you what you've had so long;

Nor need I tell you what you know so well.

I must be gone.

_Artev._ Nay, sweetest, why these tears?

_Elena._ No, let me go--I cannot tell--no--no--

I want to be alone--

Oh! Artevelde, for God's love let me go! [_Exit._

_Artev._ (_after a pause._) The night is far advanced upon the

morrow,

--_Yes, I have wasted half a summer's night_.

Was it well spent? Successfully it was.

How little flattering is a woman's love!

Worth to the heart, come how it may, a world;

Worth to men's measures of their own deserts,

If weighed in wisdom's balance, merely nothing.

The few hours left are precious--who is there?

Ho! Nieuverkerchen!--when we think upon it,

How little flattering is a woman's love!

Given commonly to whosoe'er is nearest

And propped with most advantage; outward grace

Nor inward light is needful; day by day

Men wanting both are mated with the best

And loftiest of God's feminine creation.

Ho! Nieuverkerchen!--what, then, do we sleep?

Are none of you awake?--and as for me,

The world says Philip is a famous man--

What is there woman will not love, so taught?

Ho! Ellert! by your leave though, you must wake.

(_Enter an officer._)

Have me a gallows built upon the mount,

And let Van Kortz be hung at break of day."

It is worth noticing, as a characteristic trait, that Philip Van

Artevelde speaks more like the patriot, harangues more on the cause

of freedom, now that he is Regent of Flanders, opposed to the feudal

nobility, and to the monarchy of France, and soliciting aid from

England, than when he headed the people of Ghent, strong only in their

own love of independence. "Bear in mind," he says, answering the herald

who brings a hostile message from France and Burgundy--

"Bear in mind

Against what rule my father and myself

Have been insurgent: whom did we supplant?

There was a time, so ancient records tell,

There were communities, scarce known by name

In these degenerate days, but once far famed,

Where liberty and justice, hand in hand,

Ordered the common weal; where great men grew

Up to their natural eminence, and none,

Saving the wise, just, eloquent, were great.

... But now, I ask,

Where is there on God's earth that polity

Which it is not, by consequence converse,

A treason against nature to uphold?

Whom may we now call free? whom great? whom wise?

Whom innocent?--the free are only they

Whom power makes free to execute all ills

Their hearts imagine; they alone are great

Whose passions nurse them from their cradles up

In luxury and lewdness,--whom to see

Is to despise, whose aspects put to scorn

Their station's eminence....

... What then remains

But in the cause of nature to stand forth,

And turn this frame of things the right side up?

For this the hour is come, the sword is drawn,

And tell your masters vainly they resist."

We regret to be compelled to garble in our extract so fine a passage of

writing. Meanwhile our patriot Regent sends Father John to England to

solicit aid--most assuredly not to overthrow feudalism, but to support

the Regent against France. His ambition is dragging, willingly or

unwillingly, in the old rut of politics. When Father John returns from

this embassy, he is scandalised at the union formed between Artevelde

and Elena. Here, too, is another sad descent. Our hero has to hear

rebuke, and, with a half-confession, submit to be told by the good

friar of his "sins." He answers bravely, yet with a consciousness that

he stands not where he did, and cannot challenge the same respect from

the friar that he could formerly have done.

"_Artev._ You, Father John,

I blame not, nor myself will justify;

But call my weakness what you will, the time

Is past for reparation. Now to cast off

The partner of my sin were further sin;

'Twere with her first to sin, and then against her.

And for the army, if their trust in me

Be sliding, let it go: I know my course;

And be it armies, cities, people, priests,

That quarrel with my love--wise men or fools,

Friends, foes, or factions--they may swear their oaths,

And make their murmur--rave and fret and fear,

Suspect, admonish--they but waste their rage,

Their wits, their words, their counsel: here I stand,

Upon the deep foundations of my faith

To this fair outcast plighted; and the storm

That princes from their palaces shake out,

Though it should turn and head me, should not strain

The seeming silken texture of this tie."

And now disaster follows disaster; town after town manifests symptoms

of treachery to his cause. His temper no longer retains its wonted

calmness, and the quick glance and rapid government of affairs seems

about to desert him. Note this little trait:--

"_Artev._ Whither away, Vauclaire?

_Vauclaire._ You'll wish, my lord, to have the scouts, and others

That are informed, before you.

_Artev._ 'Twere well."

It is something new that another should anticipate the necessary orders

to be given. The decisive battle approaches, and is fought. This time

it is lost. Our hero does not even fall in the field; an assassin

stabs him in the back. The career of Artevelde ends thus; and that

public cause with which his life was connected has at the same time an

inglorious termination: "the wheel has come full circle."

The catastrophe is brought about by Sir Fleureant of Heurlée. This

man's character undergoes, in the course of the drama, a complete

transformation. We do not say that the change is unnatural, or that

it is not accounted for; but the circumstances which bring it about

are only vaguely and incidentally narrated, so that the reader is not

prepared for this change. A gay, thoughtless, reckless young, knight,

who rather gains upon us at his first introduction, is converted into

a dark, revengeful assassin. It would, we think, have improved the

effect of the _plot_, if we had been able to trace out more distinctly

the workings of the mind of one who was destined to take so prominent a

part in the drama.

The character of _Lestovet_ is admirably sustained, and is manifestly

a favourite with the author. But we must now break away from _Philip

Van Artevelde_, to notice the other dramas of Mr Taylor. _Edwin the

Fair_ next claims our attention. Here also we shall make no quotations

merely for the sake of their beauty; and we shall limit ourselves to an

analysis of the principal character, Dunstan, on which, perhaps, a word

or two of explanation may not be superfluous.

Let us suppose a dramatic writer sitting down before such a character

as this of Dunstan, and contemplating the various aspects it assumes,

with the view of selecting one for the subject of his portraiture. In

the first place, he is aware that, although, as a historical student,

he may, and perhaps must, continue to doubt as to the real character of

this man--how much is to be given to pride, to folly, to fanaticism,

to genuine piety, or to the love of power--yet that, the moment he

assumes the office of dramatic poet, he must throw all doubt entirely

aside. The student of history may hesitate to the last; the poet is

presumed to have from the beginning the clearest insight into the

recesses of the mind, and the most unquestionable authority for all

that he asserts. A sort of mimic omniscience is ascribed to the poet.

Has he not been gifted, from of old, with an _inspiration_, by means of

which he sees the whole character and every thought of his hero, and

depicts and reveals them to the world? To him doubt would be fatal. If

he carries into his drama the spirit of historical criticism, he will

raise the same spirit in his reader, and all faith in the imaginary

creation he offers them is gone for ever. Manifest an error as this may

be, we think we could mention some instances, both in the drama and the

novel, in which it has been committed.

But such a character as Dunstan's is left uncertain in the light

of history, and our dramatist has to choose between uncertainties.

He will be guided in his selection partly by what he esteems the

preponderating weight of evidence, and partly, and perhaps still more,

by the superior fitness of any one phase of the character for the

purpose he has in view, or the development of his own peculiar powers.

In this case, three interpretations present themselves. The first,

which has little historical or moral probability, and offers little

attraction to the artist, is, that Dunstan was a hypocrite, seeking by

show of piety to compass some ambitious end, or win the applause of the

vulgar. Undoubted hypocrites history assuredly presents us with--as

where the ecclesiastical magnate degenerates into the merely secular

prince. There have been luxurious and criminal popes and cardinals,

intriguing bishops and lordly abbots, whom the most charitable of men,

and the most pious of Catholics, must pronounce to have been utterly

insincere in their professions of piety. But a hypocrite who starves

and scourges himself--who digs a damp hole in the earth, and lives

in it--seems to us a mere creature of the imagination. Such men, at

all events, either begin or end with fanaticism. The second and more

usual interpretation is, that Dunstan was a veritable enthusiast, and

a genuine churchman after the order of Hildebrand, capable, perhaps,

of practising deceit or cruelty for his great purpose, but entirely

devoted to that purpose--one of those men who sincerely believe that

the salvation of the world and the predominance of their order are

inseparably combined. There would be no error in supposing a certain

mixture of pride and ambition. Nor, in following this interpretation,

would there be any great violation of probability in attributing to

Dunstan, though he lived in so rude an age, all those arguments by

which the philosopher-priest is accustomed to uphold the domination

of his order. The thinking men of every age more nearly resemble each

other in these great lines of thought and argument, than is generally

supposed. The third interpretation is that which the historical student

would probably favour. It is that Dunstan was, in truth, _partially

insane_--a man of fervent zeal, and of great natural powers, but of

diseased mind. The very ability and knowledge which he possessed,

combined with the strange forms which his asceticism took, lead to this

supposition. Such men, we know, exist, and sometimes pass through a

long career before they are accurately understood. Exhibiting itself in

the form of fanaticism, and in a most ignorant and superstitious age,

a partial insanity might easily escape detection, or even add to the

reputation of the saint.

This last is the rendering of the character which Mr Taylor has

selected. It is evidently the most difficult to treat. Perhaps the

difficulty and novelty of the task it presented, as well as its greater

fidelity to history, induced him to accept this interpretation. That

second and more popular one which we have mentioned would appear, to a

mind like Mr Taylor's, too facile and too trite. Any high-churchman of

almost any age--any bishop, if you inflate the lawn sleeves, or even

any young curate, whose mind dwells too intensely on the _power of

the keys_--would present the rudiments of the character. However that

may be, Mr Taylor undertook the bold and difficult task of depicting

the strong, shrewd, fervent mind, saint and politician both, but

acting with the wild and irregular force of insanity. How, we may ask

ourselves, would such a mind display itself? Not, we way be sure, in a

tissue of weakness or of wildness. We should often see the ingenious

reasoner, more cunning than wise, the subtle politician, or even the

deep moraliser upon human life; but whenever the fatal chords were

touched--the priestly power, the priestly mission, the intercourse with

the world of spirits--there we should see symptoms of insanity and

delusion. Such is the character which Mr Taylor has portrayed.

Earl Leolf, calm and intelligent, and the perfect _gentleman_ (those

who remember the play will feel the truth of this last expression,)

gives us at the very commencement the necessary explanation--

"_Leolf._ How found you the mid-counties?

_Athulf._ Oh! monk-ridden;

Raving of Dunstan.

_Leolf._ 'Tis a raving time:

Mad monks, mad peasants; _Dunstan is not sane,

And madness that doth least declare itself

Endangers most, and ever most infects

The unsound many._ See where stands the man,

And where this people: thus compute the peril

To one and all. _When force and cunning meet

Upon the confines of one cloudy mind_,

When ignorance and knowledge halve the mass,

When night and day stand at an equinox,

Then storms are rife."

No justice, it is plain, can be done to Mr Taylor's drama, unless the

intimation here given us be kept in view. Yet we suspect, from the

remarks sometimes made upon this play, that it has been overlooked, or

not sufficiently attended to. Passages have been censured as crude or

extravagant which, in themselves, could be no otherwise, since they

were intended to portray this half-latent and half-revealed insanity.

The arrogance of Dunstan, and his communings with the spiritual world,

not often have the air of sublimity, for they arise from the disorder

and hallucination of his mind. When he tells the Queen Mother not to

sit in his presence, as well as when he boasts of his intercourse with

angels and demons, we see the workings of a perturbed spirit:--

"_Queen Mother._ Father, I am faint,

For a strange terror seized me by the way.

I pray you let me sit.

_Dunstan._ I say, forbear!

Thou art in a Presence that thou wot'st not of,

Wherein no mortal may presume to sit.

If stand thou canst not, kneel.

(_She falls on her knees._)

_Queen Mother._ Oh, merciful Heaven'

Oh, sinner that I am!

_Dunstan._ Dismiss thy fears;

Thine errand is acceptable to Him

Who rules the hour, and thou art safer here

Than in thy palace. Quake not, but be calm,

And tell me of the wretched king, thy son.

This black, incestuous, unnatural love

Of his blood-relative--yea, worse, a seed

That ever was at enmity with God--

His cousin of the house of Antichrist!

It is as I surmised?

_Queen Mother._ Alas! lost boy!

_Dunstan._ Yes, lost for time and for eternity,

If he should wed her. But that shall not be.

Something more lofty than a boy's wild love

Governs the course of kingdoms. From beneath

This arching umbrage step aside; look up;

The alphabet of Heaven is o'er thy head,

The starry literal multitude. _To few,

And not in mercy, is it given to read

The mixed celestial cipher._"

How skilfully the last passage awakes in the reader a feeling of

sympathy with Dunstan! When he has given his instructions to the Queen

Mother, the scene closes thus:--

"_Queen Mother._ Oh, man of God!

Command me always.

_Dunstan._ Hist! I hear a spirit!

Another--and a third. They're trooping up.

_Queen Mother._ St Magnus shield us!

_Dunstan._ Thou art safe; but go;

The wood will soon be populous with spirits.

The path thou cam'st retread. Who laughs in the air?"

Dunstan believes all along that he is marked out from the ordinary roll

of men--that he has a peculiar intercourse with, and a peculiar mission

from, Heaven; but he nevertheless practises on the credulity of others.

This mixture of superstition and cunning does not need insanity to

explain, but it is seen here in very appropriate company. He says to

Grumo--

"Go, get thee to the hollow of yon tree,

And bellow there as is thy wont.

_Grumo._ How long?

_Dunstan._ Till thy lungs crack. Get hence.

[_Exit Grumo._

And if thou bellowest otherwise than Satan,

It is not for the lack of Satan's sway

'Stablished within thee.

(_Strange howls are heard from the tree._")

With the same crafty spirit, and by a trick as gross, he imposes on the

Synod, contriving that a voice shall appear to issue from the crucifix.

These frauds, however, would have availed nothing of themselves; it is

the spirit of fanaticism bearing down all opposition by which he works

his way. This spirit sustains him in his solitude--

"I hear your call!

A radiance and a resonance from Heaven

Surrounds me, and my soul is breaking forth

In strength, as did the new-created Sun

When Earth beheld it first on the fourth day.

God spake not then more plainly to that orb

Than to my spirit now."

It sustains him in his solitude, and mark how triumphantly it carries

him through in the hour of action. Odo the archbishop, Ricola the

king's chaplain, as well as king and courtiers, all give way before

this inexorable, unreasoning fanaticism, a fanaticism which is as

complete a stranger to fear as it is to reason--

"_Dunstan_ (_to Elgiva._) Fly hence,

Pale prostitute! Avaunt, rebellious fiend,

Which speakest through her.

_Elgiva._ I am thy sovereign mistress and thy queen.

_Dunstan._ ... Who art thou?

I see thee, and I know thee--yea, I smell thee!

Again, 'tis Satan meets me front to front;

Again I triumph! Where, and by what rite,

And by what miscreant minister of God,

And rotten member, was this mockery,

That was no marriage, made to seem a marriage?

_Ricola._ Lord Abbot, by no----

_Dunstan._ What then, was it thou?

The Church doth cut thee off and pluck thee out!

A Synod shall be summoned! _Chains for both!

Chains for that harlot, and for this dog-priest!_

Oh wall of Jezreel!"

And forthwith Elgiva, in spite of the king's resistance, is carried out

a captive. The king, too, is imprisoned in the Tower, and here ensues

a scene which brings out another aspect of the mind of Dunstan. It was

the object of the crafty priest to induce Edwin to resign the crown; he

had, therefore, made his imprisonment as painful as possible. He now

visits him in the Tower, and in this interview we see, underneath the

mad zealot and the subtle politician, something of the genuine _man_.

Dunstan had not been always, and only, the priest; he understood the

human life he trampled on--

"_Dunstan._ What makes you weak? Do you not like your food?

Or have you not enough?

_Edwin._ Enough is brought;

But he that brings it drops what seems to say

That it is mixed with poison--some slow drug;

So that I scarce dare eat, and hunger always.

_Dunstan._ Your food is poisoned by your own suspicions.

'Tis your own fault.----

But thus it is with kings; suspicions haunt,

And dangers press around them all their days;

Ambition galls them, luxury corrupts,

And wars and treasons are their talk at table.

_Edwin._ This homily you should read to prosperous kings;

It is not needed for a king like me.

_Dunstan._ Who shall read homilies to a prosperous king!

... To thy credulous ears

The world, or what is to a king the world,

The triflers of thy court, have imaged me

As cruel, and insensible to joy,

Austere, and ignorant of all delights

That arts can minister. Far from the truth

They wander who say thus. I but denounce

Loves on a throne, and pleasures out of place.

I am not old; not twenty years have fled

Since I was young as thou; and in my youth

I was not by those pleasures unapproached

Which youth converses with.

_Edwin._ No! wast thou not?

How came they in thy sight?

_Dunstan._ When Satan first

Attempted me, 'twas in a woman's shape;

Such shape as may have erst misled mankind,

When Greece or Rome upreared with Pagan rites

Temples to Venus....

... 'Twas Satan sang,

Because 'twas sung to me, whom God had called

To other pastime and severer joys.

But were it not for this, God's strict behest

Enjoined upon me--had I not been vowed

To holiest service rigorously required,

I should have owned it for an angel's voice,

Nor ever could an earthly crown, or toys

And childishness of vain ambition, gauds

And tinsels of the world, have lured my heart

Into the tangle of those mortal cares

That gather round a throne. What call is thine

From God or man, what voice within bids thee

Such pleasures to forego, such cares confront?

* * * * *

... Unless thou by an instant act

Renounce the crown, Elgiva shall not live.

The deed is ready, to which thy name affixed

Discharges from restraint both her and thee.

Say wilt thou sign?

_Edwin._ I will not.

_Dunstan._ Be advised.

What hast thou to surrender? I look round;

This chamber is thy palace court, and realm.

I do not see the crown--where is it hidden?

Is that thy throne?--why, 'tis a base joint-stool;

Or this thy sceptre?--'tis an ashen stick

Notched with the days of thy captivity.

Such royalties to abdicate, methinks,

Should hardly hold thee long. Nay, I myself,

That love not ladies greatly, would give these

To ransom whom I loved."

These feelings of humanity, in part indeed simulated, do not long keep

at bay the cruelty and insane rage or the priest. Edwin persists in his

refusal; Dunstan leaves him for a moment, but shortly after returns

holding the deed in his hand, and followed by his tool Grumo.

"_Dunstan._ Thy signature to this.

_Edwin._ I will not sign.

_Dunstan._ Thou wilt not! wilt thou that thy mistress die?

_Edwin._ Insulting abbot! she is not my mistress;

She is my wife, my queen.

_Dunstan._ Predestinate pair!

He knoweth who is the Searcher of our hearts,

That I was ever backward to take life,

Albeit at His command. Still have I striven

To put aside that service, seeking still

All ways and shifts that wit of man could scheme,

To spare the cutting off your wretched souls

In unrepented sin. But tendering here

Terms of redemption, it is thou, not I,

The sentence that deliverest.

_Edwin._ Our lives

Are in God's hands.

_Dunstan._ Sot, liar, miscreant, No!

God puts them into mine! and may my soul

In tortures howl away eternity,

If ever again it yield to that false fear

That turned me from the shedding of thy blood!

Thy blood, rash traitor to thy God, thy blood!

Thou delicate Agag, I will spill thy blood!"

We believe we have done justice to all the aspects in which the

character of Dunstan is here represented to us, but it would require a

much larger space than we have at command to do justice to the whole

drama of _Edwin the Fair_. The canvass is crowded with figures, almost

every one of which has been a careful study, and will repay the study

of a critical reader; and if the passages of eloquent writing are

not so numerous as in his previous work, there is no deficiency of

them, and many are the pungent, if not witty sayings, that might be

extracted. The chief fault which seems to us to pervade this drama, is,

indeed, that there is too much apparent study--that too much is seen

of the artist. Speaking generally of Mr Taylor, and regarding him as a

dramatic poet, we could desire more life and passion, more abandonment

of himself to the characters he is portraying. But we feel this more

particularly in _Edwin the Fair_. We seem to see the artist sorting and

putting together again the elements of human nature. His Wulfstan, the

ever absent sage, his tricksy Emma, and her very silly lover, Ernway,

are dramatic creations which may probably be defended point by point;

but, for all that, they do not look like real men and women. As to his

monks, the satellites of Dunstan, it may be said that they could not

have been correctly drawn if they had borne the appearance of being

real men. We do not like them notwithstanding.

In the edition which lies before us, bound up with _Edwin the Fair_

is the republication of an early drama, _Isaac Comnenus_. It excited,

we are told in the preface, little attention in its first appearance.

We ourselves never saw it till very lately. Though inferior to his

subsequent productions, it is not without considerable merit, but it

will probably gather its chief interest as the forerunner of _Philip

Van Artevelde_, and from the place it will occupy in the history of

the author's mind. A first performance, which was allowed to pass

unnoticed by the public, might be expected to be altogether different

in kind from its fortunate successors. The author, in his advance out

of obscurity into the full light of success, might be supposed to have

thrown aside his first habits of thought and expression. It is not so

here. We have much the same style, and there is the same combination

of shrewd observation with a philosophic melancholy, the same gravity,

and the same sarcasm. It is curious to notice how plainly there is the

germ of _Philip Van Artevelde_ in _Isaac Comnenus_. The hero of Ghent

is far more sagacious, more serious, and more tender; but he looks

on life with a lingering irony, and a calm cynicism: to him it is a

sad and disenchanted vision. In _Isaac Comnenus_ the same elements

are combined in a somewhat different proportion: there is more of the

irony and a more bitter cynicism; less of the grave tenderness and

the practical sagacity. Artevelde is Isaac Comnenus living over life

again--the same man, but with the advantage of a life's experience.

Indeed Artevelde, if we may venture to jest with so grave a personage,

has something of the air of one who had been in the world before, who

was not walking along its paths for the first time: he treads with so

sure a footstep, and seems to have no questions to ask, and nothing to

learn of experience.

Happily it has not been necessary hitherto to say a word about the

_plot_ of Mr Taylor's dramas. This of _Isaac Comnenus_, being less

known, may require a word of preliminary introduction. The scene

is laid at Constantinople, at the close of the eleventh century;

Nicephorus is the reigning emperor. We may call to mind that the

government of the Byzantine monarchy, for a long time, maintained this

honourable peculiarity, that, though in form a despotism, the emperor

was expected to administer the law as it had descended to it from

the genius of Rome. Dynasties changed, but the government remained

substantially the same. It was an Oriental despotism with a European

administration. Whilst, therefore, we have in the play before us a

prince dethroned, and a revolution accomplished, we hear nothing of

liberty and oppression, the cause of freedom, and the usual topics

of patriotic conspiracy. The brothers Isaac and Alexius Comnenus are

simply too powerful to be trusted as subjects; an attempt has been

already made to poison the elder brother Isaac, the hero of the drama.

He finds himself in a manner constrained to push forward to the throne,

as his only place of safety. This ambitious course is thrust upon

him. Meanwhile he enters on it with no soft-heartedness. He takes up

his part, and goes bravely through with it; bravely, but coldly--with

a sneer ever on his lip. With the church, too, he has contrived to

make himself extremely unpopular, and the Patriarch is still more

rancorously opposed to him than the Emperor.

Before we become acquainted with him, he has loved and lost by death

his gentle _Irene_. This renders the game of ambition still more

contemptible in his eyes. It renders him cold also to the love of a

certain fair cousin, Anna Comnena. Love, or ambition, approaches him

also in the person of Theodora, the daughter of the emperor. She is

willing to desert her father's cause, and ally herself and all her

hopes to Isaac Comnenus. Comnenus declines her love. The rejected

Theodora brings about the catastrophe of the piece. The Emperor

Nicephorus is deposed; Isaac is conqueror in the strife, but he gives

over the crown he has won to his brother Alexius. Then does Theodora

present herself disguised as some humble petitioner to Isaac Comnenus.

Armed with a dagger, she forces her way into an inner chamber where

he is; a groan is heard, and the following stage direction closes the

play--

"_All rush into the inner chamber, whilst Theodora, passing

out from it, crosses the stage, holding in her hand a dagger

covered with blood. The curtain falls._"

This scanty outline will be sufficient to make the following

characteristic quotations intelligible to those who may not have read

the play. Eudocia, his sister, thus describes Comnenus:--

----"He

Is nothing new to dangers nor to life--

His thirty years on him have nigh told double,

Being doubly loaden with the unlightsome stuff

That life is made of. I have often thought

How nature cheats this world in keeping count:

There's some men pass for old men who ne'er lived--

These monks, to wit: they count the time, not spend it;

They reckon moments by the tick of beads,

And ring the hours with psalmody: clocks, clocks;

If one of these had gone a century,

I would not say he'd lived. My brother's age

Has spanned the matter of too many lives;

He's full of years though young."

Comnenus, we have said, is on ill terms with the church. Speaking of

the sanctuary he says:--

"I have a safer refuge. Mother church

Hath no such holy precinct that my blood

Would not redeem all sin and sacrilege

Of slaughter therewithin. But there's a spot

Within the circle my good sword describes,

Which by God's grace is sanctified for me."

On quitting his cousin Anna, she says:--

"Go, and good angels guard thee is my prayer.

_Comnenus._--Good soldiers, Anna. In the arm of flesh

Are we to trust. The Mother of the Gods,

Prolific Mother, holiest Mother church,

Hath banded heaven upon the side opposed.

No matter, when such supplicants as thou

Pray for us, other angels need we none."

It is plain that we have no dutiful son of the Church here; and that

her hostility, in this instance, is not altogether without cause.

We find that his scepticism has gone farther than to dispute the

miraculous virtues of the holy image of St Basil, the eye of which he

is reputed to have knocked out with his lance:--

"Just as you came

I moralised the matter of that change

Which theologians call--how aptly, say--

The quitting of a tenement."

And his moralising is overcast with the shadow of doubt. The addresses,

for such they are, of Theodora, the daughter of the emperor, he

receives and declines with the greatest calmness, though they are of

that order which it is manifestly as dangerous to reject as to accept.

"_Germanus._ My noble lord, the Cæsarissa waits

With infinite impatience to behold you:

She bids me say so. Ah! most noble count!

A fortunate man--the sunshine is upon you--

_Comnenus._ Ay, sir, and wonderfully warm it makes me.

Tell her I'm coming, sir, with speed."

With speed, however, he does not go, nor makes a better excuse for

his delay than that he was "sleeping out the noontide." In the first

interview he escapes from her confidence, and when subsequently she

will not be misunderstood, he says--

"Nor now, nor ever,

Will I make bargains for a lady's love."

In a dialogue with his brother Alexius, his temper and way of thinking,

and the circumstance which has mainly produced them, are more fully

developed. We make a few extracts without attempting very closely to

connect them. Alexius has been remarking the change in Comnenus since

they last met.

"_Comnenus._ Change is youth's wonder:

Such transmutations have I seen on man

That fortune seemed a slow and stedfast power

Compared with nature.

_Alexius._ There is nought thou'st seen

More altered than art thou.

I speak not of thy change in outward favour,

But thou art changed in heart.

_Comnenus._ Ay, hearts change too:

Mine has grown sprightly, has it not, and hard?

I ride it now with spurs; else, else, Alexius--

Well is it said the best of life is childhood.

Life is a banquet where the best's first served,

And when the guest is cloyed comes oil and garlick.

_Alexius._ Hast thou forgotten how it was thy wont

To muse the hours away along this shore--

These very rippled sands?

_Comnenus._ The sands are here,

But not the foot-prints. Wouldst thou trace them now?

A thousand tides and storms have dashed them out.

* * * * *

... I have no care for beauty.

Seest thou yon rainbow based and glassed on ocean?

I look on that as on a lovely thing,

But not a thing of promise."

Comnenus has wandered with his brother unawares to a spot which of all

others on earth was the most dear or the most painful to him--the spot

where his Irene had been buried. He recognises it whilst he is in the

full tide of his cynicism:--

"_Alexius._ What is this carved upon the rock?

_Comnenus._ I know not:

But Time has ta'en it for a lover's scrawl;

He's razed it, razed it.

_Alexius._ No, not quite; look here.

I take it for a lover's.

_Comnenus._ What! there's some talk

Of balmy breath, and hearts pierced through and through

With eyes' miraculous brightness--vows ne'er broken,

Until the church had sealed them--charms loved madly,

Until it be a sin to love them not--

And kisses ever sweet, till they be innocent--

But that your lover's not put down?

_Alexius._ No, none of it.

There are but two words.

_Comnenus._ That's succinct; what are they?

_Alexius._ 'Alas, Irene!' Why thy looks are now--

Comnenus parries the question of his brother, contrives to dismiss him,

and remains alone upon the spot.

"This is the very earth that covers her,

And lo! we trample it like common clay!

... When I last stood here

Disguised, to see a lowly girl laid down

Into her early grave, there was such light

As now doth show it, but a bleaker air,

Seeing it was December. 'Tis most strange;

I can remember now each circumstance

Which then I scarce was conscious of; _like words

That leave upon the still susceptive sense

A message undelivered till the mind

Awakes to apprehensiveness and takes it_.

'Twas o'er--the muttered unattended rite,

And the few friends she had beside myself

Had risen and gone; I had not knelt, but stood

With a dull gaze of stupor as the mould

Was shovelled over, and the broken sods

Fitted together. Then some idle boys,

Who had assisted at the covering in,

Ran off in sport, trailing the shovels with them,

Rattling upon the gravel; and the sexton

Flattened the last sods down, and knocked his spade

Against a neighbouring tombstone to shake off

The clinging soil,--with a contented air,

Even as a ditcher who has done his work.

... Oh Christ!

How that which was the life's life of our being

Can pass away, and we recall it thus!"

Whilst reading this play of _Isaac Comnenus_ we seemed to perceive a

certain _Byronian_ vein, which came upon us rather unexpectedly. Not

that there is any very close resemblance between Comnenus and the

heroes of Lord Byron; but there is a desperate wilfulness, a tone of

scepticism, and a caustic view of human life, which occasionally recall

them to mind. We turned to the preface to _Philip Van Artevelde_, where

there is a criticism upon the poetry of Byron, not unjust in the faults

it detects, but cold and severe, as it seems to us, in the praise

that it awards; and we found there an intimation which confirmed our

suspicion that _Isaac Comnenus_ had been written whilst still partially

under the influence of that poetry--written in what we may describe

as a transition state. He says there of Lord Byron's poetry, "It will

always produce a powerful impression upon very young readers, and I

scarcely think that it can have been more admired by any than myself,

when I was included in that category." And have we not here some

explanation of the severity and coldness of that criticism itself? Did

not the maturer intellect a little resent in that critical judgment the

hallucinations of the youth?

Perhaps we are hardly correct in calling the temper and spirit we

have here alluded to _Byronian_; they are common to all ages and to

many minds, though signally developed by that poet, and in our own

epoch. Probably the future historian of this period of our literature

will attribute much of this peculiar exhibition of bitterness and

despondency to the sanguine hopes first excited and then disappointed

by the French Revolution. He will probably say of certain regions

of our literature, that the whole bears manifest traces of volcanic

origin. Pointing to some noble eminence, which seems to have been

eternally calm, he will conjecture that it owed its elevation to

the same force which raised the neighbouring Ætna. Applying the not

very happy language of geology, he may describe it as "a crater of

elevation;" which, being interpreted, means no crater at all, but an

elevation produced by the like volcanic agency: the crater itself is

higher up in the same mountain range.

There still remains one other small volume of Mr Taylor's poetry,

which we must not pass over entirely without mentioning. _The Eve of

the Conquest, and other Poems_. The chief piece here is of the nature

of a dramatic scene. Harold, the night before the battle of Hastings,

converses with his daughter, unfolds some passages of his past life,

and vindicates himself in his quarrel with that William the Norman who,

on the morrow, was to add the title of Conqueror to his name. But as it

will be more agreeable to vary the nature of our quotations, we shall

make the few extracts we have space for from the lyric poems which

follow.

The "Lago Varese" will be, we suspect, the favourite with most readers.

The image of the Italian girl is almost as distinctly reflected in the

verse as it would have been in her own native lake.

* * * * *

"And sauntering up a circling cove,

I found upon the strand

A shallop, and a girl who strove

To drag it to dry land.

I stood to see--the girl looked round--her face

Had all her country's clear and definite grace.

She rested with the air of rest

So seldom seen, of those

Whose toil remitted gives a zest,

Not languor, to repose.

Her form was poised, yet buoyant, firm, though free,

And liberal of her bright black eyes was she.

The sunshine of the Southern face,

At home we have it not;

And if they be a reckless race,

These Southerns, yet a lot

More favoured, on the chequered earth is theirs;

They have life's sorrows, but escape its cares.

There is a smile which wit extorts

From grave and learned men,

In whose austere and servile sports

The plaything is a pen;

And there are smiles by shallow worldlings worn,

To grace a lie or laugh a truth to scorn:

And there are smiles with less alloy

Of those who, for the sake

Of some they loved, would kindle joy

Which they cannot partake;

But hers was of the kind which simply say,

They came from hearts ungovernably gay."

The "Lago Lugano" is a companion picture, written "sixteen summers"

after, and on a second visit to Italy. One thing we notice, that in

this second poem almost all that is beautiful is brought from the

social or political reflections of the writer: it is not the outward

scene that lies reflected in the verse. He is thinking more of England

than of Italy.

"Sore pains

They take to set Ambition free, and bind

The heart of man in chains."

And the best stanza in the poem is that which is directly devoted to

his own country:--

"Oh, England! 'Merry England,' styled of yore!

Where is thy mirth? Thy jocund laughter, where?

The sweat of labour on the brow of care

Make a mute answer--driven from every door!

The May-pole cheers the village green no more,

Nor harvest-home, nor Christmas mummers rare.

The tired mechanic at his lecture sighs;

And of the learned, which, with all his lore,

Has leisure to be wise?"

With some verses from a poem called "St Helen's-Auckland" we close our

extracts. The author revisits the home of his boyhood:--

"How much is changed of what I see,

How much more changed am I,

And yet how much is left--to me

_How is the distant nigh!_

The walks are overgrown and wild,

The terrace flags are green--

But I am once again a child,

I am what I have been.

The sounds that round about me rise

Are what none other hears;

I see what meets no other eyes,

Though mine are dim with tears.

* * * * *

In every change of man's estate

Are lights and guides allowed;

The fiery pillar will not wait,

But, parting, sends the cloud.

Nor mourn I the less manly part

Of life to leave behind;

My loss is but the lighter heart,

My gain the graver mind."

Poetry is no longer the most popular form of literature amongst us, and

the drama is understood to be the least popular form of poetry. If this

be the case, Mr Taylor has the additional merit of having won his way

to celebrity under singular disadvantages. But, in truth, such poetry

as Mr Taylor's could never appeal to the multitude. Literature of any

kind which requires of the reader himself _to think in order to enjoy_,

can never be popular. It is impossible to deny that the dramas we have

been reviewing demand an effort, in the first instance, on the part of

the reader: he must sit down to them with something of the spirit of

the student. But, having done this, he will find himself amply repaid.

As he advances in the work, he will read with increased pleasure; he

will read it the second time with greater delight than the first; and

if he were to live twenty years, and were to read such a drama as

_Philip Van Artevelde_ every year of his life, he would find in it some

fresh source of interest to the last.

As we have not contented ourselves with selecting beautiful passages of

writing from Mr Taylor's dramas, but have attempted such an analysis

of the three principal characters they portray as may send the reader

to their reperusal with additional zest, so neither have we paused to

dispute the propriety of particular parts, or to notice blemishes and

defects. We would not have it understood that we admire all that Mr

Taylor has written. Of whom could we say this? We think, for instance,

that, throughout his dramas, from the first to the last, he treats the

monks too coarsely. His portraiture borders upon farce. His Father John

shows that he can do justice to the character of the intelligent and

pious monk. Admitting that this character is rare, we believe that the

extremely gross portraiture which we have elsewhere is almost equally

rare. This last, however, is so frequently introduced, that it will

pass with the reader as Mr Taylor's type of the monkish order. The

monks could never have been more ignorant than the surrounding laity,

and they were always something better in morals and in true piety. We

are quite at a loss, too, to understand Mr Taylor's fondness for the

introduction into his dramas of certain songs or ballads, which are not

even intended to be poetical. To have made them so, he would probably

contend, would have been a dramatic impropriety. Very well; but let

us have as few of such things as may be, and as short as possible. In

_Edwin the Fair_ they are very numerous; and those which are introduced

in _Philip Van Artevelde_ we could gladly dispense with. We could also

very willingly have dispensed with the conversation of those burgesses

of Bruges who entertained the Earl of Flanders with some of these

ballads. We agree with the Earl, that their hospitalities are a sore

affliction. Tediousness may be very dramatic, but it is tediousness

still--a truth which our writer, intent on the delineations of his

character, sometimes forgets. But defects like these it is sufficient

merely to have hinted at. That criticism must be very long and ample

indeed, of the dramas of Mr Taylor, in which they ought to occupy any

considerable space.

A LEGEND OF GIBRALTAR.

CHAPTER I.

The Governor's residence at Gibraltar was, in days of Spanish

domination, a religious house, and still retains the name of the

Convent. Two sides of a long quadrangular gallery, traversing the

interior of the building, are hung with portraits of officers present

at the great siege in 1779-83, executed in a style which proves that

Pre-Raphaelite painters existed in those days. One of these portraits

represents my grandfather. To judge from a painting of him by Sir

Joshua, and a small miniature likeness, both still in possession of

the family, he must have been rather a good-looking old gentleman,

with an affable, soldierlike air, and very respectable features. The

portrait at the Convent is doubtless a strong likeness, but by no means

so flattering; it represents him much as he might have appeared in

life, if looked at through a cheap opera-glass. A full inch has been

abstracted from his forehead, and added to his chin; the bold nose

has become a great promontory in the midst of the level countenance;

the eyes have gained in ferocity what they have lost in speculation,

and would, indeed, go far to convey a disagreeable impression of my

ancestor's character, but for the inflexible smile of the mouth.

Altogether, the grimness of the air, the buckram rigidity of figure,

and the uncompromising hardness of his shirt-frill and the curls of

his wig, are such as are to be met with in few works of art, besides

the figure-heads of vessels, the signboards of country inns, and the

happiest efforts of Messrs Millais and Hunt.

However, my grandfather is no worse off than his compeers. Not far

from this one is another larger painting, representing a council of

officers held during the siege, where, notwithstanding the gravity of

the occasion and the imminence of the danger, not a single face in the

intrepid assembly wears the slightest expression of anxiety or fear,

or, indeed, of anything else; and though my progenitor, in addition

to the graces of the other portrait, is here depicted with a squint,

yet he is by no means the most ill-looking individual present. But the

illustrious governor, Eliott, has suffered more than anybody at the

hands of the artist. Besides figuring in the production aforesaid,

a statue of him stands in the Alameda, carved in some sort of wood,

unluckily for him, of a durable nature. The features are of a very

elevated cast, especially the nose; the little legs seem by no means

equal to the task of sustaining the enormous cocked-hat; and the

bearing is so excessively military, that it has been found necessary

to prop the great commander from behind to prevent him from falling

backwards.

My grandfather, John Flinders, joined the garrison of Gibraltar

as a major of infantry a few years before the siege. He was then

forty-seven years of age, and up to that time had remained one of the

most determined old bachelors that ever existed. Not that he ever

declaimed against matrimony in the style of some of our young moderns,

who fancy themselves too strong-minded to marry; the truth being that

they remain single either because they have not been gifted by nature

with tastes sufficiently strong to like one woman better than another,

or else, because no woman ever took the trouble to lay siege to them.

My grandfather had never married, simply, I believe, because matrimony

had never entered his head. He seldom ventured, of his own choice,

into ladies' society, but, when he did, no man was more emphatically

gallant to the sex. One after one, he saw his old friends abandoning

the irresponsible ease of bachelorhood for the cares of wedded life;

but while he duly congratulated them on their felicity, and officiated

as godfather to their progeny, he never seemed to anticipate a similar

destiny for himself. All his habits showed that he had been too long

accustomed to single harness to go cleverly as one of a pair. He

had particular hours of rising, and going to bed; of riding out and

returning; of settling himself down for the evening to a book and pipe,

which the presence of a helpmate would have materially deranged. And

therefore, without holding any Malthusian tenets, without pitying his

Benedick acquaintances, or entertaining a thought of the sex which

would have been in the least decree derogatory to the character of a De

Coverley, his castles in the air were never tenanted by any of his own

posterity.

It was fortunate for my grandfather that in his time people did not

suffer so much as now from that chronic inflammation of the conscience,

which renders them perfectly miserable unless they are engaged in some

tangible pursuit--"improving their minds," or "adding to the general

stock of information." A more useless, contented person never existed.

He never made even a show of employing himself profitably, and never

complained of weariness in maintaining the monotonous jog-trot of his

simple daily life. He read a good deal, certainly, but it was not

to improve his mind, only to amuse himself. Strong-minded books, to

stimulate his thinking faculties, would have had no charms for him; he

would as soon have thought of getting galvanised for the pleasure of

looking at his muscles. And I don't know whether it was not just as

well. In systematically cultivating his mind, he would merely have been

laying a top-dressing on a thin soil--manuring where there would never

have been a crop--and some pleasant old weeds would have been pulled

up in the process. A green thistly common, even though a goose could

hardly find sustenance there, is nature still, which can hardly be said

of a patch of earth covered with guano.

So my grandfather went on enjoying himself without remorse after his

own fashion, and never troubled himself to think--an operation that

would have been inconvenient to himself, and productive of no great

results to the world. He transplanted his English habits to Gibraltar;

and, after being two years there, knew nothing more of Spain or

Spaniards than the view of the Andaluçian hills from the Rock, and a

short constitutional daily ride along the beach beyond the Spanish

lines, to promote appetite and digestion, afforded him. And so he might

have continued to vegetate during the remainder of his service there,

but for a new acquaintance that he made about this time.

Frank Owen, commonly called Garry Owen by his familiars, was one of

those joyous spirits whose pleasant faces and engaging manners serve

as a perpetual act of indemnity for all breaches of decorum, and

trespasses over social and conventional fences, committed by them

in the gaiety of their hearts. In reproving his many derelictions

of military duty, the grim colonel of the regiment would insensibly

exchange his habitual tone of severe displeasure for one of mild

remonstrance--influenced, probably, quite as much, in secret, by the

popularity of the unrepentant offender, as by any personal regard

for him. Captain Hedgehog, who had shot a man through the heart for

corking his face one night when he was drunk, and all contact with

whose detonating points of honour was as carefully avoided by his

acquaintance as if they had been the wires of a spring-gun, sustained

Garry's reckless personalities with a sort of warning growl utterly

thrown away upon the imperturbable wag, who would still persist, in

the innocence of his heart, in playing round the den of this military

cockatrice. And three months after his arrival in Gibraltar, being

one day detected by a fierce old Spanish lady in the very act of

kissing her daughter behind the little señorita's great painted fan,

his good-humoured impudence converted the impending storm into a mild

drizzle of reproof, ending in his complete restoration to favour.

This youth had brought with him from England a letter from his mother,

a widow lady, an old friend of my grandfather, who had some thirty

years before held with her a juvenile flirtation. It recommended to

his protection her son Frank, about to join the regiment as an ensign,

pathetically enlarging on the various excellencies, domestic and

religious, which shone forth conspicuously in the youth's character,

and of the comfort of contemplating and superintending which she was

about to be deprived. In fact, it had led my grandfather to expect a

youth of extreme docility and modesty, requiring a protector rather

to embolden than to restrain him. After in vain attempting to espy in

his young acquaintance any of the characteristics ascribed to him in

his mother's letter, the Major, naturally good-natured and accessible

to his youthful comrades, very soon suffered himself to be influenced

by the good-humour, vigorous vitality, and careless cleverness of the

Ensign, to an extent that caused him sometimes to wonder secretly

at his own transformation. His retired habits were broken in upon,

one after the other, till he had scarcely a secluded hour in his

sixteen waking ones to enjoy alone his book and his pipe. His peaceful

quarters, silent, in general, as a monk's cell, would now be invaded

at all sorts of hours by the jovial Garry, followed by the admiring

satellites who usually revolved around him; and the Major, with a sound

between a groan and a chuckle, would close his well-beloved volume to

listen to the facetious details of, and sometimes to participate in,

the uncongenial freaks of the humorous subaltern. Once he had actually

consented, at about the hour he usually went to bed, to accompany the

youth to a Carnival ball--one of a series of entertainments at which

the Catholic youth of the city are wont to idemnify themselves for the

mortifications of Lent, and where masks, dominoes, and fancy dresses

lend their aid to defeat the vigilance of the lynx-eyed duennas and

mammas who look anxiously on, perfectly aware, in general, that their

own watchfulness is more to be relied on for nipping in the bud an

indiscreet amour, than any innate iciness of temperament or austere

propriety in the objects of their care. Not only did the Major mingle

in the scene, but he actually, about midnight, found himself figuring

in a cotillon with a well-developed señorita of thirteen years, whose

glances and deportment showed a precocious proficiency in the arts of

flirtation. At this ball Garry had become enamoured beyond all former

passions (and they were numerous and inconstant, in general, as if he

had been a Grand Turk) of one of his partners, a young Spanish lady.

Her graceful figure and motions in the dance had at first captivated

him--and when, after dancing with her himself, his eloquent entreaties,

delivered in indifferent Spanish, had prevailed on her to lift her

mask for one coy moment, the vision of eyes and eyebrows, the common

beauties of a Spanish countenance, and the clear rosy complexion, a

much more rare perfection, then revealed, had accomplished the utter

subjugation of his errant fancy. She had vanished from the ball

silently and irremediably, as a houri of Paradise from the awakening

eyes of an opium-eating Pacha; and all his attempts to trace her,

continued unceasingly for a couple of months afterwards, had proved in

vain.

One morning my grandfather was seated at breakfast in the verandah of

his quarters, situated high up the rock above the town. Below him lay

the roofs, terraced and balconied, and populous with cats, for whose

convenience the little flat stone squares at the top of most of the

houses appeared to have been devised. Tall towers called mirandas shot

up at intervals, from whose summits the half-baked inhabitants, pent

within close walls and streets, might catch refreshing glimpses of the

blue sea and the hills of Spain--conveniences destined soon afterwards

to be ruined by the enemy's fire, or pulled down to avoid attracting

it, and never rebuilt. Beyond the white sunny ridge of the line wall

came the sharp edge of the bay, rising in high perspective to the

purple coast of Spain opposite, which was sprinkled with buildings

white as the sails that dotted the water. My grandfather was in a

state of great sensual enjoyment, sniffing up the odour of the large

geranium bushes that grew in clumps in the little garden in front, and

the roses that twined thickly round the trellis of the vine-roofed

verandah; sipping thick creamy Spanish chocolate between the mouthfuls

of red mullet, broiled in white paper, the flavour of which he was

diligently comparing with that of some specimens of the same fish

which he remembered to have eaten in his youth in Devonshire; and

glancing sideways over the cup at an open volume of Shakspeare,

leaned slopingly on the edge of a plate of black figs bursting with

ripeness, like trunk hose slashed with crimson. The Major was none

of your skimming readers, who glance through a work of art as if it

were a newspaper--measure, weigh it, and deliver a critical opinion on

it, before the more reverential student has extricated himself from

the toils of the first act or opening chapter: not he; he read every

word, and affixed a meaning, right or wrong, to all the hard, obsolete

ones. The dramatic fitness of the characters was not to be questioned

by him, any more than that of the authentic personages of history.

He would reason on their acts and proceedings as on those of his own

intimate acquaintances. He never could account for Hamlet's madness

otherwise than by supposing the Prince must have, some time or other,

got an ugly rap on the head--let fall, perhaps, when a baby, by a

gin-drinking nurse--producing, as in some persons he had himself from

time to time been acquainted with, a temporary aberration of the wits;

a piece of original criticism that has not occurred to any of the other

commentators on this much-discussed point. Of Iago he has recorded

an opinion in an old note-book still extant, where his observations

appear in indifferent orthography, and ink yellow with age, that he

was a cursed scoundrel--an opinion delivered with all the emphasis of

an original detector of crime, anxious that full though tardy justice

should be done to the delinquent's memory. But his great favourite was

Falstaff: "A wonderful clever fellow, sir," he would say, "and no more

a coward than you or I, sir."

My grandfather proceeded slowly with his meal, holding the cup to his

lips with one hand and turning a leaf with the other--an operation

which he was delaying till a great mosquito-hawk, (a beautiful brown

moth mottled like a pheasant,) that had settled on the page, should

think proper to take flight. He had lately come from a parade, as was

evidenced by his regimental leather breeches and laced red waistcoat;

but a chintz dressing-gown and a pair of yellow Moorish slippers

softened down the warlike tone of these garments to one more congenial

with his peaceable and festive pursuits. Presently the garden door

opened, and a well-known step ascended to the verandah. Frank Owen,

dressed in a cool Spanish costume, advanced, and stopping three paces

from the Major, took off his tufted sombrero and made a low bow.

"You are the picture, my dear sir," he said, "of serene enjoyment

slightly tinged with sensuality. But how long, may I ask, have you

taken to breakfasting on spiders?"--pointing, as he took a chair

opposite the Major, at an immense red-spotted one that had dropt from

the ceiling on the morsel my grandfather was in the act of conveying to

his mouth.

The Major tenderly removed the insect by a leg.

"'Tis the worst of these al-fresco meals, Frank," said he. "Yesterday I

cut a green lizard in two that had got on my plate, mistaking him for a

bit of salad--being, as usual, more intent on my book than my food--and

had very near swallowed the tail-half of the unfortunate animal."

"There are worse things than lizards in the world," quoth Garry. "Ants,

I should say, were certainly less wholesome"--and he directed the

Major's attention to a long black line of those interesting creatures

issuing from a hole in the pavement, passing in an unbroken series up

my ancestor's left leg, the foot of which rested on the ground, then

traversing the cloth, and terminating at the loaf, the object of their

expedition.

"Bless me," said the Major, as he rose and shook his breeches gently

free from the marauders, "I must be more careful, or I shall chance to

do myself a mischief. But they're worst at night. I've been obliged to

leave off reading here in the evenings, for it went to my heart to see

the moths scorching their pretty gauzy wings in the candle till the

wicks were half-choked with them."

"Do you know, Major," said Owen, gravely, "that either this insect

diet, or the sedentary life you lead, is making you quite fat, and

utterly destroying the symmetry of your figure? In another week there

will be one unbroken line of rotundity from your chin to your knees."

My grandfather glanced downward at his waistcoat. "No, my boy, no,"

said he; "if there had been any difference, I should have known it by

my clothes. I don't think I've gained a pound this twelvemonth."

"More than a stone," quoth Garry. "We all remarked it on parade

to-day--and remarked it with sorrow. Now, look you, a sea voyage is

the very thing to restore your true proportions, and I propose that we

shall take a short one together."

"A sea voyage!" quoth my grandfather; "the boy is mad! Not if all

the wonders seen by Sinbad the Sailor lay within a day's sail. Did I

not suffer enough coming here from England? I don't think," said my

grandfather with considerable pathos, "that my digestion has ever been

quite right to this day."

"'Sick of a calm,' eh?--Like your friend Mistress Tearsheet," said the

youngster. "But I've settled it all, and count on you. Look here," he

continued, drawing from his pocket a large printed bill, and unfolding

it before my ancestor. At the top appeared in large capitals the words,

"Plaza de Toros;" and underneath was a woodcut representing a bull,

of whose sex there could be no doubt, gazing, with his tail in the

air, and an approving smile on his countenance, on the matadore about

to transfix him. Then followed a glowing account in Spanish of the

delights of a great bull-fight shortly to take place at Cadiz, setting

forth the ferocity of the bulls, the number of horses that might be

expected to die in the arena, and the fame of the picadores and espadas

who were then and there to exhibit.

The Major shook his head--the captivating prospectus had no charms

for him: he had not, as I have before said, an inquiring mind, and

habit was so strong in him that a change was like the dislocation of a

joint. The Ensign proceeded to paint the delights of the excursion in

the brightest colours he could command. They were to go to Cadiz in a

boat which he had lately bought--she was a capital sailer--there was

a half-deck forward, under which the Major might sleep as comfortably

as in his own bed--a cooking apparatus, (and here, as he expatiated on

the grills and stews and devils that were to be cooked and eaten, with

the additional stimulus to appetite afforded by sea air, there was a

spark of relenting in my grandfather's eye.) "You shall return," said

the tempter, "with a digestion so completely renovated, that my name

shall rise to your tongue at each meal as a grace before meat, and a

thanksgiving after it; and as to sea-sickness, why, this Levanter will

take us there in twelve hours, so smoothly that you may balance a straw

upon your nose the whole way." Finally, the cunning Ensign laid before

him an application for leave already made out, and only awaiting his

signature.

My grandfather made some feeble, objections, which Owen pooh-poohed

in his usual off-hand fashion. There was no standing against the

youngster's strong will, that, like Aaron's rod, swallowed up all

opposition, and at five o'clock that same evening the Major found

himself proceeding through the town towards the Waterport for

embarkation, by no means fully reconciled to the abandonment of his

beloved Lares. My luckless grandfather! did no presentiment warn you of

a consequence then hanging in the clouds, that was to change utterly

for you the untroubled aspect of those household gods?

Owen had attired himself for the trip in a half-nautical costume--a

shirt of light-blue flannel, fastened at the collar with a smart

bandana, a bluejacket, loose duck trousers, and a montero cap, which

costume became the puppy well enough. He seemed of this opinion

himself, as he walked gaily along beside the Major: so did the

black-eyed occupants of many houses on each side, who peeped forth

smilingly from behind their green lattices, sometimes nodding and

kissing their hands--for the Ensign had an incredible acquaintance with

the budding and full-blown portion of the population of Gibraltar. The

Major had stuck to his buckskins, (which stuck to him in return,) over

which he had drawn a pair of jack-boots, and wore his red-laced coat

and regimental hat--for in those days that passion for mufti, now so

prevalent in the army, did not exist. Whenever he caught sight of any

of the greetings bestowed from the windows, he would take off his laced

hat, and, fixing his eyes on the tittering señorita, who generally let

fall the lattice with a slam, would make her a low bow--and, after each

of these acts of courtesy, my grandfather walked on more elated than

before.

They passed the drawbridge at Waterport, and, struggling through the

crowd of Turks, Jews, infidels, and heretics, who usually throng the

quay, entered a shore-boat that was to row them out to where Owen's

vessel--the _Fair Unknown_, as he had christened her, in memory of

his unforgotten partner at the Carnival ball--lay moored. In her they

found a sailor who was to accompany them on their voyage--a noted

contrabandista, called Francisco, whose friendship Owen had lately

acquired, and who acted as his lieutenant on his marine excursions. The

boat was a neat affair--a small cutter, smartly painted, well found,

and capable of holding several persons comfortably; and Francisco was

a ruddy, portly, dark-skinned, large-whiskered son of the sea, the

picture of good-humour. My grandfather stept in, in his jack-boots.

There was much settling of carpet-bags and stowing of provisions in the

lockers, and then they hoisted sail, and glided smoothly out from among

the shipping into the bay.

The breeze was light and fair, and they went on, as Frank had promised,

pleasantly enough. My grandfather for the first time surveyed the scene

of his two years' residence from the sea. The grey old rock looked

mellow in the evening light, as an elderly gentleman over his wine--the

window-panes glanced ruddily, the walls gleamed whitely, and the

trees were tinted with a yellower green; behind, in the eastern sky,

floated one single purple cloud. As the objects became confused in the

distance, the sharp rugged outline of the rock assumed the appearance

that has caused the Spaniards to call it El Cuerpo--the appearance of a

vast human body laid out on its back, and covered with a winding-sheet,

like a dead Titan on his funeral pile--the head towards Spain, the

chest arched at Middle Hill, the legs rising gently upward to the

knees at O'Hara's Tower, and then sloping down till the feet rest

on Europa. The sun went down as they rounded Cabrita Point, and the

breeze, freshening, took them swiftly along under the huge hills that

rise abruptly upward from the Spanish coast. Then Francisco, lighting a

charcoal fire, placed thereon, in a frying-pan, tender steaks thickly

strewn with sliced tomatas and onions, from whence arose a steam that

brought tears of gratitude and delight into my grandfather's eyes.

He anxiously watched the cooking--even threw out slight suggestions,

such as another pinch of pepper, an additional onion, a slight dash of

cayenne, and the like; and then, settling a plate firmly on the knees

of his jack-boots, with a piece of bread and a cup by his side, and a

knife and fork pointing upwards in his hands like lightning conductors,

gazed cheerfully around him. And when Francisco, rising from his knees,

where he had been blowing the charcoal fire, removed the hissing pan

towards my grandfather's plate, transferring to it a liberal portion

of the contents, the good man, gazing on the white and red streaks of

vegetable relieved by the brown background of steak, and the whole

picture swimming in a juicy atmosphere of gravy, felt sentiments of

positive friendship towards that lawless individual, and, filling a

bumper of Xerez, drank success to the voyage.

Three times was my grandfather's plate replenished from the

thrice-filled pan. Afterwards he dallied a little with a cold pie,

followed by a bit of cheese for digestion. Then, folding his hands

across his stomach, he expressed his sincere opinion, that he had never

tasted anything so good as that steak; and when Owen placed in his hand

a smoking can of grog, he looked on the young man with a truly paternal

eye. He talked complacently and benevolently, as men do who have dined

well--praised the weather, the boat, the scene--and wondered where a

man was going who rode slowly along a mountain-path above them, within

hail, following him, in imagination, to his home, in a sort of dreamy

contentment. After a second can he began to grow drowsy, and, just

aware that Owen said the breeze was still freshening, retired to the

soft mattress spread for him under the half-deck, and replacing his

cocked hat by a red nightcap, slept till morning.

It was broad daylight when he woke, conscious that for an hour or two

past he had been sleeping most uneasily. There was a violent swinging

motion, a rushing of wind and of water, that confused him extremely;

and, forgetting where he was, he nearly fractured his skull by rising

suddenly into a sitting posture. Steadying himself on his hands, in the

posture of the Dying Gladiator, he slewed himself round on the pivot of

his stern, and protruded his powdered head, like an old beaver, out of

his hole. Owen and Francisco were sitting in a pool of water, trying to

shelter themselves under the weather-side of the boat--dripping wet,

and breakfasting on cold potatoes and fragments of meat left from last

night's meal. My grandfather did not like the appearance of things at

all. Rent in twain by horrible qualms, he inquired feebly of Owen if

they were near Cadiz? Frank, in reply, shook his head, and said they

were at anchor. Then my grandfather, making a vigorous effort, emerged

completely from his place of repose, and, rising to his feet, looked

over the gunwale. The scene he beheld was in dreary contrast to that

of the evening before. Ridges of white foam were all around--ahead was

a long low line of sandy coast, terminating in a point of rock whereon

stood a lighthouse; and to leeward the bay was enclosed by steep hills.

Over the low coast-line the wind blew with steady violence. A bright

sun rather increased the dreariness of the prospect, which was suddenly

closed to my grandfather by a shower of spray, that blinded him, and

drenched him to the skin, converting his jack-boots into buckets. The

wind had increased to a gale during the night, and they had been forced

to take precarious shelter in the harbour of Tarifa. The Major did not

venture on a second peep, but sat, dismally wet and sea-sick, the whole

morning, trying to shelter himself as he best could. Once, a man came

down to the beach, and gesticulated like a scaramouch, screaming also

at the same time; but what his gestures and screams signified nobody on

board could tell. At length, as the gale did not moderate, while their

position increased in discomfort, and was also becoming precarious,

(for one of their anchors was gone, and great fears were entertained

for the other,) Owen and Francisco decided to weigh, and stand in for

the shore, trusting to the smuggler's seamanship for a safe run. The

Major, in spite of his sickness, stood up and pulled gallantly at the

cable, the wind blowing his pigtail and skirts perpendicularly out from

his person. At last, after tremendous tugging, the anchor came up. The

jib was hoisted with a reef in it, Owen holding the sheet, while the

smuggler ran aft and took the helm. They bent over to the gale, till

the Major stood almost perpendicularly on the lee gunwale, with his

back against the weather-side, and ran in till he thought they were

going to bump ashore; then tacking, they stood up along the coast,

close to the wind, till Francisco gave the word. Owen let go the sheet,

and the jib fluttered loosely out as they ran through a narrow passage

into smooth water behind the sea-wall, and made fast to a flight of

steps.

Presently some functionary appertaining to the harbour appeared, and

with him an emissary from the Governor of the place, who, aware of

their plight, had civilly sent to offer assistance. The messenger

was the same man who had made signals to them from the beach in the

morning; and he seemed to think it advisable that they should wait

on the Governor in person, saying that he was always disposed to be

civil to British officers. This advice they resolved to act upon at

once, before it should grow dark, foreseeing that, in case of their

detention from bad weather in Tarifa, the Governor might prove a potent

auxiliary. The Major would have wished to make some little alterations

in his toilette, after his late disasters; but, after trying in vain

to pull off his jack-boots, which clung to him like his skin, he was

obliged to abandon the idea, and contented himself with standing on

his head to let the water run out of them. As they advanced along the

causeway leading to the town, (the point where they landed is connected

with the town by a long narrow sandy isthmus,) the gale swept over them

volumes of sand, which, sticking to my grandfather's wet uniform, gave

him somewhat the appearance of a brick-wall partially roughcast. His

beard was of two days' growth--his hair-powder was converted into green

paste by the sea-water--and his whole appearance travel-stained and

deplorable. Nevertheless his dignity by no means forsook him, as they

traversed the narrow alleys of the ancient town of Tarifa, on their way

to the approaching interview.

His excellency Don Pablo Dotto, a wonderfully fat little man, received

them very courteously. He was a Spaniard of the old school, and

returned the stately greeting of my grandfather, and the easy one of

the Ensign, with such a profusion of bows, that for the space of a

minute they saw little more of his person than the shining baldness

on the top of his head. Then they were presented to his wife, a

good-natured, motherly sort of old lady, who seemed to compassionate

them much. But, while Owen was explaining to her the object of

their trip, and its disastrous interruption, he suddenly stopped,

open-mouthed, and blushing violently, with his gaze directed towards

the open door of a neighbouring apartment. There he beheld, advancing

towards him, the Beauty of the Carnival ball.

The Governor's lady named her as "her daughter, the Señorita Juana."

Spite of the different dress and circumstances, she, too, recognised

Frank, and coloured slightly as she came forward to receive his

greeting. The Ensign, an impudent scamp enough in general, was,

however, the more confused of the two; and his embarrassed salutation

was entirely thrown into the shade by the magnificence of my

grandfather's bow. However, he presently recovered his assurance,

and explained to the elder lady how he had previously enjoyed the

pleasure (with a great stress upon the word) of making her daughter's

acquaintance. Then he recounted to Juana the manner in which they had

been driven in here, when on their way to Cadiz to see the bull-fight.

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

softly.

"Ah, then, we shall meet there," said Frank, who presently after was

seized with a fit of absence, and made incoherent replies. He was

considering how they might travel together, and had almost resolved to

offer to take the whole family to Cadiz in his boat--a proposal that

would probably have somewhat astonished the little Governor, especially

if he had seen the dimensions of the craft thus destined to accommodate

himself and retinue. But Garry was an adept in manoeuvring, and

marched skilfully upon the point he had in view. He drew such a

pathetic picture of the hardships they had endured on the voyage--their

probable detention here for most of their short leave--their friendless

condition, and their desire to see something of the country--that the

little Governor was in a manner impelled (fancying all the time that

the impulse sprung altogether from his own native benevolence,) to

desire that the two forlorn Englishmen would travel to Cadiz under his

escort. So it being settled entirely to Garry's satisfaction that they

were to start next morning at break of day on horseback--an arrangement

which my grandfather's total ignorance of Spanish prevented him from

knowing anything about--they retired to the principal fonda, where the

Major speedily forgot, over a tolerable dinner, the toils and perils of

the voyage.

CHAPTER II.

Daybreak the next morning found them issuing forth from the ancient

city of Tarifa on a couple of respectable-looking hacks, hired from

the innkeeper. Frank had, with his accustomed generalship, managed

to secure a position at the off-rein of the Señorita Juana, who was

mounted on a beautiful little white barb. Under her side-saddle, of

green velvet studded with gilt nails, was a Moorish saddle-cloth,

striped with vivid red and white, and fringed deeply. From the

throat-lash of the bridle hung a long tassel, as an artificial

auxiliary to the barb's tail in the task of keeping the flies off,

further assisted by a tuft of white horse-hair attached to the butt of

her whip. She wore a looped hat and white plume, a riding-skirt, and an

embroidered jacket of blue cloth, fastened, as was the wrought bosom of

her chemise, with small gold buttons. Frank could not keep his eyes off

her, now riding off to the further side of the road to take in at once

the whole of the beauteous vision, now coming close up to study it in

its delightful details.

In front of the pair rode the little Governor, side by side with a

Spaniard of about thirty, the long-betrothed lover of Juana--so long,

in fact, that he did not trouble himself to secure his authority in

a territory so undeniably his own, but smoked his cigar as coolly as

if there were no good-looking Englishman within fifty miles of his

mistress. He wore garments of the Spanish cut, made of nankeen--the

jacket frogged with silver cords, tagged with little silver

fishes--the latter appended, perhaps, as suitable companions to the

frogs. A hundred yards ahead was an escort of four horse-soldiers

with carbines on their thighs, their steel accoutrements flashing

ruddily in the level sunlight. Behind Frank came Major Flinders,

clean shaved, and with jack-boots and regimental coat restored to

something like their pristine splendour; by his side rode another

lady, the Señorita Carlota, Juana's aunt, somewhere about thirty years

old, plump and merry, her upper lip fringed at the corners with a

line of dark down, quite decided enough for a cornet of eighteen to

be proud of--a feminine embellishment too common for remark in these

southern regions, and, in the opinion of some connoisseurs, rather

enhancing the beauty of the fair wearers. She talked incessantly, at

first, to my grandfather, who did not understand a word she said,

but whose native politeness prompted him to say, "Si, Señorita," to

everything--sometimes laying at the same moment his hand on his heart,

and bowing with considerable grace. Behind this pair came another

interesting couple--viz., two servants on mules, with great saddle-bags

stuffed to extreme corpulence with provisions.

It was a glorious morning--a gentle breeze sweeping on their faces as

they mounted the hills, but dying into silence in the deep valleys,

fresh, and glistening with dew. Sometimes they rode along a rocky

common, yellowed with a flowering shrub like furze--sometimes through

unfenced fields--sometimes along broad plains, where patches of

blossoming beans made the air rich with scent, and along which they

galloped full speed, the Governor standing high in the stirrups of

his demi-pique, the Señorita's white barb arching his neck till his

muzzle touched his chest under the pressure of the long bit, and my

grandfather prancing somewhat uneasily on his hard-mouthed Spanish

entero, whose nose was, for the most part, projected horizontally in

the air. The Major was not a first-rate seat--he rode with a long

stirrup, his heel well down, his leg straight, and slanting a little

forward, body upright, and elbows back, as may be seen in the plates to

ancient works on equitation--a posture imposing enough, but not safe

across country: galloping deranged it materially, for the steed was

hard-mouthed, and required a long, strong pull, with the body back,

and a good purchase on the stirrups. The animal had a most voracious

appetite, quite overcoming his sense of what was due to his rider;

and, on seeing a tuft of juicy grass, down went his nose, drawing my

grandfather, by means of the tight reins, well over the pummel. On

these occasions, the Major, feeling resistance to be in vain, would

sit looking easily about him, feigning to be absorbed in admiration of

the prospect--which was all very well, where there was a prospect to

look at, but wore a less plausible appearance when the animal paused

in a hollow between two hedges, or ran his nose into a barn-door. But

whenever this happened, Carlota, instead of half-smothering a laugh,

as a mischievous English girl would, ten to one, have done, sat most

patiently till the Major and his steed came to an understanding, and

would greet him, as they moved on again, with a good-natured smile,

that won her, each time, a higher place in his estimation.

Thus they proceeded till the sun rose high in the heavens, when, on

reaching a grove on the edge of one of the plains, they halted under a

huge cork-tree, near which ran a rivulet. The cavalcade dismounted--the

horses were tethered, the mules disburthened of the saddle-bags, and

the contents displayed under the tree; horse-cloths and cloaks were

spread around on the ground and a fire of dry sticks was lit on the

edge of the stream with such marvellous celerity that, before my

grandfather had time to take more than a hasty survey of the eatables,

after seating himself on the root of a tree, a cup of steaming

chocolate was placed in his hand.

"Confess, Major," said Garry, speaking with his mouth full of sausage,

"that a man may lose some of the pleasures of existence by leading the

life of a hermit. Don't you feel grateful to me for dragging you out of

your cobweb to such a pleasant place as this?"

"'Tis an excellent breakfast," said my grandfather, who had just

assisted the Señorita Carlota to a slice of turkey's breast, and

himself to an entire leg and thigh--dividing with her, at the

same time, a crisp white loaf, having a handle like a teapot or

smoothing-iron--"and my appetite is really very good. I should be

perfectly easy if I could only understand the remarks of this very

agreeable lady, and make suitable replies."

"Let me interpret your sentiments," said Garry; "and though I may not

succeed in conveying them in their original force and poetry, yet they

shall lose as little as possible in transmission. Just try me--what

would you wish to say?"

"Why, really," said my grandfather, pondering, "I had a great many

things to say as we came along, but they've gone out of my head. Do you

think she ever read Shakspeare?"

"Not a chance of it," said Owen.

Here the Señorita laughingly appealed to Frank to know what my

grandfather was saying about her.

"Ah," quoth my grandfather, quoting his friend Shakspeare--

"'I understand thy _looks_--the pretty Spanish

Which thou pourest down from these swelling heavens

I am _not_ perfect in ----'

She's an extremely agreeable woman, Frank, I'll be sworn, if one only

understood her," quoth my grandfather, casting on her a glance full of

gallantry.

The Ensign was not so entirely occupied in prosecuting his own love

affair as to be insensible to the facilities afforded him for amusing

himself at the Major's expense. Accordingly, he made a speech in

Spanish to Carlota, purporting to be a faithful translation of my

grandfather's, but teeming, in fact, with the most romantic expressions

of chivalrous admiration, as was apparent from the frequent recurrence

of the words "ojos," (eyes,) "corazon," (heart,) and the like amatory

currency.

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

what you said of her."

The Major endorsed the compliments by laying his hand upon his heart,

and bowing with a tender air. Whereupon Carlota, laughing, and blushing

a deeper red, made her acknowledgments.

"She says," quoth Frank, "that she knew the English before to be a

gallant nation; but that if all the caballéros (that's gentlemen)

of that favoured race are equal to the present specimen, her own

countrymen must be thrown entirely into the shade."

"Delightful!" cried my grandfather; but it is doubtful whether this

expression of pleasure was called forth by the sentiments attributed

to the Señorita, or by the crisp succulent tenderness of a mouthful of

sucking-pig which was at that moment spreading itself over his palate.

Following up his idea, the mischievous Ensign continued to diversify

the graver pursuit of prosecuting his own suit with Juana, by

impressing Carlota and the Major with the idea that each was favourably

impressed with the other. In this he was tolerably successful--the

speeches he made to Carlota, supposed to originate with my grandfather,

had a very genuine warmth about them, being, in fact, very often

identical with those he had just been making, under immediate

inspiration, to his own divinity; while as for the Major, it would have

been an insult to the simplicity of that worthy man's nature to exert

any great ingenuity in deceiving him; it would have been like setting

a trap for a snail. So they journeyed on, highly pleased with each

other, and occasionally, in the absence of their faithful interpreter,

conversed by means of smiles and courteous gesticulations, till my

grandfather felt entirely at his ease, and was almost sorry when on the

evening of the second day they got to Cadiz.

CHAPTER III.

A whole city full of people condensed into one broad amphitheatre,

all bearing a national resemblance to each other in countenance and

costume, all apparently animated by the same spirit--for nothing could

be more unanimous than the applause which greeted a favourite smilingly

crossing the arena, the abuse which overwhelmed an object offensive

to the eye of the many-headed, or the ridicule which descended in a

joyous uproarious flood on the hapless individual in whose appearance,

dress, or manner, anything was detected calculated to appeal to the

highly-sensitive risible faculty of a Spanish assembly;--a gay and

picturesque mixture of colours, waving and tossing like a garden in

a breeze, as the masses of white mantillas, heads black as coal,

decorated with flowers and green leaves, red sashes, tufted sombreros,

and yellow gaiters, with here and there a blue-and-white soldier

standing stiffly up, were agitated by each new emotion--such was the

scene that met the eyes of our travellers on entering the bull-ring at

Cadiz before the sport commenced.

My grandfather had made his entry in spectacles--appendages highly

provocative of the public mirth--and had looked wonderingly for a

minute or two through the obnoxious glasses on a sea of faces upturned,

sideturned, and downturned, all looking at him, and all shouting some

indistinguishable chorus; while the men beat time, each with the

long, forked, painted stick, without which no Spaniard possessing

sentiments of propriety ever comes to a bull-fight, in a manner most

embarrassing to a somewhat bashful stranger, till their attention was

luckily diverted to an unhappy man in a white hat, in derision of whom

they immediately sang a song, the burden of which was "El de sombrero

blanco," (he of the white hat,) the multitude conducting itself

throughout like one man.

My grandfather and his friends occupied a distinguished position

in a box high above the multitude, and near that of the alcalde.

The Señorita Juana looked more lovely than ever in a white dress,

over which flowed a white gauzy mantilla, giving a kind of misty

indistinctness to the wavy outlines of her figure, and the warm tint

of her neck and arms. From her masses of black hair peeped one spot of

vivid white, a rosebud; and a green plumy leaf, a favourite ornament

with Spanish girls, drooped, bending, and soft as a feather, on one

side of her gold-and-tortoiseshell comb. The Major sat beside Carlota,

who, naturally frank, and looking upon him now as an old acquaintance,

would tap his arm most bewitchingly with her fan, when she wanted to

direct his attention to any object of interest. So the Major sat by

her, all gallantry and smiles, gazing about him with wonder through

the double gold eyeglass, which still, in spite of the late expression

of popular feeling, bestrid his nose. He looked with the interest of a

child at everything--at the faces and dresses around him, distinct in

their proximity, and at those, confused in their details by distance,

on the opposite side of the arena. He shared in the distress of an

unfortunate person (a contractor for bulls, who had palmed some bad

ones on the public) who tried, as he walked conspicuously across

the ring, to smile off a torrent of popular execration about as

successfully as a lady might attempt to ward off Niagara with her

parasol, and who was, as it were, washed out at an opposite door,

drenched and sodden with jeers. And when the folding-gates were opened,

and the gay procession entered, my grandfather gazed on it with

delight, and shouted "Bravo!" as enthusiastically as if he had been a

habitual frequenter of bull-rings from his earliest youth. First came

the espadas or matadores, their hair clubbed behind like a woman's,

dressed in bright-coloured jackets, and breeches seamed with broad

silver lace, white stockings, shoes fastened with immense rosettes, and

having their waists girt with silk sashes, bearing on their arms the

blood-coloured cloaks that were to lure the bull upon the sword-point.

Next followed the chulos, similarly attired; then the picadores,

riding stiffly, with padded legs, on their doomed steeds; and mules,

whose office it was to drag off the dead bulls and horses, harnessed

three abreast as in classic chariots, and almost hidden under a mass

of gay housings, closed the procession. Marching across the middle of

the ring to the alcalde's box, they requested permission to begin,

and, it being granted, the picadores stationed themselves at equal

distances from each other round the circumference of the arena. Then,

at a signal from the alcalde, two trumpeters in scarlet, behind him,

stood up and sounded--a man, standing with his hand ready on a bolt in

a door underneath, drew it, and pulled the door swiftly back, shutting

himself into a niche, as the dark space thus opened was filled by the

formidable figure of a bull, who, with glancing horns and tail erect,

bounded out, and, looking around during one fierce brief pause, made

straight at the first picador. The cavalier, standing straight in his

stirrups, his lance tucked firmly under his arm, fixed the point fairly

in the shoulder of the brute, who, never pausing for that, straightway

upset man and horse. Then my grandfather might be seen stretching far

over the front of his box, his eyes staring on the prostrate picador,

and his hands clenched above his head, while he shouted, "By the Lord,

sir, he'll be killed!" And when a chulo, darting alongside, waved his

cloak before the bull's eyes and lured him away, the Major, drawing

a long breath, turned to a calm Spaniard beside him, and said, "By

heaven, sir, 'twas the mercy of Providence!"--but the Spaniard, taking

his cigar from his mouth, and expelling the smoke through his nostrils,

merely said, "Bien está," ('tis very well.) Meanwhile, the bull (who,

like his predecessor in the china-shop, seemed to have it all his

own way) had run his horn into the heart of a second horse, and the

picador, perceiving from the shivering of the wounded creature that

the hurt was mortal, dismounted in all haste, while the horse, giving

one long, blundering stagger, fell over and died, and was immediately

stript of his accoutrements. This my grandfather didn't like at all;

but, seeing no kindred disgust in the faces round him, he nerved

himself, considering that it was a soldier's business to look on wounds

and death. He even beheld, with tolerable firmness, the spectacle of

a horse dashing blindfold and riderless, and mad with fear and pain,

against the barrier--rebounding whence to the earth with a broken

shoulder, it was forced again on its three legs, and led stumbling from

the ring. But when he saw another horse raised to its feet, and, all

ript open as it was, spurred to a second assault, the Major, who hadn't

the heart himself to hurt a fly, could stand it no longer, but, feeling

unwell, retired precipitately from the scene. On reaching the door, he

wrote over the same, with a bit of chalk, part of the speech of Henry

V., "the royal imp of fame," to his soldiers at Agincourt:--

"He that hath not stomach for the fight,

Let him depart----"

to the great astonishment of the two Spanish sentries, who gazed on the

words as if they contained a magical spell.

Frank sat till it was over--"played out the play." Not that he saw much

of the fight, however; he had eyes and speech for nothing but Juana,

and was able to indulge his _penchant_ without interruption, as the

little Governor took great interest in the fight, and the lover with

the silver fishes was a connoisseur in the sport, and laid bets on

the number of horses that each particular bull would kill with great

accuracy. So the Ensign had it all his own way, and, being by no means

the sort of person to throw away this or any other opportunity with

which fortune might favour him, got on quite as well, probably, as you

or I might have done in his place.

Leaving Cadiz next morning, they resumed the order of march they had

adopted in coming--Don Pablo riding, as before, in front with the

knight of the silver fishes, discussing with him the incidents of the

bull-ring. The old gentleman, though very courteous when addressing the

two Englishmen, had but little to say to them--neither did he trouble

himself to talk much to the ladies; and when he did, a sharp expression

would sometimes slip out, convincing Owen that he was something of

a domestic tyrant in private--a character by no means inconsistent

with the blandest demeanour in public. The Ensign was at great pains

to encourage the Major to be gracious to Carlota. "Get a little more

tropical in your looks, Major," he would say; "these Spanish ladies

are not accustomed to frigid glances. She's desperately in love with

you--pity she can't express what she feels; and she mightn't like to

trust an interpreter with her sentiments."

"Pooh, nonsense, boy," said the Major, colouring with pleasure, "she

doesn't care for an old fellow like me."

"Doesn't she?--see what her eyes say--that's what I call ocular

demonstration," quoth the Ensign. "If you don't return it, you're a

stock, a stone." Then he would say something to Carlota, causing her

eyes to sparkle, and canter on to rejoin Juana.

It was genial summer-time with Carlota--she had passed the age of

maiden diffidence, without having attained that of soured and faded

spinsterhood. She had a sort of jovial confidence in herself, and an

easy demeanour towards the male sex, such as is seen in widows. These

supposed advances of the Major were accordingly met by her rather more

than half-way. None but the Major was permitted to assist her into the

saddle, or to receive her plump form descending from it. None but the

Major was beckoned to her rein when the path was broken and perilous,

or caught on his protecting arm the pressure of her outstretched hand,

when her steed stumbled over the loose pebbles. None was repaid for

a slight courtesy by so many warm, confiding smiles as he. These,

following fast one on another, began to penetrate the rusty casing of

the Major's heart. On his own ground--that is, in his own quarters--he

could have given battle, successfully, to a score of such insidious

enemies: his books, his flowers, his pipe, his slippers, and a hundred

other Penates would have encircled him; but here, with all his strong

palisading of habit torn up and scattered, all his wonted trains of

ideas upset and routed by the novelty of situation and scenery, he lay

totally defenceless, and open to attack. The circumstance of himself

and Carlota being ignorant of each other's language, far from being an

obstacle to their mutual good-will, rather favoured its progress. In

company with an Englishwoman, in similar circumstances, my grandfather

would have considered himself bound to entertain her with his

conversation, and, perhaps, have spoiled all by trying to make himself

agreeable--it would have been a tax on the patience of both: but being

absolved from any such duty in the present instance, he could without

awkwardness ride onward in full and silent communion with his own

thoughts, and enjoy the pleasure of being smiled upon without being at

any pains to earn it.

His note-book, containing an account of the expedition, which I have

seen--and whence, indeed, the greater part of this chronicle is

gathered--exhibits, at this period of the journey, sufficient proof

that the Major enjoyed this new state of being extremely, and felt his

intellect, his heart, and his stomach at once stimulated.

"Spain," says my grandfather, in a compendious descriptive sentence,

"is a country of garlicky odours, of dirty contentment, of

overburthened donkeys, and of excellent pork; but a fine air in the

hills, and the country much sweeter than the towns. The people don't

seem to know what comfort is, or cleanliness, but are nevertheless

very contented in their ignorance. My saddle is bad, I think, for I

dismounted very sore to-day. The Señorita mighty pleasant and gracious.

I entertain a great regard for her--no doubt a sensible woman, as well

as a handsome. A pig to-day at breakfast, the best I have tasted in

Spain."

The desultory style of the composition of these notes prevents me from

quoting largely from them. Statistics, incidents of travel, philosophic

reflections, and the state of his digestive organs, are all chronicled

indiscriminately. But, from the above mixture of sentiments, it will

be perceived that the Major's admiration for Carlota was of a sober

nature, by no means ardent or Quixotic, and pretty much on a par with

his passion for pig.

This was far from being the case with Garry, who became more and more

enamoured every hour. The Spanish lover continued to conduct himself

as if he had been married to Juana for twenty years, never troubling

himself to be particularly agreeable or attentive, for which obliging

conduct Garry felt very grateful to him. The Major had been too long

accustomed to witness Owen's philanderings to see anything peculiar

in the present case, till his attention was attracted by a little

incident he accidentally witnessed. After the last halt they made

before reaching Tarifa, Garry was, as usual, at hand, to assist Juana

to her saddle. The strings of her hat were untied, and he volunteered

to fasten them; and, having done so, still retaining his hold of the

strings, he glanced quickly around, and then drew her blooming face

towards his own till their lips met--for which piece of impudence he

only suffered the slight penalty of a gentle tap with her whip. My

grandfather discreetly and modestly withdrew his eyes, but he was not

the only observer. He of the silver fishes was regarding them with a

fixed look from among some neighbouring trees, where he had tethered

his horse. Probably the Spaniard, with all his indifference, thought

this was carrying matters a little too far, for, after conversing a

moment with the Governor, he took his place at Juana's side, and did

not again quit it till they arrived at Tarifa. Then both he and the

Governor took leave of our travellers with a cold civility, defying all

Garry's attempts to thaw it, and seeming to forbid all prospect of a

speedy renewal of the acquaintance.

CHAPTER IV.

At the inn, that night, the Major betook himself to rest early, that he

might be ready to start for Gibraltar betimes in the morning, for on

the following day their leave was to expire.

He had slept soundly for several hours, when he was awoke by Owen, who

entered with a candle in his hand. The Major sat up in bed and rubbed

his eyes.

"Time's up, my boy, eh?" said he, with a cavernous yawn. "I should have

liked another hour of it, but it can't be helped," (preparing to turn

out.)

"I didn't want to spoil your rest last night," said Owen, seating

himself on the edge of the bed, "so I said nothing about a mishap that

has occurred. That smuggling villain, Francisco, took advantage of our

absence to fetch a contraband cargo in the boat from Gibraltar, and has

been caught in attempting to run it here."

"God bless me," said my grandfather, "who would have thought it!--and

he such a capital cook! But what's to be done? where's the boat?"

"The boat is, for the present, confiscated," said Garry; "but I daresay

the Governor would let us have it in the morning, on explaining, and

perhaps release Francisco, with the loss of his cargo; but--but--in

fact, Major, I don't want the Governor to know anything about our

departure."

My grandfather stared at him, awaiting further explanation.

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

The Major did not dispute the fact, though he could not, for the life

of him, see what it had to do with the subject.

"She never liked that dingy Spanish lover of hers," said the Ensign,

"and her father intends she shall marry him in a month. 'Twould make

her miserable for life."

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

"She told me so. You see," said Owen, shading the candle with his hand,

so that my grandfather couldn't see his face, and speaking hurriedly,

"I didn't intend we should start alone--in fact--that is--Juana has

agreed to fly with me to Gibraltar."

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

fellow!"

"She's waiting for us now," resumed Garry, gathering courage after the

first plunge into the subject; "we ought to be off before daylight.

Oblige me, my dear sir," (smiling irresistibly,) "by getting up

immediately."

"And how are we to get away," asked my grandfather, "supposing this

insane scheme of yours to be attempted?"

"I've bribed the sentry at Francisco's place of durance," returned the

Ensign. "We shall get out of the town the instant the gates are opened;

and the boat is tied to the steps, as before, only under the charge of

a sentry whom we can easily evade. Every guarda costa in the place was

sent out last night to blockade a noted smuggler who has taken refuge

in Tangier; so, once out, we are safe from pursuit: I found it all out

after you had gone to bed."

The disposition of Major Flinders, as the reader knows, was the reverse

of enterprising--he wouldn't have given a straw to be concerned in

the finest adventure that ever happened in romance. He paused with

one stocking on, inclined, like the little woman whose garments had

been curtailed by the licentious shears of the pedlar, to doubt his

own identity, and wondering if it could be really he, John Flinders,

to whom such a proposition was broached, requiring him to assist in

invading the peace of a family. As soon as he recovered his powers of

speech, of which astonishment had for a moment deprived him, he began

earnestly to dissuade the Ensign from the enterprise; but Owen knew his

man too well, and had too much youthful vivacity of will to allow much

time for remonstrance.

"Look you, Major," said he, "I'm positive I can't live without Juana.

I'll make a bold stroke for a wife. The thing's settled--no going back

now for me; and I shall go through with it with or without you. But

you're not the man, I'm sure, to desert a fellow in extremity, at a

time, too, when the advantages of your experience and coolness are so

peculiarly needed. 'Call you that backing of your friends?'"

The compliment, or the quotation, or both, softened the Major. "'Would

it were night, Hal, and all well,'" said he, half mechanically

following the Falstaffian train of ideas Owen had artfully conjured up,

and at the same time drawing on the breeches which that astute youth

obsequiously handed to him.

It was still dark when they issued forth into the narrow and dingy

streets of Tarifa. My grandfather, totally unaccustomed to visit

the glimpses of the moon in this adventurous fashion, was full of

strange fears--heard as many imaginary suspicious noises and voices as

Bunyan's Pilgrim in the dark valley--and once or twice stopt abruptly

and grasped Owen's arm, while he pointed to a spy dogging them in the

distant gloom, who turned out to be a door-post. But Owen was now in

his element; no tom-cat in Tarifa was more familiar with housetops

and balconies at the witching hour than he, and he stepped gaily on.

Presently they were challenged by a sentry, to whom Owen promptly

advanced and slipped into his itching palm a doubloon, when the

trustworthy warrior immediately turned upon his heel, and, walking to

the extremity of his post, looked with great vigilance in the opposite

direction.

Owen advanced to a grated window and tapped. Immediately the burly face

of Francisco showed itself thereat, his white teeth glancing merrily in

a glimmer of moonshine. A bar, previously filed through, was removed

from the window, and Owen, taking him by the collar to assist his

egress, drew him through as far as the third button of his waistcoat,

where he stuck for a moment; but the substance was elastic, and a lusty

tug landed him in the middle of the narrow street. Receiving Frank's

instructions, given in a hurried whisper, to go at once to where the

boat lay, and cast her off, ready to shove off on the instant, he

nodded and disappeared in the darkness, while Owen and the Major made

for the Governor's house.

Arrived near it, Owen gave a low whistle--a peculiar one, that my

grandfather remembered to have heard him practising to Juana on the

previous day--when, to the unutterable surprise of the Major, _two_

veiled figures appeared on the balcony.

"Why, Owen, boy, d'ye see!" quoth the Major, stuttering with anxiety,

"who can the other be?--her maid, eh?"--indistinct stage recollections

of intriguing waiting-women dawning on him.

"Ahem!--why, you see, Major," whispered Owen, "she wouldn't come

alone--couldn't manage it at all, in fact, without the knowledge of

her aunt, who sleeps in the next room; so I persuaded Carlota _to come

too_, and gave her a sort of half promise that _you_ would _take care

of her_." Here, wishing to cut short a rather awkward explanation,

he ran under the balcony--one of the ladies dropped a cord--and Owen

producing from under his coat a rope ladder, (he had sat up all night

making it,) attached it, and, as soon as it was drawn up, ascended,

motioning to my astounded grandfather to keep it steady below. The

Major, after a moment's desperate half-resolve to make a hasty retreat

from the perilous incidents which seemed momentarily to thicken round

him, and leave his reckless friend to his fate, yielded to the force

of circumstances, and did what was required of him. Then Owen lifted

the ladies, one after the other, over the railing of the balcony, and

they swiftly descended. First came Juana, who, scarcely touching the

Major's offered hand, lit on the pavement like gossamer; then Carlota

descended, and making, in her trepidation, a false step near the

bottom, came so heavily on the Major, that they rolled together on the

stones. By the time they were on their feet again, Owen had slipped

down the ladder, and, taking Juana under his arm, set off rapidly

towards the bay.

If anything could have added to the Major's discomfiture and

embarrassment, it would have been the pressure of Carlota's arm on his,

as she hung confidingly on him--a pressure not proceeding from her

weight only, but active, and with a meaning in it; but he was in that

state of mental numbness from the successive shocks of astonishment,

that, as with a soldier after the first two dozen, any additional

laceration passed unheeded. He was embarked in an adventure of which

he could by no means see the end; all was strange and dark in the

foreground of his future; and if he had been at that moment tried,

cast, and condemned for an imaginary crime, he would have been too

apathetic to say anything in arrest of judgment.

Silently and swiftly, as a forlorn hope, they passed through the town

and along the sandy causeway. The succession of white rolling waves

on their left, where extended the full breadth of the Straits, while

the bay on their right was almost smooth, showed the wind to be still

against them; but it was now so moderate that they might safely beat up

for the Rock. Arrived at the head of the stairs leading to the water,

they paused in the angle of the wall to reconnoitre. Francisco was

lying coiled up in the head of the boat, his hand on the rope, ready to

cast her loose, and the boat-hook projecting over the bow. Above them,

and behind the wall, at a little distance, they could hear the measured

tread of the sentry, and catch the gleam of his bayonet as he turned

upon his walk: a few vigorous shoves would carry them outside the

sea-wall and beyond his ken. All depended on their silence; and like

two stealthy cats did Owen and Juana descend to the boat--the Major and

Carlota watching the success of their attempt with protruded necks.

Cautiously did Owen stride from the last stair to the deck--cautiously

did he transfer Juana to the bark, and guide her aft. The Major was

just preparing to follow, when a noise from the boat startled him:

Juana had upset an unlucky wine-jar which Francisco had left there.

The sentry put his head over the wall, and challenged; Francisco,

starting up, shoved hastily off; the sentry fired his piece, his bullet

shattering the wine-jar that had caused the mischief. Juana screamed,

Owen swore in English, and Francisco surpassed him in Spanish. There

was no time to return or wait for the other pair, for the guard was

alarmed by the sentry's shot, and their accoutrements might be heard

rattling near at hand, as they turned hastily out. Before they reached

the wall, however, the boat had disappeared.

Major Flinders watched it till it was out of sight, and, at first,

experienced a feeling of despair at being thus deprived of the aid

of Garry's boldness and promptitude, and left to his own resources.

Presently, however, a gleam of comfort dawned upon him--perhaps Carlota

would now abandon the enterprise, and he should thus, at any rate,

be freed from the embarrassment her presence occasioned him. In this

hope he was shortly undeceived. To have added the shame of failure and

exposure to her present disappointment, while an opening to persevere

still remained, did not suit that lady's ardent spirit; and whether it

was that the unscrupulous Garry had really represented the Major as

very much in love, or whether such an impression resulted from her own

lively imagination, she certainly thought her companion would be as

much chagrined at such a denouement as herself. She displayed a prompt

decision in this emergency, being, indeed, as remarkable for presence

as the Major was for absence of mind. Taking the Major's arm, she

caused him swiftly to retrace his steps with her to the inn where he

had slept. As they retreated, they heard the boom of a gun behind them,

fired, doubtless, from the Point, at the Fair Unknown. At Carlota's

orders, a couple of horses, one with a side-saddle, were speedily at

the inn-door; they mounted, and, before the sun was yet risen, had

issued forth from the gate of Tarifa, on the road to Gibraltar.

The Major rode beside her like a man in a dream--in fact, he was

partly asleep, having been deprived of a large portion of his natural

and accustomed rest, and partly bewildered. A few days before he

had been the most methodical, unromantic, not to say humdrum, old

bachelor in his Majesty's service; and here he was, how or why he did

not well know, galloping away at daybreak with a foreign lady, of

whose existence he had been ignorant a week before, with the prospect

of being apprehended by her relatives for her abduction, and by the

Government for assisting in the escape of, a smuggler. When at length

roused to complete consciousness by the rapidity of their motion, he

positively groaned in anguish of spirit, and vowed internally that,

once within the shelter of his own quiet quarters, nothing on earth

should again tempt him forth on such harum-scarum expeditions.

It was near noon when they reached Algeçiras, where they stopped to

breakfast, both of them rather exhausted with fatigue and hunger. This

town stands just opposite Gibraltar, across the bay--the road they had

come by forms the base of a triangle, of which Cabrita Point is the

apex, the bay washing one side of the projecting coast, the Straits the

other. The Major was reserved and embarrassed; there was a tenderness

about Carlota's manner that frightened him out of his usual gallantry,

and, to avoid meeting her glance, he looked steadily out of the window

at the rock of Gibraltar, casting wistful glances at the spot where his

quarters lay hidden in a little clump of foliage. Immediately after

the meal he quitted the room, on pretence of looking after the horses.

He determined to protract their stay in Algeçiras till late in the

afternoon, that they might enter Gibraltar in the dusk, and thus avoid

awkward meetings with equestrian parties from the garrison, who would

then be hastening homewards, in order to be in before gun-fire, when

the gates are shut.

On returning, still out of temper, to the room where he had left

Carlota, he found her, quite overcome with fatigue, asleep on the

sofa. Her head was thrown a little back on the cushion; her lips were

just parted, and she looked in her sleep like a weary child. The Major

approached on tiptoe, and stood regarding her. His ill-humour melted

fast into pity. He thought of all her kindness to him, and, by a sudden

soft-hearted impulse, took gently one of her hands projecting over

the side of the sofa. Carlota opened her eyes, and squeezed the hand

that held hers; whereupon the Major suddenly quitted his hold, and,

retreating with great discomposure to the window, did not venture to

look at her again till it was time to resume their journey.

At a little distance from Algeçiras is the river Palmones, called by

the English the Second River. This was crossed by a floating bridge,

pulled from shore to shore by a ferryman warping on a rope extended

across. They had just reached the opposite bank of the stream, when

Carlota noticed two horsemen galloping fast along the road they had

just traversed. A second glance showed them to be Don Pablo and the

lover of Juana. The first inquiries of the Governor had led him to

suppose that all had escaped in the boat, and it was not till some time

after that he had learned the true state of affairs.

The fugitives now hastened on in earnest, and roused their horses to

a steady gallop, never pausing till they reached the Guadaranque,

or First River, about a mile nearer Gibraltar than the other, and

furnished with a similar bridge. The delay of the pursuers at the

former ferry had thrown them far in rear; and my grandfather, inspired

by the imminence of the peril, now conceived a bright idea--the

brightest, probably, that ever flashed upon him--by executing which

they might effectually distance their pursuers. Dropping his glove at

a little distance from the shore, he sent the ferryman to fetch it,

and then pushed off, (Carlota having already embarked,) and warped the

bridge to the opposite bank, heedless of the frantic gesticulations

of the proprietor, who screamed furiously after them to stop. When

he reached the opposite side, he took out his pocket-knife and

deliberately cut the rope. Having thus, as it were, blown up the

communication in his rear, my grandfather, without the loss of his

baggage, continued his retreat to the fortress; while the little

Governor, who galloped up just as they were disappearing, was, like

Lord Ullin, left lamenting.

The sun was already declining, and threw their shadows far before them

on the sands, as they rode along the beach close to the water. The

bay at this inner extremity makes a great circular sweep--radii drawn

from the rock to different distant points of the arc would be almost

equal; and for half an hour they continued to see Gibraltar at nearly

the same distance to the right and in front of them, holding itself

aloof most provokingly. Twilight descended as they passed the Spanish

lines and entered on the Neutral Ground. The Major glanced anxiously

at his watch--in a few minutes the gun from Middle Hill would give

the signal for shutting the gates, and doom them irretrievably to

return into Spain for the night. For the first time in his life Major

Flinders really punished his horse, lifting the tired beast along with

whip and rein. Carlota's kept easily beside him under her lighter

weight, and they rapidly neared the barrier. Just as they passed it,

a stream of flame shot from the rock, illumining objects like a flash

of lightning;--then came the heavy report of the gun--another minute

and the drawbridge at Landport would be lifted; but they were upon it.

They dashed across somewhat in the style of Marmion quitting Douglas's

castle, "just as it trembled on the rise," and were safe in Gibraltar.

CHAPTER V.

After life's fitful fever, the Major did not sleep well. He had left

Carlota comfortably established at the inn; and he now lay nervously

thinking how his embarrassment with regard to her was to terminate,

especially if Owen did not shortly make his appearance. Then he

was worried by doubts as to the fate of the Fair Unknown and her

passengers. They might have been recaptured, as escaped smugglers, by a

guarda costa--they might be detained in the Straits by adverse winds or

calms--they might have run ashore into some bay, and come on overland.

This last supposition haunted him most pertinaciously, and he resolved

to go up the rock as soon as it should be daylight to look out for them

along the road from Spain. He lay tossing restlessly till the morning

gun gave the signal of the approach of dawn, and before the echoes died

away he had his breeches on.

Night was at odds with morning my grandfather, with a telescope under

his arm, sallied forth and began the ascent. Silence was over the

rock, except an occasional sighing of a remnant of night wind that had

lost itself among the crags. At first, the only clear outline visible

was that of the rugged edge of the rock above against the colourless

sky; but as he toiled up the steep zig-zag path, the day kept pace

with him--each moment threw a broader light on the scene--blots of

shadow became bushes or deep fissures, and new shapes of stone glided

into view. The only symptoms of animal life that he beheld were a

rabbit that fled silently to his hole, and a great white vulture that,

startled from his perch on a grey crag, sailed slowly upward on his

black-tipped wings, circling higher and higher, till his breast was

crimsoned by the yet unrisen sun.

The path led diagonally to the summit; and, turning a sharp

level corner, my grandfather looked perpendicularly down on the

Mediterranean, whose lazy waves, sending up a gentle murmur, rippled

far below him. On his left, also steep down below him, was the Neutral

Ground, level as the sea itself, extending northward into sandy plains,

abruptly crossed by tumbled heaps of brown mountains. A reddening of

the sky showed that the sun was at hand; and presently the glowing disk

came swiftly up from behind the eastern hills; the pale earth shared in

the ruddiness of the sky, and a long rosy gleam swept gradually over

the breadth of the grey sea, like an unwilling smile spreading itself

from a man's lips to his eyes and forehead.

Conspicuous on the highest point in the landscape stood my grandfather,

panting with his exertions as he wiped his forehead. After standing

for a moment, bronzed in front like a smith at the furnace, face to

face with the sun, he turned and swept with his telescope the road into

Spain. Early peasants, microscopic as ants, were bringing their fruits

and vegetables into the fortress--a laden mule or two advanced along

the beach over which the Major had last night galloped--but nothing

resembling what he sought was in sight. Then turning completely round,

with his face to the path he had just ascended, he gave a long look

towards the Straits; and as he did so, the wind, which had shifted

to the south-west towards morning, blew gently on his face. A sail

or two was discernible in the distance, outward bound, but nothing

resembling the cutter. As the Major looked, a signal was made from

Cabrita, and directly two feluccas left their station at Algeçiras, and

swooped out, like two white birds, as if to intercept some bark yet

hidden by the Point. Again my grandfather looked out to the Strait,

and presently a small white sail came in sight near Cabrita. For a

quarter of an hour he stood steadily, with levelled telescope, and

then he was almost sure--yes, he could swear--that he saw the small

English ensign relieved against the sail; and above, at the mast-head,

the yellow-striped flag that Francisco hoisted before as the mark of a

yacht. It was the Fair Unknown--and my grandfather at once comprehended

that the pursuers, whom he had escaped the night before, had, on

returning to Algeçiras, made arrangements for her capture as soon as

she should appear.

The breeze was on her beam, and much fresher with her than farther in

the bay, so that the feluccas steered slantingly across her course as

she made for the rock. They held on thus, the pursuers and pursued,

till within a mile of each other, when the cutter suddenly altered her

course to one nearly parallel with that of the feluccas. The latter,

however, now gained fast upon her, and presently a puff of smoke

from the bow of the foremost was followed by the report of a gun. My

grandfather could look no longer through his glass, for his hand shook

like a reed, but began, with huge strides more resembling those of

a kangaroo than a quiet middle-aged gentleman, to descend the rock.

Breathless, he reached his quarters, had his horse saddled and brought

out, and galloped off towards Europa.

Europa Point is at the southern extremity of the rock, and commands at

once the entrance of the bay and the passage of the Straits. The road

to it from the north, where the Major was quartered, affords, for the

most part, a view of the bay. Many an anxious glance did he cast, as

he sped along, at the state of affairs on the water. The feluccas fired

several shots, but all seemed to fall wide, and were probably intended

only to frighten the chase, out of consideration for her fair freight.

Still, however, the English colours floated, and still the cutter held

her course.

Some artillerymen and an officer were assembled at the Point as the

Major galloped up.

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

"Too far off," said the Lieutenant, rising from the parapet on which he

was leaning, and showing a drowsy unshaven countenance; "we should only

frighten them."

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

taken before my eyes!"

"Boy!" quoth the Lieutenant, wondering what particular interest the

Major could take in the smuggler. "What boy?"

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

"The devil!" cried the Lieutenant, jumping down. "What, Garry Owen!--we

must try a long shot. Pull those quoins out," (to a gunner.) "Corporal,

lay that gun; a dollar if you hit the felucca. I'll try a shot with

this one." So saying, he laid the thirty-two pounder next him with

great care.

"Fire!" said he, jumping on the parapet to see the effect of the

shot. At the second rebound it splashed under the bows of the leading

felucca, which still held on. She was now scarcely three hundred yards

from the cutter.

"Why, d--n their impudence!" muttered the Lieutenant, on seeing his

warning pass unheeded, "they won't take a hint. Corporal, let drive at

'em."

The Corporal earned his dollar. The shot went through the side of

the felucca, on board of which all was presently confusion; in a few

minutes it was apparent she was sinking. The other, abandoning the

chase, went to the assistance of her consort, lifting the crew out,

some of whom were evidently hurt.

"A blessed shot!" cried my grandfather, giving the lucky Corporal a bit

of gold; "but I'm glad they're picking up the crew."

The cutter instantly stood in for the harbour, and half an hour

afterwards the Major bade his young friend and Juana welcome to

Gibraltar.

Carlota was beside herself with joy at seeing the wanderers safe. She

first cast herself upon Juana, and cried over her; then embraced the

Ensign, who made no scruple of kissing her; lastly, threw herself

tenderly upon the Major, who gazed over her head as it lay on his

shoulder with a dismayed expression, moving his arms uneasily, as if

he didn't know what he was expected to do with them. Every moment it

was becoming clearer to him that he was a compromised man, no longer

his own property. On his way through the streets that morning he

had passed a knot of officers, one of whom he overheard describing

"Old Flinders" as "a sly old boy," for that he "had run away with

a devilish handsome Spaniard--who would have thought it?" "Ay, who

indeed!" groaned the Major, internally. But the seal was put to his

doom by the Colonel, who, when he went to report himself, slapped him

on the shoulder, and congratulated him on his happiness. "Fine woman, I

hear, Flinders--didn't give you credit for such spirit--hope you'll be

happy together." The Major, muttering an inarticulate denial, hastily

retreated, and from that moment surrendered himself to his fate an

unresisting victim.

About dusk that night, Owen came to him.

"By heavens!" the Ensign began, throwing himself into a chair, "I'm the

most unlucky scoundrel! Nothing goes right with me. I promised myself

that this should be my wedding-night--and here I am, as forlorn a

bachelor as ever."

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

his mouth.

"I pressed her with all my eloquence," said Owen; "reminded her of her

promise to marry me the day we should arrive here--of the necessity of

caring for her reputation, after leaving her father's house and coming

here under my protection," (here my grandfather winced;) "talked, in

fact, like an angel who had been bred a special pleader--yet it was all

of no use."

"Deliberating about marriage!" said the Major, "after leaving her

father and lover for you! What gnat can she be straining at, after

swallowing a camel of such magnitude?"

"A piece of female Quixotry," returned Owen. "She says she can't think

of such selfishness as being comfortably married herself, while Carlota

is so unhappy, and her fate so unsettled." Here he made a significant

pause; but my grandfather was immovably silent, only glancing nervously

at him, and smoking very hard.

"In fact, she protests she won't hear of marrying me, till you have

settled when you will marry Carlota."

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

"Why, you don't mean to say you're not going to marry her!" exclaimed

the Ensign, throwing a vast quantity of surprise into his expressive

countenance.

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

"Oh, Lord!" said Garry, "here will be pleasant news for her! Curse me

if I break it to her."

"But really, now, Frank," the Major repeated--"marriage, you know--why,

I never thought of such a thing."

"You're the only person that hasn't then," rejoined Owen. "Why, what

can the garrison think, after the way you smuggled her in; what can she

herself think, after all your attentions?"

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

"Oh,--ah! 'twas civility, I suppose, to squeeze her hand in the inn

at Algeçiras, in the way she told Juana of--and heaven knows what

else you may have done during the flight. Juana is outrageous against

you--actually called you a vile deceiver; but Carlota's feeling is

more of sorrow than of anger. She is persuaded that nothing but your

ignorance of Spanish has prevented your tongue from confirming what

your looks have so faithfully promised. I was really quite affected

to-day at the appealing look she cast on me after you left the room;

she evidently expected me to communicate her destiny."

My grandfather smoked hard.

"Lots of fellows would give their ears for such a wife," pursued the

Ensign. "Lovelace, the Governor's aide-de-camp, bribed the waiter of

the hotel to lend him his apron to-day, at dinner, that he might come

in and look at her--swears she's a splendid woman, and that he'd run

away with such another to-morrow."

Still my grandfather smoked hard, but said nothing, though there was a

slight gleam of pride in his countenance.

"Poor thing!" sighed Garry. "All her prospects blighted for ever.

Swears she never can love another."

At this my grandfather's eyes grew moist, and he coughed as if he had

swallowed some tobacco-smoke.

"And as for me, to have Juana at my lips, as it were, and yet not

mine--for she's as inflexible as if she'd been born a Mede and

Persian--to know that you are coming between me and happiness as surely

as if you were an inexorable father or a cruel guardian--worse, indeed;

for those might be evaded. Major, major, have you no compassion!--two

days of this will drive me crazy."

The Major changed his pipe from his right hand to his left, and,

stretching the former across the table, sympathetically pressed that of

the Ensign.

"Do, Major," quoth Garry, changing his flank movement for a direct

attack--"do consent to make yourself and me happy; do empower me to

negotiate for our all going to church to-morrow." (My grandfather gave

a little jump in his chair at this, as if he were sitting on a pin.)

"I'll manage it all; you shan't have the least trouble in the matter."

My grandfather spoke not.

"Silence gives consent," said the Ensign, rising. "Come, now, if you

don't forbid me, I'll depart on my embassy at once; you needn't speak,

I'll spare your blushes. I see this delay has only been from modesty,

or perhaps a little ruse on your part. Once, twice, thrice,--I go." And

he vanished.

The Major remained in his chair, in the same posture. His pipe was

smoked out, but he continued to suck absently at the empty tube. His

bewilderment and perturbation were so great that, though he sat up

till two in the morning, during which time he smoked eleven pipes,

and increased the two glasses of grog with which he was accustomed to

prepare for his pillow to four, he was still, when he went to bed, as

agitated as ever.

In this state of mind he went to the altar, for next day a double

ceremony was performed, making Owen happy with Juana, and giving

Carlota a husband and me a grandfather. The Major was more like a proxy

than a principal in the affair; for Owen, taking the entire management

upon himself, left him little more to do than to make the necessary

responses.

Carlota made a very good-tempered, quiet, inobtrusive helpmate, and

continued to be fond of her spouse even after he was a gray-headed

colonel. My grandfather, though credulous in most matters, could with

difficulty be brought to consider himself married. He would sometimes

seem to forget the circumstance for a whole day together, till it came

to be forced on his recollection at bed-time. And when, about a year

after his marriage, a new-born female Flinders (now my venerable aunt)

was brought one morning by the nurse for his inspection and approval,

he gazed at it with a puzzled air, and could not be convinced that he

was actually in the presence of his own flesh and blood, till he had

touched the cheek of his first-born with the point of his tobacco-pipe,

removed from his mouth for that purpose, making on the infant's

countenance a small indentation.

The little Governor, Don Pablo, was subsequently induced to forgive his

relatives, and frequent visits and attentions were interchanged, till

the commencement of the siege put a stop to all intercourse between

Gibraltar and Spain.

I have often, on a summer's evening, sat looking across the bay at a

gorgeous sunset, and retracing in imagination the incidents I have

related. My grandfather's establishment was broken up during the siege

by the enemy's shells, but a similar one now stands on what I think

must have been about the site of it. The world has changed since then;

but Spain is no land of change; and, looking on the imperishable

outline of the Andaluçian hills, unaltered, probably, since a time to

which the period of my tale is but as yesterday, it is easy for me to

"daff aside" the noisy world without, and, dropping quietly behind the

age, to picture to myself my old-fashioned grandfather issuing forth

from yonder white-walled town of Algeçiras with his future bride.

GERMAN LETTERS FROM PARIS[2].

German Professors are altered men since those joyous days when we

drank chopines and swang the schlaeger in the thirsty and venerable

University of Saxesaufenberg. We remember them studious bookworms,

uneasy when removed from library and lecture-room, their meerschaum

their only passion, knowledge their sole ambition, beholding the

external world through "the loopholes of retreat,"--the said embrasures

being considerably obscured by tobacco-smoke and misty philosophy. Such

is the portrait our memory has preserved of them; and we doubt not that

its fidelity will be recognised by our brother-_burschen_ of bygone

days. But great has been the change. The quality of a German professor

now suggests the idea of a red-hot democrat, fanning revolution, pining

in prison, or fugitive in foreign lands. The smoking-cap is exchanged

for the _bonnet rouge_, and the silence of the sage for the clamour

of the demagogue. This may not be true of all, perhaps not even of a

majority, but it is true of a pretentious and prominent minority. The

busy, bustling multitude knows nothing of the others.

[2] _Zwei Monate in Paris._ VON ADOLPH STAHR. Two Vols. Oldenburg:

Schulzeschen Buchhandlung. London: Williams and Norgate, 1851.

Professor Stahr, of the University of Oldenburg, is a gentleman

chiefly remarkable for his democratic tendencies, and for the fluent

correctness of his literary style. Few men write better German, or

profess doctrines more revolutionary. His reputation as a literary

man rests principally upon a work on Italy, published after a

twelvemonth's residence in that country.[3] As a critic of fine art,

he is not without merit. As a politician he is wild and speculative.

The revolutionary coterie to which he belongs reckons amongst its

members Fanny Lewald, the lively Hebrew socialist, and Moritz Hartmann,

the bitter radical. Both of these, especially the former, are his

intimate friends, and appear to have been his constant companions

during two months of last autumn, spent by him in Paris, and which

have given occasion and a title to his latest book. With Mr Hartmann

he forgathered at Brussels, early in the month of September, and

together they proceeded southwards. In consideration of Professor

Stahr's acknowledged abilities, we will not apply to him a common

rule, and judge him by the company he keeps. But, in spite of his

well-turned periods and general moderation of expression, his book is

not pleasant to read. There is an ill-conditioned tone about writers

of his political class, extremely trying to the patience and temper

of the reader. Convinced of the general unfitness of existing human

institutions, and of the necessity for radical changes, they inevitably

fall into a cavilling and censorious strain. Viewing the condition

of society with a jaundiced eye, they adopt the maxim that whatever

is, is wrong. Mr Stahr has hardly entered the railway carriage that

is to transport him to Paris, when he shows himself querulous and

a grumbler. He hoisted his colours before leaving Brussels. Had we

never before heard either of him or his principles, we yet should have

been at no loss to discover the latter by certain passages in his

very first chapter. Sitting in his inn at eventide, after visiting

the monument to the slain of 1830, he reads an account of the Belgian

revolution. The Dutch troops, he finds, made but one hundred and

twenty-two prisoners, whilst the insurgents captured four hundred

and ninety-five. On the other hand, the Belgian killed and wounded

exceeded by three hundred those of their opponents. Mr Stahr is ready

with an inference from these statistics. It takes the form of a slur

upon the soldiers who were doing their duty to their king and country.

"The inequality in the number of prisoners may well arise from the

circumstance that the Dutch, as fighters for loyal tranquillity and

order, were least disposed to give quarter. And soldiers against men

without uniform--one knows that!" Then he falls foul of the writer of

the narrative, for attributing to Providence the preservation of the

royal palace, and other public buildings, to which the Dutch attempted

to set fire; and, gliding thence into religious speculations, he gets

very profound, and rather profane, so that we are not sorry when the

current of his ideas is diverted into a more commonplace channel,

by the visit, at Valenciennes, of the French customhouse officers,

on the look-out for Belgian cigars and reprints. He is sore at this

irksome visitation--wonders that powerful France so long endures the

literary piracies of her little neighbour--and finally prophesies the

abolition of all customhouses. "A time will come," he says, "when this

system of legally privileged waylaying will appear just as fabulous

to the people of Europe, as do now to us the highway depredations of

the robber-knights." Pending the advent of that desirable state of

things, he revenges himself on a fellow-traveller for his customhouse

annoyances. A German book which he had left in the carriage on

alighting had disappeared, and could not be recovered. A _douanier_

had perhaps taken it for a contraband commodity. He should have

declared it, opined a fat Frenchman in the same carriage. Mr Stahr was

indignant. It was a German book, he tartly replied, and was not printed

at Brussels, but at Leipzig--a place, he added, which must still be

pretty well remembered in France! A polite and tasteful allusion which

did the German radical infinite credit, and to which the fat Frenchman

might fairly have retorted, "Jena," and half a dozen other significant

names, instead of holding his tongue, and leaving his fellow-traveller

to digest at leisure his loss and his ill-humour.

[3] _Ein Jahr in Italien._ Three Vols., 8vo. Oldenburg: 1850.

Mr Stahr's volumes, composed of letters to friends, are desultory,

and for the most part slight. Picture galleries are favourite haunts

of his: now he criticises a pamphlet, now a play; he moralises, after

his own peculiar fashion, in deserted palaces, assists at a banquet

of workmen, witnesses extravagant dances at Mabille, sits by the

bedside of the infirm and suffering Heine. His first walk in Paris

was to the Palais Royal, after nightfall. "Stahr," said his companion

to him suddenly, on the way, "this is the Place de Grève!"--"Were I

to live a century," exclaims the impressionable professor, "I should

never forget the shudder that came over me at these words." And he

breaks into a tumid rhapsody about the lava-streams of the great

European volcano, talks of the guillotine, tells the well-known story

of Favras, and proceeds to the Palais Royal, where, at ten o'clock

at night, he is unable to obtain a beef-steak for supper, and whose

glory he accordingly declares departed. Returning to their quarters,

at a hotel beyond the Seine, the two Germans get bewildered in the

labyrinth of the Quartier Latin, and are indebted for guidance to some

artisans, whose "Good night, _citoyens_!" at parting, again thrills

the sensitive Stahr. The historical and fanciful associations that

crowd upon his mind are of a less practical nature than the reflection

suggested to his companion by the Republican mode of address--"We

must exchange our grey Calabrian hats" (the sort of bandit sombreros

affected by travelling students and red republicans) "for the loyal

hats of order, or soon we shall have Louis Napoleon's police at our

heels." Thus spoke Mr Hartmann--who has a natural aversion to all

police, and who gladly sneers at the party of Order, and at Louis

Napoleon as its representative. Mr Stahr professes no great liking or

tenderness for the chief of the Republic--the first gendarme in France,

as he calls him, meaning thereby to cast opprobrium on the President,

gentlemen of his political complexion having an instinctive detestation

of gendarmes. He saw him for the first time at the celebrated review

held at Satory, on the 10th October 1850. On his way thither, Mr

Stahr joined in conversation with peasants, who were flocking from

all the country round to see the President and the military pageant.

Many of them had sons in the regiments that were to be reviewed.

They made no mystery of their political creed. It was simple enough:

"Peace and moderate taxation," said they, "is what we want. He who

gives us those two things is our man, whether as King or President

matters not." The review over, the throng of spectators drew up to

see Louis Napoleon. After the Minister of War, d'Hautpoul, and the

then-all-powerful Changarnier, had passed, each with his staff, "there

came by, mounted on a tall gray horse, the elect of six millions of

voters. Judiciously-distributed adherents waved their hats and shouted,

at the top of their voices, 'Long live the Emperor! Vive Napoleon!' The

people were mute. It was a laughable farce. The hero of Strasburg and

Boulogne, mounted on a tall charger, in a brilliant general's uniform,

the broad riband of the Legion of Honour over his shoulder, in plumed

hat and jackboots, was the very model of a circus equestrian." An air

of helplessness and exhaustion, according to Mr Stahr, was the main

characteristic of the President's appearance. "I stood near enough," he

continues, "to see him well, and never did I behold a more unmeaning

countenance. An unwholesome grey-brown is its prevailing tint. Of

likeness to the great Emperor there is scarcely a trace." There is

no chance, Mr Stahr declares, of such a person as Louis Napoleon

putting the republic in his pocket. Having given his opinion of the

President's exterior, he proceeds in the next chapter to sketch his

character, as described by a person who had known him from his youth.

"He is naturally goodtempered and harmless," said this anonymous

informant, "and by no means without ability. But he is tainted with

the moral corruption of all European societies, Italian, French, and

English. He has the _pourriture_ of the drawing-room education of all

nations. Still he is not devoid of sense, nor of a certain goodness

of disposition. He can weep, unaffectedly weep, over a touching case

of wretchedness and misery, and he willingly shows clemency, when

asked, even to political opponents. But no reliance can be placed in

him. In a word, his character is that of a woman. As a result of his

wandering and adventurous existence, he appears to-day as a German,

to-morrow as a Frenchman, and the day after to-morrow as an Englishman

or Italian. He is wholly without fixed principles, and without moral

stay. If one represents to him the immorality of an act, he will laugh

and say, '_Bah!_ what is that to me?' But the very next day you shall

find him as much oppressed with moral scruples as any German candidate.

He has the physical courage of his unusual bodily strength--_corporis

robore stolide ferox_--supported by a fatalist belief in his star;

and this belief, which has lately acquired increased strength by his

extraordinary vicissitude of fortune, blinds him to his real position,

and renders him deaf to the warning voices of his few honest friends.

In this respect his mother, who unceasingly stimulated his ambition,

did him much harm. Personally he is modest and unassuming, but he is

madly vain of his name and of his legitimate claims. That he has done

and continues to do himself grievous harm, as it is universally said,

by excesses of the most unrefined description, and by opium-smoking,

seems unfortunately to be only too true. For the change in him since

his youth has been altogether too great. Nevertheless, he is much less

the tool of others than might be supposed. He has a way of half-closing

his inexpressive light-blue eyes, which he has adopted to prevent

persons from reading his thoughts. His chief delusion is that the army

is unconditionally devoted to him. This is by no, means the case." We

give this curious sketch, in which truth and malignity are ingeniously

blended, for no more than it is worth. The reader will have little

difficulty in sifting the grain from the chaff, the idle or malicious

gossip from the well-founded observations. Mr Stahr supports the

assertion of the indifference of the French army to the commonplace

nephew of their great idol, by anecdotes derived from personal

experience. After the review, he dined for some days in company with

three hussar officers, quartered in the house he lived in. His account

of them hardly agrees with the popular notion of French officers. "They

are modest, reserved, and serious in manner. Nowhere in Paris have I

found a trace of that overweening presumption by which German officers,

especially cavalrymen, seek to give themselves importance at _tables

d'hôte_ and other public places. We spoke of yesterday's manoeuvres,

and I paid them a compliment on the really splendid bearing of the

troops and the capital equipments. There are no longer grounds to

depreciate the French cavalry. Africa has been an excellent school

for them. 'But there was one thing wanting,' I remarked--'namely,

enthusiasm.' 'You are quite right, sir,' replied one of the officers;

'but there is not much to be enthusiastic about in the position in

which we are.' The speaker was a thorough soldier, and anything but an

upholder of revolutionary or socialist-democratic ideas. The supporters

of the latter he invariably spoke of as '_les Voraces_,' and bitterly

complained that for years past he and his comrades had had nothing else

to do than to '_faire la chasse aux voraces_!' But with the 'Nephew of

the Uncle' none of the officers showed the least sympathy. Concerning

him they all observed a very eloquent silence." In contrast to the

ridicule and censure levelled by Mr Stahr at the more recent portion of

Louis Napoleon's career, are some anecdotes he tells us of his earlier

years. "In his youth," he says, "he must have been very amiable. I

have had opportunity to look through a collection of letters written

by him to a friend of his family, and extending over more than twenty

years. It included even notes written when he was a boy of eleven,

some of them in the German language and character. Louis Napoleon is

known to be a perfect master of German. The most pleasing and amiable

of these letters were a series written from his prison at Ham. Good

feeling, hearty gratitude for proofs of faithful adherence and for

affectionate little services, and a deep dejection at his lot, were

the characteristics of these letters. He read and studied a great deal

at Ham, especially military science, but also poetry and literature.

Within those prison-walls he now and then began to distrust the

'star' of his destiny." These letters were doubtless the same spoken

of elsewhere by Mr Stahr as filling several volumes, and as having

been addressed to Madame Hortense Cornu, a well-known writer on fine

art, who was long attached to the household of Queen Hortense. She

had known Louis Napoleon from his childhood, and retained sufficient

influence over him to obtain the rescue from the hands of the Roman

priesthood of the Italian republican Cernuschi. The letters, says Mr

Stahr, abound in evidence of the esteem and gratitude entertained by

the French President for the staunch and trusty friend of his youth.

"This correspondence, fragments of which I was favoured with permission

to read, includes all the epochs of his adventurous life. It ceases

with the day when the infatuated man, having attained to power, laid

hands upon the right of universal suffrage which had raised him from

the dust. Madame Cornu's last letter was a solemn exhortation to

abstain from that step. She laboured in vain, for fate is stronger than

humanity. But it is an honourable testimony to the originally good

disposition of the blinded man that he did not withdraw his favour

from his tried friend. A proof of this is to be found in Cernuschi's

deliverance."

During a visit paid by Mr Stahr to Alexander Dumas, the French

romance-writer told the German professor an anecdote of Louis Napoleon

and the late Duke of Orleans, which is curious, if true. Perhaps it

is as well to bear in mind, whilst reading it, that its narrator is a

story-teller by profession, and the most imaginative and decorative

of historians. Dumas, it appears, had been long acquainted with the

imperial pretender and his mother; was aware of the rash schemes of

the Prince, then meditating the Strasburg expedition; and advised him,

by letter, to abandon them, or at least to adopt a totally different

mode of carrying them out. If he would uproot (_deraciner_) the dynasty

of Louis Philippe, wrote Dumas, he must try very different means. He

must endeavour to obtain the revocation of his sentence of exile,

get himself elected member of the French Chamber of Deputies, and so

follow up his plans in opposition to the ruling dynasty. Deaf to this

advice, which was certainly sensible enough, Louis Napoleon made his

ridiculous attempt at Strasburg, and was taken prisoner. Thereupon his

mother, Queen Hortense, hurried to the neighbourhood of Paris under an

assumed name, and with one confidential attendant. This person she sent

to Dumas, to entreat him to apply to his patron, the Duke of Orleans,

to know what the Court had decided with respect to the prisoner's

fate. Dumas wrote forthwith for an audience; the Duke received him

with a smile. "Well!" he said, "so your _protégé_ has not succeeded

in _uprooting_ us?" "Prince, you know----?" stammered the terrified

novelist. "Do you suppose we are so badly served for our money as not

to know what brings you here, and where Queen Hortense is at this very

moment?" After a short pause, during which he enjoyed the embarrassment

of Dumas, the Duke continued, "Tell Madame Hortense," he said, "that

the Orleans do not yet feel themselves strong enough _to have their

Duke d'Enghien_."

"It is a bitter answer, your royal highness," replied Dumas, taking his

leave, "but still it will console the mother's heart."

"And now," muses Mr Stahr, "the shattered bones of the unfortunate

young Duke of Orleans have long been mouldering in the grave, his

statue in the court of the Louvre has been dragged down and stowed

away in a corner of the Versailles Museum, and the Adventurer of

Strasburg rules France as a republic, with power more unlimited than

the wily Louis Philippe ever possessed over it as a monarchy! For so

long as it lasts, that is to say; for methinks the feet of those who

shall carry him out are already before the door. But how did he ever

get in? How was it that even his candidature for the presidency was

not overwhelmed and rendered impossible by that most dangerous of all

opponents in France, the curse of the Ridiculous, which had already

decorated with cap and bells the hero of the blunders of Strasburg

and Boulogne, the trainer of the tame eagle, the special constable of

London?" It has puzzled acuter politicians than Mr Stahr to reply to

this question, which millions have asked. The riddle interests him, and

he runs about on all sides seeking its solution. He has little success,

and evidently himself mistrusts the ingenious and original conclusion

to which he at last comes, that the election of Louis Napoleon was a

homage to the hereditary principle. "When I recently, on my way across

the plain of Satory, asked a countryman if he had given his vote to the

President, his reply was, 'Of course! was he not the rightful heir, his

uncle's legitimate successor?' This may sound ill for the republican

education of the people of the French republic; but it is the truth.

The principle of hereditary rule may be perfectly incompatible with

that of 'liberty and equality,' but it is, or was, (at the time of

Louis Napoleon's election,) the prevailing principle in the heads of

the French rural population. 'One must know the French peasantry as

I know them, who have grown up amongst them,' lately said to me the

representative De Flotte, 'to find their conduct in this matter quite

natural. The French peasant has only one fundamental idea in politics,

and that is derived from his own family relations. That fundamental

idea is the sacredness and necessity of hereditary right. That the

territorial property of the father should descend to the son, or next

of kin, seems to him the main condition or all human existence.'"

Admitting, for argument's sake, the soundness of this statement, and

that the French peasant is thus devoted to the hereditary principle,

the natural inference is that, when he perceived his country to be in

a state of transition, ruled by provisional intruders, and anxiously

looking out for a more permanent chief of the state, he should have

hoisted the white cockade, and tossed up his beaver for the Fifth

Henry. Messrs Stahr and De Flotte explain why he did not do this.

"The French peasant has no longer any sort of sympathy with the elder

Bourbons. For him the glory of Louis XIV. is far too remote. What else

he knows of them is, that they brought the foreigner into his country,

and on that account he curses them." In this there is some truth. The

old royalist spirit still lingers in certain departments of France,

but in the country generally the Count de Chambord's partisans are

rather intelligent and influential than numerous. Should he ascend

the throne, it will not be in virtue of zeal for the principle of

legitimacy or of personal attachment to himself, but because the nation

will see in his accession the best guarantee of order and economical

administration. These two things are the real wants and desires of the

mass of the population. The peasant who told Mr Stahr he wished for

peace and light taxation, spoke the feeling of a great majority of

Frenchmen. "The dynasty of Orleans," says the professor's informant,

continuing his explanation of the concurrence of circumstances which

raised Louis Napoleon to the president's chair, "never enjoyed much

prestige amongst the rural population, who did not forgive old Louis

Philippe for having violated the principle of hereditary right."

This is rather far-fetched. If the provinces cared little for Louis

Philippe, it was because he had troubled himself little about them.

True to his system of centralisation, Paris, to him, was France, and

ungrateful Paris it was that finally abandoned and expelled him. It is

unnecessary to go out of one's way to seek reasons for the fact, that

when, in December 1848, the French, exhausted by nine months' anarchy

and misery, and ashamed of those February follies into which a few

deluded and designing men had led them, cast about for a ruler under

whom they might hope for respite and breathing time, none turned a

wishful or expectant eye to any member of the house of Orleans. The

family had been weighed and found wanting. From the astute politician,

"whose word no man relied on," and who reaped in his latter days those

bitter fruits of usurpation and anarchy whose seeds he had sown in his

prime, down to the youngest of the sons to whose advancement he had

sacrificed his conscience and his country, and who, in the supreme

hour of peril and confusion, were found utterly deficient in princely

and manly qualities, in self-possession, energy, and resource, there

was not one of the line whom France would trust. The time was too

short that had elapsed since the picture of selfishness and incapacity

had been exhibited to wondering Europe: the cause had been unable to

revive from the grievous and self-inflicted shock; it lay supine and

seemingly dead, awaiting the day when intrigue and hypocrisy should

galvanise it into a precarious vitality. When the crisis of May 1852

arrives, we shall see what has been the effect of the complicated

manoeuvres of the house of Orleans, which, in December 1848, stood

so low in public estimation. Then, according to Mr Stahr, Buonapartism

was the only political creed that appealed to the prejudices and

feelings of the French peasant, and it required no great skill to get

him to write upon his election-ticket the name of the prince whom he

looked upon as the rightful heir of the Emperor. "He did it of his own

accord, out of a conviction that he was performing an act of justice,

and that hereditary right demanded it. Other motives concurred. The

forty-five-centime impost had embittered the countryman against the

Republic, which had increased instead of lightening his load. Upon

the Democrat-Socialists he looked distrustfully. He would have nought

to say to those '_partageux_' (dividers.) He cared nothing for the

fine speeches of parliamentary orators. The peasant is by nature

taciturn, and has little confidence in assemblies of great talkers.

He was not disposed to make a stir about the freedom of the press,

of which he makes no use. His political understanding did not extend

beyond one wish, and that wish was, a strong government, which should

secure to him the enjoyment and inheritance of his property. And who

could do that better than a Napoleon--Napoleon himself, the Emperor

of Béranger?--for there are many places where the country people have

never believed the Emperor dead." The clever author of _Jerome Paturot_

has expressed a similar opinion as regards the prevalence of this

scarcely credible delusion amongst the uneducated classes in certain

districts of France. It does not appear to be entirely confined to that

country. "I myself am witness," says Mr Stahr, "that, in the year 1848,

a peasant of a province of Northern Germany, on hearing of the new

French revolution, and of its first consequences in Germany, remarked

that, 'without doubt old Buonaparte had a finger in the pie.'" It is

Mr Stahr's belief that Louis Napoleon is destined to dispel, by his

inability to fulfil the expectations of the ignorant portion of his

constituents, that Buonapartist prestige to which he partly owed his

election, and that attachment to the hereditary principle which the

professor assumes still to exist in France. "The nephew of the great

Emperor," he says, "is selected by fate to disturb, if not to destroy,

the idolatry with which a large portion of the French nation has

hitherto regarded the name and memory of its greatest tyrant. Napoleon

the Second throws a grey shadow over Napoleon the First."

If the French President receives but rude handling from the German

republican, the Orleans family cannot congratulate themselves on

much better treatment. His first reference to that fallen dynasty is

suggested by a little book, which, at the time of its appearance,

attracted some attention both in England and France. M. Louis Tirel's

_La République dans les Carrosses du Roi_ was neither calculated nor

intended to please the democrats. Mr Stahr, however, is pretty fair

in his appreciation of it, sneering a little at the author for taking

what he calls a valet-de-chambre's view of the February revolution,

but doing justice to the interest and instruction to be found in his

pages, which show up the _parties honteuses_ of that most disastrous

and ill-advised political convulsion; the scandalous greed, vanity, and

egotism of the adventurers and knaves who alone profited by the storm

they had contributed to raise. M. Tirel, although to all appearance

honest and truthful, certainly wrote like a partisan. His position and

attachments were incompatible with a just estimate of circumstances.

Whilst accurately describing events, he deluded himself as to the

causes that led to them, and, above all, he could see no wrong in

his master; could not for the life of him comprehend how it was that

Louis Philippe, "who had so faithfully observed his oath to maintain

the charter, and who had a majority in the Chambers," should have

been ejected from his throne and kingdom. The worthy keeper of the

royal carriages never attains to more than a glimmering and confused

notion that the nation could scarcely be said to be represented by the

majority in question, and that a moderate extension of the suffrage,

accorded with a good grace, would probably have maintained the July

dynasty at the helm of French affairs to this day, and for years to

come. His admiration of Louis Philippe's wisdom and skill is unlimited,

as is also his indignation at the ingratitude of the people. Mr Stahr

loses patience at the affectionate manner in which the _ex-controlleur

des equipages_ lauds the virtues of the old "Jesuit-King," as the

German irreverently styles the defunct monarch; and, provoked by

Tirel's exaggerated encomiums, he retorts by the following severe but

too true remarks with reference to the oft-repeated accusation of

miserly hoarding, brought against Louis Philippe by Republican and

Legitimist writers:--"Louis Philippe," he says, "was no _avare_ such

as Molière has drawn--no comedy-miser--but yet he was immoderately

avaricious. There was no end to his demands of money for the princes

of his house. He knew, or thought he knew, that _money is power_; and

as he could not obtain enough of the latter, he restlessly strove

after the former as the means to an object. He was a good father of a

family, in the _bourgeois_ sense of the word; but he had no conception

of that which makes a king the father of his people. His defenders

celebrate the care which this prince, denounced as grasping, expended

upon the conservation of the royal palaces, the great sums which he

laid out upon rich furniture, numerous attendants, brilliant equipages,

and luxurious festivals--to which latter often three or four thousand

guests were invited. 'How,' it is said, 'could the people tax such a

sovereign with niggardliness and greed of gold?' But the people had

no part or share in these enjoyments. It suffered hunger and want,

whilst the higher and middle classes of the _bourgeoisie_ revelled

in these feasts, and grew rich by supplying their materials." Raised

to the throne by the suffrages of the middle classes, Louis Philippe

relied on them for support. He was bitterly disappointed. Scandalous

and cowardly was the manner in which the men of July--those whom he

had fed, pampered and decorated, favoured and preferred--deserted

him in the hour of danger. The very national guards of Neuilly, who

had lived and flourished in the shadow of the château walls, refused

to turn out, when, in February 1848, the intendant of the castle

appealed to them to protect from plunder the property of their patron

and king. They had caught the contagion of that intense selfishness

which was Louis Philippe's most striking characteristic. "Let those

who choose go out to be shot," said the burghers of Neuilly; "we shall

stop at home and take care of our houses." And assuredly the inert

and unsympathising attitude of the Paris national guard contributed

more than anything else to deter Louis Philippe from resisting by

force the progress of the February revolutionists. The burghers were

disgusted by the dilapidation of the finances, and the venality of

the administration--they were disgusted with Guizot for not daring to

resist the headstrong will of the old king--and they cried out for

electoral reform. With a little more patience they would have achieved

their desire;--over-hasty, they suddenly beheld themselves plunged

into revolution. They had not foreseen it; they lacked presence of

mind to repel its first inroads. And they also lacked, there can be

no question, that feeling of personal attachment to the sovereign

which would have prevented their standing by, tame witnesses of his

dethronement. "Louis Philippe," says Mr Stahr, "never knew how to

inspire an earnest and cordial attachment even in those nearest his

person. The circumstances of his fall are the most speaking proof of

this. His own panegyrist tells us that Louis Philippe himself had a

misgiving that none loved him for his own sake. He often said to his

most confidential attendants: 'You serve me faithfully, but not with

the zeal and warmth which distinguished the servants of Napoleon.

Their devotion to his person was unbounded.' If such was the case

in the French king's prosperous days, what could he expect in the

hour of adversity? M. Tirel himself proves, beyond the possibility

of refutation, that, when the moment of danger arrived, the nearest

personal attendants of the king thought, almost without exception,

only of themselves. Not one of them troubled himself about the safety

of the immense sums contained in the treasury of the Tuileries. None

thought of holding in readiness the necessary means of travelling,

in the possible case of the departure or flight of the king and his

family; and even M. Tirel exclaims, with reference to this--'It is

difficult to credit such utter want of foresight, when they knew they

were standing on a volcano.'" At Neuilly, as already mentioned, the

national guard refused to turn out; whilst the servants of the royal

residence busied themselves in saying their own things, leaving their

master's property to be pillaged and burned by the rabble, with whose

disgusting and disgraceful depredations the troops of the line did not

interfere. Regulars and militia, domestics and mob, the same want of

feeling was manifest in all; none showed attachment or devotion to the

prince, whose star was on the decline. Mr Stahr made a pilgrimage to

Neuilly, and devotes a letter to it. It was a grey, sad-looking autumn

afternoon, and the road was silent and deserted along which he took his

way to the favourite residence of the departed king. The impression

made upon him was most melancholy. "_Vous verrez de belles choses_,"

said the porter at the lodge, as he pointed out to the Germans the

way to the ruins. "Up to this time," says Mr Stahr, "nothing in Paris

had reminded me that here had raged, but a very few years before, the

hurricane of a revolution that shook the world, and that had swept a

dynasty from the soil of France like chaff from the thrashing-floor.

At Neuilly I first received this impression. They made clean work of

it, those bands of incendiaries of the 28th February 1848. A single

night sufficed to convert that stately building, and all its splendour,

into a heap of hideous ruins.... High grass now grows upon the floors

of the state apartments of the destroyed king's-home. Bushes spring up

around the columns, over which creepers luxuriantly twine; and the red

poppy and the yellow king-cup wave their blossoms in the chambers and

saloons in which, so short a time ago, the ruler of proud France paced

his Persian carpets, revolving plans for the eternal consolidation of

his dynasty! On the ravaged foot-paths before the windows, the melted

glass of the magnificent panes has flowed down and formed a brilliant

flooring. At the foot of a balcony, whose pillars still supported the

remains of broken beams, a flush of pale pink harvest roses exhaled

their delicate fragrance. It was an incredibly melancholy sight. The

closely-locked doors and shattered windows of the wing that was saved

increased the gloom of the whole impression. Everywhere the tall iron

lattice-work, and the iron posts supporting lamps, are rent and broken;

the statues on the flights of steps are shivered to pieces; there

remain but a couple of colossal sphinxes, which gaze inquiringly out

of the dark green of the shrubbery. Who shall solve their riddle--the

riddle of the history of France and of mankind? Louis Philippe, wise

amongst the wise, thought he had done so. Where is he now? His weary

bones sleep the eternal sleep in the country of the banished kings of

France."

Neuilly has become a place of pilgrimage for the friends of the

fallen dynasty. A host of inscriptions, mostly in an anti-republican

sense, were to be read upon the walls and pillars at the period of

Mr Stahr's visit. Of several which he took the trouble to copy, one

only is superior in tone and significance to the usual average of such

scribblings. "High upon a broken column a firm hand had inscribed with

charcoal, and in gigantic characters, these three words:

DROIT DU TALION. 1830. 1848.

Other hands had tried to obliterate the writing, but in vain. The

revengeful word 'RETALIATION' was still quite legible. And this

word best expresses the feeling with which plain-dealing probity

contemplates the fate of the overthrown July monarch. For here at

Neuilly was it that he, a modern Richard III., played the hypocritical

part of rejecting power, when the blood of the July revolution still

reddened the streets of Paris. Here was it that he wrote the letter

to Charles X. in which he assured him of his fidelity and devotion,

when he was already extending a lustful hand towards the crown of the

rightful heir. Here too, in Neuilly, was it that he spun that Spanish

web, whose most secret documents Lord Palmerston carefully preserves,

and which gave the world a glimpse into an abyss of moral foulness at

which the soul shudders. And here, in presence of this funeral pile

of his happiness and his splendour--here, before the memorial of his

disgraceful and ignominious fall--here, when I called to mind his acts,

I felt no touch of pity for the fallen King. But the _man_ I did indeed

pity, the husband and the father. He had loved this Neuilly. Here had

he enjoyed such a measure of domestic happiness as is rarely vouchsafed

to a monarch. This house had he, for many a long year, built up and

decorated with that fine feeling for art and architecture which was

proper to him. To this green retirement and solitude, to this remote

dwelling, hidden from all eyes, he loved to withdraw. Here, where all

was his own creation--where no stone was added, no tree planted, no

path cut, but under his eye--exactly here, in the most sensitive spot,

the blow struck him. The destruction of this house was more deeply

felt by the _man_ than was the loss of his throne by the _king_!

Before the Count of Neuilly had left French ground, the building had

ceased to exist from which he had borrowed the name. And all his

wiles and stratagems, all his cunning, were as insufficient to avert,

from the man and from the king, this last fated climax, as were the

fortifications and bastilles with which he had surrounded the dreaded

Paris."

Quitting Neuilly, Mr Stahr was startled, as well he might be, by the

terms of a bill stuck upon the park-gates--

"House of Orleans, (thus it ran,) château and domain of Neuilly _to

let_ for three years with immediate possession; about one hundred

and eighty acres, meadows, forest-land, &c., _bordering on the

fortifications_!"

Wandering through the endless galleries of Versailles, Mr Stahr is

naturally enough led to reflect how strange it is that Louis Philippe,

the Napoleon of Peace, as his flatterers called him, and as he loved

to hear himself called--the man whose motto, as his enemies constantly

asserted, was "Peace at any price," and who avowedly and upon principle

disliked war--should have devised and carried out the plan of a

national gallery of French military fame. A merciless analyser of the

citizen king's secret thoughts and motives, Mr Stahr declares this

gallery to have been a speculation of "the crowned shopkeeper,"--a

speculation by which his dynasty was to gain strength at the expense

of a national weakness. There is truth in this; but, at the same

time, the professor's opinion must not here be accepted as impartial

evidence. He is evidently led into unusual fervour by his holy horror

of war. We suspect him of being a member of the Peace Congress--to

which he in one place kindly alludes, as the humble commencement of

a great movement. Like many other adherents of the political sect

which proposes to itself an aim that could never possibly be attained

without terrible convulsions and sanguinary conflicts, he cannot abide

the sight of blood, shudders at wounds, and recoils in terror and

dismay from the "slaying and murdering, singeing and burning, cutting

and stabbing," depicted upon the walls of the Versailles gallery. He

looks not lovingly upon this pictorial history of France, sketched

from her battle-fields, and including the exploits of her innumerable

warriors, from Clodwig down to Bugeaud. On the other hand, he curiously

and eagerly examines the pictures illustrating the events of 1830 and

Louis Philippe's accession. Of the battle-pieces he has set down some

(and not altogether without reason) as mere daubs, which no one would

glance at twice but for the sake of the subject. When surveying the

illustrations of the July revolution, he forgets artistic criticism

in his satirical account of the personages that fill the canvass, and

especially of the chief actor in those scenes, Louis Philippe himself.

"His arrival at the Palais Royal," says the rancorous professor, "has

something sneaking about it. He is profusely adorned with tricolor

ribbons, wears white trousers, a brown coat, and a round hat. He

looks like a rogue who has just crept into another man's estate.

But characteristic above all is the picture in which he signs the

proclamation naming him Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom (July 31,

1830.) The figures are the size of life, all in plain clothes, and

decorated with the tricolor. They sit round a green council-table,

the coming Citizen-King in the midst of them, dressed in a brown coat

with a black velvet collar and a black satin waistcoat, a large fine

shirt-frill, a neatly tied white cravat, his hair carefully curled, his

eyes half closed, the corners of his month lugubriously drawn down.

He holds up the momentous sheet of paper, close above which the pen

in his right hand hovers, and seems to ask those around him--'Ought

I then?--must I?' All eyes are fixed trustingly upon him, especially

those of honest Laffitte, in the corner on the left. Sebastiani looks

somewhat keener and shrewder. Never in my life did I see a picture that

so perfectly represents an assemblage of Jew bankers, gathered round

their leader to advise on a 'bull' or 'bear' speculation. The whole

party have this Jewish calculating expression--Louis Philippe more

than any of them. And this is the countenance the man has himself had

perpetuated! It is a strange historical irony. All the old Bourbons,

even the two last Louises and Charles X. looked noble, or at least

like noblemen, in the expression of their features, compared with this

essentially common physiognomy. Their faces, at any rate, expressed

the decided and undeniable consciousness of high descent, whilst the

predominating expression in Louis Philippe's countenance is that of

a cunning shopkeeper. And this expression is everywhere the same, in

all the pictures, &c. &c." There is more in the same strain. Some may

be disposed to quarrel with Mr Stahr for pressing so hard upon a dead

man; but, living or dead, kings are fair subjects of criticism; and,

unsparing and savage as are often the professor's strictures on the

character and policy of Louis Philippe, they yet are the most truthful

and just of all the political portions of his book. Messrs Montalivet

and Miraflores, and the other unscrupulous panegyrists of the late

King of the French, would have too good a game left them if it were

forbidden to reply by more exact and impartial statements to their

exaggerated encomiums.

Passing from the deceased sovereign to his family, we are led to an

apparently remote subject--namely, Mr Stahr's visit to Alexander Dumas,

who, as is well known, was a favourite and intimate of the dukes of

Orleans and Montpensier. When reviewing, a few years ago, the Paris

diary of a countryman of Mr Stahr's--a gentleman of similar politics

and equal discretion--we noticed an offensive practice common amongst

modern German writers, many of whom, on return from foreign travel,

scruple not to commit to print the most confidential conversation

and minute domestic details of persons who have hospitably welcomed

them, and imprudently admitted them to intimacy. No consideration of

propriety checks these impudent scribblers. Delicacy and reserve are

things unknown to them. The persons concerning whom they flippantly

babble may dwell within a day's railroad of them, and be sure to see

their books--may be equally sure to feel vexed or disgusted by their

unwarrantable revelations and offensive inferences; no matter, they

speak of them as though Pekin were their domicile. As regards the

radical professor from Oldenburg, we sincerely trust that he may fall

in, at an early day, with the martial author of the _Mousquetaires_,

and receive from him, as guerdon for his gossip, a delicately

administered _estocade_. We never heard whether Janin chastised Mr

Carl Gutzkow, either with pen or pistol, for his slipshod and indecent

chatter concerning him and Madame Janin; but we remember somebody

doing it for him in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, where we suspect Mr

Stahr has a fair chance of being in his turn gibbeted. Here is the

German professor's account of Dumas's personal appearance and private

residence. It is a curious bit of miniature-painting. "In person he is

tall and powerful; his movements, once unquestionably very flexible,

are now characterised by an easy negligence. His bright complexion

and large prominent light-blue eyes contrast with the mouth and nose,

which betray his African origin. Good-nature, and a combination of

intellectuality with a keen relish of life, are the most prominent

characteristics of his broad round face. His thick woolly hair, now

all but grey, seems to have been formerly light-coloured. He sits in

a very large room on the first floor of the last house in the Avenue

Frochot. His apartment is reached through a dark corridor. On the side

that looks out upon the very quiet street, is a glass gallery, which

serves as a greenhouse. There was nothing remarkable in it. Mignonette

and heliotropes were growing in the tubs in which a few large oleander

bushes were planted. Of the magnificent tropical vegetation of which

report has spoken, there was no sign. The room was decorated, and

divided into two parts, with brown woollen hangings. In the largest

division, into which visitors are conducted, and in front of the

greenhouse windows, stands a vast writing-table. Ancient and modern

arms deck the walls. But of Oriental luxury there was not the least

appearance. And some other apartments through which he afterwards

took me, to show me his winter reception-room, were by no means so

luxuriously fitted up as has been reported in Germany."

"I found his bookseller with him. 'Look well at the man,' said Dumas,

'who pays to one author a hundred thousand francs a-year. Such men are

not to be seen every day.' Notwithstanding this little bit of brag, I

hear that his finances are in no very brilliant state, and that the

failure of his _Théatre Historique_, especially, threatens him with

heavy losses. In the course of conversation, he humourously complained

of the total absence of repose in his laborious existence, of which we

easy-going, comfortable, German authors could scarcely form an idea.

So many newspapers, a theatre of his own, the contract-romances, and

the stipulated dramas--truly, it amounts to a considerable total.

On subsequent visits, I never found his room and antechamber free

from a throng of visitors--booksellers, printers, managers, actors,

secretaries, and others--all of whom he knew how to despatch with great

rapidity, and without interrupting the thread of our conversation for

more than a few moments at a time." Conversations with so lively and

versatile a genius as M. Dumas, turned, as may be supposed, on a vast

variety of subjects, but that of which Mr Stahr has given us most

details related to the ex-royal family of France. "In a side-room he

showed us some very pretty pen-and-ink drawings--hunting subjects, by

the late Duke of Orleans. This gave him opportunity to speak of his

high respect for the mental endowments of the prince, with whom it is

well known that he was on a footing of intimacy. 'He had wit enough for

ten,' said Dumas. 'When we were five or six _hommes d'esprit de Paris_

together,' added he, with amusing _naiveté_, 'it was quite impossible

to distinguish which was the prince and which the wit. The prince

was the incarnation of French _esprit_, and of the Parisian-French

_esprit_, which includes all possible qualities. Her inability to

understand and appreciate this _esprit Parisien_ was a drawback upon

the domestic happiness of the Duchess of Orleans, notwithstanding her

many excellent qualities. Her heavier German nature did not harmonise

with her husband's light elastic disposition. It put her beside

herself when he transgressed in the presence of a third person the

rules prescribed by the etiquette of little German courts.' Dumas told

some interesting examples of this--examples, however, not adapted for

publication, as they related to the prince's private life. The Duke of

Orleans foresaw a revolution, in a republican sense, as a consequence

of his father's system. His testamentary arrangements with respect to

the education of his son were all made in anticipation of such an event

coming to pass. In any case, he wished his wife to have nothing to do

with the government of the country. The passage of his will relating

to this point is conceived quite in the spirit of the words with which

Homer's Telemachus consigns his mother Penelope to the society of her

women. 'If, unhappily, the king's authority could not watch over my

son until his majority, Helen should prevent her name being pronounced

for the regency. Leaving, as it is her duty and her interest, all the

cares of government to virile hands, accustomed to handle the sword,

Helen should devote herself entirely to the education of our children.'

The Duke of Orleans' death was pregnant with fatal consequences for

the dynasty, because he, the most highly gifted of all the old king's

sons, was perhaps the only one who would have been capable of giving

things a different turn in the event of a conflict like the February

revolution. He knew his brothers too well not to be convinced that they

were unequal to such an emergency. 'Nemours,' said he to one of his

confidants, 'is the man of rule and etiquette: he _keeps step_ well,

and keeps himself behind me with scrupulous attention. He will never

assume the initiative.' He held the Dukes of Nemours and Aumale to be

brave soldiers. Of the Prince de Joinville he said: 'He has a passion

for danger: he will commit a thousand acts of brilliant imprudence, and

will receive a ball in his breast at the assault of a barricade,'--a

fate which Joinville escaped in February probably only by his absence

from Paris. 'Now that younger sons are no longer made _abbés_,'

continued the Duke of Orleans, referring to little Montpensier, 'I am

at a loss to imagine what is to be done with them.'

"Of none of his sons was the old king more jealous," says Mr Stahr,

"than of the heir to the crown. Letters found in the Tuileries in

February 1848 show that he kept him in the strictest dependence, and

had spies observing him wherever he was. In the year 1839 the duke

complained 'that he had less power than any private citizen who had

a vote at elections; that he did nothing but the commissions of the

ministers; that everything was in danger, nothing gave promise of

durability, and that it was impossible to say what might happen from

one day to the other.' The prince, expressed himself thus whilst upon a

journey, in a confidential circle of officers of rank. Two days later

his words, set down in writing, were in the hands of the king. The

surprising irresolution and want of presence of mind displayed by the

other princes in the hour of danger, can only be accounted for by the

slavish dependence in which the old monarch had kept them."

Although easy and affable in his intercourse with his friends, a

certain jealous vigilance with regard to the respect due to his

rank formed a feature in the character of the Duke of Orleans. The

anecdote told to Mr Stahr by Dumas, as an illustration of this trait,

can hardly, however, be admitted to prove undue susceptibility,

but rather the prince's consciousness that his house stood upon an

unstable foundation. It was at a hunting-party at Fontainebleau.

The chase was very unsuccessful. The Duke of Orleans turned to an

Italian nobleman, to whose family Louis Philippe had obligations of

ancient date, and who on that account was on a friendly footing at

court. "Well! Monsieur de--," said the duke, "how are we hunting

to-day?" "Like pigs, Monseigneur, (_comme les cochons_,)" was the

Italian's coarse reply. The duke, evidently annoyed, said to Dumas:

"And you believe our monarchy possible, when a _De_ ... dares thus to

answer the heir to the throne?" Mr Stahr was interested to find that

Dumas, notwithstanding his monarchical friendships and associations,

believed in the necessity and durability of the republic. "It seems,"

said the ingenious and versatile author of _Monte Christo_, "as if

Providence had resolved to let us try all manner of monarchies, in

order to convince us that not one of them is adapted to our character

and condition." Then he gave his auditors a detailed sketch of all

the French monarchies previous to the Revolution of 1789. "Since that

Revolution," he went on, "we have had the monarchy of Genius: it lasted

ten years. We have had the restoration of the monarchy of _esprit_ and

chivalrous gallantry: it lasted fifteen years; and was succeeded by the

citizen-monarchy, which lasted eighteen. What would you have us try

now? This republic is bad. But a child in swaddling-clothes matures

into a man." Sensibly enough spoken for a romance-writer, indulgently

remarks Mr Stahr, who is always glad to obtain a suffrage in favour

of republican institutions. We attach the same degree of value to M.

Dumas's political vaticinations as to his Frenchified _rifaccimenti_

of Shakspeare's plays. Shakspeare in French, as Mr Ford remarks in

his Spanish Handbook, "is like Niagara passed through a jelly-bag."

A miracle of degradation which reminds us to turn to a scornful and

indignant chapter suggested to Mr Stahr by a certain Monsieur Michel

Carré's version of Goethe's _Faust_, performed at the _Gymnase_

theatre. "Goethe is unknown in France," says the Countess d'Agoult,

one of the few competent French appreciators of German literature, in

her _Esquisses Morales et Politiques_. Nothing, according to Mr Stahr,

could be better fitted to confirm and perpetuate French ignorance of

the great German than such dramas as that which he painfully endured at

the Gymnase. According to Madame d'Agoult, her countrymen will not take

the trouble to study Goethe. To do so they must first learn a language.

"Why did he not write in French? He has only what he deserves, after

all. How is it possible to be a German?--(_comment est on Allemand?_)"

"If this is not exactly out-spoken," says Madame d'Agoult, "it is

at least privately thought in a country where _the arrogance of

ignorance_ attains proportions unknown to other nations." "_La superbe

de l'ignorance," "der Uebermuth der Unwissenheit!_" cries Mr Stahr

in an ecstasy: "I kiss the fair lady's hand who wrote the word, for,

without it, I should never have hit upon the appropriate term for this

newest French atrocity of M. Michel Carré, perpetrated upon the most

profound work of German genius. I am not without experience of the

theatrical sufferings of our day; but such torture as was yesterday

inflicted, at the Gymnase theatre, upon every German fibre in our

frames, I never before in my whole life witnessed or underwent. I was

prepared for little that was good, and for much that was laughable; but

my expectations and fears were surpassed to an extent it was impossible

to anticipate. Marsyas flayed by Apollo is no very pleasing picture,

but the Belvidere Apollo flayed by a Marsyas is a spectacle which it

takes all the nerve of German critical observation to endure." Mr Stahr

then proceeds to dissect the drama, act by act, and almost scene by

scene, with considerable acuteness and humour. The specimens of fustian

he gives, the execrable French taste he exposes, fully justify the

intensity of his disgust. The _Gymnase_ drama is evidently worse than

a tame translation; it is an obscene parody of Goethe's great poem. It

is a compound, as Mr Stahr expresses it, of "dirt and fire--that sort

of fire, namely, which is lighted by the brandy-bottle." We believe

it impossible that _Faust_ should ever be done justice to in a French

version. But if translators, owing to the want of power of the French

language, and to the utter absence of affinity and sympathy between

it and the German, must ever fall to a certain extent, they at least

may avoid degrading and distorting the tone and sentiments of the

original. This M. Carré, of whom we now hear for the first time, seems

to have cultivated his taste and sought his inspirations in the worst

school of modern French literature, and in the orgies of Parisian

rakes. The inference is inevitable from the scenes and passages

described and quoted by Mr Stahr. As to the verbal spirit and fidelity

of the translation, the following may serve as a specimen. "In the

church-going scene, the lines, so charming in the original:--

'Mein schónes Fräulein, darf ich wagen,

Arm und Geleite anzutragen?'

are thus rendered in M. Carré's French: _Oserai-je, Mademoiselle, vous

offrir mon bras, pour vous conduire jusqu'à chez vous?_ For Gretchen's

exquisitely graceful and saucy reply--

'Bin weder Fräulein, weder schön,

Kann ungeleitet nach Hause gehn!'

which so completely captivates Goethe's Faust, this Frenchman has been

able to discover no better equivalent than, '_Pardon, Monsieur, je puis

fort bien rentrer seule à la maison_'--an answer too flat and insipid

even for a Paris _Lorette_ of the present day." Mr Stahr was tolerably

well pleased with the bearing of the audience who had come to partake

of this pitiable French hash. They may have felt a natural curiosity

to know something about the Faust and Margaret whose acquaintance

they had made in the print-shop windows, but their sympathy with the

piece went no farther. Even the Rose of the Gymnase, the Rose Chéri,

so cherished by the Parisian public, failed to extract applause as M.

Carré's Margaret. "It is very romantic," Mr Stahr heard some of his

neighbours remark, "but it is a little too German; Monsieur Goethe's

poetry does not suit the French taste." Poor public! Poor Goethe!

introduced to each other under such dismal auspices. It must have

been a relief to Mr Stahr to quit this miserable travesty, and turn

to the native drama; although even by this, judging from a letter on

theatrical subjects addressed to his friend Julius Mosen, he does not

appear to have been much gratified. "I know not," he says, "whether

my taste for theatres is gone by, or what is the reason, but as yet I

have been scarcely half-a-dozen times to the play. Beginning with the

_Théatre Français_, I might place as a motto at the beginning of this

letter the words of Courier: 'The fact is that the Théatre Français,

and all the old theatres of Paris, the Opera included, are excessively

wearisome.' To be sure, Rachel is not here. She is gathering laurels in

Germany; and when I complained confidentially to an acquaintance that

the tragedy of the Théatre Français did not move me, he endeavoured to

console me by telling me of Madlle. Rachel, and of her speedy return to

Paris. She stands alone, incomparable, a phenomenon. But the phenomenon

is absent; and the Paris stage is consequently darkened. It is always

a bad sign for the condition of an art when it thus entirely depends

upon one of its professors." Mr Stahr was better pleased with the

lively performances at the four _Vaudeville_ theatres, and gives an

amusing analysis of _La Fille bien gardée_, the little one-act piece

which, for many weeks of last year, nightly drew crowds to the _Théatre

Montansier_. It belongs to a class of dramatic trifles in which French

playwrights and actors are perfect and inimitable; trifles which only

grow upon French soil, and will not bear transplanting.

After his savage attacks upon Louis Philippe and the French President,

it would be quite out of character if Mr Stahr--who evidently bears

monarchy a grudge, and will tolerate no government that can possibly

be identified with the cause of order--had not a fling at Henri Cinq.

Perhaps it is because he deems the Legitimist interest less formidable

to his views than the Orleanist or Buonapartist, that he adopts a

different mode of attack, and exchanges ferocity for raillery. The

German tongue being but indifferently adapted to the lighter manner

of warfare, he glides into French, in which language he writes nearly

a whole chapter. Stepping one day into a hair-dresser's rooms, he

was so fortunate as to come under the hands of the master of the

establishment, an eager politician and a red-hot Legitimist, voluble

and communicative as only a Frenchman and a barber can be. With the

very first clip of the scissors an animated conversation began, which

Mr Stahr has set down so far as his memory serves him, although he much

doubts that his pen has conveyed all the minuter comical touches of

the dialogue. This began with the usual exordium of Frenchmen of all

classes since the revolution--"You, Monsieur," said the man of wigs,

"are a foreigner, and consequently uninterested in our quarrels. Tell

me what you think of our situation?"

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

power."

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

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

"And _I_ say that he will fail. Henry the Fifth for me! _à la bonne

heure!_ There is a man for you."

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

tonsures?"

"What do I know about him? But, Monsieur, I have seen him, I am

acquainted with him, I have spoken to him, and I tell you he is a

charming man!"

"Where did you see him?"

"Did I not go to see him at Wiesbaden! Sir, there were thirty-nine

of us--workmen, we called ourselves, though we were all masters--who

went of our own accord to pay our respects to Henry V. The thing was

briskly done, I beg you to believe. I spoke to him as I speak to you,

sir, at this moment. At first I was received by M. de la Ferronnaye,

his aide-de-camp. 'Good morning, Monsieur R.,' said he, 'how do you

do?'--'Very well, sir, I thank you,' answered I; and far from making me

wait whole hours at the door, like those republicans of the _Veille_,

he made me sit down beside him on the sofa, as affable as could be."

Mr Stahr inquired of the worthy coiffeur what had been the motive of

his journey to Wiesbaden, which he seemed to look upon as a sort of

North Pole expedition, and of whose fatigues and privations he drew a

vivid picture. He wished to judge for himself, he said; to see whether

the rightful heir to the throne was as ill-favoured as his enemies

represented him to be. He found him, on the contrary, full of amiable

qualities. He was a little lame, but his smile was irresistible.

Warming with his subject, the enthusiastic Henriquinquist asked his

customer's permission to relate all the particulars of his reception at

Wiesbaden. This was just what Mr Stahr wished, and he duly encouraged

his interlocutor.

"On our arrival," continued the hairdresser, "we presented ourselves

to the aide-de-camp, as I have had the honour of informing you. He

took down our names, and gave us each a number of rotation, according

to which we were arranged in the afternoon at the general audience. We

were formed in three ranks. The prince was informed beforehand of the

name and trade of each number, so that he was able to address a few

well-chosen words to everybody. When we were all drawn up in order, he

came in, placed himself in the midst of us, at a few paces distance,

and addressed us. 'Good day to you, my friends,' he said: 'believe me

when I say that I am most sensible of the mark of sympathy you have so

spontaneously given me, by quitting your families and occupations, and

undertaking a journey into a foreign country to see and console me in

my exile. Be sure that I will never forget what you have done for me.'

Then he said, 'Come nearer, my friends!' We advanced a step. 'Nearer

yet, my friends. You come from too far not to come nearer! I hope to

see you all at eight o'clock to-night!'"

The hairdresser acted this scene as he related it, addressing himself

and Mr Stahr alternately as the prince, by whose mandate to draw a step

nearer he was evidently vastly flattered. The professor, immensely

amused by the performance, still fancied he saw that the main cause of

the fascination which Henry V. had exercised upon his devoted adherent

was still undivulged. The sequel showed that he was not mistaken.

"In the evening," continued the coiffeur, "we returned to the Prince's

residence; there we partook of refreshments, and the Prince had an

amiable word for each and all of us. He talked about the state of

affairs in France, and wished to know all our opinions of it. The

next day some of us were received in private audience. I was of the

number. But as we were numerous, and the Prince was very busy, I

could not have much conversation with him. However, he gave me a

silver medal, and--'Mr R.,' said he, 'have you a comfortable bed at

your hotel?' 'Monseigneur,' I replied, 'since you deign to ask the

question, I am accustomed to sleep between two sheets, and as I do

not understand a word of German, I have been unable to make them

understand this at my hotel. They put the sheet sometimes over and

sometimes under the blanket, but never more than one.' Sir," continued

the delighted barber, addressing himself to Mr Stahr, whilst his face

beamed with triumph, "_that night I had two sheets upon my bed_. Could

anything be more amiable? Ah, sir, I have seen them from very near,

those republicans of the Mountain, those members of the Provisional

Government!--what blockheads! what boors! They aspired to command, and

in their whole lives scarcely one of them had had as much as a servant

at his orders! Sir, it was pitiable to behold."

Mr Stahr observed to the loyal hair-curler that he had seen the persons

in question only _after_ they had attained power, and that there are

few more amiable people in the world than a pretender, _before_ he has

gained his object. He thought it possible that, once at the Tuileries,

Henry V. might show himself in a less agreeable light, and trouble

himself less about his adherent's bedlinen. The barber's sensible reply

did him honour. But barbers, from Don Quixote's day downwards, have

been men of good counsel.

"Monsieur," said the coiffeur, "I am not a fool. Do you suppose I shall

go and plague him, when he is king? He will have other matters to

mind then. I have no pretensions to be made minister or prefect, when

there are people who have studied those things all their lives. I am a

hairdresser, and I shall remain one. But _I want to dress a great deal

of hair_, and under the republic I dress none."

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

The barber, however, was no admirer of the President, whom he had also

been to see, before his election, and upon the appearance of whose head

he passed a most unfavourable opinion. He was sulky, he said, and not

conversable. The affairs of France could never go on well under a man

who knew not how to talk. Moreover, nothing could suit him but Henry

V. He was neither Buonapartist nor Republican. But when things were at

the worst, he said, his cry had always been "_Vive la France!_" "Stick

to that!" said a customer who just then stepped in. "France has a tough

existence, and will outlive your Henri Dieudonné and all his kin, and

the President to boot. And now have the goodness to curl my hair."

Whether fact or invention, this sketch has one truthful point: it

gives a sound enough notion of the manner of reasoning of the French

shopkeeper and _petit bourgeois_--a numerous and weighty class, without

whose concurrence no state of things can long be permanent in France.

With them the whole question, since they first awoke from the shock

and folly of the February revolution, has been one of _two sheets on

their bed_ and _more hair to dress_. They will support any government

under which they can sleep in peace and drive a good trade. Some of

our readers will not have forgotten the sufferings and fate of poor

_Monsieur Bonardin_.[4] The disasters and commercial depression of

1848 were a severe but perhaps a wholesome and necessary lesson to

many thousands of Frenchmen. Unfortunately, as illustrated in M.

Bonardin's case, the lesson was given to many who neither required

nor deserved it. Wandering near Versailles, in the pleasant valley of

Jouy, Mr Stahr and his companions were invited by a friendly dame,

whose acquaintance they had made in the omnibus, to walk into her

house and taste her grapes. She perhaps thought the object of the

foreigners' pedestrian stroll was to purchase one of the pleasant

country houses, surrounded by vineyards and orchards, which there

abound; for she took them all through her kitchen-garden and vineyard,

and through the copse of chestnuts and hazel bushes, to the fish-pond,

and to the pleasant grotto, fitted up as a chapel, and even to the

vine-dresser's cottage, from whose windows a lovely view repaid the

ascent of the numerous terraces. During this tour of inspection the

good lady's tongue was not altogether idle, and a melancholy page

out of a Paris citizen's life was laid open to the Germans' eyes.

The pleasant little domain they were rambling over was the fruit of

five-and-twenty years' toil. "Monsieur Cendrell, a skilful gilder, had

bought it a few years before the last revolution, and had laid out

considerable sums in building and embellishment. The revolution broke

out just as he had given up his business to a friend and assistant. He

suffered heavy losses, and was now compelled, in spite of the general

depreciation of all landed property, to part with his little estate.

It was to be had for only thirty thousand francs, as it stood--garden

and vineyard, dwelling-house and garden-cottage, shady copse, and pond

well stocked with carp, and right of shooting over I know not how

many acres. And how neatly and comfortably arranged was the house,

with its bath and billiard-rooms, and its library with portraits of

Louis Philippe and the Count de Paris--how cleanly kept was every room

from the kitchen to the attics, the gardener's house and the stable

included! There was nothing wanting, but--thirty thousand francs to

buy it with, and as much more to live there quietly till the end of

one's days. We sat full half-an-hour in the cottage on the hill,

refreshing ourselves with the sweet grapes that clustered round the

windows of the rush-matted room, whilst the kindly Frenchwoman told

us her story. It is that of thousands of her class in Paris since the

February revolution. Truly it grieved us, both for her sake and our

own, that we could not purchase the pleasant country house." This, it

will be said, is a common-place incident. There is certainly nothing

in it very striking or dramatic. Every day somebody or other suffers

losses, and is compelled to reduce his establishment, or to put it down

altogether; to sell his last acre of sunny meadow and vineyard, and

toil in an obscure lodging for daily bread. But there will be found in

the picture something deeply affecting, if we suffer the mind to dwell

upon it for a moment, recalling, at the same time, the well-known fact

referred to by Mr Stahr, that, since the dreary days of 1848, the fate

of the frame-gilder of Jouy has been that of multitudes of others who,

like him, had passed a laborious manhood in earning, for their old

age, a competency and a right to repose. Thus we obtain a glimpse of

a mass of misery, of domestic happiness broken up, if not destroyed,

of hallowed associations rudely ruptured--by no fault of the victims,

but as a melancholy effect of the obstinacy of a selfish king, and of

the rashness and precipitancy of a section of his subjects. But these

material evils, deplorable as they are, sink, in our opinion, into

insignificance, contrasted with the moral results of the last most

ill-omened French revolution. These strike Mr Stahr in a very different

light. The early part of the month of October was passed by him at the

pretty village of Loges, near Versailles, whither he went to enjoy the

beautiful scenery and the mellow autumnal weather, and to escape for

a few days from the whirl and rattle of Paris. In the course of his

walks, he and his friends not unfrequently visited a little rural inn

on the way to Jouy, kept by a corpulent but active dame, who usually

favoured them with her society and conversation, whilst they consumed

a glass of her country wine and a slice of her _fromage de Brie_.

She read no newspapers--none were received in her modest tavern--and

knew but little of the intricacies of her country's dissensions; but

she had political notions of her own, and was a warm republican. "We

French," said she to Mr Stahr, "soon get tired of governments. They

have driven away all that have been chosen since Napoleon; and when

they were driven away the consequence always was a terrible shock,

affecting all kinds of property. Now, in a republic, there is no one

person to drive away with so much clatter, and that is why, for my

part, I desire neither a Napoleon nor a king." "Query," exclaims Mr

Stahr, "whether the woman is so much in the wrong? For my part, from no

French politician have I yet heard a more striking remark with respect

to the present circumstances of France. That France has no longer any

king, any family ruling her by right divine, that is the chief thing

won by the February revolution. The dynastic and monarchical illusion

is completely eradicated from the people's mind, never again to take

firm root." This prospect, in which the German radical exults, we,

as staunch upholders of the monarchical principle, should of course

deplore, did we attach any value to his predictions. But, after what

has passed, we think anything possible in France, and should be no

more astonished at a Bourbon restoration, than at a consolidation of

the republic; at Joinville's presidency, than at Louis Napoleon's

re-election. It needs more temerity than judgment to hazard a prophecy

concerning what will or will not take place in a country which, as far

as politics go, has become, above all others, _le pays de l'imprévu_.

The title used to belong to Spain; and in the years of Continental

tranquillity that preceded 1848, it was amusement for unoccupied

politicians to watch the unforeseen crises constantly occurring in the

Peninsula. It is infinitely more exciting to wait upon the caprices of

a great and powerful country, whose decisions, however unreasonable,

may influence the state of all Europe. They can but be waited upon,

they cannot be foretold. Since the memorable 10th of December 1848,

this has been our conviction. Before that date there was at least a

certain logical sequence in the conduct of the French nation. Although

often impossible to approve, it had always been possible to account for

it. But the common sense of Europe certainly stood aghast when Louis

Napoleon Buonaparte was elected ruler of France, by a majority so great

as to attach a sort of ridicule to the petty minorities obtained by men

who, in ability and energy, and, as far as two of them were concerned,

in respectability, were infinitely his superiors. At that period, Louis

Napoleon had never given one proof of talent, or rendered the slightest

service, civil or military, to the nation that thus elected him its

head. Twice he had violated, by armed and unjustifiable aggression,

resulting in bloodshed and disgrace, the laws of his country. Pardoned

the first time, on a pledge of future good conduct, he took an early

opportunity of forfeiting his word. Notwithstanding the stigma thus

incurred, four districts, when universal suffrage became the law of

France, elected him their representative to the National Assembly. This

may not be worth dwelling upon. There were stranger elections to the

Assembly than that, after the February revolution. But when, out of

seven millions of voters, five and a half millions gave their voices

to a man whose sole recommendation was a name,--then did wonder reach

its perigee. And thenceforward bold indeed must be the politician who

attempts to foreshadow the possible whims of the fickle people of

France.

[4] _Blackwood's Magazine_ for December 1848.

THE SUBMARINE TELEGRAPH.

Who will venture to make catalogue of the possible results of the

"Submarine Electric Telegraph?" The more we meditate, the more new

wonders open before us. We are running a race with Time; we outstrip

the sun, with the round world for the race-course.--Yet, let us not

boast: we do not run the race, but that more than a hundred million

horse-power invisible to us, which was created with the sun. We are but

the atoms involved, and borne about in the secrets of nature. And the

secrets--what know we of them?--The facts only of a few of them: the

main-springs of their action are, and perhaps ever will be, hidden. The

world progresses; it has its infant state, its manhood state, and its

old age--in what state are we now? and what is the world's age? Madame

de Stael considered it quite in its youth--only fifteen--scarcely

responsible! It seems, however, making rapid growth. Is it past

the conceited epoch, and now cutting its wise teeth? We stand like

spectators at the old fair-show; we see the motley, the ever busy, ever

running harlequin and columbine; we are astonished at the fooleries,

and are amazed at the wit, the practical wisdom, the magical wand power

of the fantastic descendants of Adam and Eve, the masculine, and the

feminine; and we laugh to behold the shuffling step of old Grandfather

Time, as--

"Panting Time toiled after them in vain."

It is through the agency of mind that a few secrets are disclosed to

us, and for our use. We call the recipient and the inventor Genius. It

is given, as it is wanted, at the right time, and for the preordained

purpose. We are sceptical as to "mute inglorious Miltons." Where the

gift is bestowed it is used; and if it appear to be partially used,

it is where partially given, that one man may advance one step, his

successor another--and thus invention leads to invention. Genius for

one thing arises in one age, and sleeps after his deed is done; genius

for another thing succeeds him. Who shall dare to limit the number? One

thing only we pause to admire--how seldom does the gift fall upon bad

men!

There have been, perhaps, those who have had thrown in upon their minds

a wondrous vision of things to come, which they were not allowed,

themselves, to put forth in manifest action to the world. There have

been seers of knowledge; and, perhaps, prophesiers in facts. No one

will credit the assertion, therefore we make it not, that thousands

of years ago steam was known, and applied to the purposes of life. We

call, then, certain records the prophecies of Facts; that is, there was

a certain practical knowledge, which in its description is prophetic of

a new knowledge to be developed. Semiramis set up a pillar on which it

was written, "I, Semiramis, by means of iron made roads over impassable

mountains, where no beasts [of burthen] come." Did Semiramis prophecy

a railroad--or were there Brunells and Stephensons then? When Homer

spake, of the ships of the Phæcians, how they go direct to the place

of their venture, "knowing the mind" of the navigator, "covered with

cloud and vapour," had the old blind bard a mind's-eye vision of our

steam-ships? Many more may be the prophecies of Facts; for in these

cases doubtless there were facts, the prophecy being in the telling.

But there have been visions also without facts--that is, without the

practical visions of an inward knowledge--wherein nature had given

a mirror and bade genius look into it. Friar Bacon's prophecy is an

example.

"Bridges," says he, "unsupported by arches, can be made to span the

foaming current; man shall descend to the bottom of the ocean safely

breathing, and treading with firm step on the golden sands never

brightened by the light of day. Call but the secret powers of Sol and

Luna into action, and behold a single steersman, sitting at the helm,

guiding the vessel which divides the waves with greater rapidity than

if she had been filled with a crew of mariners tolling at the oars.

And the loaded chariot, no longer encumbered by the panting steeds,

darts on its course with relentless force and rapidity. Let the pure

and simple elements do thy labour; bind the eternal elements, and yoke

them to the same plough."

Here is poetry and philosophy wound together, making a wondrous chain

of prophecy. Who shall adventure upon a solution of that golden chain,

which the oldest of poets told us descended from heaven to earth,

linking them as it were together? Was it an electric fluid in which

mind and matter were in indissoluble union?

What prophetic truths may yet be extracted from myth and fable, and

come blazing like comets we know not whence, into the world's field!

Hermes "the inventor," what is his wand, serpent-twined, and its

meaning, brought into vulgar translation, and seen in the buffoonery of

harlequinade? of what new power may it not be the poetical prototype?

Who shall contemplate the multiplicity of nature's facts, and the

myriads of multiplicities in their combination? Knowing that all

that has ever been written or spoken, in all languages, is but the

combination of a few sounds transferred to the alphabet of twenty-four

letters, or even less, are we not lost in the contemplation of the

possibilities of the myriads of facts, in their interchangings,

combinations, and wonderful dove-tailings?

Perhaps, that we may not know too much before our time, facts are

withdrawn from us as others are protruded. Memory may sleep, that

invention may awake. Did we know by what machinery Stonehenge was

built, we might have rested satisfied with a power inadequate to other

and new wants, for which that power might have been no help. Archimedes

did that which we cannot do, in order that we might do that which he

did not. Who shall lift the veil of possibility?

Of this we may be sure, as the mind is made inventive, (and there is no

seeming probability that a faculty once given will be taken away from

our created nature,) there is a large and inexhaustible store-house,

wherefrom it shall have liberty to gather and to combine. We do

not believe that steam itself, the miracle of our age, is anything

more than a stepping-stone to the discovery of another power--means

superseding means. There is and will be no end, as long as the fabric

of the world lasts.

There is an old German play, in which the whimsical idea of bringing

the Past and Present together in _dramatis personæ_ is amusingly

embodied. We forget the particulars, but we think Cæsar or Cicero

figure in the dialogue. The ridiculous is their laughable ignorance of

the commonest things. The modern takes out his watch and puts it to

his ear, and tells the ancient the hour of the day. This is but one

out of many puzzling new things; but, even here, how little is told of

the real post-Ciceronian inventions; for the object of the play is to

show the skill of the Germans only; it is but an offering to the German

genius of invention.

Could a tale of Sinbad's voyage have been read to the Roman--how, as

he approached the mountain, the nails flew out of the ship, for lack

of comprehension of the load-stone--he would have thought it only

fantastically stupid; and if he had laughed, it would have been at the

narrator's expense. And so, indeed, it has fared with discoverers:

they have been before the time of elucidation, like Friar Bacon; and

some for fear of ridicule have kept back their knowledge; but not

many perhaps; for knowledge, when it is touched by genius, becomes

illuminated and illuminating, and will shine though men may shut the

door, and stay themselves outside and see it not, while it brightens

up only the four walls of a small chamber as it were with the magic

lantern in a student's hand. Whereas it ought, according to its power,

to gild the universe. The secresy of invention is rather of others'

doing--of an envious or doubting world of lookers-on, than of the first

perceiving genius. Fortunately the gift of genius, as intended for the

use of mankind, comes with an expansive desire of making it known.

If the memory of tradition fails, and some inventions are lost, that

their detail may not hamper the faculty that should take altogether

a new line, so have we what we may term false lines, that yet,

nevertheless, lead into the true. Science may walk in an apparently

unnecessary labyrinth, and awhile be lost in the wildest mazes, and yet

come out into day at last, and have picked up more than it sought by

the way. Wisdom herself may have been seen sometimes wearing the fool's

cap. The child's play of tossing up an apple has ended in establishing

the law of gravitation. The boy Watt amused himself in watching a

kettle on the fire: his genius touched it, and it grew and grew into

a steam-engine; and, like the giant in the show, that shook off his

limbs, and each became another giant, myriads of gigantic machines,

of enormous power, hundred armed Briareuses, are running to and fro

in the earth, doing the bidding of the boy observant at his grandam's

hearth. Is there an Arabian tale, with all its magic wonders, that can

equal this? We said that Wisdom has worn the fool's cap; true, and

Foolery was the object--the philosopher's stone; but in the wildest

vagaries of her thought, there were wise things said and done, and her

secretary, Common Sense, made notes of the good; and all was put down

together in a strange shorthand, intelligible to the initiated; and the

facts of value were culled, in time, and sifted from the follies, and

from the disguises--for there were disguises, that strangers should

not pry into them before the allowed hour. Alchemy has been the parent

of chemistry--that "[Greek: epistêmê iera]," and its great mysteries,

to reveal which was once death!! Secrets were hidden under numbers,

letters, signs of the zodiac, animals, plants, and organic substances.

Thus in the vocabulary of the alchemists, the basilisk, the dragon,

the red and green lions, were the sulphates of copper and of iron; the

salamander, the fire; milk of the black cow, mercury; the egg, gold;

the red dragon, cinnabar. There is a curious specimen, in the work of

the monk Theophilus, translated by Mr Hendrie, how to make Spanish

gold:--

"The Gentiles, whose skilfulness in this art is probable, make

basilisks in this manner: They have underground a house, walled with

stones everywhere, above and below, with two very small windows, so

narrow that scarcely any light can appear through them: in this house

they place two old cocks, of twelve or fifteen years, and they give

them plenty of food. When these have become fat, through the heat of

their good condition, they agree together, and lay eggs. Which being

laid, the cocks are taken out, and toads are placed in, which may

hatch the eggs, and to which bread is given for food. The eggs being

hatched, chickens issue out like hens' chickens, to which, after seven

days, grow the tails of serpents, and immediately, if there were not

a stone pavement, they would enter the earth," &c. &c.--"After this,

they uncover them, and apply a copious fire, until the animals' insides

are completely burnt. Which done, when they have become cold, they are

taken out, and carefully ground, adding to them a third part of the

blood of a Red Man, which blood has been dried and ground."

Doubtless it was the discovery of some such language as this which led

to the popular belief that the Jews, who were great goldsmiths and

alchemists, made sacrifices with the blood of children; and many a

poor Jew suffered for the sin of mistifying knowledge. "The toads of

Theophilus," says Mr Hendrie, "are probably fragments of the mineral

salt, nitrate of potash, which would yield one of the elements for the

solvent of gold; the blood of the Red Man, which had been dried and

ground, probably a muriate of ammonia," &c. Such were the secrets of

the "Ars Hermetica;" and their like may have been bidden in the wand of

Hermes. Dragons, serpents, and toads! Awful the vocabulary, to scare

the profane; but fair Science came at length unscathed out of the

witches' cauldron: and thus it appeared that natural philosophy, like

its own toad, ugly and venomous, bore a "precious jewel in its head."

Alchemy and magic were twin sisters, and often visited grave

philosophers in their study both together. The Orphic verses and the

hexameters of Hesiod, on the virtues of precious stones, exhibit the

superstitions of science. They descended into the deeply imaginative

mind of Plato, and perhaps awakened the curiosity of the elder,

scarcely less fabulous Pliny, the self-devoted martyr to the love of

discoveries in science. The Arabian Tales may owe some of their marvels

to the hidden sciences, in which the Arabs were learned, and which

they carried with them into Spain. Albertus Magnus, in his writings,

preserved the Greek and Arab secrets; and our Roger Bacon turned them

over with the hand of a grave and potent genius, and his touch made

them metaphorically, if not materially, golden. His prophecy, which we

have given, was, when uttered, a kind of "philosopher's stone."

Superstitions of science, of boasted and boasting philosophy! And why

not? Is there not enough of superstition now extant--a fair sample of

the old? Is the new philosophy without that original ingredient? It

is passed down from the old, and will incorporate itself with all new

in some measure or other, for the very purpose of misleading, that

the very bewilderment may set the inventive brain to work, in ways it

thought not of. Reasoners are every day reasoning themselves out of

wholesome, airbreathing, awakening truths into the visionary land of

dreams, and, speaking mysteriously like uncontradicted somnambulists,

believe themselves to be oracular. Materialists have followed matter,

driven it into corners, divided it, dissected it, and cut it into such

bits that it has become an undiscernible evaporation; and they have

come away disappointed, and denied its existence altogether. Thus,

mesmerism is the bewildered expression of this disappointment, their

previous misapprehension. They will not believe that the wand of Hermes

represents two serpents intertwined--they see but one, though the two

look each other in the face before them, and they are purblind to the

wand and the hand that holds it. Even the "Exact Sciences," as they are

called, are not complete; they lead to precipices, down which to look

is a giddiness. The fact is, the action of the mind is as that of the

body: mind and body have their daily outward work, and their times of

sleep and of dreaming, and the dreaming of the one is not unfrequently

the life of the other. The dream of the philosopher, be he waking or

sleeping, is his refreshment, and at times suggestive of the to come.

How know we but that "such stuff as dreams are made of" may serve for

the fabrication of noble thoughts, and be inwoven into the habit of

life, and become useful wear?

Perhaps magic was the first and needful life of philosophy--needful

as a covering while it grew, and which it shook off as its

swaddling-clothes, and became a truth. How few can trace invention

to its germ, or know where the germ lies, and how that it fed upon

reached it! The suggestion of a dream begetting a reality! They

are no fools who think that good and bad angels are the authors of

inventions. It is ingenious to suppose that we are rather the receivers

and encouragers of our original thoughts than the authors of them. We

may use the magnifying glasses of our reason or our passions, and do

but a little distort them, or advance them to use and beauty, as we

are good or bad in ourselves. And thus, from suggestions given, the

imaginative genius, inventing, magnifies and multiplies by these his

glasses and his instruments; and the thing invented requires much of

this brilliant finery of our own to be removed before it be fitted for

demand and use. Like wrought iron, the sparks must be beaten out of it

while it is forming into shape. It must be off its red heat or white

heat--be dipped in the cold stream of doubt, and look ugly enough to

the eye of common opinion, and be long in the hand of experiment to

try the patience of the inventor. And, after all, will the benefited

be thankful? History has many a sad tale to tell on this subject. The

"Sic vos non vobis" should be inscribed over the portals of the patent

office. Yet sometimes, in pity to lost expectations, in the carrying

out one great idea to--shall we say its final incompletion, to its last

residuum of insanity?--some little scarcely noticeable matter in the

machinery has been by some kind suggesting spirit held up to the eye of

the philosopher, which has proved to be the _magnum bonum_ of the whole

scheme.

We once knew a tradesman who had spent the best years of his life, as

well as his substance, to discover "perpetual motion." He sold off his

goods when he fancied he had discovered it, and left his provincial

town for the great metropolis and a philosopher's fame. As he travelled

by the coach, going over in his mind the processes of his machinery, a

portion of it struck him as applicable to a manufacture of common use,

but of no very high pretensions. His perpetual motion failed. There

was a good angel that whispered to him, "Descend from the ladder of

your ambition--do not lose sight of it; but try the little interloping

suggestion, and raise the means for prosecuting more favourably your

perpetual motion." He did so. The action saved him from lunacy--the

undignified and bye-sport, as it were, of his invention answered--from

a ruined man he became rich, and his new business required of him so

much perpetual motion bodily, that the idea of it, wonderful to say,

was driven out of his speculative mind.

A sudden thought--a happy hit--we are too apt to call a _lucky_ one.

Will it be the worse if we give it a better name, and say it is a gift?

The thankfulness implied in gift may make it a blessing. It was no

deep study that brought the great improvements into our manufacturing

machinery.

The poor boy Arkwright, in a moment of idleness or weariness, thought

happily of a cog in the wheel; and that little cog, was to him and his

posterity a philosopher's stone; realising the alchemist's hopes, by

far more sure experiment than the dealings with "green" and "red lions"

and "dragons" for a result never to be reached. How wonderful has been

the result, even to the whole world, of that momentary thought--that

simple invention!

We have often heard it remarked that this is an age of inventions.

It is true: not that the inventive mind was ever wanting. It is a

practical age; the necessities of multiplied life make it so. The

well-known "century of inventions" of the Marquis of Worcester is a

stock not yet exhausted. But to speak of this our age, how can it be

otherwise? Not only are material means enlarged by geographical and

other discoveries, but the inventive mind is multiplied because mankind

are multiplied, whose nature it is to invent. A population--to speak

of England, for it is of England we are thinking--of five millions,

as it was in the time of Queen Elizabeth, cannot bear comparison

with ours of nearer twenty millions. Then, if we enlarge our view,

and take in England's transplanted progeny, whose activity and whose

advancement in knowledge and science we share, under every facility

for the transmission of knowledge, we may fairly speculate upon a very

wonderful futurity. The glory of the German dramatist, with his watch,

and perhaps, but we forget, his printing-press, (for it ought to be in

the play,) is annihilated: the author himself would now stand in the

place of his Cæsar or Cicero.

It would be a dream worth dreaming to bring back from his Elysian

Fields Agricola, the Roman governor of Britain--he who first discovered

that it was an island--to show him his semi-barbarians, whom he so

equitably governed, (passing by, however, how far we are, any of us,

their descendants.) We will imagine but an hour or two passed with him

at the Polytechnic Rooms, to show him enormous iron cables twisted into

knots, as if they were pieces of tape--to see vast ponderous masses

suspended by magnetism only--to let him look into the wonders of the

telescope and the microscope, besides a thousand marvellous things, too

numerous and too often enumerated to mention. Nor would it be unamusing

to dream that we return with him, and on his way accompany him,

summoned to the court of Pluto and Proserpine to narrate the incidents

of his sojourn above. We could believe the line of Homer verified,

and that we see the grim and sceptical Pluto leap up from his throne

in astonishment, and perhaps, as the poet would have it, fear lest

our subterranean speculators should break in upon his dominions, and

let in the light of our day. We have taken the humblest walk for the

"surprise." What if we had accompanied the ex-governor of Britain to

the Crystal Palace? That we will not venture upon. But had he continued

his narrative of all he saw there, Pluto would have given a look--at

which Cerberus would have growled from his triple throats--and that the

unlucky narrator might escape the castigation of Rhadamanthus, he would

have been ordered a fresh dip in Lethe, as one contaminated, and who

had contracted the lying propensities of people in the upper air.

We know not if the wonder in us be not the greater that we have not the

slightest pretensions to mechanical knowledge. But we confess that,

when we suddenly came upon the mechanical department, and saw the

various machinery at work, the world's life and all its business came

out vividly upon the canvass of our thought, as the great poetry of

nature. Yes, nature rather than art, for art is but the capability of

nature in practice. We thought of Sophocles and his chorus of laudation

of man--the inventor and the [Greek: pontoporos]--and how impoverished

did the Greek seem, how tame and inadequate the description!

Shakspeare is more to the mark. The whole world is scarcely large

enough for the exhibition of man's thought and deed, as Shakspeare

sees him. There is no small talk of his little doings--how he passes

over the seas and bridles the winds. Inimitable Shakspeare omits the

doing to show the capacity; makes, for a moment of comparison only,

the earth a sterile promontory, and man that is on it himself, and

in his own bosom, the ample region of all fertility, in undefined

thought and action. "What a piece of work is man!--how noble in

reason!--how infinite in faculties! In form and moving how express and

admirable!--in action how like an angel!--in apprehension how like a

god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!" Behold man the

inventor!

We have said that the increase of population must necessarily enlarge

the stock of inventions, both by new and multiplied demands, and by the

added number of inventors. But there is another cause in operation,

that is seldom taken into the account--there are not only more millions

of human hands to do the work, but there is an artificial working

population, if we may call horse-power of steam a population as

equivalent to hands.

In this view the _working_ population, or working power, so far exceeds

our actual population, that they can scarcely be named together. If

it be said, this is not a power of mind, and therefore cannot be

said to be inventive; it may be answered, that every instrument is

a kind of mind to him who takes it up, improves, and works upon it,

and with it: for, after all, it is mind that is operating in it. The

man is not to be envied who in heart and understanding is dead to the

manifold evolutions of this great workshop of the human brain, who

cannot feel the poetry of mechanics. Is it not a creative power?--and

is it not at once subjecting and civilising the world? Is not this

poetry of mechanics showing also that man has dominion given him over

the inert materials, as over other living creatures of the earth? We

hail it in all its marvellous doings, as subject for creative dreams,

scarcely untrue. Let those who will (and many there be who profess this

blindness to the poetry of art and science) see nothing but the tall

chimneys and the black smoke. To the imaginative, even the smoke itself

becomes an embodied genie, at whose feet the earth opens at command;

and they who yield themselves to the spell are conducted, through

subterranean ways, to the secret chambers of the treasures of nature;

and, by a transition to a more palpable reality, find themselves

in a garden covered with crystal, to behold all beauteous things

and precious stones for fruit, such as Aladdin saw, and fountains

throwing out liquid gems, and fair company, as if brought together

by enchantment--and this is the romance of reality. If we write

rhapsodically, let the subject be the excuse, for the secrets of nature

throw conjecture into the depths of wonder, and thought far out of the

conveyance of language.

It was our purpose to speak of the Submarine Telegraph, and it is

not surprising if we have in some degree been transported to great

distances by its power.

The inventors, Messrs Brett, under every difficulty and discouragement,

have at length succeeded. Our greatest engineers for a long while

withheld their countenance; practical philosophers denied the

probability. The possibility was tested by the first experiment.

Fortunately no accident occurred in laying down the wire across the

Channel, until communication by means of it had been made between

France and England; and even the subsequent accident--the cutting the

wire by the fishermen--has only served the good purpose of making more

sure the permanent setting up of this extraordinary telegraph. The

protection of the wires by the gutta-percha covering is considered

perfect; but should it turn out otherwise, it will not affect the

certainty of the invention: it must be permanent. A narrative of all

the difficulties which beset the inventors, and which have delayed the

experiment for years, would be curious. The discouragements and the

expenses would have crushed men of less energy. Even at last, in making

the cable, there was a disappointment and a hitch, arising from rival

companies. We extract from the _Times_.

"On the 19th of July last, Mr Crampton undertook to construct

and lay down a cable containing four electric wires, each

insulated in two coatings of gutta percha, and the whole

protected by ten strands of galvanised iron wire, on or before

the 30th of September. The electric wires, covered with gutta

percha, in length a hundred miles, were turned out by Mr

Statham, at the works of the Gutta Percha Company, and nothing

can be more perfect than the manner in which that order was

executed. The wire covering was ordered from Messrs Wilkins and

Weatherly; but unfortunately, a dispute respecting the patent

for making wire ropes occurred between that firm and Messrs

Newall, which seriously delayed the progress of the work, as an

injunction was served by the latter to prevent Messrs Wilkins

and Co. from proceeding with the order.

"This was eventually compromised, and the rope was made

conjointly by the workmen of the two firms on the premises of

Messrs Wilkins and Weatherly, at Wapping.

"The very hurried manner in which (from this unforeseen delay)

the work had to be accomplished, prevented that close attention

that ought to have been given to any fracture, however small,

of the wire; and in consequence, the outer casing, though

of great strength and solidity, was not made with the same

exquisite nicety and care that had been bestowed on the core of

the cable."

The weather was unpropitious, and was probably the cause, from the

circumstance of the Blazer being driven somewhat out of her course,

that the length of the wire cable was not sufficient. This defect was,

however, only of a temporary kind, and was supplied by that which was

intended for another purpose. We extract the interesting account of the

proceedings from the _Times_:--

"Shortly after 7 o'clock the fastenings at the end of the cable

at the Foreland were completed, and the Fearless started to

point out the exact course to be followed by the Blazer, which

was towed by two tugs, one alongside, and the other ahead of

her.

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

"The arrangements for paying out the cable consisted simply

of a bar fixed transversely above the hold, over which the

rope was drawn as it was uncoiled from below, and a series of

breaks acting by levers fitted to the deck, in order to arrest

the passage of the rope in the case of too rapid a delivery.

On reaching the stem the cable passed overboard through a

'chock' of a semicircular shape, lined with iron. On starting,

the steam-tugs proceeded at much too rapid a pace, (from four

to five knots an hour,) and consequently one of the fractured

wires (before alluded to) caught in the friction-blocks, and,

before the way of the vessel could be checked, one strand

of the iron wire was, for a length of about eighteen yards,

stripped from the cable. The steam-tug towing ahead was then

ordered alongside, when the speed could be better regulated,

and the rate was reduced to about one and a half to two knots

an hour. About six miles from shore it was determined to test

the wires; but, from a misapprehension of instructions, the

telegraph instruments at the South Foreland were not joined up

with those on board the Blazer. A steam-tug, with one of the

engineers and directors on board, immediately returned to the

Foreland, when communication was made by telegraph and fusees

fired from the vessel to the shore, and from the shore to the

Blazer.

"At about mid-Channel, in the midst of a heavy sea, and a

strong wind from the SW., an accident occurred, but for which

the enterprise would have been carried out with the most

perfect success; this was the snapping of the towrope (an

eight-inch cable) and the consequent drifting of the Blazer

from her appointed course to the length of a mile and a-half.

Notwithstanding the delay caused by this untoward incident, the

Blazer arrived off Sangatte at about 6 o'clock. The evening

was, however, too far advanced, and the weather too stormy to

attempt a landing; and, after embarking most of her passengers

on board one of the steamers that ran into Calais, she was

anchored for the night about two miles from the shore.

"On Friday the wind blew a strong gale from the westward, which

rendered all near approach to the shore impracticable; but the

Blazer was towed to within a mile of the beach, when, it being

considered dangerous to leave her at anchor, the remainder

of the rope was made fast to a buoy and hove overboard. The

steam-tugs then returned with the Blazer to England.

"On Saturday the weather continued unfavourable, but Captain

Bullock proceeded with the Fearless to the buoy off Sangatte,

and, having hauled up the end of the rope, he towed it some

hundred yards nearer the shore, and then again moored it.

"On Sunday the wind shifted more to the southward and

moderated. Accordingly, the engineers and managers of the Gutta

Percha Company took on board the Fearless a large coil of gutta

percha roping, and, after hauling up the end of the telegraph

cables, the first wires were carefully attached, and at

half-past five in the afternoon a boat landed them on the beach

at Sangatte. The moment chosen for landing was low-water, and

the coil of gutta percha ropes was immediately buried in the

beach by a gang of men in attendance, up to low-water mark, and

even to a short distance beyond it. Thence to where the cable

was moored did not much exceed a quarter of a mile.

"The telegraphs were instantly attached to the submarine

wires, and all the instruments responded to the batteries from

the opposite shore. At six o'clock messages were printed at

Sangatte from the South Foreland, specimens of which Captain

Bullock took over to Dover the same evening for the Queen and

the Duke of Wellington.

"On Monday morning the wires at Sangatte were joined to those

already laid down to Calais, and two of the instruments used by

the French Government having been sent to the South Foreland,

Paris was placed in immediate communication with the English

Court."

We have remarked that very important discoveries are accidentally made

in pursuing one of quite a different character from those which come up

in the search unexpectedly.

They who remember our towns lighted with the old lamps, that in

comparison with our gas-lights made but a "palpable obscure," should

also remember how the change was brought about. The gas, which has

proved of such vast utility that we can now-a-days scarcely conceive

how the world could go on without it, was first a misfortune. It was

generated in the coal mines, and, in order to get rid of it, it was

conveyed by tubes to the outer air: in doing this it was found there

to ignite, and from this simple attempt to effect an escape for a

nuisance is almost every town in the civilised world illuminated by

gas--besides which, the advantageous use of it in manufactories is

beyond calculation. Even of gutta percha, now applied as a coating to

these wires, who can determine all the uses to which it may be found

applicable? Nature, it should seem, does not fabricate one material for

itself, or for one use only, but adapts one thing to many purposes--and

thus, as it were, teaches us that there is a chain in the facts of

nature, by showing us a few of the connected links; and, at the same

time, so far from exhibiting any sudden breaks, offering evidences of

a continuous connection reaching beyond our conception. Verily this

poor opaque earth of ours is the foundation on which the Jacob's ladder

of invention is laid. We know not where it reaches, but there may be

suggesting angels passing to and fro, and when their feet touch the

ground, it delivers up its secrets, that float into the ears of the

dreamer.

Electricity, it would appear, is the great agent in this connecting

chain--nay, is it not, whatever it be in its essence, the chain itself,

and the universal power equally in inert matter and in life? It has

neither boundary on the earth nor in space. Its home is ubiquity; like

the sphere of Hermes, its centre is everywhere, its circumference

nowhere. That this astonishing power is yet under restraint--that

it is not only kept from the evil it would do, but rendered to us

serviceable--is a proof of the great beneficence of Him who made it

and us. When the admiring child touches that gem, the dew-drop on the

rose-leaf, it knows not that the little hand is on that which has

lightning in it enough to cause instant death. It is scarcely the

lover's poetical dream that he _may_ be killed by the lightning of an

eye--done dead by the tear that only moves his pity, on his mistress's

eye-lid. In that little drop is the power of death--and by what miracle

(truly all nature is miraculous) is the execution staid--the power

forbidden to act? Nay, even the pity that we speak of, love itself,

strange in its suddenness as we see it, how know we what of electricity

be in it, instantly conveying from person to person natural but unknown

sympathy?

Let us not get out of our depths,--but emerge from "the submarine," to

land; and for this purpose, and to complete our argument of unexpected

and collateral uses, we offer an extract from the _Army and Navy

Register_:--

"NEW MODE OF DISCHARGING GUNPOWDER.--On Monday, August 18,

some interesting experiments were tried at the Gutta Percha

Company's Works, Warf Road, City Road, for the purposes of

demonstrating the means by which this extraordinary production

may be applied to the operation of discharging gunpowder. A

galvanic battery was connected with upwards of 50 miles of

copper wire covered with gutta percha, to the thickness of

an ordinary black lead pencil. The wire, which was formed

into coils, and which has been prepared for the projected

submarine telegraph, was attached to a barge moored in the

canal alongside the manufactory, the coils being so fixed

together (although the greater portion of them were under

water) as to present an uninterrupted communication with

the battery to a distance limited at first to 57 miles, but

afterwards extended to 70. A "cartridge" formed with a small

hollow roof of gutta percha, charged with gunpowder, and

having an intercommunicating wire attached, was then brought

into contact with the electric current. The result was, that a

spark was produced, which, igniting the gunpowder, caused an

immediate explosion similar to that which would arise from the

discharge of a small cannon. The same process was carried out

in various ways, with a view of testing the efficient manner

in which the gutta percha had been rendered impervious to wet,

and in one instance the fusee or cartridge was placed under

the water. In this case the efficiency of the insulation was

equally well demonstrated by the explosion of the gunpowder at

the moment the necessary "contact" was produced; and by way

of showing the perfect insulation of the wire, an experiment

was tried which resulted in the explosion of the fusee from

the charge of electricity retained in the coils of wire, three

seconds after contact with the battery had been broken. This

feature in the experiment was especially interesting from the

fact of its removing all difficulty and doubt as to whether

the gutta percha would so far protect the wires as to preserve

the current of electricity under the most disadvantageous

circumstances. Another experiment was successfully tried by

passing the electric current to its destination through the

human body. Mr C. J. Wollaston, civil engineer, volunteered to

form part of the circuit by holding the ends of 35 miles of

the wire in each hand. The wire from the battery was brought

to one end of the entire length of 70 miles, and instant

explosion of the cartridge took place at the other end. The

experiments were altogether perfectly successful, as showing

beyond all question that the properties of gutta percha and

electricity combined are yet to be devoted to other purposes

than that of establishing a submarine telegraph. The blasting

of a rock, the destruction of a fortification, and other

operations which require the agency of gunpowder, have often

been attended with considerable danger and trouble, besides

involving large outlays of money; but it may be truly said

that the employment of electricity in the manner described is

calculated to render such operations comparatively free from

difficulty. Amongst the company present on this occasion was

Major-General Sir Charles Pasley, who took a warm interest

in the proceedings, and expressed himself much gratified at

the result. It is impossible to foretell the value of this

discovery, particularly in engineering and mining operations.

It forms a valuable addition to the benefits already conferred

upon the public by the enterprise of the Gutta Percha Company."

This extract may lead the reader to conclude that there are double

and opposite purposes in the secrets of nature. The chain which was

intended to connect all nations in a bond of peace, has, it should

seem, also (incidental to the first discovery) its apparatus for war.

When his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury was blessing the Crystal

Palace, and all within it, as emblems of a religious bond of peace, and

of amity of all nations, and it pleased the admiring masses to proclaim

it the Temple of Peace and of Love, there was little thought that,

among the machinery and instruments it contained, those of murderous

purpose would be the first required for use, which was actually the

case, when permission was asked and given for the removal of revolving

firearms from the American department, to be sent out to the Cape.

Thus, good and evil are not unmixed. Either may be extracted, and leave

the remainder, in appearance to us, a kind of _caput mortuum_.

It is far more pleasant to look to the peaceful results of

inventions--to hear the spirit that is in the electric fluid say--

"I will be correspondent to command,

And do my spiriting gently."

Let it be the means that far-off friends at the Antipodes shall

communicate, if not by voice, by that which is like it--by sound and

by lettered words. Let it touch a bell at their mid-day, and it may

tingle at that instant in your ears at midnight, and awake you to

receive, evolved from the little machinery at your bed's head, a letter

in a printed strip, conveying "thoughts that breathe, and words that

burn," even as though you felt the breath that uttered them. Reader,

be not sceptical. How many very practicable things have you denied,

and yet found brought tangibly before your eyes, and into your hands!

This simultaneous tingle of two bells--one at the Antipodes, and one

within reach of your own touch, and at your own ear--may cause you to

curl your lip in derision; but say, is it impossible? We have heard you

say of much more improbable things, "Where there is a will there is a

way." Well, here it is evident you have only a little to strengthen

your will, and the length of the way will be no obstacle. You may amuse

yourself with the idea, and make a comparison of it, and look at the

figures on your China plate, and imagine them moved to each other under

spell of their passion, (see the tale of the willow pattern,) to the

defiance of all the ordinary rules of distance. Did not the foreseeing

artist intimate thereby that love and friendship have no space-limits,

and hold within themselves a power that laughs at perspective, as it

does "at locksmiths?" The artist whom you contemned as ignorant was,

you acknowledge, wise--wise beyond his art, if not beyond his thought.

He had a second-sight of a new mode of communication, and expressed it

prudently in this his hieroglyphic.

Does any marvel exceed this in apparent absurdity--that you, in London

or Edinburgh, shall be able to communicate instantaneously with your

friend or relative at St Petersburg or Vienna; for which purpose

you have but to touch a few keys denoting letters of the alphabet,

and under water and over land your whole thoughts pass as soon as

your fingers have delivered them to the keys--nay, the letters are

forestalling your thought, and those before it? Does it not seem very

absurd to say that all the foreign news may be at your breakfast-table,

fresh from every capital in Europe, before the _Times_ can be published

and circulated? How will the practice of the press be affected by this

novelty? "The latest intelligence" becomes a bygone tale, "flat, stale,

and unprofitable." Far greater things than the poet dreamed of become

daily realities. Richest in fancy, Shakspeare apologetically covers the

incredible ubiquity of his Ariel with a sense of fatigue--of difficulty

in his various passages--Ariel, the spirit who

"thought it much to tread

The ooze of the salt deep."

Our Government officers will have ready on the instant, messengers far

swifter than Ariel--wondrous performers on the "slack-wires." They will

put you

"A girdle round about the earth

In forty minutes."

No; that was the lagging, loitering pace of the old spirit. It will

not take forty seconds. What are thousands of miles to a second of

time? Time is, as it were, annihilated: the sand in the glass must

be accelerated, or the glass, held for ages, taken out of his hand,

and some national exhibition ransacked for a new hour-instrument. The

Prospero's wand broken, and newer wonders to be had for a trifle.

Fortunatus's "wishing-cap" to be bought at the corner-shop, and the

famed "seven-league boots" next door--and to be had cheap, considering,

that you may tell all your thoughts, at ever so great a distance, by a

little bell and a wire, while you are sitting in your armchair. It will

be quite an easy matter to

"Waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole."

Railroads and the Submarine Telegraph more than double man's life, if

we count his years by action. History itself must now begin as from a

new epoch. All the doings of the world, through this rapidity given to

person and to thought, must be so altered as to bear no parallel with

the past. The old locomotive and communicating powers are defunct--they

are as the water that has passed the mill. It must grind with that

which succeeds. They are new powers that must set the wheels of

governments and of all the world's machinery in motion.

There is in the _Spectator_ a paper of the true Addisonian wit,

descriptive of an Antediluvian courtship, in which the _young_ couple,

having gone through the usual process in the early art of love,

complete their happiness in the some hundredth year of their ages.

Theorists have entertained the notion that this long life was bestowed

upon man in the world's first era, that knowledge might be more readily

transmitted, there being few generations to the Flood. To the lovers

of life it would be a sad thing to be led to the conclusion, that,

transmission being quickened, life will be shortened; or that, as in

the winding-up of a drama, events are crowding into the last act of our

earth's duration. It may relieve their apprehensions to read of the

advance the medical science is making simultaneously with all other

sciences, so that they may look to a state in which a man may live as

long as he likes, and at the same time do ten times the work: a man's

day will perhaps be a year, counting by his doings. Morose poets and

philosophers have lamented over us as ephemeral; if so, we are at least

like the Antediluvian butterflies, and our day long. And now, with

all our sanitary inventions, it stands a fair chance of a tolerable

lengthening.

We have observed that it has been said that the world is not fifteen

years of age; and, indeed, it looks like enough. Hitherto Nature has

treated us as a kind mother does her children--given us toys and

playthings, to be broken and discarded as we get older. We are throwing

them by, we are becoming of age, and Nature opens her secrets to us,

and we are just setting up for ourselves--as it were, commencing the

business of life, like grown men in good earnest; and every day we find

out more secrets, and all worth knowing.

We will not lay down the pen without expressing our congratulations to

the inventors of the Submarine Telegraph, the Messrs Brett, and wishing

them the fullest success. They themselves as yet know not the extent of

the reach of their own invention, or they might well wonder at their

own wonders, like

"Katerfelto, with his hair on end!"

We wish them long life to see the results--and that they will not,

through mistrust of so great a discovery, imitate Copernicus, who,

says Fontenelle, "distrusting the success of his opinions, was for a

long time loth to publish them, and, when they brought him the first

sheet of his work, died, foreseeing that he never should be able to

reconcile all its contradictions, and therefore wisely slipped out of

the way." Messrs Brett will think it wiser to live, and be in the way

and at their post, (no _post obit_,) ready to answer all queries and

contradictions, through the convincing, the very satisfactory means, of

their "Submarine Telegraph."

MY NOVEL; OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE.

BY PISISTRATUS CAXTON.

BOOK VIII.--INITIAL CHAPTER.

THE ABUSE OF INTELLECT.

There is at present so vehement a flourish of trumpets, and so

prodigious a roll of the drum, whenever we are called upon to throw

up our hats, and cry, "Huzza" to the "March of Enlightenment," that,

out of that very spirit of contradiction natural to all rational

animals, one is tempted to stop ones ears, and say, "Gently, gently;

LIGHT is noiseless; how comes 'Enlightenment' to make such a clatter?

Meanwhile, if it be not impertinent, pray, where is Enlightenment

marching to?" Ask that question of any six of the loudest bawlers

in the procession, and I'll wager tenpence to California that you

get six very unsatisfactory answers. One respectable gentleman, who,

to our great astonishment, insists upon calling himself "a slave,"

but has a remarkably free way of expressing his opinions, will

reply--"Enlightenment is marching towards the nine points of the

Charter." Another, with his hair _à la jeune France_, who has taken a

fancy to his friend's wife, and is rather embarrassed with his own,

asserts that Enlightenment is proceeding towards the Rights of Women,

the reign of Social Love, and the annihilation of Tyrannical Prejudice.

A third, who has the air of a man well to do in the middle class, more

modest in his hopes, because he neither wishes to have his head broken

by his errand-boy, nor his wife carried off to an Agapemoné by his

apprentice, does not take Enlightenment a step farther than a siege

on Debrett, and a cannonade on the Budget. Illiberal man! the march

that he swells will soon trample _him_ under foot. No one fares so ill

in a crowd as the man who is wedged in the middle. A fourth, looking

wild and dreamy, as if he had come out of the cave of Trophonius, and

who is a mesmeriser and a mystic, thinks Enlightenment is in full

career towards the good old days of alchemists and necromancers. A

fifth, whom one might take for a Quaker, asserts that the march of

Enlightenment is a crusade for universal philanthropy, vegetable diet,

and the perpetuation of peace, by means of speeches, which certainly

do produce a very contrary effect from the Philippics of Demosthenes!

The sixth--(good fellow, without a rag on his back)--does not care a

straw where the march goes. He can't be worse off than he is; and it

is quite immaterial to him whether he goes to the dogstar above, or

the bottomless pit below. I say nothing, however, against the march,

while we take it altogether. Whatever happens, one is in good company;

and though I am somewhat indolent by nature, and would rather stay at

home with Locke and Burke, (dull dogs though they were,) than have my

thoughts set off helter-skelter with those cursed trumpets and drums,

blown and dub-a-dubbed by fellows that I vow to heaven I would not

trust with a five-pound note--still, if I must march, I must; and so

deuce take the hindmost. But when it comes to individual marchers upon

their own account--privateers and condottieri of Enlightenment--who

have filled their pockets with lucifer-matches, and have a sublime

contempt for their neighbours' barns and hay-ricks, I don't see why I

should throw myself into the seventh heaven of admiration and ecstasy.

If those who are eternally rhapsodising on the celestial blessings

that are to follow Enlightenment, Universal Knowledge, and so forth,

would just take their eyes out of their pockets, and look about

them, I would respectfully inquire if they have never met any very

knowing and enlightened gentleman, whose acquaintance is by no means

desirable. If not, they are monstrous lucky. Every man must judge by

his own experience; and the worst rogues I have ever encountered were

amazingly well-informed, clever fellows! From dunderheads and dunces

we can protect ourselves; but from your sharp-witted gentleman, all

enlightenment, and no prejudice, we have but to cry, "Heaven defend

us!" It is true, that the rogue (let him be ever so enlightened)

usually comes to no good himself, (though not before he has done harm

enough to his neighbours.) But that only shows that the world wants

something else in those it rewards, besides intelligence _per se_ and

in the abstract; and is much too old a world to allow any Jack Horner

to pick out its plumbs for his own personal gratification. Hence a man

of very moderate intelligence, who believes in God, suffers his heart

to beat with human sympathies, and keeps his eyes off your strong-box,

will perhaps gain a vast deal more power than knowledge ever gives to a

rogue.

Wherefore, though I anticipate an outcry against me on the part of the

blockheads, who, strange to say, are the most credulous idolaters of

enlightenment, and, if knowledge were power, would rot on a dunghill;

yet, nevertheless, I think all really enlightened men will agree with

me, that when one falls in with detached sharpshooters from the general

march of enlightenment, it is no reason that we should make ourselves

a target, because enlightenment has furnished them with a gun. It has,

doubtless, been already remarked by the judicious reader, that of the

numerous characters introduced into this work, the larger portion

belong to that species which we call the INTELLECTUAL--that through

them are analysed and developed human intellect, in various forms and

directions. So that this History, rightly considered, is a kind of

humble familiar Epic, or, if you prefer it, a long Serio-Comedy, upon

the Varieties of English Life in this our Century, set in movement

by the intelligences most prevalent. And where more ordinary and

less refined types of the species round and complete the survey of

our passing generation, they will often suggest, by contrast, the

deficiencies which mere intellectual culture leaves in the human being.

Certainly, I have no spite against intellect and enlightenment. Heaven

forbid I should be such a Goth. I am only the advocate for common sense

and fair play. I don't think an able man necessarily an angel; but I

think if his heart match his head, and both proceed in the Great March

under a divine Oriflamme, he goes as near to the angel as humanity

will permit: if not, if he has but a penn'orth of heart to a pound

of brains, I say, "_Bon jour, mon ange!_ I see not the starry upward

wings, but the grovelling cloven-hoof." I'd rather be offuscated by

the Squire of Hazeldean, than enlightened by Randal Leslie. Every man

to his taste. But intellect itself (not in the philosophical, but

the ordinary sense of the term) is rarely, if ever, one completed

harmonious agency; it is not one faculty, but a compound of many, some

of which are often at war with each other, and mar the concord of

the whole. Few of us but have some predominant faculty, in itself a

strength; but which, (usurping unseasonably dominion over the rest,)

shares the lot of all tyranny, however brilliant, and leaves the empire

weak against disaffection within, and invasion from without. Hence

intellect maybe perverted in a man of evil disposition, and sometimes

merely wasted in a man of excellent impulses, for want of the necessary

discipline, or of a strong ruling motive. I doubt if there be one

person in the world, who has obtained a high reputation for talent, who

has not met somebody much cleverer than himself, which said somebody

has never obtained any reputation at all! Men, like Audley Egerton, are

constantly seen in the great positions of life; while men, like Harley

l'Estrange, who could have beaten them hollow in anything equally

striven for by both, float away down the stream, and, unless some

sudden stimulant arouse the dreamy energies, vanish out of sight into

silent graves. If Hamlet and Polonius were living now, Polonius would

have a much better chance of being Chancellor of the Exchequer, though

Hamlet would unquestionably be a much more intellectual character.

What would become of Hamlet? Heaven knows! Dr Arnold said, from his

experience of a school, that the difference between one man and another

was not mere ability--it was energy. There is a great deal of truth in

that saying.

Submitting these hints to the judgment and penetration of the

sagacious, I enter on the fresh division of this work, and see

already Randal Leslie gnawing his lip on the back-ground. The German

poet observes, that the Cow of Isis is to some the divine symbol of

knowledge, to others but the milch cow, only regarded for the pounds of

butter she will yield. O tendency of our age, to look on Isis as the

milch cow! O prostitution of the grandest desires to the basest uses!

Gaze on the goddess, Randal Leslie, and get ready thy churn and thy

scales. Let us see what the butter will fetch in the market.

CHAPTER II.

A new reign has commenced. There has been a general election; the

unpopularity of the Administration has been apparent at the hustings.

Audley Egerton, hitherto returned by vast majorities, has barely

escaped defeat--thanks to a majority of five. The expenses of his

election are said to have been prodigious. 'But who can stand against

such wealth as Egerton's--no doubt backed, too, by the Treasury purse?'

said the defeated candidate. It is towards the close of October; London

is already full; Parliament will meet in less than a fortnight.

In one of the principal apartments of that hotel in which foreigners

may discover what is meant by English comfort, and the price which

foreigners must pay for it, there sat two persons, side by side,

engaged in close conversation. The one was a female, in whose pale

clear complexion and raven hair--in whose eyes, vivid with a power

of expression rarely bestowed on the beauties of the north, we

recognise Beatrice, Marchesa di Negra. Undeniably handsome as was

the Italian lady, her companion, though a man, and far advanced

into middle age, was yet more remarkable for personal advantages.

There was a strong family likeness between the two; but there was

also a striking contrast in air, manner, and all that stamps on the

physiognomy the idiosyncrasies of character. There was something

of gravity, of earnestness and passion, in Beatrice's countenance

when carefully examined; her smile at times might be false, but it

was rarely ironical, never cynical. Her gestures, though graceful,

were unrestrained and frequent. You could see she was a daughter of

the south. Her companion, on the contrary, preserved on the fair

smooth face, to which years had given scarcely a line or wrinkle,

something that might have passed, at first glance, for the levity and

thoughtlessness of a gay and youthful nature; but the smile, though

exquisitely polished, took at times the derision of a sneer. In his

manners he was as composed and as free from gesture as an Englishman.

His hair was of that red brown with which the Italian painters produce

such marvellous effects of colour; and, if here and there a silver

thread gleamed through the locks, it was lost at once amidst their

luxuriance. His eyes were light, and his complexion, though without

much colour, was singularly transparent. His beauty, indeed, would

have been rather womanly than masculine, but for the height and sinewy

spareness of a frame in which muscular strength was rather adorned

than concealed by an admirable elegance of proportion. You would never

have guessed this man to be an Italian; more likely you would have

supposed him a Parisian. He conversed in French, his dress was of

French fashion, his mode of thought seemed French. Not that he was like

the Frenchman of the present day--an animal, either rude or reserved;

but your ideal of the _Marquis_ of the old _régime_--the _roué_ of the

Regency.

Italian, however, he was, and of a race renowned in Italian history.

But, as if ashamed of his country and his birth, he affected to be

a citizen of the world. Heaven help the world if it hold only such

citizens!

"But, Giulio," said Beatrice di Negra, speaking in Italian, "even

granting that you discover this girl, can you suppose that her father

will ever consent to your alliance? Surely you know too well the nature

of your kinsman?"

"_Tu te trompes, ma soeur_," replied Giulio Franzini, Count di

Peschiera, in French as usual--"_tu te trompes_; I knew it before he

had gone through exile and penury. How can I know it now? But comfort

yourself, my too anxious Beatrice, I shall not care for his consent

till I've made sure of his daughter's."

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

"_Eh, mordieu!_" interrupted the Count, with true French gaiety; "what

would become of all the comedies ever written, if marriages were not

made in despite of the father? Look you," he resumed, with a very

slight compression of his lip, and a still slighter movement in his

chair--"look you, this is no question of ifs and buts; it is a question

of must and shall--a question of existence to you and to me. When

Danton was condemned to the guillotine, he said, flinging a pellet of

bread at the nose of his respectable judge--'_Mon individu sera bientôt

dans le néant_'--_My_ patrimony is there already! I am loaded with

debts. I see before me, on the one side, ruin or suicide; on the other

side, wedlock and wealth."

"But from those vast possessions which you have been permitted to enjoy

so long, have you really saved nothing against the time when they might

be reclaimed at your hands?"

"My sister," replied the Count, "do I look like a man who saved?

Besides, when the Austrian Emperor, unwilling to raze from his

Lombard domains a name and a house so illustrious as our kinsman's,

and desirous, while punishing that kinsman's rebellion, to reward

my adherence, forbore the peremptory confiscation of those vast

possessions at which my mouth waters while we speak, but, annexing

them to the Crown during pleasure, allowed me, as the next of male

kin, to retain the revenues of one-half for the same very indefinite

period--had I not every reason to suppose, that, before long, I could

so influence his Majesty or his minister, as to obtain a decree

that might transfer the whole, unconditionally and absolutely, to

myself? And methinks I should have done so, but for this accursed,

intermeddling English Milord, who has never ceased to besiege the court

or the minister with alleged extenuations of our cousin's rebellion,

and proofless assertions that I shared it in order to entangle my

kinsman, and betrayed it in order to profit by his spoils. So that,

at last, in return for all my services, and in answer to all my

claims, I received from the minister himself this cold reply--'Count

of Peschiera, your aid was important, and your reward has been large.

That reward, it would not be for your honour to extend, and justify the

ill opinion of your Italian countrymen by formally appropriating to

yourself all that was forfeited by the treason you denounced. A name so

noble as yours should be dearer to you than fortune itself.'"

"Ah, Giulio," cried Beatrice, her face lighting up, changed in its

whole character--"those were words that might make the demon that

tempts to avarice fly from your breast in shame."

The Count opened his eyes in great amaze; then he glanced round the

room, and said, quietly--

"Nobody else hears you, my dear Beatrice; talk common sense. Heroics

sound well in mixed society; but there is nothing less suited to the

tone of a family conversation."

Madame di Negra bent down her head abashed, and that sudden change

in the expression of her countenance, which had seemed to betray

susceptibility to generous emotion, faded as suddenly away.

"But still," she said coldly, "you enjoy one-half of those ample

revenues--why talk, then, of suicide and ruin?"

"I enjoy them at the pleasure of the crown; and what if it be the

pleasure of the crown to recall our cousin, and reinstate him in his

possessions?"

"There is a _probability_, then, of that pardon? When you first

employed me in your researches, you only thought there was a

_possibility_."

"There is a great probability of it, and therefore I am here. I

learned some little time since that the question of such recall had

been suggested by the Emperor, and discussed in Council. The danger

to the State, which might arise from our cousin's wealth, his alleged

abilities--(abilities! bah!)--and his popular name, deferred any

decision on the point; and, indeed, the difficulty of dealing with

myself must have embarrassed the ministry. But it is a mere question

of time. He cannot long remain excluded from the general amnesty

already extended to the other refugees. The person who gave me this

information is high in power, and friendly to myself; and he added a

piece of advice, on which I acted. 'It was intimated,' said he, 'by one

of the partisans of your kinsman, that the exile could give a hostage

for his loyalty in the person of his daughter and heiress; that she

had arrived at marriageable age; that if she were to wed, with the

Emperor's consent, some one whose attachment to the Austrian crown was

unquestionable, there would be a guarantee both for the faith of the

father, and for the transmission of so important a heritage to safe

and loyal hands. Why not' (continued my friend) 'apply to the Emperor

for his consent to that alliance for yourself?--you, on whom he can

depend;--you who, if the daughter should die, would be the legal heir

to those lands?' On that hint I spoke."

"You saw the Emperor?"

"And after combating the unjust prepossessions against me, I stated,

that so far from my cousin having any fair cause of resentment against

me, when all was duly explained to him, I did not doubt that he would

willingly give me the hand of his child."

"You did!" cried the Marchesa, amazed.

"And," continued the Count imperturbably, as he smoothed, with careless

hand, the snowy plaits of his shirt front--"and that I should thus

have the happiness of becoming myself the guarantee of my kinsman's

loyalty--the agent for the restoration of his honours, while, in the

eyes of the envious and malignant, I should clear up my own name from

all suspicion that I had wronged him."

"And the Emperor consented?"

"_Pardieu_, my dear sister. What else could his majesty do? My

proposition smoothed every obstacle, and reconciled policy with mercy.

It remains, therefore, only to find out, what has hitherto baffled all

our researches, the retreat of our dear kinsfolk, and to make myself a

welcome lover to the demoiselle. There is some disparity of years, I

own; but--unless your sex and my glass flatter me, overmuch--I am still

a match for many a gallant of five-and-twenty."

The Count said this with so charming a smile, and looked so

pre-eminently handsome, that he carried off the coxcombry of the words

as gracefully as if they had been spoken by some dazzling hero of the

grand old comedy of Parisian life.

Then interlacing his fingers, and lightly leaning his hands, thus

clasped, upon his sister's shoulder, he looked into her face, and said

slowly--"And now, my sister, for some gentle but deserved reproach.

Have you not sadly failed me in the task I imposed on your regard for

my interests? Is it not some years since you first came to England on

the mission of discovering these worthy relatives of ours? Did I not

entreat you to seduce into your toils the man whom I knew to be my

enemy, and who was indubitably acquainted with our cousin's retreat--a

secret he has hitherto locked within his bosom? Did you not tell me,

that though he was then in England, you could find no occasion even to

meet him, but that you had obtained the friendship of the statesman to

whom I directed your attention, as his most intimate associate? And yet

you, whose charms are usually so irresistible, learn nothing from the

statesman, as you see nothing of _Milord_. Nay, baffled and misled, you

actually suppose that the quarry has taken refuge in France. You go

thither--you pretend to search the capital--the provinces, Switzerland,

_que sais-je?_--all in vain,--though--_foi de gentilhomme_--your police

cost me dearly,--you return to England--the same chace, and the same

result. _Palsambleu, ma soeur_, I do too much credit to your talents

not to question your zeal. In a word, have you been in earnest--or have

you not had some womanly pleasure in amusing yourself and abusing my

trust?"

"Giulio," answered Beatrice sadly, "you know the influence you have

exercised over my character and my fate. Your reproaches are not just.

I made such inquiries as were in my power, and I have now cause to

believe that I know one who is possessed of this secret, and can guide

us to it."

"Ah, you do!" exclaimed the Count. Beatrice did not heed the

exclamation, and hurried on.

"But grant that my heart shrunk from the task you imposed on me, would

it not have been natural? When I first came to England, you informed

me that your object in discovering the exiles was one which I could

honestly aid. You naturally desired first to know if the daughter

lived; if not, you were the heir. If she did, you assured me you

desired to effect, through my mediation, some liberal compromise with

Alphonso, by which you would have sought to obtain his restoration,

provided he would leave you for life in possession of the grant you

hold from the crown. While these were your objects, I did my best,

ineffectual as it was, to obtain the information required."

"And what made me lose so important, though so ineffectual an ally?"

asked the Count, still smiling; but a gleam that belied the smile shot

from his eye.

"What! when you bade me receive and co-operate with the miserable

spies--the false Italians--whom you sent over, and seek to entangle

this poor exile, when found, in some rash correspondence, to be

revealed to the court;--when you sought to seduce the daughter of the

Counts of Peschiera, the descendant of those who had ruled in Italy,

into the informer, the corrupter, and the traitress! No, Giulio--then I

recoiled; and then, fearful of your own sway over me, I retreated into

France. I have answered you frankly."

The Count removed his hands from the shoulder on which they had

reclined so cordially.

"And this," said he, "is your wisdom, and this your gratitude.

You, whose fortunes are bound up in mine--you, who subsist on my

bounty--you, who----"

"Hold," cried the Marchesa, rising, and with a burst of emotion, as

if stung to the utmost, and breaking into revolt from the tyranny of

years--"Hold--gratitude! bounty! Brother, brother--what, indeed, do I

owe to you? The shame and the misery of a life. While yet a child, you

condemned me to marry against my will--against my heart--against my

prayers--and laughed at my tears when I knelt to you for mercy. I was

pure then, Giulio--pure and innocent as the flowers in my virgin crown.

And now--now--"

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

"Now you upbraid me," said the Count, unruffled by her sudden passion,

"because I gave you in marriage to a man young and noble?"

"Old in vices, and mean of soul! The marriage I forgave you. You had

the right, according to the customs of our country, to dispose of my

hand. But I forgave you not the consolations that you whispered in the

ear of a wretched and insulted wife."

"Pardon me the remark," replied the Count, with a courtly bend of his

head, "but those consolations were also conformable to the customs of

our country, and I was not aware till now that you had wholly disdained

them. And," continued the Count, "you were not so long a wife that the

gall of the chain should smart still. You were soon left a widow--free,

childless, young, beautiful."

"And penniless."

"True, Di Negra was a gambler, and very unlucky; no fault of mine. I

could neither keep the cards from his hands, nor advise him how to play

them."

"And my own portion? Oh Giulio, I knew but at his death why you had

condemned me to that renegade Genoese. He owed you money, and, against

honour, and I believe against law, you had accepted my fortune in

discharge of the debt."

"He had no other way to discharge it--a debt of honour must be

paid--old stories these. What matters? Since then my purse has been

open to you."

"Yes, not as your sister, but your instrument--your spy! Yes, your

purse has been open--with a niggard hand."

"_Un peu de conscience, ma chère_, you are so extravagant. But come, be

plain. What would you?"

"I would be free from you."

"That is, you would form some second marriage with one of these rich

island lords. _Ma foi_, I respect your ambition."

"It is not so high. I aim but to escape from slavery--to be placed

beyond dishonourable temptation. I desire," cried Beatrice with

increased emotion, "I desire to re-enter the life of woman."

"Eno'!" said the Count with a visible impatience, "is there anything

in the attainment of your object that should render you indifferent to

mine? You desire to marry, if I comprehend you right. And to marry, as

becomes you, you should bring to your husband not debts, but a dowry.

Be it so. I will restore the portion that I saved from the spendthrift

clutch of the Genoese--the moment that it is mine to bestow--the moment

that I am husband to my kinsman's heiress. And now, Beatrice, you

imply that my former notions revolted your conscience; my present plan

should content it; for by this marriage shall our kinsman regain his

country, and repossess, at least, half his lands. And if I am not an

excellent husband to the demoiselle, it will be her own fault. I have

sown my wild oats. _Je suis bon prince_, when I have things a little

my own way. It is my hope and my intention, and certainly it will be

my interest, to become _digne époux et irréprochable père de famille_.

I speak lightly--'tis my way. I mean seriously. The little girl will

be very happy with me, and I shall succeed in soothing all resentment

her father may retain. Will you aid me then--yes or no? Aid me, and

you shall indeed be free. The magician will release the fair spirit

he has bound to his will. Aid me not, _ma chère_, and mark, I do not

threaten--I do but warn--aid me not; grant that I become a beggar, and

ask yourself what is to become of you--still young, still beautiful,

and still penniless? Nay, worse than penniless; you have done me the

honour, (and here the Count, looking on the table, drew a letter from a

portfolio, emblazoned with his arms and coronet,) you have done me the

honour to consult me as to your debts."

"You will restore my fortune?" said the Marchesa, irresolutely--and

averting her head from an odious schedule of figures.

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

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

"Possibly," said the Count, with a caressing suavity--and he kissed his

sister's forehead. "Possibly; but by my honour, I wish to repair to you

any wrong, real or supposed, I may have done you in past times. I wish

to find again my own dear sister. I may overvalue your aid, but not the

affection from which it comes. Let us be friends, _cara Beatrice mia_,"

added the Count, for the first time employing Italian words.

The Marchesa laid her head on his shoulder, and her tears flowed

softly. Evidently this man had great influence over her--and evidently,

whatever her cause for complaint, her affection for him was still

sisterly and strong. A nature with fine flashes of generosity, spirit,

honour, and passion, was hers--but uncultured, unguided--spoilt by

the worst social examples--easily led into wrong--not always aware

where the wrong was--letting affections good or bad whisper away her

conscience or blind her reason. Such women are often far more dangerous

when induced to wrong, than those who are thoroughly abandoned--such

women are the accomplices men like the Count of Peschiera most desire

to obtain.

"Ah, Giulio," said Beatrice, after a pause, and looking up at him

through her tears, "when you speak to me thus, you know you can do with

me what you will. Fatherless and motherless, whom had my childhood to

love and obey but you?"

"Dear Beatrice," murmured the Count tenderly--and he again kissed her

forehead. "So," he continued more carelessly--"so the reconciliation

is effected, and our interests and our hearts re-allied. Now, alas! to

descend to business. You say that you know some one whom you believe

to be acquainted with the lurking-place of my father-in-law--that is to

be!"

"I think so. You remind me that I have an appointment with him this

day: it is near the hour--I must leave you."

"To learn the secret?--Quick--quick. I have no fear of your success, if

it is by his heart that you lead him?"

"You mistake; on his heart I have no hold. But he has a friend who

loves me, and honourably, and whose cause he pleads. I think here that

I have some means to control or persuade him. If not--ah, he is of a

character that perplexes me in all but his worldly ambition; and how

can we foreigners influence him through _that_?"

"Is he poor, or is he extravagant?"

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

"Then we have him," said the Count composedly. "If his assistance be

worth buying, we can bid high for it. _Sur mon âme_, I never yet knew

money fail with any man who was both worldly and dependent. I put him

and myself in your hands."

Thus saying, the Count opened the door, and conducted his sister with

formal politeness to her carriage. He then returned, reseated himself,

and mused in silence. As he did so, the muscles of his countenance

relaxed. The levity of the Frenchman fled from his visage, and in

his eye, as it gazed abstractedly into space, there was that steady

depth so remarkable in the old portraits of Florentine diplomatist or

Venetian oligarch. Thus seen, there was in that face, despite all its

beauty, something that would have awed back even the fond gaze of love;

something hard, collected, inscrutable, remorseless. But this change

of countenance did not last long. Evidently thought, though intense

for the moment, was not habitual to the man. Evidently he had lived

the life which takes all things lightly--so he rose with a look of

fatigue, shook and stretched himself, as if to cast off, or grow out

of, an unwelcome and irksome mood. An hour afterwards, the Count of

Peschiera was charming all eyes, and pleasing all ears, in the saloon

of a high-born beauty, whose acquaintance he had made at Vienna, and

whose charms, according to that old and never-truth-speaking oracle,

Polite Scandal, were now said to have attracted to London the brilliant

foreigner.