of the monarchy, purchased his patent of noblesse. Every body knew that
he was a _parvenu_; and rumor, as she is wont in such cases, had adorned
his early history with so many myths and portents, that Niebuhr himself
could hardly have distinguished between the fable and the truth. It was
said and believed that he was a foundling--a Gipsy's son, a wandering
beggar, a tinker. Others had seen him in rags, selling pencils at the
steps between the Pont-Neuf and the Pont-au-Change. Others, again,
maintained that he had for years filled the canine office of guide to an
old blind mendicant, whose beat was about the Rue de Bauboug; and were
even furnished with a number of pleasant anecdotes about his hardships
and adroitness, while in this somewhat undignified position. Indeed, the
varieties of positions though which good Mother Gossip sent him were
such, and so interminable, that a relation of half of them would alone
make a library of fiction. But fortune had consecrated this mean and
smutty urchin. He stood now worshipped in the awful glory of his
millions, pedestalled on his money-bags, gilded from head to heel; and
what could the proudest noblesse upon earth do but forget and forgive
the rags and hunger of his infancy, and come together, from the east and
from the west, to drink of the cup of his enchantments, and cry, "Long
live King Solomon in all his glory?"
"She is beautiful as a divinity," exclaimed the gallant old Marquess de
Fauteuil, who had just completed an admiring survey of the fair Madame
le Prun.
"Pretty--yes; but she has the manners of a _petite moine_," said the
Duchess de la Cominade, an old flame of the marquis, who, in spite of
her marriage and her mistakes, conceived her claims upon his devotions
unabated.
"And her little gossip, too, Le Prun's niece, is a charming creature--an
exquisitely contrived contrast. By my word, this place deserves its
name--is it not truly the Chateau des Anges?"
"Who is that young person whom Le Prun is leading towards them? He is
the only man I have seen to-night whose dress is perfect; and he looks
like a hero of romance."
"That?--eh? Why that is the Marquis de Secqville."
"What! the horrid man who enslaves us all? I have not seen him for
years--how very handsome he is!"
"Yes; and I fancy that melancholy air assists him very much in
vanquishing the gentle sex. I once had a little vein of that myself."
"So you had," murmured the duchess, with a tender smile of memory, and a
little sigh. "But is it not a madness of poor Le Prun to present that
terrible man to his handsome young wife?"
"He is to marry the niece--the affair is concluded. Poor little thing!
she looks so frightened; see--a little fluttered pigeon of Venus--it
becomes her very much."
Meanwhile Le Prun and the marquis were approaching Lucille and Julie,
who were seated together close to a window which opened to the floor,
and admitted the soft summer air, charged with such sounds and perfumes
as might have hovered among the evergreen groves of Calypso's island.
"He is coming," said Julie, "he is coming with my uncle."
"Who?" asked Lucille, looking coldly on the advancing figures.
"My--my fiance, the Marquis de Secqville," whispered Julie, in trembling
haste, blushing, and dropping her eyes.
"Oh, then, I must observe him carefully," said Lucille, with an arch
smile.
"Do, and tell me honestly what you think of him."
"Ha! little rogue, I see you are not quite so indifferent as you
pretend."
"My _heart_ is indifferent--but--but he is very handsome--don't you
think so?"
"Hush! here he is."
"I have the happiness, madame, to present Monsieur le Marquis de
Secqville, with whom, as you are aware, we are about to have the honor
of being nearly allied."
So said Monsieur le Prun, with a smile of conjugal affection, which may,
or may not, have been genuine.
"I was not until now aware of the full extent of the honor and the
happiness involved in that alliance," said the marquis, with a glance of
respectful admiration.
Madame le Prun acknowledged this little speech with a slight bow, and a
cold and haughty smile.
"You have been in the south lately?"
"Yes, madame, with my regiment at Avignon."
"So he says," interrupted the fermier-general, with a cunning leer; "but
his colonel swears he never saw him there."
"Then either you or your colonel must be wrong," said Madame le Prun,
drily.
"No, no, madame; but Monsieur le Prun likes a jest at my expense."
"Not at all," said Le Prun, laughing; "I protest D'Artois, his colonel,
vows he has not seen him for six months at least."
"They are in a conspiracy to quiz me."
"Then you _were_ at Avignon?"
"No such thing, I tell you; the fellow was about some mischief--ha! ha!
ha!"
"He is resolved to laugh at me."
"Yes, yes, I say he is a mischievous fellow--the most dangerous dog in
France; and so shy that, by my word, it requires a shrewd fellow like
myself to discover his rogueries."
"And so he deserves not only _all_ my sins, but a great deal more."
"Stay--here is the Visconte de Charrebourg. Visconte, this is the
Marquis de Secqville, my future nephew."
The old visconte looked closely and dubiously for a moment in the young
man's face. The marquis, on the contrary, seemed to have some little
difficulty in suppressing a smile.
"But that I know I have not had the honor of meeting you before, I
should----but no doubt it is a family likeness. I knew your father when
he was about your age, and a very handsome fellow, by my faith. Is his
brother, the Conte de Cresseron, still living?"
The old gentleman drew the marquis away before he had had time to pay
his devoirs to Julie, who had shrunk at his approach into the
background, and left the little group to themselves.
"What do you think of him?" whispered Julie, resuming her place by
Lucille.
"He is pretty well."
"Monsieur le Marquis is a handsome man," said Blassemare, who at that
moment joined them; and, addressing Lucille, "You have seen him before?"
"_I?_--no. He has just been presented to me for the first time."
"And you think him----"
"Rather handsome--indeed, _decidedly_ handsome; but, somehow, his
melancholy spoils him. But I forgot, Julie--I ask your pardon, my
pretty niece, for criticising your hero. Remember, however, I admit his
beauty, though I can't admire him."
There is no truth of which we have been reminded with such unnecessary
reiteration, as the pretty obvious fact that every human enjoyment must,
sooner or later, come to an end. The _fete_ at the Chateau des Anges had
no exemption from this law of nature and necessity. Musicians, cooks,
artists, and artisans of all sorts, gradually disappeared. At length the
last equipage whirled down the great avenue, and a stillness and void,
more mournful from the immediate contrast, supervened.
The windows were closed--the yawning servants betook themselves to their
beds, and the angel of sleep waved his downy wings over the old chateau.
The genius of Blassemare was of that electric sort which is not easily
unexcited. He could no more have slept than he could have transformed
himself into one of the stone Tritons of the fountain by which in the
moonlight he now stood alone. Blassemare had had a magnificent triumph;
so well-contrived an entertainment had never, perhaps, been known
before; and, like certain great generals, he felt desirous to visit the
field of his victory after the heat of action was over.
Monsieur Le Prun was also wide awake and astir from other causes. No
vein of Blassemare's excitement--not even jealousy, nor conscience, nor
any mental malady--kept him waking. The cause of his vigilance was,
simply, his late supper and an indigestion.
Now it happened that both these worthies were walking unconsciously
almost side by side--Le Prun along the summit, and Blassemare along the
base, of the beautiful terrace which stretched in front of the windows
of the chateau.
There was a little receding court which lay in front of Madame Le Prun's
windows, which were furnished with a heavy stone balcony. On the side
opposite was a high wall, which divided the pleasure-grounds from the
wild, wooded park that lay immediately beyond, and in this was a door
with a private key and a spring lock.
Now it happened that both Monsieur Le Prun and the Sieur de Blassemare,
as they approached this point, amid the fumes of expiring lamps and the
wreck of fireworks, heard certain sounds of an unexpected sort. These
were, in fact, human voices, conversing in earnest but suppressed
tones--so low, indeed, that were it not for the breathless stillness of
the night they would have been unheard.
"Sacre!" muttered Le Prun, looking up like a toothless old panther.
"Ma foi! what's this?" whispered Blassemare, whose jealousy was also
alarmed.
The sounds continued--the eavesdroppers quickened their paces. Le Prun
was, however, unfortunately a little asthmatic, as sometimes happens to
bridegrooms of a certain age, and, spite of all his efforts to hold it
in, he could not contain a burst of coughing.
Its effect was magical. There supervened an instantaneous silence,
followed by the dropping of a heavy body upon the ground, as it seemed,
under Madame Le Prun's windows. The descent was, however, unfortunately
made; a dog, evidently hurt, raised a frightful yelping, making the
night additionally hideous. Blassemare hurried up the steps, and at the
top encountered Le Prun, running and panting, with his sword drawn.
There was a sound, as of hastily closing the casement above the
balcony--a light gleamed from it for an instant, and was
extinguished--and, at the same moment, they beheld the dim figure of a
man hurrying across the court, and darting through the opposite door,
which shut with a crash behind him.
"Thieves! robbers!" shouted Le Prun, dashing at the door.
"Robbers! thieves!" cried a shrill voice of alarm from Madame Le Prun's
casement.
"Horns! antlers!" halloed Blassemare.
"Robbers! robbers!"
"Thieves! thieves!"
The lady screamed, Le Prun bawled, Blassemare laughed.
"He is gone, however," said the latter, as soon as the explosion had a
little subsided. "Suppose we get the key, madame. Please throw us yours
from the window. I promise to pink the burglar through the body.
Quick--quick!"
"Ay, ay," thundered Le Prun, "the key! the key!"
Madame Le Prun was too much excited to get it in an instant. She ran
here, and flew there--she screamed and rummaged. Le Prun stormed. A key
was at last thrown out, amid prayers and imprecations. How
provoking!--it was a wrong one. Another effort--a new burst of
execration from Le Prun--another fit of laughter from Blassemare--more
screaming and pressing from the window--and all accompanied by the
sustained yelping of the injured lap-dog.
"Here it is--this must be it," and another key clangs and jingles on the
ground.
"Yes, this time it is the right key." The door flies open--Le Prun
rushes puffing among the bushes. Blassemare sees something drop
glittering to the ground as the door opens--a button and a little rag of
velvet; he says nothing, but pockets it, and joins the moonlight chase.
It is all in vain. Le Prun, perspiring and purple, his passion as
swollen as his veins, knowing not what to think, but fearing every
thing, staggered back, silent and exhausted; Blassemare also silent--no
longer laughing--abstracted, walks with knit brows, and compressed lips,
beside him.
"Of course," said Blassemare, "you have the fullest reliance upon the
honor of your wife?"
Monsieur Le Prun growled an inarticulate curse or two, and Blassemare
whistled a minuet.
"Come, my dear Le Prun," he resumed, "let us be frank; you are uneasy."
"About what?"
"Madame Le Prun."
"She is not injured?"
"No, but----"
"Ah, she's in league with the thieves, may be?" said Le Prun, with an
agitated sneer.
"Precisely so," answered Blassemare, with a cold laugh.
"I know what you think, and I know what _I_ think," replied Le Prun,
with suppressed fury.
His suspicions were all awake; he was bursting with rage, and looked
truly infernal.
"On the faith of a gentleman," said Blassemare, with a changed tone, "I
cannot be said to _think_ any thing about the affair. I have my doubts,
but that is all. We men are naturally suspicious; but, after all, there
are such things as thieves and housebreakers."
Le Prun said nothing, but looked black and icy as the north wind.
"At all events," said Blassemare, "we men of the world know how to deal
with affairs of this sort; so long as any uncertainty exists, put
ostensibly the best possible construction upon it. Thus much is due to
one's dignity in the eyes of the public; and in private we may prosecute
inquiries unsuspected, and with the greater likelihood of success."
"I know the world as well as you, Blassemare. I'm sick of your tone of
superiority and advice. I know when to respect and when to defy the
world. A man can no more make a fortune without tact than he can lose
one without folly."
"Well, well," said Blassemare, who was used to an occasional rebuff, and
regarded a gruff word from his principal no more than he did the buzz of
a beetle, "I know all that very well; but you, robust fellows, with
millions at your back, are less likely to respect those subtle and
delicate influences which sometimes, notwithstanding, carry mischief
with them, than we poor, sensitive valetudinarians, without a guinea in
our pockets; and if you will permit me, I will, when I return to-day,
sift the matter for you. I understand woman; it is an art in itself,
though not, perhaps, a very high one. A careless conversation with
Madame Le Prun will let me further into the mystery, than a year spent
in accumulating circumstantial evidence. You may rely on the result."
The fermier-general uttered something between a growl and a grunt, which
might or might not convey assent; and, waving Blassemare towards the
house, walked along the terrace alone; and sat himself down upon the
steps at the further end.
The mental torpor which supervenes under sudden disasters was not, in
the case of the fermier-general, without its dreamy groups of ugly
images in prospect. As the light broke, and the darkness began to melt
eastward into soft crimson mists and streaks of amber, Monsieur Le Prun
rose stiffly from his hard, cold seat, and, with the slow step of a man
irresolute and oppressed with profound wrath and mortification, began to
return homeward.
"Robbers!--thieves!" he muttered bitterly. "How glibly the traitress
echoed the cry! The rascal Blassemare gave the true alarm--she did not
echo _that_. D---- her, and d----him! Robbers, indeed! Thieves!--very
like. I know what they came a thieving for. Upon her balcony--talking in
murmurs--the candle extinguished in such a devil of a hurry--the ready
cry of 'Thieves'--the spring door open for his flight--and the long
delay to find the key. Bah! what proofs are wanting?"
He heard just at this point a cracked voice singing a gay love verse
from an open window. He knew the voice; every association connected with
the performance and the performer jarred upon his nerves.
It was indeed the Visconte de Charrebourg, some of whose early gayety
had returned with his good fortune. He had, such was the pride of his
rich son-in-law, a little household of his own, and kept his state and
his own exorbitantly early hours in a suite of rooms assigned him,
through one of whose windows, arrayed in a velvet cap and gown of
brocade, he was rivalling the lark and greeting the rising sun, and,
while sipping his chocolate in the intervals, moved, with the nimble
irregularity of idle and active-minded age, about his apartment.
"Well, sir, a pleasant affair this!" cried a harsh voice, interrupting
his cheery occupation; and on looking round he saw the purple and
sinister face of the fermier-general looming through the window.
"What affair?" asked the visconte, in unfeigned astonishment, for he had
been quite certain that his worthy son-in-law was quietly in his bed.
"Your daughter's conduct."
"What of her?"
"Just this--she is a ----!" and, with the term of outrage, Le Prun
uttered a forced laugh of fury.
"I cannot have heard you aright: be kind enough to repeat that."
There was a certain air of pomp and menace in this little speech, which
drove Le Prun beyond all patience. He repeated the imputation in
language still grosser. This was an insult which the ancient blood of
the Charrebourgs could not tolerate, and the visconte taunted him with
the honor which one of his house had done him in mingling their pure
blood with that of a "roturier." Then came the obvious retort, "beggar,"
and even "trickster," retaliated by a torrent of scarcely articulate
scorn and execration, and an appeal to the sword, which, with brutal
contempt, (while at the same time, nevertheless, he recoiled
instinctively a foot or two from the window,) the wealthy plebeian
retorted by threatening to arrest him for the sums he had advanced. Le
Prun had the best of it; he left the outraged visconte quivering and
shrieking like an old woman in a frenzy. It was some comfort to have
wrapt another in the hell-fire that tormented himself.
[From the Examiner.]
MAZZINI ON ITALY.
We may--we do differ from Mazzini in many of his political views, and in
our estimate of what may be the wisest policy for Italian liberals in
existing circumstances. We think that he seeks to impart to politics a
mathematical precision of which they are not susceptible, and does not
sufficiently regard a principle the correctness of which has been
admitted by himself, that the fact of a thing being true in principle
cannot give the right of suddenly enthroning it in practice. But his
errors are all on the large and generous side. He is too apt to
attribute to society the precise convictions and spirit he feels within
himself, and so to expect impossibilities, by impossible means. But
there is a power of reasoning in Mazzini, an unsullied moral purity, a
chivalrous veracity and frankness, an utter abnegation of self, and a
courage that has stood the severest trials, which command not only
respect but veneration. He belongs to the martyr age of Italian
liberalism, and possesses himself the highest qualities of the martyr.
His declared object in publishing the small volume[27] before us is to
correct public opinion in England as to the Italian movement in which he
took part. But it is a statement of principles rather than a narrative
of details. It is always dignified in tone, often singularly eloquent,
and substantially it contains little which would be likely to draw forth
an expression of willing disagreement from any well-educated,
high-minded, liberal Englishman.
Mr. Mazzini thus declares his reasons
WHY THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD BE REPUBLICAN.
The Italian tradition is eminently republican. In England, the
aristocratic element has a powerful influence, because it has a
history: well or ill, it _has_ organized society: it has
created a power, snatched from royalty, by conquering
guarantees for the rights of the subject; it has founded in
part the wealth and the influence of England abroad. The
monarchical element has still great influence over the
tendencies of France, because it also claims an important page
in the national history; it has produced a Charlemagne, a Louis
XI., a Napoleon; it has contributed to found the unity of
France; it has shared with the communes the risks and the
honors of the struggle against feudalism; it has surrounded the
national banner with a halo of military glory. What is the
history of the monarchy and of the aristocracy of Italy? What
prominent part have they played in the national development?
What vital element have they supplied to Italian strength, or
to the unification of the future existence of Italy? The
history of our royalty in fact commences with the dominion of
Charles V., with the downfall of our liberties; it is
identified with servitude and dismemberment; it is written on a
foreign page, in the cabinets of France, of Austria, and of
Spain. Nearly all of them the issue of foreign families,
viceroys of one or other of the great powers, our kings do not
offer the example of a single individual redeeming by brilliant
personal qualities the vice of subalternity, to which his
position condemned him; not a single one who has ever evinced
any grand national aspiration. Around them in the obscurity of
their courts, gather idle or retrograde courtiers, men who call
themselves _noble_, but who have never been able to constitute
an aristocracy. An aristocracy is a compact independent body,
representing in itself an idea, and from one extremity of the
country to another, governed, more or less, by one and the same
inspiration: our nobles have lived upon the crumbs of royal
favor, and if on some rare occasions they have ventured to
place themselves in opposition to the monarch, it has not been
in the cause of the nation, but of the foreigner, or of
clerical absolutism. The nobility can never be regarded as an
historical element: it has furnished some fortunate
_Condottieri_, powerful even to tyranny, in some isolated town;
it has knelt at the feet of the foreign emperors who have
passed the Alps or crossed the sea. The original stock being
nearly everywhere extinct, the races have become degenerated
amidst corruption and ignorance. The descendants of our noble
families at Genoa, at Naples, at Venice, and at Rome, are, for
the most part specimens of absolute intellectual nullity.
Almost every thing that has worked its difficult way in art, in
literature, or in political activity, is plebeian.
In Italy the initiative of progress has always belonged to the
people, to the democratic element. It is through her communes
that she has acquired all she has ever had of liberty: through
her workmen in wool or silk, through her merchants of Genoa,
Florence, Venice, and Pisa, that she has acquired her wealth;
through her artists, plebeian and republican, from Giotto to
Michael Angelo, that she has acquired her renown; through her
navigators,--plebeian,--that she has given a world to humanity;
through her Popes--sons of the people even they--that until the
twelfth century she aided in the emancipation of the weak, and
sent forth a word of unity to humanity. All her memories of
insurrection against the foreigner are memories of the people:
all that has made the greatness of our towns, dates almost
always from a republican epoch: the educational book, the only
book read by the inhabitant of the Alps or the Transteverin who
can read, is an abridgment of the history of the Ancient Roman
Republic. This is the reason why the same men who have so long
been accused of coldness, and who had in fact witnessed with
indifference the aristocratic and royal revolutions of 1820 and
1821, arose with enthusiasm and with a true power of
self-sacrifice at the cry of _St. Mark and the Republic, God
and the People_! These words contained for them a guarantee.
They awoke in them, even unconsciously to themselves, the
all-powerful echo of a living past, a confused recollection of
glory, of strength, of conscience, and of dignity.
With such elements how would it be possible to found a monarchy
surrounded with an aristocracy? How can one speak of a balance
of powers, where there are but two forces--foreign absolutism,
and the people? How could one organize a constitutional
monarchy where the aristocracy is without a past, and where
royalty inspires neither affection nor respect?
It will surprise many candid readers to find Mr. Mazzini repeatedly
declaring in this book that the republican, or, as he calls it, the
national party, are not responsible for the disunion, which, at a time
when the whole nation was armed against the foreigners and might have
driven them from the country, turned its forces against its own
citizens. He gives proof that his own advice was for union till the day
of victory, and _not till then_ for discussion as to what party should
reap its fruits. Whether to monarch, or to people, he affirms that he
was ready to submit; he asserts repeatedly that it was only after having
been betrayed that the national party set up for themselves; and he
expresses his belief that even now, when a union of princes has been
seen to be impossible, the leadership of a single prince would be
accepted by all, supposing such a fitting leader could be found. He thus
describes
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND THEIR DETRACTORS.
They have said, and they say again, without taking advantage of
the favorable position in which events have placed them:--Let
the nation arise; let her make herself mistress of her own
territory; then, the victory once gained, let her freely decide
who shall reap the fruits. Monarch or People, we will submit
ourselves to the power she herself shall organize. Is it
possible that so moderate and rational a proposition should be
the object of such false interpretations, in a country which
reveres the idea of right and of self-government? Is it
possible that its leaders should be the object of so much
calumny?
It is time that these calumnies should cease. It matters little
to us, who act as our conscience dictates, without troubling
ourselves as to the personal result; and to whom faith and
exile have given the habit of looking higher than the praise or
blame of this earth. But it should be recognized as most
important by all who believe that political questions agitated
by whole nations, are questions eminently religious. For
religion, to all those who see more in it than the mere
materialism of forms and formulae, is not only a thought of
heaven, but the impulse which seeks to apply that thought, as
far as possible to government on earth, our rule of action for
the good of all, and for the moral development of humanity.
Politics then are like religion--sacred; and all good men are
bound to see them morally respected. Every question has a right
to serious, calm, and honest discussion. Calumny should be the
weapon of those only who have to defend not ideas, but crimes.
It is immoral to say to men who have preached clemency
throughout the whole of their political career, who have
initiated their rule by the abolition of capital punishment,
who, when in power, never signed a single sentence of exile
against those who had persecuted them, nor even against the
known enemies of their principle.--"You are the sanguinary
organizers of _terror_, men of vengeance and of cruelty." It is
immoral to ascribe to them views which they never had, and to
choose to forget that they have, through the medium of the
press here and elsewhere, attracted and refuted those
communistic systems and exclusive solutions which tend to
suppress rather than to transform the elements of society; and
to say to them, "_You are communists, you desire to abolish
property_." It is immoral to accuse of irreligion and impiety
men who have devoted their whole lives to the endeavor to
reconcile the religious idea, betrayed and disinherited by the
very men who pretend to be its official defenders, with the
National movement. It is immoral to insinuate accusations of
personal interest and of pillage, against men who have serenely
endured the sufferings of poverty, and whose life, accessible
to all, has never betrayed either cupidity or the desire of
luxury. It is immoral continually to proclaim, as the act of a
whole party, the death of a statesman killed by an unknown
hand, under the influence of the irritation produced by his own
acts and by the attacks of another political party, many months
before the Republican party recommenced its activity.
Mr. Mazzini charges no direct treachery against Carlo Alberto. He
declares him to have been himself the victim of the weakness which
caused others as well as himself so much loss and misery. For the
impossible political project of a Kingdom of the North he was content to
surrender the grand reality of a United People which fate had placed
within his hands.
CHARLES ALBERT.
Genius, love, and faith were wanting in Charles Albert. Of the first,
which reveals itself by a life entirely, logically, and resolutely
devoted to a great idea, the career of Charles Albert does not offer the
least trace; the second was stifled in him by the continual mistrust of
men and things, which was awakened by the remembrance of an unhappy
past; the last was denied him by his uncertain character, wavering
always between good and evil, between _to do_ and _not to do_, between
daring and not daring. In his youth, a thought, not of virtue, but of
Italian ambition--the ambition however which may be profitable to
nations--had passed through his soul like lightning; but he recoiled in
affright, and the remembrance of this one brilliant moment of his youth
presented itself hourly to him, and tortured him like the incessant
throbbing of an old wound, instead of acting upon him as an excitement
to a new life. Between the risk of losing, if he failed, the crown of
his little kingdom, and the fear of the liberty which the people, after
having fought for him, would claim for themselves, he went hesitating
on, with this spectre before his eyes, stumbling at every step, without
energy to confront these dangers, without the will or power to
comprehend that to become King of Italy he must first of all forget that
he was King of Piedmont. Despotic from rooted instinct, liberal from
self-love, and from a presentiment of the future, he submitted
alternately to the government of Jesuits, and to that of men of
progress. A fatal disunion between thought and action, between the
conception and the faculty of execution, showed itself in every act.
Most of those who endeavored to place him at the head of the enterprise,
were forced to agree to this view of his character. Some of those
intimate with him went so far as to whisper that he was threatened with
lunacy. He was the Hamlet of Monarchy.
A characteristic passage of the volume has relation to
LAMARTINE'S VIEWS OF ITALIAN INDEPENDENCE.
The war between the two principles was general in Europe--the enthusiasm
excited by the movements in Italy, especially the Lombard insurrection
and the prodigies of the five days, was immense; and Italy could, had
she willed it and known how, have drawn thence sufficient force to
counterbalance all the strength of hostile reaction. But to do this, it
was necessary, whatever the mean policy of the _Moderates_ might fear,
to give to the movement a character so audaciously national as to alarm
our enemies, and to offer the most powerful element of support to our
friends. Both felt the time was ripe, and began to believe that Italy
would be but _Italy_, and not _the Kingdom of the North_. I remember the
consoling words Lamartine addressed to me, at his house, on the eve of
my departure for Italy, and in presence, amongst others, of Alfred de
Vigny, and of the same Forbin Janson whom I was afterwards to meet
preaching the papal restoration, and getting up various petty
conspiracies and ridiculous intrigues at Rome.
"The hour has struck for you," said the minister, "and I am so firmly
convinced of it, that the first words with which I have charged Monsieur
d'Harcourt for the Pope are these; _Holy Father, you know that you ought
to be the President of the Italian Republic_." But Monsieur d'Harcourt
had quite other things to say to the Pope, on the part of that faction
which involved Lamartine in its snares whilst he imagined that he could
control it. For myself I attached no importance, except as a symptom, to
these words of Lamartine, a man of impulse and of noble instincts, but
unstable in belief, without energy for a fixed purpose, and without real
knowledge of men and things. He was indeed the echo of a tendency
all-powerful, in those moments of excitement, upon the French mind; and
every re-awakening nationality, every political programme, which, if not
absolutely republican, was like that, at least, of the Italian
constituent, would have compelled the support of the most hesitating
government in France.
From great things great things are born. The _dwarfish_ conception of
the _Moderates_ froze up all souls, and imposed an utter change of
politics upon France. The ITALIAN PEOPLE was an ally more than
sufficiently powerful to preserve the Republic from all danger of a
foreign war; a _Kingdom of the North_, in the hands of princes little to
be relied upon, and hostile, by long tradition, to the Republicans of
France, did but add a dangerous element to the league of kings. The
French nation became silent, and left its government free to exist
without any foreign policy, and to leave the destinies of the republic
to the impenetrable future.
The incidents described in most detail are those immediately preceding
and following the fatal surrender of Milan; and it is impossible not to
be struck by the contrast of the royal and the republican party,
assuming the statement to be in all respects correct. But passing this
ignominious period, there ought to be small difference of opinion in a
free and educated country as to where the right lay in the subsequent
Roman struggle. What sensible or honest Protestant would not sympathize
with the indignant eloquence of this earnest Italian protesting against
the flimsy oratory of a Jesuit Frenchman?
MAZZINI TO MONTALEMBERT.
"You base your argument upon the void; you discuss that which was, not
that which is. The Papacy is dead, choked in blood and mire; dead,
because it has betrayed its own mission of protection to the weak
against the oppressor; dead, because for three centuries and a half it
has prostituted itself with princes; dead, because in the name of
egotism and before the palaces of all the corrupt, hypocritical, and
skeptical governments, it has for the second time crucified Christ;
dead, because it has uttered words of faith which it did not itself
believe; dead, because it has denied human liberty and the dignity of
our immortal souls; dead, because it has condemned science in Galileo,
philosophy in Giordano Bruno, religious aspiration in John Huss and
Jerome of Prague, political life by an anathema against the rights of
the people, civil life by Jesuitism, the terrors of the inquisition, and
the example of corruption, the life of the family by confession
converted into a system of espionage, and by division introduced between
father and son, brother and brother, husband and wife; dead, for the
princes, by the treaty of Westphalia; dead, for the peoples, with
Gregory XI., in 1378, and with the commencement of the schism; dead, for
Italy, since 1530, when Clement VII. and Charles V., the Pope and the
Emperor, signed an infamous compact, and extinguished, at Florence, the
dying liberties of Italy, as to-day you have attempted to extinguish her
rising liberties in Rome; dead, because the people has risen, because
Pius IX. has fled, because the multitude curses him, because those very
men who for fifteen years have made war upon the priests, in the name of
Voltaire, now hypocritically defend them, because you and yours defend
them, with intolerance and by force of arms, and declare that the Papacy
and liberty cannot live side by side? You ask Victor Hugo to point out
to you an idea which has been worshipped for eighteen centuries. It is
that idea which you have declared irreconcilable with the Papacy, and
which was breathed into humanity by God; the idea which has withdrawn
from Catholicism the half of the Christian world, the idea which has
snatched from you Lammennais and the flower of the intellects of Europe,
the idea of Christ, that pure, holy, and sacred liberty which you
invoked for Poland some years back, which Italy invokes for herself
to-day, under the form, and with the guarantee of nationality, and which
you cannot pretend to be good for one country and bad for another,
unless you believe it a part of religion to create a pariah people in
the bosom of humanity."
Very admirably, too, and nobly written, are Mr. Mazzini's later remarks
on the republican and anti-papal administration of Rome, and the
coldness it met with in England and elsewhere. We must admit that it is
hard for a people to struggle, suffer, and bleed alone, yet hold
themselves in this temperate attitude. It is _not_ generous, as Mr.
Mazzini too truly complains, in a nation having the enjoyment and the
consciousness of liberty herself, to wait until the hour of victory has
sounded for another nation before she stretches out a sister's hand
towards her.
WHAT THE REPUBLICANS DID AND ENGLAND MIGHT HAVE DONE.
I affirm that with the exception of Ancona, where the triumvirate were
obliged energetically to repress certain criminal acts of political
vengeance, the republican cause was never sullied by the slightest
excess; that no censorship was assumed over the press before the siege,
and that no occasion arose for exercising it during the siege. Not a
single condemnation to death or exile bore witness to a severity which
it would have been our right to have exercised, but which the perfect
unanimity which reigned amongst all the elements of the state rendered
useless. I affirm that, except in the case of three or four priests, who
had been guilty of firing upon our combatants, and who were killed by
the people during the last days of the siege, not a single act of
personal violence was committed by any fraction of the population
against another, and that if ever there was a city presenting the
spectacle of a band of brothers pursuing a common end, and bound
together by the same faith, it was Rome under the republican rule. The
city was inhabited by foreigners from all parts of the world, by the
consular agents, by many of your countrymen; let any one of them arise
and under the guarantee of his own signature deny, if he can, the truth
of what I say. Terror now reigns in Rome; the prisons are choked with
men who have been arrested and detained without trial; fifty priests are
confined in the castle of St. Angelo, whose only crime consists in their
having lent their services in our hospitals; the citizens, the best
known for their moderation, are exiled; the army is almost entirely
dissolved, the city disarmed, and the "factious" sent away even to the
last man; and yet France dares not consult in legal manner the will of
the populations, but re-establishes the papal authority by military
decree. I do not believe that since the dismemberment of Poland there
has been committed a more atrocious injustice, a more gross violation of
the eternal right which God has implanted in the peoples, that of
appreciating and defining for themselves their own life, and governing
themselves in accordance with their own appreciation of it. And I cannot
believe that it is well for you or for Europe that such things can be
accomplished in the eyes of the world, without one nation arising out of
its immobility to protest in the name of universal justice. This is to
enthrone brute force, where, by the power of reason, God alone should
reign; it is to substitute the sword and poniard for law--to decree a
ferocious war without limit of time or means between oppressors rendered
suspicious by their fears, and the oppressed abandoned to the instincts
of reaction and isolation. Let Europe ponder upon these things. For if
the light of human morality becomes but a little more obscured, in that
darkness there will arise a strife that will make those who come after
us shudder with dread.
The balance of power in Europe is destroyed. It consisted formerly in
the support given to the smaller states by the great powers: now they
are abandoned. France in Italy, Russia in Hungary, Prussia in Germany, a
little later perhaps in Switzerland; these are now the masters of the
continent. England is thus made a nullity; the "celsa sedet in Eolus in
arce," which Canning delighted to quote, to express the moderating
function which he wished to reserve for his country, is now a
meaningless phrase. Let not your preachers of the theory of material
interests, your speculators upon extended markets deceive themselves;
there is history to teach them that political influence and commercial
influence are closely bound together. Political sympathies hold the key
of the markets; the tariff of the Roman Republic will appear to you, if
you study it, to be a declaration of sympathy towards England to which
your government did not think it necessary to respond.
* * * * *
And yet, above the question of right, above the question of political
interest, both of which were of a nature to excite early the attention
of England, there is, as I have said, another question being agitated at
Rome of a very different kind of importance, and which ought to have
aroused all those who believe in the vital principle of religious
reformation--it is that of liberty of conscience. The religious question
which broods at the root of all political questions showed itself there
great and visible in all its European importance. The Pope at Gaeta was
the theory of absolute infallible authority exiled from Rome for ever;
and exiled from Rome was to be exiled from the world. The abolition of
the temporal power evidently drew with it, in the minds of all those who
understood the secret of the papal authority, the emancipation of men's
minds from the spiritual authority. The principle of liberty and of free
consent, elevated by the Constituent Assembly into a living active
right, tended rapidly to destroy the absolutist dogma which from Rome
aims more than ever to enchain the universe. The high aristocracy of the
Roman Catholic clergy well know the impossibility of retaining the soul
in darkness, in the midst of light inundating the intelligence of men;
for this reason they carried off their Pope to Gaeta; for this reason
they now refuse all compromise. They know that any compromise would be
fatal to them; that they must re-enter as conquerors, or not at all. And
in the same way that the aristocracy of the clergy felt this
inseparability of the two powers, the French government, in its present
reactionary march, has felt that the keystone of despotism is at
Rome--that the ruin of the spiritual authority of the middle ages would
be the ruin of its own projects--and that the only method of securing to
it a few more years of existence was to rebuild for it a temporal
domination.
England has understood nothing of this. She has not understood what
there was of sublime and prophetic in this cry of emancipation, in this
protestation in favor of human liberty, issuing from the very heart of
ancient Rome, in the face of the Vatican. She has not felt that the
struggle in Rome was to cut the Gordian knot of moral servitude against
which she has long and vainly opposed her Bible Societies, her Christian
and Evangelical Alliances; and that there was being opened, had she but
extended a sisterly hand to the movement, a mighty pathway for the human
mind. She has not understood that one bold word, "respect for the
liberty of thought," opposed to the hypocritical language of the French
government, would have been sufficient to have inaugurated the era of a
new religious policy, and to have conquered for herself a decisive
ascendency upon the continent.
The writer of such passages as these may nevertheless be of good heart.
Though we may not think him exactly qualified to conduct to a successful
issue practical political movements in the existing state of Italian
society, we think him qualified for something far higher and nobler.
Like Knox and Wicliffe, Huss and Luther, Mr. Mazzini is no maker of
ephemeral arrangements and compromises; but like them he is the
uncompromising asserter of principles, and the creator of a national
sentiment, that will in time give law to the makers of such
arrangements. Looking to the yet weak and timid condition of public
opinion in Italy--looking to the narrow provincial views which still
hamper general society--above all, looking to the limited power of its
princes and prelates, and to the imbecile and demoralized characters of
its Pio Nonos and Antonellis, we must confess that we see no hope of any
immediate political settlement, the attainment of which need make it
worth while for Mr. Mazzini to compromise or abandon for a moment his
most extreme political opinions. Nothing is to be accomplished at
present; and he is therefore more usefully employed in rallying his
party by fervent reiteration of his principles, and in forming a pure
and elevated public sentiment alike by his precepts and his example.
How masterly is this sketch of the career of
PIO NONO.
A Pope arose, by his tendencies, his progressive instincts and his love
of popularity, an exception to the Popes of later times: to whom
Providence, as if to teach mankind the absolute powerlessness of the
institution, opened, in the love and in the illusions of the people, the
path to a new life. So great is the fascination exercised by great
memories--so great is the power of ancient customs--so feverish, in
these multitudes who are said to be agitated by the breath of anarchy,
is the desire for authority as the guide and sanction of their progress,
that a word of pardon and tolerance from the Pope's lips sufficed to
gather round him, in an enthusiasm and intoxication of affection,
friends and enemies, believers and unbelievers, the ignorant and the men
of thought. One long cry, the cry of millions ready to make themselves
martyrs or conquerors at his nod, saluted him as their father and
benefactor, the regenerator of the Catholic faith and of humanity. The
experience of three ages and the inexorable logic of ideas, were at once
forgotten; writers, powerful by their intellect and doctrines, until
then dreaded as adversaries, employed themselves in founding around that
_One_ man systems destined to prepare for him the way to a splendid
initiative. The many advocates of liberty of conscience, weary of the
spectacle of anarchy revealed by the Protestant sects, remained in
doubt. The few believers in the future church remained silent and
thoughtful. It might be that history had decided too rashly, it might be
amongst the secrets of Providence that an institution, which had for ten
centuries at least given life and movement to Europe, should rise again,
reconciled with the life and movement of humanity, from its own tomb.
The minds of the whole civilized world hung, troubled and excited, upon
the _word_ which was to issue from the Vatican.
And where now is Pius IX.?
In the camp of the enemy: irrevocably disjoined from the progressive
destinies of humanity; irrevocably adverse to the desires, to the
aspirations which agitate his people and the people of believers. The
experiment is complete. The abyss between Papacy and the world is
hollowed out. No earthly power can fill it up.
Impelled by the impulses of his heart to seek for popularity and
affection, but drawn on by the all-powerful logic of the principle that
he represents, to the severity of absolute dictatorship; seduced by the
universal movement of men's minds, by living examples in other
countries, by the spirit of the age, to feel, to understand the sacred
words of progress, of people, of free brotherhood, but incapable of
making himself their interpreter; fearful of the consequences, and
trembling like one who feels himself insecure, lest he should see the
people, raised to a new consciousness of its own faculties and of its
own rights, question the authority of the pontificate--Pius IX.
vacillated contemptibly between the two paths presented to him, muttered
words of emancipation, which he neither knew how nor intended to make
good, and promises of country and independence to Italy which his
followers betrayed by conspiring with Austria. Then, struck with sudden
terror, he fled before the multitudes who cried aloud to him _courage;_
he sheltered himself under the protection of a Prince whom he
despised--the executioner of his subjects; he imbibed his tendencies,
and in order to revenge himself for the quiet with which Rome, provoked
in vain to a civil war, was organizing a new government, he solicited
foreign aid; and he who had, from a horror of bloodshed, shortly before
endeavored to withdraw Roman assistance from the Lombard struggle,
agreed that French, Austrian, Neapolitan, and Spanish bayonets should
rebuild his throne. He now wanders amidst the fallacies of secret
protocols, the servant of his protectors, the servant of all except of
duty and of the wish of those who hoped in him, turning to the frontiers
of Rome and yet not expecting to re-enter there, and as if kept back by
the phantoms of the slain. The Louis XVI. of Papacy, he has destroyed it
for ever. The cannon ball of his allies discharged against the Vatican,
gave the last blow to the institution.
Whilst these things were happening, a Prince was pursuing in the north
of our peninsula a similar course, accompanied by the same hopes, by the
same illusions and delusions of the people. He was saluted by the title
of the _Sword of Italy_. The choicest spirits from all parts pointed out
to him Austria and the Alps, and suspended, in order to make the last
trial of monarchy, the propagandism of their most cherished ideas. He
was preceded by the encouragement of all Europe, and followed by a
numerous and valiant army. Where died Charles Albert?
Thus has Providence shown to our people, desirous of the right, but
lukewarm in faith and too credulous in the illusions of the old world,
the powerlessness of monarchy to insure the safety of Italy, and the
irreconcilability of papacy with the free progress of humanity. The
dualism of the middle ages is henceforward a mere form without life or
soul; the Guelph and Ghibelline insignia are now those of the tomb.
Neither Pope, nor King! God and the people only shall henceforth
disclose to us the regions of the future.
* * * * *
Future times--nay the present will do ample justice to Mazzini, as well
as to Pio Nono. In the first will be frankly recognized one of those
iron men who are able to beard tyranny and profligacy even while they
stand alone, the apostles of reformation, the originators and heralds of
after change. In the other--but the words just quoted anticipate as it
seems to us, and in no ungenerous spirit, the verdict and language of
history.
FOOTNOTES:
[27] Royalty and Republicanism in Italy; or Notes and Documents relating
to the Lombard Insurrection, and to the Royal War of 1848. By Joseph
Mazzini. Charles Gilpin.
[From the Keepsake for 1851.]
THE MOTHER'S LAST SONG.
BY BARRY CORNWALL.
Sleep!--the ghostly winds are blowing;
No moon's abroad; no star is glowing;
The river is deep, and the tide is flowing
To the land where you and I are going!
We are going afar,
Beyond moon or star,
To the land where the sinless angels are!
I lost my heart to your heartless sire;
('Twas melted away by his looks of fire;)
Forgot my God, and my father's ire,
All for the sake of a man's desire:--
But now we'll go
Where the waters flow,
And make us a bed where none shall know.
The world is cruel; the world's untrue;
Our foes are many; our friends are few;
No work, no bread, however we sue!
What is there left for us to do--
But fly--fly,
From the cruel sky,
And hide in the deepest deeps--and die!
[From the Ladies' Companion.]
A DRIVE ABOUT MY NEIGHBORHOOD IN 1850.
BY MARY RUSSEL MITFORD.
If there be one thing more than another in the nice balance of tastes
and prejudices (for I do not speak here of principles) which incline us
now to the elegance of Charles, now to the strength of Cromwell,--which
disgust us alternately with the license of the Cavaliers and the
fanaticism of the Roundheads; it would be the melancholy ruin of
cast-down castles and plundered shrines, that meet our eyes all over our
fair land, and nowhere in greater profusion than in this district, lying
as it does in the very midst of some of the most celebrated battles of
the Civil Wars. To say nothing of the siege of Reading, which more even
than the vandalism of the Reformation completed the destruction of that
noble abbey, the third in rank and size in England, with its magnificent
church, its cloisters, and its halls, covering thirty acres of
buildings,--and such buildings! within the outer courts;--to say nothing
of that most reckless barbarity just at our door--we in our little
village of Aberleigh lie between Basting-House to the south, whose
desperately defended walls offer little more now than a mere site,--and
Donnington to the west, where the ruined Gatehouse upon the hill alone
remains of that strong fortress, which overlooked the well-contested
field of Newbury,--and Chalgrove to the north, where the reaper, as he
binds his sheaf, still pauses to tell you the very place where Hampden
fell; every spot has a history! Look at a wooden spire, and your
companion shakes his head, and says that it has been so ever since the
Cavaliers were blown up in the church tower! Ask the history of a
crumbling wall, and the answer is pretty sure to be, Cromwell! That his
Highness the Lord Protector did leave what an accomplished friend of
mine calls "his peculiar impressions" upon a great many places in our
neighborhood is pretty certain; on so many, that there is no actual or
authentic catalogue of all; and in some cases there is nothing but
general tradition, and the nature of the "impressions" in question, to
vouch for the fact of their destruction at that period.
Amongst these, one of the edifices that must have been best worth
preserving, and is even now most interesting to see, is the grand old
castellated mansion, which in the reign of Elizabeth belonged to one of
her favorite courtiers, and was known as Master Comptroller's House, at
Grays.
The very road to it is singularly interesting. Passing through the town,
which increases in growth every day, until one wonders when and where it
will stop, and looking with ever fresh admiration at the beautiful
lacework window of the old Friary, which I long to see preserved in the
fitliest manner, by forming again the chief ornament of a church, and
then driving under the arch of the Great Western Railway, and feeling
the strange vibration of some monster train passing over our heads,--a
proceeding which never fails to make my pony show off his choicest airs
and graces, pricking up his pretty ears, tossing his slender head,
dancing upon four feet, and sometimes rearing upon two,--we arrive at
the long, low, picturesque old bridge, the oldest of all the bridges
that cross the Thames, so narrow that no two vehicles can pass at once,
and that over every pier triangular spaces have been devised for the
safety of foot passengers. On the centre arch is a fisherman's hut,
occupying the place once filled by a friar's cell, and covering a still
existing chapel, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, now put to secular
uses--a dairy or a cellar.
A little way down the river is one of the beautiful islands of the
Thames, now a smooth and verdant meadow, edged round with old willow
pollards calmly reflected in the bright, clear waters, but giving back
in the twelfth century a far different scene. Here was fought a wager of
battle between Robert de Montford, appellant, and Henry de Essex,
hereditary Standard-bearer of the kings of England, defendant, by
command, and in the presence of Henry the Second. The story is told very
minutely and graphically by Stowe. Robert de Montford at length struck
down his adversary, "who fell," says the old historian, "after receiving
many wounds; and the King, at the request of several noblemen, his
relations, gave permission to the monks to inter the body, commanding
that no further violence should be offered to it. The monks took up the
vanquished knight, and carried him into the abbey, where he revived.
When he recovered from his wounds, he was received into the community,
and assumed the habit of the order, his lands being forfeited to the
King." I have always thought that this story would afford excellent
scope to some great novelist, who might give a fair and accurate picture
of monastic life, and, indeed, of the monastic orders, as landlords,
neighbors, teachers, priests, without any mixture of controversial
theology, or inventing any predecessors of Luther or Wicliffe. How we
should have liked to have heard all about "The Monastery," about the
"Abbot" and Father Eustace, untroubled by Henry Warden or John Knox!
From the moment that they appear, our comfort in the book vanishes, just
as completely as that of the good easy Abbot Boniface himself. There we
are in the middle of vexed questions, with the beautiful pile of Melrose
threatening every moment to fall about our ears!
Our business now, however, is to get over the bridge, which after the
excitement of one dispute with a pugnacious carrier, and another with a
saucy groom, whose caracoling horse had well nigh leaped over the
parapets on either side; after some backing of other carriages, and some
danger of being forced back to our own, we at last achieve, and enter
unscathed, the pleasant village of Caversham.
To the left, through a highly ornamented lodge, lies the road to the
ancient seat of the Blounts, another house made famous by Pope, where
the fair ladies of his love, the sisters Martha and Teresa, lived and
died. A fine old place it is; and a picturesque road leads to it,
winding through a tract called the Warren, between the high
chalk-cliffs, clothed with trees of all varieties, that for so many
miles fence in the northern side of the Thames, and the lordly river
itself, now concealed by tall elms, now open and shining in the full
light of the summer sun. There is not such a flower bank in Oxfordshire
as Caversham Warren.
Our way, however, leads straight on. A few miles further, and a turn to
the right conducts us to one of the grand old village churches, which
give so much of character to English landscape. A large and beautiful
pile it is. The tower half clothed with ivy, standing with its charming
vicarage and its pretty vicarage-garden on a high eminence, overhanging
one of the finest bends of the great river. A woody lane leads from the
church to the bottom of the chalk-cliff, one side of which stands out
from the road below, like a promontory, surmounted by the laurel hedges
and flowery arbors of the vicarage-garden, and crested by a noble cedar
of Lebanon. This is Shiplake church, famed far and near for its
magnificent oak carving, and the rich painted glass of its windows,
collected, long before such adornments were fashionable, by the fine
taste of the late vicar, and therefore filled with the very choicest
specimens of mediaeval art, chiefly obtained from the remains of the
celebrated Abbey of St. Bertin, near St. Omers, sacked during the first
French Revolution. In this church Alfred Tennyson was married. Blessings
be upon him! I never saw the great Poet in my life, but thousands who
never may have seen him either, but who owe to his poetry the purest and
richest intellectual enjoyment, will echo and re-echo the benison.
A little way farther, and a turn to the left leads to another spot
consecrated by genius,--Woodcot, where Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton passed
the earlier years of his married life, and wrote several of his most
powerful novels. I have always thought that the scenery of Paul Clifford
caught some of its tone from that wild and beautiful country, for wild
and beautiful it is. The terrace in the grounds commands a most
extensive prospect; and beneath a clump of trees on the common behind
the house, is the only spot where on a clear day Windsor may be seen on
one side, and Oxford on the other,--looking almost like the domes, and
towers, and pinnacles that sometimes appear in the clouds--a fairy
picture that the next breeze may waft away! This beautiful residence
stands so high, that one of its former possessors, Admiral Fraser
(grandfather to that dear friend of mine who is the present owner),
could discover Woodcot Clump from the mast of his own ship at Spithead,
a distance of sixty miles.
Wyfold's Court, another pretty place a little farther on, which also
belonged once to a most dear friend, possesses the finest Wych-elms in
England. Artists come from far and near to paint these stately trees,
whose down-dropping branches and magnificent height are at once so
graceful and so rich. They are said always to indicate ecclesiastical
possession, but no trace of such dependency is to be found in the
title-deeds, or in the tenure by which in feudal times the lands were
held,--that of presenting a rose to the King, should he pass by a
certain road on a May-day.
And now we approach Rotherfield Grays,--its bowery lanes, its wild
rugged commons, and its vast beech woods, from the edge of which
projects every here and there a huge cherry-tree, looking, in the
blossoming springtime, as if carved in ivory, so exquisite is the
whiteness, casting upon the ferny-turf underneath showers of snowy
petals that blanch the very ground, and diffusing around an almond-like
odor, that mingles with the springing thyme and the flowering gorse, and
loads the very air with heavy balm.
Exquisite is the pleasantness of these beech woods, where the light is
green from the silky verdure of the young leaves, and where the mossy
wood-paths are embroidered with thousands of flowers, from the earliest
violet and primrose, the wood-anemone, the wood-sorrel, the daffodil,
and the wild hyacinth of spring, to the wood-vetch, the woodroof, the
campanulas, and the orchises of summer;--for all the English orchises
are here: that which so curiously imitates the dead oak leaf, that again
which imitates the human figure; the commonest but most pretty bee
orchis, and the parallel ones which are called after the spider, the
frog, and the fly. Strange freak of nature this, in a lower order of
creation, to mimic her own handyworks in a higher!--to mimic even our
human mimicry!--for that which is called the man orchis is most like the
imitation of a human figure that a child might cut from colored paper.
Strange, strange mimicry! but full of variety, full of beauty, full of
odor. Of all the fragrant blossoms that haunt the woods, I know none so
exquisite as that night-scented orchis which is called indifferently,
the butterfly or the lily of the valley. Another glory of these woods,
an autumnal glory, is the whole fungus tribe, various and innumerable as
the mosses; from the sober drab-colored fungi, spotted with white, which
so much resemble a sea-egg, to those whose deep and gorgeous hues would
shame the tinting of an Indian shell. Truffles, too, are found beneath
the earth; and above it are deposited huge masses of the strange
compound called in modern geological phrase Agglomerate. Flint and
coral, and gravel, and attrited pebbles enter into the combination of
this extraordinary natural conglomeration, which no steel, however
hardened, can separate, and which seems to have been imitated very
successfully by the old builders in their cements and the substances
used in the filling up of their grandest structures, as may be seen in
the layers which unite the enormous slabs of granite in the Roman walls
at Silchester, as well as in the works of the old monkish architects at
Reading Abbey. Another beauty of this country is to be found in the
fields,--now of the deep-red clover, with its shining crimson tops, now
of the gay and brilliant saintfoin (the holy hay), the bright pink of
whose flowery spikes gives to the ground the look of a bed of roses.
And now we reach the gate that admits us down a steep descent to the
Rectory-house, a large substantial mansion, covered with Banksia roses,
and finely placed upon a natural terrace,--a fertile valley below, and
its own woods and orchard-trees above.
My friend the rector, raciest of men, is an Oxford divine of the old
school; a ripe scholar; one who has travelled wide and far, and is
learned in the tongues, the manners, and the literature of many nations;
but who is himself English to the backbone in person, thought, and
feeling. Orthodox is he, no doubt. Nowhere are church and schools, and
parish visitings, better cared for; but he has a knack of attending also
to the creature comforts of all about him, of calling beef and blankets
in aid of his precepts, which has a wonderful effect in promoting their
efficacy. Mansion and man are large alike, and alike overflowing with
hospitality and kindliness. His original and poignant conversation is so
joyous and good-humored, the making every body happy is so evidently his
predominant taste, that the pungency only adds to the flavor of his
talk, and never casts a moment's shade over its sunny heartiness.
Right opposite the Rectory terrace, framed like a picture by the rarest
and stateliest trees, stands the object of my pilgrimage, Grays' Court,
a comparatively modern house, erected amongst the remains of a vast old
castellated mansion, belonging first to the noble family of Gray, who
gave their name not merely to the manor, but to the district; then to
the house of Knollys; and latterly to the Stapletons, two venerable
ladies of that name being its present possessors.
All my life I had heard of Grays' Court; of the rich yet wild country in
which it is placed; of the park so finely undulated, and so profusely
covered by magnificent timber; of the huge old towers which seem to
guard and sentinel the present house; of the far extended walls, whose
foundations may yet be traced, in dry seasons, among the turf of the
lawn; of the traditions which assign the demolition of those ancient
walls to the wars of the Commonwealth; and of the strange absence of all
documentary evidence upon the subject.
Another cause for my strong desire to see this interesting place, is to
be found in its association with one of those historical personages in
whom I have always taken the warmest interest. Lord Essex (whose mother
was the famous Lettice Knollys, who had had for her second husband
another of Queen Elizabeth's favorites, Robert Dudley, Earl of
Leicester), when confined in London, a prey to the tyranny of Elizabeth,
petitioned, in one of those eloquent letters to the Virgin Queen which
will always remain amongst the earliest and finest specimens of English
prose, to be allowed to repair, for the benefit of his health, "to
Master Comptroller's house at Grays." Ah! we can fancy, when looking
over this lovely valley, with its woods, its verdure, its sweep of
hills, its feeling of the near river, we can well fancy how the
poet-heart of the great Earl must have longed to leave the trial, the
turmoil, the jangling, the treachery, the weary fears, the bitter
humiliations of his London captivity, and to taste once more the sweet
air, the pleasant sights, the calmness and the quiet of the country.
Hope and comfort must have come with the thought. One of the prettiest
pictures that I know, is an extract from a contemporary letter, in the
first volume of Mr. Craik's most interesting book, the "Romance of the
Peerage," telling of the Earl and Countess, during one of the daily
visits that she was at one time permitted to pay him when he was a
prisoner in Essex House, walking together in the garden, "now he, now
she, reading one to the other." The whole taste and feeling of the man,
the daily habit of his life, is shown in this little circumstance. And
this is the brave soldier who, when examined before the Privy Council, a
council composed of open enemies and treacherous friends, had been kept
nearly all the day kneeling at the bottom of the table. Tyranny drove
him into madness, and then exacted the full penalty of the wild acts
which that madness prompted. But Essex was a man in advance of his age;
the companion as well as the patron of poets; the protector of papist
and puritan; the fearless asserter of liberty of conscience! He deserved
a truer friend than Bacon, a more merciful judge than Elizabeth.
To the house of Knollys belongs another interesting association, that
strangest of genealogical romances, the great case of the Banbury
peerage. The cause was decided (if decided it can be called even now) by
evidence found in the parish register of Rotherfield Grays.
The place has yet another attraction in its difficulty of access; the
excellent ladies of the Court admitting few beyond their own immediate
connections and nearest friends. One class, to be sure, finds its way
there as if by instinct--the poor, who, as the birds of the air detect
the grain under the surface in the newly sown ground, are sure to find
out the soil where charity lies germinating. Few excepting these
constant visitors are admitted. But, besides the powerful introduction
of our mutual friend the rector, a nephew of theirs, and his most sweet
and interesting wife, had for some time inhabited the house which had
been the home of my own youth, so that my name was not strange to them;
and they had the kindness to allow me to walk over their beautiful
grounds and gardens, to see their charming Swiss dairy, with its marbles
and its china, and, above all, to satisfy my curiosity by looking over
the towers which still remain of the old castle,--piles whose prodigious
thickness of wall and distance from each other give token of the immense
extent and importance of the place. It is said to have been built round
two courts. Alnwick and Windsor rose to my thoughts as I contemplated
these gigantic remains, and calculated the space that the original
edifice must have covered. One of these towers is still occupied by the
well of the castle, a well three hundred feet deep, which supplies the
family with water. It will give some idea of the scale of the old
mansion, to say that the wheel by which the water is raised, is
twenty-five feet in diameter. Two donkeys are employed in the operation.
One donkey suffices for the parallel but much smaller well at
Carisbrook, where the animal is so accustomed to be put in for the mere
purpose of exhibiting the way in which the water is raised to the
visitors who go to look at the poor king's last prison, that he just
makes the one turn necessary to show the working of the machine, and
then stops of his own accord. The donkeys at Grays, kept for use and not
for show, have not had a similar opportunity of displaying their
sagacity.
One cannot look at the place without a feeling of adaptedness. It is the
very spot for a stronghold of the Cavaliers: a spot where Lovelace and
Montrose might each have fought and each have sung, defending it to the
last loaf of bread and the last charge of powder, and yielding at last
to the irresistible force of Cromwell's cannonade.
[From the Keepsake for 1851.]
STANZAS.
Come not, when I am dead,
To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave,
To trample round my fallen head,
And vex the unhappy dust thou wouldst not save.
There let the wind sweep, and the plover cry;
But go thou by.
Child, if it were thine error or thy crime
I care no longer, being all unblest;
Wed whom thou wilt; but I am sick of time,
And I desire to rest.
Pass on, weak heart, and leave me where I lie.
Go by--go by!
ALFRED TENNYSON.
[From Blackwood's Magazine.]
MY NOVEL:
OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE.
BY PISISTRATUS CAXTON.
_Continued from page 120._
BOOK II.--CHAPTER VII.
In spite of all his Machiavellian wisdom, Dr. Riccabocca had been foiled
in his attempt to seduce Leonard Fairfield into his service, even though
he succeeded in partially winning over the widow to his views. For to
her he represented the worldly advantages of the thing. Lenny would
learn to be fit for more than a day-laborer; he would learn gardening,
in all its branches--rise some day to be a head gardener. "And," said
Riccabocca, "I will take care of his book learning, and teach him
whatever he has a head for."
"He has a head for every thing," said the widow.
"Then," said the wise man, "every thing shall go into it."
The widow was certainly dazzled; for, as we have seen, she highly prized
scholarly distinction, and she knew that the parson looked upon
Riccabocca as a wondrous learned man. But still, Riccabocca was said to
be a Papist, and suspected to be a conjuror. Her scruples on both these
points, the Italian, who was an adept in the art of talking over the
fair sex, would no doubt have dissipated, if there had been any use in
it; but Lenny put a dead stop to all negotiations. He had taken a mortal
dislike to Riccabocca; he was very much frightened by him--and the
spectacles, the pipe, the cloak, the long hair, and the red umbrella;
and said so sturdily, in reply to every overture, "Please, sir, I'd
rather not; I'd rather stay along with mother"--that Riccabocca was
forced to suspend all further experiments in his Machiavellian
diplomacy. He was not at all cast down, however, by his first failure;
on the contrary, he was one of those men whom opposition stimulates. And
what before had been but a suggestion of prudence, became an object of
desire. Plenty of other lads might no doubt be had, on as reasonable
terms as Lenny Fairfield; but the moment Lenny presumed to baffle the
Italian's designs upon him, the special acquisition of Lenny became of
paramount importance in the eyes of Signor Riccabocca.
Jackeymo, however, lost all his interest in the traps, snares, and gins
which his master proposed to lay for Leonard Fairfield, in the more
immediate surprise that awaited him on learning that Dr. Riccabocca had
accepted an invitation to pass a few days at the Hall.
"There will be no one there but the family," said Riccabocca. "Poor
Giacomo, a little chat in the servants' hall will do you good: and the
squire's beef is more nourishing, after all, than the sticklebacks and
minnows. It will lengthen your life."
"The Padrone jests," said Jackeymo, statelily, "as if any one could
starve in his service."
"Um," said Riccabocca. "At least, faithful friend, you have tried that
experiment as far as human nature will permit;" and he extended his hand
to his fellow-exile with that familiarity which exists between servant
and master in the usages of the continent. Jackeymo bent low, and a tear
fell upon the hand he kissed.
"_Cospetto!_" said Dr. Riccabocca, "a thousand mock pearls do not make
up the cost of a single true one! The tears of women, we know their
worth; but the tear of an honest man--fie, Giacomo!--at least I can
never repay you this! Go and see to our wardrobe."
So far as his master's wardrobe was concerned, that order was pleasing
to Jackeymo; for the Doctor had in his drawers suits which Jackeymo
pronounced to be as good as new, though many a long year had passed
since they left the tailor's hands. But when Jackeymo came to examine
the state of his own clothing department, his face grew considerably
longer. It was not that he was without other clothes than those on his
back--quantity was there, but the quality! Mournfully he gazed on two
suits, complete in the three separate members of which man's raiments
are composed: the one suit extended at length upon his bed, like a
veteran stretched by pious hands after death; the other brought
piecemeal to the invidious light--the _torso_ placed upon a chair, the
limbs dangling down from Jackeymo's melancholy arm. No bodies long
exposed at the Morgue could evince less sign of resuscitation than those
respectable defuncts. For, indeed, Jackeymo had been less thrifty of his
apparel--more _profusus sui_--than his master. In the earliest days of
their exile, he preserved the decorous habit of dressing for dinner--it
was a respect due to the Padrone--and that habit had lasted till the two
habits on which it necessarily depended had evinced the first symptoms
of decay; then the evening clothes had been taken into morning wear, in
which hard service they had breathed their last.
The Doctor, notwithstanding his general philosophical abstraction from
such household details, had more than once said, rather in pity to
Jackeymo, than with an eye to that respectability which the costume of
the servant reflects on the dignity of the master, "Giacomo, thou
wantest clothes; fit thyself out of mine!"
And Jackeymo had bowed his gratitude, as if the donation had been
accepted; but the fact was, that that same fitting out was easier said
than done. For though--thanks to an existence mainly upon sticklebacks
and minnows--both Jackeymo and Riccabocca at that state which the
longevity of misers proves to be most healthful to the human frame,
viz., skin and bone--yet, the bones contained in the skin of Riccabocca
all took longitudinal directions; while those in the skin of Jackeymo
spread out latitudinally. And you might as well have made the bark of a
Lombardy poplar serve for the trunk of some dwarfed and pollarded oak,
in whose hollow the Babes of the Wood could have slept at their ease, as
have fitted out Jackeymo from the garb of Riccabocca. Moreover, if the
skill of the tailor could have accomplished that undertaking, the
faithful Jackeymo would never have had the heart to avail himself of the
generosity of his master. He had a sort of religious sentiment too,
about those vestments of the Padrone. The ancients, we know, when
escaping from shipwreck, suspended in the votive temple the garments in
which they had struggled through the wave. Jackeymo looked on those
relics of the past with a kindred superstition. "This coat the Padrone
wore on such an occasion. I remember the very evening the Padrone last
put on those pantaloons!" And coat and pantaloons were tenderly dusted,
and carefully restored to their sacred rest.
But now, after all, what was to be done? Jackeymo was much too proud to
exhibit his person, to the eyes of the Squire's butler, in habiliments
discreditable to himself and the Padrone. In the midst of his perplexity
the bell rang, and he went down into the parlor.
Riccabocca was standing on the hearth, under his symbolical
representation of the "Patriae Exul."
"Giacomo," quoth he, "I have been thinking that thou hast never done
what I told thee, and fitted thyself out from my superfluities. But we
are going now into the great world; visiting once begun, Heaven knows
where it may stop! Go to the nearest town and get thyself clothes.
Things are dear in England. Will this suffice?" And Riccabocca extended
a L5 note.
Jackeymo, we have seen, was more familiar with his master than we formal
English permit our domestics to be with us. But in his familiarity he
was usually respectful. This time, however, respect deserted him.
"The Padrone is mad!" he exclaimed; "he would fling away his whole
fortune if I would let him. Five pounds English, or a hundred and
twenty-six pounds Milanese![28] Santa Maria! Unnatural Father! And what
is to become of the poor Signorina? Is this the way you are to marry her
in the foreign land?"
"Giacomo," said Riccabocca, bowing his head to the storm, "the Signorina
to-morrow; to-day, the honor of the house. Thy small-clothes, Giacomo.
Miserable man, thy small-clothes!"
"It is just," said Jackeymo, recovering himself, and with humility; "and
the Padrone does right to blame me, but not in so cruel a way. It is
just--the Padrone lodges and boards me, and gives me handsome wages, and
he has a right to expect that I should not go in this figure."
"For the board and the lodgment, good," said Riccabocca. "For the
handsome wages, they are the visions of thy fancy!"
"They are no such thing," said Jackeymo, "they are only in arrear. As if
the Padrone could not pay them some day or other--as if I was demeaning
myself by serving a master who did not intend to pay his servants! And
can't I wait? Have I not my savings, too? But be cheered, be cheered;
you shall be contented with me. I have two beautiful suits still. I was
arranging them when you rang for me. You shall see, you shall see."
And Jackeymo hurried from the room, hurried back into his own chamber,
unlocked a little trunk which he kept at his bed head, tossed out a
variety of small articles, and from the deepest depth extracted a
leathern purse. He emptied the contents on the bed. They were chiefly
Italian coins, some five-franc pieces, a silver medallion inclosing a
little image of his patron saint--San Giacomo--one solid English guinea,
and two or three pounds' worth in English silver. Jackeymo put back the
foreign coins, saying prudently, "One will lose on them here;" he seized
the English coins and counted them out. "But are you enough, you
rascals?" quoth he angrily, giving them a good shake. His eye caught
sight of the medallion--he paused; and after eyeing the tiny
representation of the saint with great deliberation, he added, in a
sentence which he must have picked up from the proverbial aphorisms of
his master:
"What's the difference between the enemy who does not hurt me, and the
friend who does not serve me? _Monsignore San Giacomo_, my patron saint,
you are of very little use to me in the leathern bag. But if you help me
to get into a new pair of small-clothes on this important occasion, you
will be a friend indeed. _Alla bisogna, Monsignore_." Then, gravely
kissing the medallion, he thrust it into one pocket, the coins into the
other, made up a bundle of the two defunct suits, and, muttering to
himself, "Beast, miser that I am, to disgrace the Padrone, with all
these savings in his service!" ran down stairs into his pantry, caught
up his hat and stick, and in a few moments more was seen trudging off to
the neighboring town of L----.
Apparently the poor Italian succeeded, for he came back that evening in
time to prepare the thin gruel which made his master's supper, with a
suit of black--a little threadbare, but still highly respectable--two
shirt fronts, and two white cravats. But, out of all this finery,
Jackeymo held the small-clothes in especial veneration; for as they had
cost exactly what the medallion had sold for, so it seemed to him that
San Giacomo had heard his prayer in that quarter to which he had more
exclusively directed the saint's attention. The other habiliments came
to him in the merely human process of sale and barter; the small-clothes
were the personal gratuity of San Giacomo!