BLACKWOOD’S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

BLACKWOOD’S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCLXXXVIII. FEBRUARY, 1848. Vol. LXIII.

EDINBURGH:

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET;

AND 37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

CONTENTS.

THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE.

(Secret History of the Court and Government of Russia, under the Emperors Alexander and Nicholas. By H. SCHNITZLER. Two vols. Bentley: London.)

Russia is the most extraordinary country on the globe, in the four most important particulars of empire,—its history, its extent, its population, and its power.

It has for Europe another interest,—the interest of alarm, the evidence of an ambition which has existed for a hundred and fifty years, and has never paused; an increase of territory which has never suffered the slightest casualty of fortune; the most complete security against the retaliation of European war; and a government at once despotic and popular; exhibiting the most boundless authority in the sovereign, and the most boundless submission in the people; a mixture of habitual obedience, and divine homage: the reverence to a monarch, with almost the prostration to a divinity.

Its history has another superb anomaly: Russia gives the most memorable instance in human annals, of the powers which lie within the mind of individual man. Peter the Great was not the restorer, or the reformer of Russia; he was its moral creator. He found it, not as Augustus found Rome, according to the famous adage, “brick, and left it marble:” he found it a living swamp, and left it covered with the fertility of laws, energy, and knowledge: he found it Asiatic, and left it European: he removed it as far from Scythia, as if he had placed the diameter of the globe between: he found it not brick, but mire, and he transformed a region of huts into the magnificence of empire.

Russia first appears in European history in the middle of the ninth century. Its climate and its soil had till then retained it in primitive barbarism. The sullenness of its winter had prevented invasion by civilised nations, and the nature of its soil, one immense plain, had given full scope to the roving habits of its half famished tribes. The great invasions which broke down the Roman empire, had drained away the population from the north, and left nothing but remnants of clans behind. Russia had no Sea, by which she might send her bold savages to plunder or to trade with Southern and Western Europe. And, while the man of Scandinavia was subduing kingdoms, or carrying back spoil to his northern crags and lakes, the Russian remained, like the bears of his forest, in his cavern during the long winter of his country; and even when the summer came, was still but a melancholy savage, living like the bear upon the roots and fruits of his ungenial soil.

It was to one of those Normans, who, instead of steering his bark towards the opulence of the south, turned his dreary adventure to the north, that Russia owed her first connexion with intelligent mankind. The people of Novgorod, a people of traders, finding themselves overpowered by their barbarian neighbours, solicited the aid of Ruric, a Baltic chieftain, and, of course, a pirate and a robber. The name of the Norman had earned old renown in the north. Ruric came, rescued the city, but paid himself by the seizure of the surrounding territory, and founded a kingdom, which he transmitted to his descendants, and which lasted until the middle of the sixteenth century.

In the subsequent reign we see the effect of the northern pupillage; and an expedition, in the style of the Baltic exploits, was sent to plunder Constantinople. This expedition consisted of two thousand canoes, with eighty thousand men on board. The expedition was defeated, for the Greeks had not yet sunk into the degeneracy of later times. They fought stoutly for their capital, and roasted the pirates in their own canoes, by showers of the famous “Greek fire.”

Those invasions, however, were tempting to the idleness and poverty, or to the avarice and ambition of the Russians; and Constantinople continued to be the great object of cupidity and assault, for three hundred years. But the city of Constantine was destined to fall to a mightier conqueror.

Still, the northern barbarian had now learned the road to Greece, and the intercourse was mutually beneficial. Greece found daring allies in her old plunderers, and in the eleventh century she gave the Grand-duke Vladimir a wife, in the person of Anna, sister of the emperor Basil II; a gift made more important by its being accompanied by his conversion to Christianity.

A settled succession is the great secret of royal peace: but among those bold riders of the desert, nothing was ever settled, save by the sword; and the first act of all the sons, on the decease of their father, was, to slaughter each other; until the contest was settled in their graves, and the last survivor quietly ascended the throne.

But war, on a mightier scale than the Russian Steppes had ever witnessed, was now rolling over Central Asia. The cavalry of Genghiz Khan, which came, not in squadrons, but in nations, and charged, not like troops, but like thunderclouds, began to pour down upon the valley of the Wolga. Yet the conquest of Russia was not to be added to the triumphs of the great Tartar chieftain; a mightier conqueror stopped him on his way, and the Tartar died.

His son Toushi, lit the beginning of the thirteenth century, burst over the frontier at the head of half a million of horsemen. The Russian princes, hastily making up their quarrels, advanced to meet the invader; but their army was instantly trampled down, and, before the middle of the century, all the provinces, and all the cities of Russia, were the prey of the men of the wilderness. Novgorod alone escaped.

The history of this great city would be highly interesting, if it were possible now to recover its details. It was the chief depot of the northern Asiatic commerce with Europe; it had a government, laws, and privileges of its own, with which it suffered not even the Khan or the Tartars to interfere. Its population amounted to four hundred thousand—then nearly equal to the population of a kingdom. In the thirteenth century it connected itself still more effectively with European commerce, by becoming a member of the Hanseatic League; and the wonder and pride of the Russians were expressed in the well-known half-profane proverb, “Who can resist God, and the great Novgorod?”

There is always something almost approaching to picturesque grandeur in the triumphs of barbarism. The Turk, until he was fool enough to throw away the turban, was the most showy personage in the world. The Arabs, under Mahomet, were the most stately of warriors, and the Spanish Moors threw all the pomp, and even all the romance, of Europe into the shade. Even the chiefs of the “Golden Horde” seemed to have had as picturesque a conception of supremacy as the Saracen. Their only city was a vast camp, in the plains between the Caspian and the Wolga; and while they left the provinces in the hands of the native princes, and enjoyed themselves in the manlier sports of hunting through the plains and mountains, they commanded that every vassal prince should attend at the imperial tent to receive permission to reign, or perhaps to live; and that, even when they sent their Tartar collectors to receive the tribute, the Russian princes should lead the Tartar’s horse by the bridle, and give him a feed of oats out of their cap of state!

But another of those sweeping devastators, one of those gigantic executioners, who seem to have been sent from time to time to punish the horrible profligacies of Asia, now rose upon the north. Timour Khan, the Tamerlane of European story, the Invincible, the Lord of the Tartar World, rushed with his countless troops upon the sovereignties of Western Asia. This universal conqueror crushed the Tartar dynasty of Russia, and then burst away, like an inundation, to overwhelm other lands. But the native Russians again made head against their Tartar masters, and a century and a half of sanguinary warfare followed, with various fortunes, and without any other result than blood.

Without touching on topics exclusively religious, it becomes a matter of high interest to mark the vengeances, furies, and massacres, of heathenism, in every age of the world. Yet while we believe, and have such resistless reason to believe, in the Providential government, what grounds can be discovered for this sufferance of perpetual horrors? For this we have one solution, and but one: stern as the inflictions are, may they not be in mercy? may not the struggles of barbarian life be permitted, simply to retard the headlong course of barbarian corruption? may there not be excesses of wickedness, extremes of national vice, an accumulation of offences against the laws of moral nature, (which are the original laws of Heaven,) actually incompatible with the Divine mercy? Nothing can be clearer to the understanding, than that there are limits which the Divine Being has prescribed to his endurance of the guilt of man, and prescribed doubtless for the highest objects of general mercy; as there are offences which, by human laws, are incompatible with the existence of society.

The crimes of the world before the flood were evidently of an intense iniquity, which precluded the possibility of purification; and thus it became necessary to extinguish a race, whose continued existence could only have corrupted every future generation of mankind.

War, savage feuds, famines, and pestilences, may have been only Divine expedients to save the world from another accumulation of intolerable iniquity, by depriving nations of the power of utter self-destruction, by thinning their numbers, by compelling them to feel the miseries of mutual aggression, and even by reducing them to that degree of poverty which supplied the most effective antidote to their total corruption.

Still, those sufferings were punishments, but punishments fully earned by their fierce passions, savage propensities, remorseless cruelties, and general disobedience of that natural law of virtue, which, earlier even than Judaism or Christianity, the Eternal had implanted in the heart of his creatures.

In the fifteenth century Russia began to assume a form. Ivan III. broke off the vassalage of Russia to the “Golden Horde.” He had married Sophia, the niece of the Greek emperor, to which we may attribute his civilisation; and he received the embassies of Germany, Venice, and Rome, at Moscow. His son, Ivan IV., took Novgorod, which he ruined, and continued to fight the Poles and Tartars until he died. His son Ivan, in the middle of the sixteenth century, was crowned by the title of Czar, formed the first standing army of Russia, named the Strelitzes, and established a code of laws. In 1598, by the death of the Czar Feodor without children, the male line of Ruric, which had held the throne for seven hundred and thirty-six years, and under fifty-six sovereigns, became extinct.

Another dynasty of remarkable distinction ascended the throne, in the beginning of the seventeenth century. Michael Romanoff, descended from the line of Ruric by the female side, was declared Czar. His son Alexis was the father of Peter the Great, who, with his brother Ivan, was placed on the throne at the decease of their father, but both under the guardianship of the Princess Sophia. But the Princess, who was the daughter of Alexis, exhibiting an intention to seize the crown for herself, a revolution took place in 1689, in which the Princess was sent to a convent. Ivan, who was imbecile in mind and body, surrendered the throne, and Peter became sole sovereign of Russia.

The accession of Peter began the last and greatest period of Russian history. Though a man of fierce passions and barbarian habits, he had formed a high conception of the value of European arts, chiefly through an intelligent Genevese, Lefort, who had been his tutor.

The first object of the young emperor was to form an army; his next was to construct a fleet. But both operations were too slow for his rapidity of conception; and, in 1697, he travelled to Holland and England for the purpose of learning the art of ship-building. He was forced to return to Russia after an absence of two years, by the revolt of the Strelitzes in favour of the Princess Sophia. The Strelitzes wore disbanded and slaughtered, and Peter felt himself a monarch for the first time.

The cession of Azof by the Turks, at the peace of Carlowitz in 1699, gave him a port on the Black Sea. But the Baltic acted on him like a spell; and, to obtain an influence on its shores, he hazarded the ruin of his throne.

Sweden, governed by Charles XII., was then the first military power of the north. The fame of Gustavus Adolphus in the German wars, had given the Swedes the example and the renown of their great king; and Charles, bold, reckless, and half lunatic, despising the feebleness of Russia, had turned his arms against Denmark and Poland. But the junction of Russia with the “Northern League” only gave him a new triumph. He fell upon the Russian army, and broke it up on the memorable field of Narva, in 1700.

Peter still proceeded with his original vigour. St Petersburg was founded in 1703. The war was prosecuted for six years, until the Russian troops obtained a degree of discipline which enabled them to meet the Swedes on equal terms. In 1708, Charles was defeated in the memorable battle of Pultowa. His army was utterly ruined, and himself forced to take refuge in Turkey. Peter was now at the head of northern power. Frederic Augustus was placed on the throne of Poland by the arms of Russia, and from this period Poland was under Russian influence.

Peter now took the title of “Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias.” In 1716 he again travelled in Europe. In 1723 he obtained the provinces on the Caspian, by an attack on Persia. But his vigorous, ambitious, and singularly successful career was now come to a close. The death of a Russian prince is seldom attributed to the course of nature; and Peter died at the age of fifty-two, a time when the bodily powers are still undecayed, and the mental are in the highest degree of activity. The day, still recorded by the Russians with the interest due to his extraordinary career, was the 28th of January 1725. In thirty-six years he had raised Russia from obscurity to a rank with the oldest powers of Europe.

We hasten to the close of this sketch, and pass by the complicated successions from the death of Peter to the reign of the Empress Catherine.

The Russian army had made their first appearance in Germany, in consequence of a treaty with Maria Theresa; and their bravery in the “Seven Years’ War,” in the middle of the last century, established their distinction for soldiership.

Peter III. withdrew from the Austrian alliance, and concluded peace with Prussia. But his reign was not destined to be long. At once weak in intellect, and profligate in habits, he offended and alarmed his empress, by personal neglect, and by threats of sending her to a convent. Catherine, a German, and not accustomed to the submissiveness of Russian wives, formed a party against him. The people were on her side; and, what was of more importance, the Guards declared for her. An insurrection took place; the foolish Czar, after a six months’ reign, was dethroned July 1762, was sent to a prison, and within a week was no more. The Russians assigned his death to poison, to strangulation, or to some other species of atrocity. Europe talked for a while of the “Russian Tragedy!” but the emperor left no regrets behind him; and “Catherina, Princess of Anhalt Zerbst,” handsome, young, accomplished, and splendid, ascended a throne of which her subjects were proud; which collected round it the elite of Germany, its philosophers and soldiers; which the empress connected with the beaux esprits of France, and the orators and statesmen of England; and which, during her long, prosperous, and ambitious reign, united the pomp of Asia with the brilliancy and power of Europe. The shroud of the Czar was speedily forgotten, in the embroidered robe which Catherine threw over the empire.

But the greatest crime of European annals was committed in this bold and triumphant reign. Russia, Prussia, and Austria, tempted by the helplessness of Poland, formed a league to seize upon portions of its territory; and the partition of 1772 took place, to the utter astonishment of Europe, but with scarcely a remonstrance from its leading powers.

Poland had so long been contented to receive its sovereign from Russia, its religions disputes had so utterly weakened the people, its nobility were so profligate, and its peasantry were so poor, that it had lost all the sinews of national defence. It therefore fell an easy prey; and only waited, like a slave in the market, till the bargain for its sale was complete.

In 1793, a second partition was effected. In the next year, the Polish troops took up arms under the celebrated Kosciusko; but the Russians advanced on Warsaw with a force which defied all resistance. Warsaw was stormed, twenty thousand gallant men were slain in its defence, Suwarroff was master of the unfortunate capital; and, in 1795, the third and last partition extinguished the kingdom.

Having performed this terrible exploit, which was to be as terribly avenged, the career of Catherine was closed. She died suddenly in 1796.

Paul, her son, ascended the throne, which he held for five years; a mixture of the imbecility of his father, and the daring spirit of his mother. Zealous for the honour of Russia, yet capricious as the winds, he first made war upon the French Republic, and then formed a naval league to destroy the maritime supremacy of England. This measure was his ruin; England was the old ally of Russia,—France was the new enemy. The nation hated the arrogance and the atheism of France, and resolved on the overthrow of the Czar. In Russia the monarch is so far removed from his people, that he has no refuge among them in case of disaster. Paul was believed to be mad, and madness, on a despotic throne, justly startles a nation. A band of conspirators broke into his palace at midnight, strangled the master of fifty millions of men, and the nation, at morning, was in a tumult of joy.

His son, Alexander, ascended the throne amid universal acclamation. His first act was peace with England. In 1805, his troops joined the Austrian army, and bore their share in the sufferings of the campaign of Austerlitz. The French invasion of Poland, in two years after, the desperate drawn battle of Eylau, and the disaster of Friedland, led to the peace of Tilsit. Alexander then joined the Continental system of Napoleon; but this system was soon found to be so ruinous to Russian commerce, as to be intolerable. Napoleon, already marked for downfall, was rejoiced to take advantage of the Russian reluctance, and instantly marched across the Polish frontier, at the head of a French and allied army amounting to the astonishing number of five hundred thousand men.

Infatuation was now visible in every step of his career. Instead of organising Poland into a kingdom, which would have been a place of retreat in case of disaster; and, whether in disaster or victory, would have been a vast national fortification against the advance of Russia, he left it behind him; and, instead of waiting for the return of spring, commenced his campaign on the verge of winter, in the land of winter itself, and madly ran all the hazards of invading a boundless empire of which he knew nothing, of which the people were brave, united, and attached to their sovereign; and of which, if the armies had fled like deer, the elements would have fought the battle.

Napoleon was now infatuated in all things, infatuated in his diplomacy at Moscow, and infatuated in the rashness, the hurry, and the confusion of his retreat. His army perished by brigades and divisions. On the returning spring, three hundred thousand men were found buried in the snow; all his spoil was lost, his veteran troops were utterly destroyed, his fame was tarnished, and his throne was shaken.

He was followed into France by the troops of Russia and Germany. In 1814, the British army under Wellington crossed the Pyrenees, and liberated the southern provinces of France. In the same year, the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian armies marched to Paris, captured the capital, and expelled Napoleon. The battle of Waterloo, in the year after, destroyed the remnant of his legions in the field, threw him into the hands of the British government, and exiled him to St Helena, where he remained a British prisoner until he died.

Alexander died in 1825, at the age of forty-eight, and, leaving no sons, was succeeded by his brother Nicholas, the third son of Paul—Constantine having resigned his claims to the throne. We pass over, for the moment, the various events of the present imperial reign. Its policy has been constantly turned to the acquisition of territory; and that policy has been always successful. The two great objects of all Russian cabinets, since the days of Constantine, have been the possession of Turkey and the command of the Mediterranean. Either would inevitably produce a universal war; and while we deprecate so tremendous a calamity to the world, and rely on the rational and honourable qualities of the Emperor, to rescue both Russia and Europe from so desperate a struggle, we feel that it is only wise to be prepared for all the contingencies that may result from the greatest mass of power that the world has ever seen, moved by a despotic will, and that will itself subject to the common caprices of the mind of man.

The volumes to which we shall now occasionally refer, are written by an intelligent observer, who began his study of Russia by an office under her government, and who has, since that period, been occupied in acquiring additional knowledge of her habits, finances, population, and general system of administration. A Frenchman by birth, but a German by descent, he in a very considerable degree unites the descriptive dexterity of the one with the grave exactness of the other. His subject is of the first importance to European politicians, and he seems capable of giving them the material of sound conclusions.

The author commences with the reign of Alexander, and gives a just panegyric to the kindliness of his disposition, the moderation of his temper, and his sincere desire to promote the happiness of his people. Nothing but this disposition could have saved him from all the vices of ambition, profligacy, and irreligion; for his tutor was La Harpe, one of the savans of the Swiss school, a man of accomplishment and talent, but a scoffer. But the English reader should be reminded, that when men of this rank of ability are pronounced hostile to religion, their hostility was not to the principles of Christianity, but to the religion of France; to the performances of the national worship, to the burlesque miracles wrought at the tomb of the Abbé Paris, and to that whole system of human inventions and monkish follies, which was as much disbelieved in France as it was disdained in England.

In fact, the religion of the gospel had never come into their thoughts; and when they talked of revelation, they thought only of the breviary. The Empress Catherine, finding no literature in Russia, afraid, or ashamed of being known as a German, and extravagantly fond of fame, attached herself to the showy pamphleteers of France, and courted every gale of French adulation in return. She even corresponded personally with some of the French litterateurs, and was French in every thing except living in St Petersburg, and wearing the Russian diadem. She was even so much the slave of fashion as to adopt, or pretend to adopt, the fantasies in government which the French were now beginning to mingle with their fantasies in religious.

She wrote thus to Zimmerman, the author of the dreamy and dreary work on “Solitude,” “I have been attached to philosophy, because my soul has always been singularly republican. I confess that this tendency stands in strange contrast with the unlimited power of my place.”

If the quiet times of Europe had continued, and France had exhibited the undisturbed pomps of her ancient court, Alexander would probably have been a Frenchman and philosophe on the banks of the Neva; but stirring times were to give him more rational ideas, and the necessities of Russia reclaimed him from the absurdities of his education.

La Harpe himself was a man of some distinction—a Swiss, though thoroughly French and revolutionary. After leaving Russia, he became prominent, even in France, as an abettor of republican principles, and was one of the members of the Swiss Directory. La Harpe survived the Revolution, the Empire, and the Bourbons, and died in 1838.

The commencement of Alexander’s reign was singularly popular, for it began with treaties on every side. Paul, who had sent a challenge to all the sovereigns of Europe to fight him in person, had alarmed his people with the prospect of a universal war. Alexander was the universal pacificator; he made peace with England, peace with France, and a commercial treaty with Sweden. He now seemed resolved to avoid all foreign wars, to keep clear of European politics, and to devote all his thoughts to the improvement of his empire. Commencing this rational and meritorious task with zeal, he narrowed the censorship of the press, and enlarged the importation of foreign works. He broke up the system of espionage—formed a Council of State—reduced the taxes—abolished the punishment by torture—refused to make grants of peasants—constituted the Senate into a high court of justice divided into departments, in order to remedy the slowness of law proceedings—established universities and schools—allowed every subject to choose his own profession; and, as the most important and characteristic of all his reforms, allowed his nobility to sell portions of land to their serfs, with the right of personal freedom: by this last act laying the foundation of a new and free race of proprietors in Russia.

The abolition of serfdom was a great experiment, whose merits the serfs themselves scarcely appreciated, but which is absolutely necessary to any elevation of the national character. It has been always opposed by the nobles, who regard it as the actual plunder of their inheritance; but Alexander honourably exhibited his more humane and rational views on the subject, whenever the question came within his decision.

A nobleman of the highest rank had requested an estate “with its serfs,” as an imperial mark of favour. Alexander wrote to him in this style: “The peasants of Russia are for the most part slaves. I need not expatiate on the degradation, or on the misfortune of such a condition. Accordingly, I have made a vow not to increase the number; and to this end I have laid down the principle not to give away peasants as property.”

The Emperor sometimes did striking things in his private capacity. A princess of the first rank applied to him to protect her husband from his creditors, intimating that “the emperor was above the law.”

Alexander answered, “I do not wish, madam, to put myself above the law, even if I could, for in all the world I do not recognise any authority but that which comes from the law. On the contrary, I feel more than any one else the obligation of watching over its observance, and even in cases where others may be indulgent, I can only be just.”

The French war checked all those projects of improvement; and the march of his troops to the aid of Austria in 1805, commenced a series of hostilities, which, for seven years, occupied the resources of the empire, and had nearly subverted his throne. But he behaved bravely throughout the contest. When Austria was beaten and signed a treaty, Alexander refused to join in the negotiation. When Prussia, under the influence of counsels at once rash and negligent—too slow to aid Austria, and too feeble to encounter France—was preparing to resist Napoleon in 1805, Alexander, Frederic William, and his queen Louisa, made a visit by torch-light to the tomb of Frederic the Great in Potsdam; and there, on their knees, the two monarchs joined their hands over the tomb, and pledged themselves to stand by each other to the last.

When Prussia was defeated, Alexander still fought two desperate battles; and it was not until the advance of the French made him dread the rising of Poland in his rear, that he made peace in 1802.

At this peace, he was charged with bartering his principles for the extension of his dominions by the seizure of Turkey, and even of the extravagance of dividing the world with Napoleon. But these charges were never proved.

We, too, have our theory, and it is, that the fear of seeing Poland in insurrection alone compelled Alexander to submit to the treaty of Tilsit; but that he felt all the insolence of the French Emperor, in demanding the closing of the Russian ports against England; and felt the treaty as a chain, which he was determined to break on the first provocation. We think it probable that the knowledge of the “secret articles” of that treaty was conveyed from the Russian Court to England; and, without pretending to know from what direct hand it came, we believe that the seizure of the Danish fleet, which was the immediate result of that knowledge, was as gratifying to Alexander as it was to the English cabinet, notwithstanding the diplomatic wrath which it pleased him to affect on that memorable occasion.

But other times were ripening. It has been justly observed, that the Spanish war was the true origin of Napoleon’s ruin. He perished by his own perfidy. The resistance of Spain awoke the resistance of Europe. All Germany, impoverished by French plunder, and indignant at French insults, longed to rise in arms. The Russians then boldly demanded the emancipation of their commerce, and issued a relaxed tariff in 1811. British vessels then began to crowd the Russian ports. Napoleon was indignant and threatened. Alexander was offended, and remonstrated. The French Emperor instantly launched one of his fiery proclamations; declared that the House of Romanoff was undone; and, on the 24th of June 1812, threw his mighty army across the Niemen.

We pass over the events of that memorable war as universally known; but justice is not done to the Russian emperor, unless we recollect how large a portion of the liberation of Europe was due to his magnanimity. To refuse obedience to the commercial tyranny of Napoleon, where it menaced the ruin of his people, was an act of personal magnanimity, for it inevitably exposed his throne and life to the hazards of war with a universal conqueror. On the declaration of war, he determined to join his armies in the field, another act of magnanimity, which was prevented only by the remonstrance of his generals, who represented to him the obstacles which must be produced by the presence of the emperor. But, when the invasion of France was resolved on, and negotiations might require his presence, he was instantly in the camp, and was of the highest importance to the final success of the campaign. He threw vigour into the councils of the Austrian generalissimo, and, with the aid of the British ambassador, actually urged and effected the “March to Paris.”

In Paris, however, his magnanimity was unfortunate, his generosity was misplaced, his chivalric feelings had to deal with craft, and his reliance on the pledges of Napoleon ultimately cost Europe one of the bloodiest of its campaigns. A wiser policy would have given Napoleon over to the dungeon, or sent him before a military tribunal, as he had sent the unfortunate Duc d’Enghien, with not the thousandth part of the reason or the necessity, and the peace of the Continent would thus have been secured at once. But a more theatric policy prevailed. The promises of a man who had never kept a promise were taken; the stimulant of an imperial title was kept up, when he ought to have been stripped of all honours; an independent revenue was issued to him, which was sure to be expended in bribing the officials and soldiery of France; and, by the last folly of a series of generous absurdities, Napoleon was placed in the very spot which he himself would have chosen, and probably did choose, for the centre of a correspondence, between the corruption of Italy and the corruption of France.

The result was predicted by every politician of Europe, except the politicians of the Tuileries. France was speedily prepared for revolt; the army had their tricoloured cockades in their knapsacks. The Bourbons, who thought that the world was to be governed by going to mass, were forced to flee at midnight. Napoleon drove into the capital, with all the traitors of the army and the councils clinging to his wheels, cost France another “March to Paris,” the loss of another veteran army, and himself another exile, where he was sent to linger out his few wretched and humiliated years in the African Ocean.

The Holy Alliance was the first conception of Alexander on the return of peace. It died too suddenly to exhibit either its good or its evil. It has been calumniated, because it has been misunderstood. But it seems to have been a noble conception. France which laughs at every thing, laughed at the idea of ruling Europe on principles of honour. Germany, which is always wrapped in a republican doze, reprobated a project which seemed to secure the safety of thrones by establishing honour as a principle. And England, then governed by a cabinet doubtful of public feeling, and not less doubtful of foreign integrity, shrank from all junction with projects which she could not control, and with governments in which she would not confide. Thus the Holy Alliance perished. Still, the conception was noble. Its only fault was, that it was applied to men before men had become angels.

The author of the volumes now before us is evidently a republican one—of the “Movement”—one of that class who would first stimulate mankind into restlessness, and then pronounce the restlessness to be a law of nature. Metternich is of course his bugbear, and the policy of Austria is to him the policy of the “kingdom of darkness.” But, if there is no wiser maxim than “to judge of the tree by its fruits,” how much wiser has that great statesman been than all the bustling innovators of his day, and how much more substantial is that policy by which he has kept the Austrian empire in happy and grateful tranquillity, while the Continent has been convulsed around him!

No man knows better than Prince Metternich, the shallowness, and even the shabbiness, of the partisans of overthrow, their utter incapacity for rational freedom, the utter perfidy of their intentions, and the selfish villany of their objects. He knows, as every man of sense knows, that those Solons and Catos of revolution are composed of lawyers without practice, traders without business, ruined gamblers, and the whole swarm of characterless and contemptible idlers, who infest all the cities of Europe. He knows from full experience that the object of such men is, not to procure rights for the people, but to compel governments to buy their silence; that their only idea of liberty, is liberty of pillage; and that, with them, revolution is only an expedient for rapine and a license for revenge. Therefore he puts them down; he stifles their declamation by the scourge, he curbs their theories by the dungeon, he cools their political fever by banishing them from the land; and thus governing Austria for nearly the last forty years, he has kept it free from popular violence, from republican ferocity, from revolutionary bloodshed, and from the infinite wretchedness, poverty, and shame, which smites a people exposed to the swindling of political impostors.

Thus, Austria is peaceful and powerful, while Spain is shattered by conspiracy; while Portugal lives, protected from herself only under the guns of the British fleet; while Italy is committing its feeble mischiefs, and frightening its opera-hunting potentates out of their senses; while every petty province of Germany has its beer-drinking conspirators; and while the French king guards himself by bastions and batteries, and cannot take an evening’s drive without fear of the blunderbuss, or lay his head on his pillow without the chance of being wakened by the roar of insurrection. These are the “fruits of the tree;” but it is only to be lamented that the same sagacity and vigour, the same determination of character, and the same perseverance in principle, are not to be found in every cabinet of Europe. We should then hear no more of revolutions.

The life of the Russian emperor was a cloudy one. The external splendour of royalty naturally captivates the eye, but the realities of the diadem are often melancholy. It would be scarcely possible to conceive a loftier preparative for human happiness than that which surrounds the throne of the Russias. Alexander married early. A princess of Baden was chosen for him, by the irresistible will of Catherine, at a period when he himself was incapable of forming any choice. He was married at sixteen, his wife being one year younger. He never had a son, but he had two daughters, who died. And the distractions of the campaign of Moscow, which must have been a source of anxiety to any man in Russia, were naturally felt by the emperor in proportion to the immense stake which he had in the safety of the country.

For some years after the fall of Napoleon, Alexander was deeply engaged in a variety of anxious negotiations in Germany, and subsequently, he was still more deeply agitated by the failing constitution of the empress. The physicians had declared that her case was hopeless if she remained in Russia, and advised her return to her native air. But she, in the spirit of romance, replied, that the wife of the Emperor of Russia must not die but within his dominions. The Crimea was then proposed, as the most genial climate. But the emperor decided on Taganrog, a small town on the sea of Azof, but at the tremendous distance of nearly fifteen hundred miles from St Petersburg.

The present empress has been wiser, for, abandoning the romance, she spent her winter in Naples, where she seems to have recovered her health. The climate of Taganrog, though so far to the south, is unfavorable, and in winter it is exposed to the terrible winds which sweep across the desert, unobstructed from the pole. But Alexander determined to attend to her health there himself, and preceded her by some days to make preparations. A strange and singularly depressing ceremony preceded his departure. For some years he had been liable to melancholy impressions on the subject of religion. The Greek church, which differs little from the Romish, except in refusing allegiance to the bishop of Rome, abounds in formalities, some stately, and some severe. Alexander, educated under the Swiss, who could not have taught him more of Christianity than was known by a French philosophe, and having only the dangerous morals of the Russian court for his practical guide, suffered himself, when in Paris, to listen to the mystical absurdities of the well-known Madame de Krudener, and from that time became a mystic. He had the distorted dreams and the heavy reveries, and talked the unintelligible theories which the Germans talk by the fumes of their meerschaums, and propagate by the vapours of their swamps. He lost his activity of mind; and if he had lived a few years longer, he would probably have finished his career in a cell, and died, like Charles V., an idiot, in the “odour of sanctity.”

The preparation for his journey had the colouring of that superstition which already began to cloud his mind.

It was his custom, in his journeys from St Petersburg, to start from the cathedral of “Our Lady of Kasan.” But on this occasion, he gave notice to the Greek bishop, that he should require him to chant a service at four o’clock in the morning, at the monastery of St Alexander Newski, in the full assembly of ecclesiastics, at which he would be present.

On this occasion every thing took an ominous shape, in the opinion of the people. They said that the service chanted was the service for the dead, though the official report stated that it was the Te Deum. The monastery of St Alexander Newski is surrounded by the chief cemetery of St Petersburg, where various members of the reigning family, who had not worn the crown, were interred, and among them the two infant daughters of the emperor. The popular report was, that the ecclesiastics wore mourning robes; but this is contradicted, whether truly or not, by the official report, which states that they wore vestures of crimson worked with gold.

Just at dawn the emperor came alone in his calèche, not even attended by a servant. The outer gates were then carefully reclosed, the mass was said, the old prelate gave him a crucifix to accompany him on his journey, the priests once more chanted their anthem, they then conducted him to the gate, and the ceremonial closed.

But the more curious feature of the scene was to follow.

Seraphim, the old prelate, invited the emperor to his cell, where, when they were alone, he said, “I know your Majesty feels a particular interest in the Schimnik.” (These are monks who live in the interior of the convents in the deepest solitude, following strictly all the austerities prescribed to their order, and are venerated as saints.) “We for some time have had a Schimnik within the walls of the Holy Lavra. Would it be the pleasure of your majesty that he should be summoned?”—“Be it so,” was the reply, and a venerable man, with an emaciated face and figure, entered. Alexander received his blessing, and the monk asked him to visit his cell. Black cloth covered the floor, the walls were painted black, a colossal crucifix occupied a considerable portion of the cell. Benches painted black were ranged around, and the only light was given by the glimmer of a lamp, which burned night and day before the pictures of saints! When the emperor entered, the monk prostrated himself before the crucifix, and said, “Let us pray.” The three then knelt and engaged in silent prayer. The emperor whispered to the bishop, “Is this his only cell? where is his bed?” The answer was, “He sleeps upon this floor, stretched before the crucifix.”—“No, sire,” said the monk, “I have the same bed with every other man; approach, and you shall see.” He then led the emperor into a small recess, screened off from the cell, where, placed upon a table, was a black coffin, half open, containing a shroud, and surrounded by tapers. “Here is my bed,” said the monk, “a bed common to man; there, sire, we shall all rest in our last long sleep.”

The emperor gazed upon the coffin, and the monk gave him an exhortation on the crimes of the people, which, he said, had been restrained by the pestilence, and the war of 1812, but when those two plagues had passed by, had grown worse than ever.

But we must abridge this pious pantomime, which seems evidently to have been got up for the occasion, and which would have been enough to dispirit any one who had left his bed at four in the morning in the chill of a Russian September.

The emperor at length left the convent, evidently dejected and depressed by this sort of theatrical anticipation of death and burial, and drove off with his eyes filled with tears.

On his journey he was unattended. He took with him but two aides-de-camp, and his physician, Sir James Wylie, a clever Scotsman, who had been thirty years in the imperial service. The journey was rapid, and without accident, but his mind was still full of omens. A comet had appeared. “It presages misfortune,” said the emperor; “but the will of Heaven be done.”

The change of air was beneficial to the empress, who reached Taganrog after a journey of three weeks; and the emperor remained with her, paying her great attention, and constantly accompanying her in her rides and drives. The season happened to be mild, and Alexander proposed to visit the Crimea, at the suggestion of Count Woronzoff, governor of the province. This excursion, with all its agreeabilities, was evidently a trying one to a frame already shaken, and a mind harassed by its own feelings. He rode a considerable part of the journey, visited Sebastopol, inspected fortifications in all quarters, received officers, dined with governors, visited places where endemics made their haunt; ate the delicious, but dangerous fruits of the country, received Muftis and Tartar princes; in short did every thing that he ought not to have done, and finally found himself ill.

He remarked to Sir James Wylie, that his stomach was disordered, and that he had had but little sleep for several nights. The physician recommended immediate medicine, but Alexander was obstinate. “I have no confidence,” said he, “in potions; my life is in the hands of Heaven; nothing can stand against its will.” But the illness continued, and the emperor began to grow lethargic, and slept much in his carriage. With a rashness which seems to be the prevalent misfortune of sovereigns, he still persisted in defying disease, and suffered himself to be driven every where, visiting all the remarkable points of the Crimea, yet growing day by day more incapable of feeling an interest in any thing. He was at length shivering under intermittent fever, and he hurried back to the empress. On being asked by Prince Volkonski, whom he had left as the manager of his household, what was the state of his health,—“Well enough,” was the answer, “except that I have got a touch of the fever of the Crimea.” The prince entreated him to take care of his health, and not to treat it as he “would have done when he was twenty years old.” On the next day his illness had assumed a determined character, and was declared to be dangerous, and a typhus.

Unfortunately, at this period, an officer of rank arrived with details of one of those conspiracies which had been notoriously on foot for some time. His tidings ought to have been concealed: but sovereigns must hear every thing, and the tidings were communicated to the emperor. He was indignant and agitated. The empress exhibited the most unwearied kindness; but all efforts were now hopeless. On the 1st of December he sank and died.

The blow was felt by the whole empire; during the long journey of four months, from Taganrog to St Petersburg, where the body was interred in the church of St Peter and St Paul, the people crowded from every part of the adjoining country to follow the funeral; and troops, chiefs, nobles, and the multitude, gave this melancholy ceremonial all the usual pomp of imperial funeral rites, and more than the usual sincerity of national sorrow.

Europe had been so often startled by the assassination of Russian sovereigns, that the death of Alexander was attributed to conspiracy. Ivan, Peter III., and Paul I., had notoriously died by violence. It is perfectly true, that the life of Alexander was threatened, and that his death by the typhus alone saved him from at least attempted assassination. It was subsequently ascertained that his murder had been resolved on; and one of the conspirators, a furious and savage man, rushed into their meeting, exclaiming at the delay which had suffered Alexander to die a natural death, and thus deprived him of the enjoyment of shedding the imperial blood.

The origin of those conspiracies is still among the problems of history. Nothing could be less obnoxious than the personal conduct and character of Alexander. His reign exhibited none of the banishments or the bloodshed of former reigns. He was of a gentle disposition; his habits were manly; and he had shared the glory of the Russian victories. The assassinations of the former sovereigns had assignable motives, though the act must be always incapable of justification. They had perished by intrigues of the palace; but the death of Alexander was the object of a crowd of conspirators widely scattered, scarcely communicating with each other, and united only by the frenzy of revolution.

In the imperfection of the documents hitherto published, we should be strongly inclined to refer the principle of this revolutionary movement to Poland. That unhappy country had been the national sin of Russia; and though Moscow had already paid a severe price for its atonement, from Poland came that restless revenge, which seemed resolved, if it could not shake Russia, at least to imbitter the Russian supremacy.

The death of Alexander had disappointed the chief conspirators. But the conspiracy continued, and the choice of his successor revived all its determination.

The house of Romanoff had received the diadem by a species of election. Michael Romanoff, a descendant of the house of Ruric only by the female line, had been chosen by all the heads of the nation. The law of primogeniture was declared. But Peter the Great, disgusted by the vices or the imbecility of his son Alexis, had changed the law of succession, and enacted, that the sovereign should have the choice of his successor, not even limiting that choice to the royal line. Nothing is so fatal to the peace of a country as an unsettled succession; and this rash and prejudiced change produced all the confusions of Russian history from 1722 to 1797, when the Emperor Paul restored the right of primogeniture in the male line, in failure of which alone was the crown to devolve on the female line. In which case, the throne was to devolve on the princess next in relation to the deceased emperor; and, in case of her dying childless, the other princesses were to follow in the order of relationship. Alexander, in 1807, confirmed the act of Paul, and strengthened it by an additional act in 1820; stating, that the issue of marriages, authorised by the reigning emperor, and those who should themselves contract marriages, authorised by the reigning emperor, should alone possess the right of succession.

Alexander had left three brothers—the Grand-duke Constantine, born in 1779; the Grand-duke Nicholas, born in 1796; and the Grand-duke Michael, born in 1798: two of his surviving sisters had been married, one to the Grand-duke of Saxe Weimar, and the other to the King of Holland. Thus, according to the law of Russia, Constantine was the next heir to the throne.

The singular commotion which gave so melancholy a prestige of the reign of Nicholas, receives a very full explanation from this author. The Grand-duke Constantine had the countenance of a Calmuck and the manners of a Calmuck. But those were the countenance and manners of his father Paul. The other sons resembled their mother, the Princess of Wirtemberg, a woman of striking appearance and of commanding mind. Constantine was violent, passionate, and insulting; and in his viceroyalty of Poland rendered himself unpopular in the extreme. The result was, that Alexander dreaded to leave him as successor to the throne. Constantine, when scarcely beyond boyhood, had been married to one of the princesses of Saxe Cobourg, not yet fifteen. They soon quarrelled, and at the end of four years finally separated. In two years after, proposals were made to her to return. But she recollected too deeply the vexations of the past, and refused to leave Germany. Constantine now became enamoured of the daughter of a Polish count, and proposed to marry her. The Greek Church is stern on the subject of divorce, but its sternness can give way on due occasion. The consent of the emperor extinguished all its scruples, and Constantine divorced his princess, and married the Polish girl; yet, by that left-handed marriage, which precludes her from inheriting titles or estates. But the emperor shortly after conferred on her the title of Princess of Lowictz, from an estate which he gave her, and both which were capable of descending to her family.

It was subsequently ascertained that, at this period, Alexander had proposed to Constantine the resignation of his right to the throne; either as the price of his consent to the divorce, or from the common conviction of both, that the succession would only bring evil on Constantine and the empire. That Alexander was perfectly disinterested, is only consonant to his manly nature, and that Constantine had come to a wise decision, is equally probable. He knew his own failings, the haste of his temper, his unpopularity, and the offence which he was in the habit of giving to all classes. He probably, also, had a sufficient dread of the fate of his father, whom, as he resembled in every thing else, he might also resemble in his death. His present position fulfilled all the wishes of a man who loved power without responsibility, and enjoyed occupation without relinquishing his ease. The transaction was complete, and Alexander was tranquillised for the fate of Russia.

When the intelligence of the emperor’s death reached St Petersburg, Nicholas attended the meeting of the Senate, to take the oath of allegiance to Constantine. But they determined that their first act should be the reading of a packet, which had been placed in their hands by Alexander, with orders to be opened immediately on his decease. The president broke the seal, and found documents dated in 1822 and 1823, from Constantine, resigning the right of succession, and from Alexander accepting the resignation. Constantine’s letter stated thus: “Conscious that I do not possess the genius, the talents, or the strength, necessary to fit me for the dignity of sovereign, to which my birth would give me a right, I entreat your imperial majesty to transfer that right to him to whom it belongs, after me; and thus assure for ever the stability of the empire.

“As to myself, I shall add, by this renunciation, a new guarantee and a new force to the engagement which I spontaneously and solemnly contracted on the occasion of my divorce from my first wife. All the circumstances in which I find myself strengthen my determination to adhere to this resolution, which will prove to the empire and to the whole world the sincerity of my sentiments.”

Another of those documents appointed Nicholas as the heir to the throne. The Senate now declared that Nicholas was emperor. But he refused the title, until he had the acknowledgment from Constantine himself, that he had resigned. The suspense continued three weeks. At length the formal renunciation of Constantine was received, Nicholas was emperor, and the day was appointed to receive the oath of allegiance of the great functionaries of the army and of the people. The emperor dated his accession from the day of the death of Alexander, December the 1st, 1825.

The interregnum was honourable to both the brothers; but it had nearly proved fatal to Russia: it unsettled the national feelings, it perplexed the army, and it gave sudden hopes to the conspirators against the throne.

The heads of the conspiracy in St Petersburg were, Sergius, Prince Troubetskoi; Eugene, Prince Obalenskoi, and Conrad Ryleieff. The first was highly connected and highly employed, colonel of the Etat Major, and military governor of Kief. The second was a lieutenant in the imperial guard, poor, but a man of talent and ambition. In Russia all the sons of a prince are princes, which often leaves their rental bare. The third was simply a noble, educated in the corps of cadets, but who had left the army, and had taken the secretaryship of the American company. He was a man of letters, had written some popular poems, and was an enthusiastic republican. Connected with those were some general officers and colonels, whose revolutionary spirit might chiefly be traced to their expulsion from employment, military disgrace, or disappointed ambition. The Russian campaigns in France, and the residence of the army of occupation, under the command of the great English general, had naturally given the Russian troops an insight into principles of national government, which they could not have acquired within the Russian frontier. The pretext of the conspirators was a constitutional government, which the talkers of St Petersburg seemed to regard as the inevitable pouring of sudden prosperity of all kinds into the empire. The old illusion of all the advocates of change is, that every thing depends on government, and that government can do every thing. There cannot be a greater folly, or a more glaring fiction. Government can do nothing more than prevent the existence of obstacles to public wealth. It cannot give wealth, it cannot create commerce, it cannot fertilise the soil, it cannot put in action any of those great instruments by which a nation rises superior to its contemporaries. Those means must be in the people themselves, they cannot be the work of cabinets; governments can do no more than give them their free course, protect them from false legislation, and leave the rest to Providence.

The Russian conspirators called themselves patriots, and professed to desire a bloodless revolution. But to overthrow a government at the head of five hundred thousand men, must be a sanguinary effort; and there could be no doubt that the establishment of a revolutionary government in Russia would have been the signal for a universal war.

On the 24th and 25th of December, the conspirators met in St Petersburg, and as Nicholas was to be proclaimed on the next day, they determined to lead the battalions to which they respectively belonged, into the great square, seize on the emperor, and establish a provisional government. They were then to raise a national guard, establish two legislative chambers, and proclaim liberty to Russia. The question next arose, what was to be done with the members of the imperial family after victory. It was answered significantly, that “circumstances must decide.” At this anxious moment one of the members told them that information had been given to the emperor. “Comrades,” said he, “you will find that we are betrayed, the court are in possession of much information; but they do not know our entire plans, and our strength is quite sufficient.” A voice exclaimed, “the scabbards are broken, we can no longer hide our sabres.”

Reports of various kinds now came crowding on them. An officer arrived to say that, in one of the armies, one hundred thousand men were ready to join them. A member of the Senate came to tell them that the council of the empire was to meet at seven o’clock the next morning, to take the oath to the emperor. The time for action was now fixed. The officers of the guard were directed to join their regiments, and persuade them to refuse the oath. Then all kinds of desperate measures were proposed. It was suggested that they should force open the spirit shops and taverns, in order to make the soldiery and populace drunk, then begin a general pillage, carry off banners from the churches, and rush upon the winter palace. This, the most mischievous of all the measures, was also the most feasible, for the number of unemployed peasants and idlers of all kinds was computed at seventy thousand and upwards, and from their poverty and profligacy together, there could be little doubt that, between drunkenness and the prospect of pillage, they would be ready for any atrocity. “When the Russians break their chains,” says Schiller, “it will not be before the freeman, but before the slave, that the community must tremble.”

It must be acknowledged that some were not equally ferocious. But when a military revolt has once begun, who shall limit it to works of wisdom, moderation, or security? If the revolt had succeeded, St Petersburg must have been a scene of massacre.

We shrink from all details on this painful subject. The conspirators remained in deliberation all night. As the morning dawned, they went to the barracks of their regiments, and told the soldiers that Constantine was really their emperor, that he was marching to the capital at the head of the army from Poland, and that to take the oath to Nicholas would consequently be treason. In several instances they succeeded, and collected a considerable body of troops in the Great Izaak Square. But there they seem to have lost their senses. An insurrection which stands still, is an insurrection ruined. They were rapidly surrounded by the garrison. Terms were offered, which they neither accepted nor refused. The gallant Milarodowitch, the hero of the Russian pursuit of the French, advancing to parley with them, was brutally shot. When all hope of submission was at an end, when the day was declining, and alarm was excited for the condition of the capital during the night, artillery was brought to bear upon them; and, after some firing on both sides, the mutineers dispersed. The police were then let loose, and numerous arrests were made.

In five months after, a high court was constituted for the trial of the leaders. A hundred and twenty-one were named in the act of accusation, many of them belonging to the first families, and in the highest ranks of civil and military employment. But the sentence was the reverse of sanguinary. Only five were put to death in St Petersburg, the remainder were chiefly sent to Siberia. But Siberia is now by no means the place of horrors which it once was. It is now tolerably peopled, it has been partially civilised; the soil is fertile; towns have sprung up; and, though the winter is severe, the climate is healthy. Many of the families of the exiles were suffered to accompany them; and probably, on the whole, the exchange was not a calamitous one, from the anxieties of Russian life, the pressure of narrow circumstances in Europe, and the common disappointments to which all competitors for distinction, or even for a livelihood, are exposed in the crowded and struggling population of the west, to the undisturbed existence and sufficient provision, which were to be found in the east of this almost boundless empire.

Among the anecdotical parts of these volumes, is a slight account of the appearance of the Duke of Wellington as ambassador to Russia, in the beginning of the new reign. Count Nesselrode, on the accession of the Czar, had sent a circular to the European courts, stating his wishes for amicable relations with them all. But England dreaded to see a collision with Turkey, and Canning selected the Duke as the most important authority on the part of England. The Duke took with him Lord Fitzroy Somerset as his secretary. On his arrival at Berlin, he was treated with great distinction by Frederic William. Gneisenau, at the head of the Prussian general officers, paid him a visit in his hotel; and he was fêted in all directions. General officers were sent from St Petersburg to meet him on the Russian frontier. The emperor appointed a mansion for him, beside the palace of the Hermitage, paid him all the honours of a Russian field-marshal, (he was then the only one in the service,) placed him on a footing with the princes of the imperial family, and was frequently in his society. The people were boundless in their marks of respect.

But the Duke is evidently not a favourite with the Frenchman—and we do not much wonder at this feeling in a Frenchman, poor as it is. Without giving any opinion of his own, he inserts a little sneer from the work of Lacretelle on the “Consulate and the Empire.” On this authority, Wellington is “a general of excellent understanding, phlegmatic and tenacious, proceeding not by enthusiasm, but by order, discipline, and slow combinations, trusting but little to chance, and employing about him all the popular and vindictive passions, from which he himself is exempt.” By all which, M. Lacretelle means, that the Duke is a dull dog, without a particle of genius; simply a plodding, positive man, who, by mere toil and time, gained his objects, which any Dutchman could have gained as well, and which any Frenchman would have scorned to gain. With this French folly we have not sufficient time, nor have we sufficient respect for the national failing, to argue.

But the true view of Wellington’s character as a soldier would be, brilliancy of conception. What more brilliant conception than his first great battle, Assaye, which finished the Indian war? What more brilliant conception than his capture of Badajoz and Ciudad in the face of the two armies of Masséna and Soult advancing on him from the south and north, and each equal to his own force; while he thus snatched away the prize in the actual presence of each, and left the two French generals the mortification of having marched three hundred miles a-piece, only to be lookers-on? What more brilliant conception than his march of four hundred miles, without a stop, from Portugal to Vittoria; where he crushed the French army, captured one hundred and fifty pieces of cannon, and sent the French king and all his courtiers flying over the Pyrenees? What, again, more brilliant conception, than his storming the Pyrenees, and being the first of the European generals to enter France? and, finally, his massacre of the French army, with Soult, Ney, and Napoleon at their head, on the crowning day of Waterloo?

But all this was mere “pugnacity and tenacity,” and sulkiness and stupidity, because it was not done with a theatrical programme, and with the air of an opera-dancer. Yet M. Lacretelle’s sketch, invidious as he intends it to be, gives, involuntarily, the very highest rank of generalship to its object. For, what higher qualities can a general have, than trusting nothing to chance, being superior to enthusiasm—which, in the French vocabulary, means extravagance and giddiness—and acting by deep and effective combinations, which, as every man knows, are the most profound problems and the most brilliant triumphs of military genius? Let it be remembered, too, that in the seven years’ war of the Peninsula, Wellington never had twenty-five thousand English bayonets in the field; that the Spanish armies were almost wholly disorganised, and that the Portuguese were raw troops; while the French had nearly two hundred thousand men constantly recruited and supplied from France:—Yet, that Wellington never was beaten, that he met either six or seven of the French field-marshals and beat them all; and that at Waterloo, with a motley army of recruits, of whom but thirty thousand were English—and those new troops—and ten thousand German, he beat Napoleon at the head of seventy-two thousand Frenchmen, all veterans; trampled his army in the field, hunted him to Paris, took every fortress on the road, captured Paris, destroyed his dynasty, dissolved the remnants of the French army on the Loire; and sent Napoleon himself to expiate his guilt and finish his career, under an English guard, in St Helena.

We need not envy the Frenchman his taste for “enthusiasm,” his scorn of “science,” his disdain of “profound combinations,” and his passion for winning battles by the magic of a village conjuror.

M. Schnitzler disapproves even of the physiognomy of the Duke. “His nose was too aquiline, and stood out too prominently on his sunburnt countenance, and his features, all strongly marked, were not devoid of an air of pretension.” He objects to his appearing “without a splendid military costume, to improve his appearance!” And yet, all this foolery is the wisdom of foreigners. No man, however renowned, must forget “the imposing.” Hannibal, or Alexander the Great, would have been nothing in their eyes, except in the uniform of the “Legion of Honour.” His walking, and walking without attendants, through the streets, was a horror, rendered worse and worse by his “wearing a black frock-coat and round hat.” Even when he appeared in uniform on state occasions, “he was equally luckless;” for the costume of a Russian field-marshal, which had been given to him by Alexander, did not fit him, and was too large for his thinness. On the whole, the Duke failed, as we are told, to “gain any remarkable success in the Russian salons.” The countesses could make nothing of him; the princesses smiled on without his returning the smile; the courtiers told him bons mots without much effect; and the politicians were of opinion that a Duke so taciturn had no tongue.

Still the emperor’s attentions to him continued; and, on the day of distributing medals to the army, he gave Wellington the regiment of Smolensk, formed by Peter the Great, and of high reputation in the service.

But he succeeded in his chief object, which referred to Greece; and which ultimately, in giving independence to a nation, the classic honours of whose forefathers covered the shame of their descendants,—and by a succession of diplomatic blunders, has turned a Turkish province into a European pensioner, enfeebling Turkey without benefiting Europe, and merely making a new source of contention between France, Russia, and England.

The career of Nicholas has been peaceable; and the empire has been undisturbed but by the guilty Circassian war, which yet seems to be carried on rather as a field of exercise for the Russian armies, than for purposes of conquest.

But all nations now require something to occupy the public mind; and an impression appears to be rising in Russia, that the residence of the sovereign should be transferred to Moscow. Nothing could be more likely to produce a national convulsion, and operate a total change on the European policy of Russia, and the relations of the northern courts. Yet it is by no means improbable, that the singular avidity of the Russian court to make Poland not merely a dependency, but an integral part of the empire, by the suppression of its very name, the change of its language, and the transfer of large portions of its people to other lands, may have for its especial purpose the greater security of Russia on the West, while she fixes her whole interest on a vigorous progress in the South.

There are some problems which still perplex historians, and will probably perplex them for many an age; and among those are, the good or evil predominant in the Crusades, the use of a Pope in Italy, (where he obviously offers, and must always offer, the strongest obstacle to the union of the Italian States into a national government,) the true character of Peter the Great, and the true policy of placing the capital of Russia in the northern extremity of the empire.

It appears to be now at least approaching to a public question,—Whether Peter showed more of good sense, or of savage determination, in building a magnificent city in a swamp, where man had never before built any thing but a fisherman’s hut; and in condemning his posterity for ever to live in the most repulsive climate of Europe? Some pages in these volumes are given to the inquiry into the wisdom of deserting an ancient, natural, and superb seat of empire in the South, for a new, unnatural, and decaying seat of sovereignty in the vicinage of the Arctic circle; of retarding the progress of civilisation by the insuperable difficulties of a climate, where the sea is frozen up for six months in the year, and the rivers and land are frozen up for nine! The question now is, Whether Peter had not equally frozen up the Russian energies, impeded the natural prosperity of the empire, and flung the people back into the age of Ivan I.?

Of course, no one doubts that the Russian empire is of vast extent and substantial power; but its chief power is in its central provinces, and in its faculty of expansion into the south. Its northern provinces defy improvement, and can be sustained only by the toil of government.

The probable view of the case is, that Peter was deluded by his passion for naval supremacy. He had seen the fleets of Western Europe trained in their boisterous but ever-open seas; and he determined to have a fleet in a sea which, throughout the winter, is a sheet of ice, and where the ships are imbedded as if they were on dry ground. He had then no Black Sea for his field of exercise, and no Sebastopol for his dockyard. He touched upon no sea but the Baltic; and, under the infatuation of being a naval power, he threw the Russian government as far as he could towards the North Pole.

Moscow should have remained the Russian capital. With an admirable climate, at once keen enough to keep the human frame in its vigour, and with the warm summer of the south, to supply all the vegetable products of Europe; its position commanding the finest provinces of Western Asia, Russia would have been mistress of the Black Sea a century earlier, had probably been in possession of Asia Minor, and have fixed a Viceroy in the city of the Sultans.

The policy of Catherine II., evidently took this direction; she made no northern conquests; she withdrew her armies on the first opportunity from the Prussian war, in which Russia had been involved by the blunders of her foolish husband; and though she engaged in that desperate act by which Poland was partitioned—an act which, though perfidious, was originally pacific—the whole force of her empire was thrown into southern war.

This policy is still partially maintained. The war of the Caucasus, an unfortunate and unjustifiable war, now exhibits the only hostilities on which Russia expends any portion of her power. The success of that war would evidently put the eastern, as well as the northern shore of the Black Sea, in her possession. The southern shore could then make no resistance, if it were the will of Russia to cast an eye of ambition on the land of the Turk. We by no means infer that such is her will; we hope that higher motives, and a sense of national justice, will rescue her reputation from an act of such atrocity. But Asia Minor, on the first crash of war, would be open to the squadrons of the Scythian. This policy was interrupted in the reign of Alexander only by the French war. When the providential time was come for the destruction of Napoleon, his rage of conquest acted the part for him which the false prophets were accustomed to act for the kings of Judah and Israel. It urged him headlong to his ruin, and all his distinguishing qualities were turned to his overthrow. His ardour in the field became precipitancy; his sagacity became a fierce self-dependence; the old tactic which had led him to strike the first blow at the capitals of Europe, urged him into the heart of the wilderness; his diplomatic confidence there exposed him to be baffled by the plain sense of Russia, and his daring reliance on his fortune stripped him of an army and a throne.

But, when Russia had recovered from this invasion, her first efforts were pointed in the old direction. She recommenced the Turkish war, seized Moldavia and Wallachia, crossed the Balkan, threatened Constantinople, and, with the city of Constantine in her grasp, retired only on the remonstrances of the European powers.

M. Schnitzler imagines that the direction of Russian conquest will be towards Germany, and contemplates the all-swallowing gluttony which is to absorb all the states from the Vistula to the Rhine. We wholly differ from those views. The condition of Europe must be totally changed before the policy of Russia will attempt to make vassals of these iron tribes. It would have too many battles to fight, and too little to gain by them. To attempt the absorption of any one leading German power would produce a universal war. Poland is still a thorn in its side; and it would take a century to convert its intense hostility into cordial obedience. Prussia and Austria are the political “Pillars of Hercules” which no invader can pass; and if Germany can but secure herself from the restless and insatiable ambition of France, she need never shrink from the terrors of a Tartar war.

If war should inflame the Continent again, the Russian trumpets will be heard, not on the Elbe, but on the shores of the Propontis. Asia Minor and Syria will be a lovelier and a more lucrative prey; while probably Egypt will be the prize which will draw to the waters of the Mediterranean, the maritime force of the world.

On the whole, the volumes of this Franco-German are intelligent, and may be studied with advantage by all who desire to comprehend the actual condition of an empire, which extends from the Baltic to the Sea of Kamtschatka, which contains seven millions of square miles, nearly sixty millions of souls, is capable of containing ten times the number, and which is evidently intended to exercise a most important influence on the globe.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A GERMAN HEADSMAN.

(Das Grosse Malefizbuch. Herausgegeben von Wilhelm v. Chezy. Landshut: 1847.)

The peculiar and powerful interest attaching to narratives of remarkable crimes, and of their judicial investigation, is abundantly evidenced by the avidity with which that class of literature is invariably pounced upon by the public. Independently of the romance incidental to the subject, of the doubts and intricacies and conflicting circumstances of extraordinary criminal trials, well calculated to captivate the imagination of the vulgar, and rivet attention on their recital,—such cases possess a psychological interest, making itself felt by the least intelligent of readers, appealing with almost equal force to the scantily educated and to the scholar, to inexperienced youth and thoughtful age. By the former, it is true, the exact process by which such narratives lay hold upon the feelings and imagination, may not be easily detected, but the charm, if unseen, is not the less potent. The great success and enduring reputation of books of this kind, are the best proof of their strong and universal fascination. Whilst the legal works of Gayot de Pitaval are long since shelved and forgotten, the title of his Causes Célébres[^[1]] continues as familiar to our ear as those of the most notable literary productions of our own century; the book itself—of frequent reference, and found in every library of importance—has obtained the honours of repeated translation, and of reproduction in numerous forms. Those twenty volumes, it might be thought, were an ample supply of this species of reading, sufficient to stock the world and blunt the public appetite for such records. But the varieties of the subject are inexhaustible, as much so as the infinite shades and capricious directions of human passions, the unceasing diversity and perverse ingenuity of human crime. And Richer’s continuation of what Pitaval began, found as eager readers as its compiler could reasonably desire. In later times, two Germans, Messrs Hitzig and Häring, have edited with considerable success a work of a similar nature.[^[2]] Others doubtless will appear. There can be no lack of materials. Each successive half-century yields matter for a new and lengthy series. Meanwhile, and although civilisation, impotent wholly to check crime, is also unable to strip its annals of novelty and pungency, the remarkable criminal records of ruder ages are frequently recurred to and reproduced, as wilder and more romantic in their nature than those of a recent day. Alexander Dumas has collected from various quarters a voluminous work of this nature; and, although its greater portion was already a thrice-told tale, the book is one of the most popular of his multifarious productions. Feuerbach the celebrated jurist, the impartial narrator and critic of the extraordinary history of Caspar Hauser, the indefatigable labourer in the arid vineyard of the law, whose lightest literary pastime would to most men have been toil,[^[3]] deemed it not unworthy his learned pen to collate and comment two volumes of trials,[^[4]]—volumes familiarised to the English reader by a recent translation. His well-stored mind and skilful handling imparted new depth and value to the subject, and doubtless the book would not so long have awaited a transfer into our language, but for the warlike circumstances and interrupted Continental communication of the period at which its first edition appeared. The interest of such narratives is no way diminished from their scene being in a foreign land; indeed, it is most engrossing when exotic, since the illustrations of the peculiar laws and characteristics of other nations is then superadded to that of the eccentricities of crime. And, perhaps, the most fertile field at the disposal of the curious in such matters, is afforded by that wide country, claiming to include in its bond of brotherhood every land wherein the German tongue resounds. The variety of the laws by which the kingdoms and provinces of Germany have at different times been governed, tends greatly to diversify its criminal calendar. And, doubtless, in many old libraries, private and public, in the dusty and rarely-opened book-cases of provincial barons and Freiherrn, on the shelves of museums, and in municipal collections (scarce less neglected and unread) of ancient books and manuscripts, much curious reading of this description, well worthy of publicity, lies buried and forgotten.

It is from a literary lumber-room of this kind, we suspect, that Mr Chézy has extracted the contents of the three curious volumes now before us, containing, as their old French name implies, details of crimes and malefactors. “What we,” he tells us in his preface, “are wont to call criminal archives, were in many places styled by our forefathers ‘Malefice-books,’ records kept partly by the public executioner, who, in his capacity of torturer, had frequent occasion to share in criminal investigations.” From this passage, and from the expression herausgegeben (edited) in the title-page, we understand that the “Grosse Malefizbuch” is not to be viewed as an original composition, which the word verfasser, (author) employed in the preface, might have led us to believe. This makes a certain difference in the critical view to be taken of the book. Were it a mere fiction, intended as an imitation of the probable style of the headsman, inditing, chiefly as matter of duty, but yet not without a certain rude feeling and interest in the task, the crimes and circumstances his sanguinary profession brought under his notice, we should admit some skill in the tone adopted. But, as an editor, Mr Chézy has performed his part in a lazy and slovenly fashion. He appears to have contented himself with merely modernising the orthography, and (slightly) the language. With excellent stuff to work upon, he had it in his power to make a very complete and remarkable book: he has been contented to put forward a meagre and deficient one. We would not have had him greatly alter the text. Here and there a little curtailment might have been advantageously practised, or a paragraph judiciously interpolated. But the volumes should have been richly garnished with notes and commentaries, instead of being wholly without them. From the first page to the last not a line appears—at the end of each volume we vainly seek an appendix—explanatory of the singular usages so frequently referred to; referred to usually in as cursory and off-hand a way as if they were matters of present custom, to which all men were still habituated, and concerning which none needed enlightenment. Mr Chézy seems conscious of his fault, for he tells us, in a half apologetic tone, to bear in mind that he is a poet, and not a scholar. No great depth of scholarship was essential for what we would have had him do. A very moderate amount of study and patience would have put him in possession of the necessary information. Its want is wofully felt as we wander through his bald pages, at whose foot not the smallest fragment of a note attracts the reader’s eye, and removes the tantalised feeling with which he encounters distant and unexplained allusions, and is compelled to guess their purport. “This work,” says Mr Chézy, “intended to represent men and circumstances as they once may have been, is not confined within the limits of the documental authority. The Malefizbuch may be styled a poetical Pitaval.” In view of this professed design of poetising his materials, and of conveying, through a romantic medium, information concerning old times and obsolete customs, we can but repeat that the author’s performance has fallen short of his project. But the subject was too good to be wholly spoiled, even by the clumsiest treatment, with which, however, it would hardly be fair to charge Mr Chézy, whose faults are rather of omission than commission. And the anathemas we are tempted, in our progress through his pages, to invoke upon his head, are frequently checked by the occurrence of interesting passages and striking incidents.

The three volumes of the Malefizbuch are various in the form and nature of their contents, although all bear reference to the same subject, and illustrate, in different points of view, the criminal laws and customs of a rude, cruel, and superstitious period. Besides the absence of notes, the author is guilty of the common German carelessness about dates and places, and is often very vague in his indication of both. This is especially the case with his first volume, which many readers will consider the best, by reason of a certain melancholy interest running through it. We are appealed to for our sympathy with the misfortunes of an executioner’s son, who, after absenting himself from his country, and obtaining an education superior to his station, is compelled to accept the loathsome inheritance of his father, and wield axe and work rack in obedience to the law’s stern dictates. This volume (each volume has a special title, independently of the general one) is called “Ten Narratives from Master Hammerling’s Life and Memoirs.” They are chapters rather than detached narratives, for a connecting thread runs through them, and they in fact form a complete history of the childhood and youth of Meister Hämmerling, the German Jack Ketch. The name of the latter personage upon an English title-page, would be suggestive of little beyond the drop at Newgate, and penny tracts sold at street corners. But none who have any acquaintance with the German headsman of the middle ages, will be so unjust as to class him with the vulgar and prosaic official who executes in England the last sentence of the law. Formerly, by the laws of the empire, the SCHARFRICHTER was held ehrbar or of honourable repute. The broad bright sword was the only instrument of death he condescended to touch, and consequently his dealings were with men of gentle blood, for whom decapitation was especially reserved. Infamous chastisements were inflicted by the dishonouring hands of the Henker or common hangman, who was considered anrüchig or infamous. Gradually, the two offices were blended in one, the headsman’s privileges were abridged or became totally obsolete; and the grim romance attaching to the stern saturnine man who, on days of notable executions, appeared on the scaffold in bright scarlet mantle, and peaked hat with sable feather, and with one flashing sweep of his terrible blade severed heads from shoulders of well-born criminals, was dissipated and forgotten. Still, on the crowded and diversified canvass of the middle ages, the strange figure stands prominently forth, recalling, by its associations, many a dark deed and wild legend. But the change is great since then. “The executioner now-a-days,” says Mr Chézy, “is a citizen like any body else, an elector and eligible; if he possess enough property, he may be sent as deputy to the second Chamber, and perhaps give his vote against capital punishment. The headsman of former centuries has faded into a tradition; and a poet may therefore be allowed to sketch his portrait once more, perhaps for the last time, in all its different aspects and mysterious horrors.” And without further prelude, we are introduced to the last minister of the law, a meek and melancholy man, who remembers, one still Sabbath morning, that it is his bounden duty to keep up the record in the Malefizbuch, begun by his great-grandfather, the first of his race who could write. Whilst pondering over this necessity, he incidentally recapitulates some of his privileges and advantages; how he is of as good descent after his kind as the best nobleman in the holy Roman empire, tracing back his genealogy to the days of Henry the First of Germany, surnamed the Fowler, who nominated his ancestor to the office of executioner, since when the family has held house and ground, goods and profits, in fief of the crown. And how he is no way subject to the authorities of the land, further than that he is bound to serve them with sword, axe, wheel and cord, with ladder, screws and tongs, pitch, sulphur and rods, either in his own person or by his assistants, as his letter of privileges dictates. Neither is he infamous, like those of his men who remove dead beasts and do such like unclean work; and, whoever addresses him with contemptuous speech, shall be fined according to law of the empire, as if he had insulted a lord of the council. Finally, when the number of unfortunates slain by his hand shall exceed five hundred, the headsman has a right, if it so please him, to abandon his charge, and mix once more upon equal terms with his fellow-citizens. After this recapitulation, Master Hammerling takes up his own history from the day of his birth, when he was laid in his father’s arms as he returned from burning an old witch upon the market-place. This he finds set down in his father’s hand-writing, and also how he was christened by the name of Berthold, on the very day on which Black Hannah, the child-murderess, was executed; whilst her accomplice, long Heinz, was compelled to look on at the execution, and was then flogged out of the town and district. The latter would have been hung, had not the executioner saved him, in virtue of an old privilege, which he exercised less out of love for Heinz than for fear of its becoming annulled by disuse. Had a daughter instead of a son been born to him, he had a right to save the poor girl who had fallen victim to a base seducer. So was it set forth in the headsman’s charter.

Berthold Benz traces back his recollections to a very early period of his childhood, and in his manner of narrating them there is a quaint sad simplicity, by no means unattractive. “My mother, God help her!” he says, “right well do I remember her; and though I should live a hundred and many hundred years, I still shall ever have her before me, with her kindly blue eyes and her ringlets of the same colour as the flax which she drew from the distaff with her slender white fingers, and sent whirling round the spindle. We were always alone; my father went about his affairs, and of the servants none came near us in our apartment, or in our little flower-garden—parted by hedge and fence from the rest of the court—save and except fat Grethel, a sturdy broad-footed Swabian girl, my mother’s cousin, and taken in by her for the love of God.” And Berthold was happy at his mother’s knee, and in his childish fancy deemed the headsman’s hereditary dwelling, with its high surrounding wall, to be little short of a fortress, and held the vaulted sitting-room, with its three narrow windows, at least equal to any hall in the proud castle that towered upon the cliff beyond the stream. But his tranquil happiness lasted not long; the troubles of the doomster’s son had an early beginning. “On a sudden, my dearest mother wept more than she smiled, grew pale and yet paler, weak and still more weak, until at last she was unable to lead me out into the garden. At the same time I ceased to see my father. Neither at meals, nor as formerly, in the chamber, of a morning, was he visible, and however early I got up, the answer to my questions always was that he had already gone out. And one day, Heaven only knows how it happened, dear mother was gone, and when I screamed and wept for her, Swabian Grethel beat me, and said that ‘she was my mother now.’” From this day, Berthold’s sufferings began. Hated by his stepmother, neglected by his father, who was infatuated with his young wife,—he was left to run wild with the executioner’s assistants. After a while, a brother was born, and then his lot became still harder. He was sent to sleep amongst the hay in the loft; and the sole notice he obtained from his father was when the latter instructed him in the duties of his office. But old Benz was a harsh teacher, and the child preferred to receive his lessons from Arnulph, the chief assistant, who took him with him to the town and on rambles in the forest; taught him to sever cabbage-heads at a single stroke, and told him, as they sat together upon the top of the lonely gallows-tree, wonderful tales and strange anecdotes of their craft and its professors. These Berthold drank in with greedy ear; and, although terrified at first by the sight of the grim black gallows, of the mouldering skeletons depending from it, and the ill-omened birds that croaked and hovered around its summit, he soon got used to his ”father’s workshop,“ gladly climbed the ladder to his lofty perch, and enjoyed the terror of the passing horseman whom an unexpected greeting in Arnulph’s harsh voice caused to spur his steed in terror, and hasten on his road. “The Thief’s Thumb,” one of the narratives of this practical joker and hangman, is not without its wild interest, but we cannot dwell upon episodes; our object being rather to exhibit the headsman’s social position and peculiar privileges. One of the latter—and not the least curious—is shown in the chapter headed “Vom Rosenthal,”—from the Valley of Roses—in which Berthold’s adventures may properly be said to begin.

“Regularly each Saturday evening after vespers, my father (now in heaven) went into the town, turned from the market-place into the alley known as the Rosenthal, which winds, narrow and dark, in the direction of the prison and behind St Kummerniss, and struck, at regular intervals, three heavy blows upon the door of a great dark house, bearing the sign of the Elephant. Thereupon, an old woman gave him entrance, ushered him into a spacious arched hall, and placed a wooden stoup of wine and a loaf of bread upon the table. Whilst he ate and drank, a number of young women entered the room, every one of whom handed him a silver coin, sometimes exchanged a word with him, and then walked away in silence. Almost all these women had a strange look, the lustre of their staring eyes was quenched, their features were drawn, their cheeks pale, and their clothes hung loosely upon them; they looked shyly at my father, but kindly at me, as though they would gladly have kissed and caressed me. This, however, as I afterwards found, was strictly forbidden them; and once, when a young girl extended her hand to pat my cheek, my father exclaimed, ‘Away with you, hussy!’ and struck her upon the face. Whereupon the poor girl slunk from the room, bleeding at mouth and nose, and pursued by the laughter of her companions.”

At times, Benz would leave his son in the lower room, whilst he searched the house to see that no strangers were there at that forbidden hour. Then Berthold often heard screams and sounds of quarrel; and one evening that the uproar was greater than usual, he crept in alarm from the apartment, and found his way through the back door into a court, where a few trees grew, and at whose further end was a grass-plot, on which linen lay bleaching. “On the grass, near the fountain, sat a pretty child, keeping the geese and fowls and grunting swine from the bleaching-place, with a long stick, and when she saw me, she smiled kindly at me. I went up to her, took the little maid’s hand, and asked her name.

“‘I am called Elizabeth. And you?’

“‘They call me Benz,’ I replied, and, although Arnulph had constantly warned me never to say who I was, unless asked, I thoughtlessly added: ‘and I am the headsman’s boy.’

“I shuddered at the words as I spoke them, and expected Elizabeth to shrink from me with disgust. Instead of that she said, quite friendly,

“‘Sit down by me, Benz, and help me to watch the linen.’

“I thought myself in heaven; since dear mother had left me, I had never known the joy of a smile from a sweet face. In a moment we two children were the best of friends, sat hand in hand beside each other, laughed and chattered unceasingly, and forgot the whole world besides. I asked little Elizabeth who were her parents. She looked at me in amazement with her great black eyes, knew not what I meant, and was only the more bewildered by my attempted explanation. At last I heard my father’s whistle; kissed my new friend, and ran into the house. On my way home, I told my father what had happened, and he said the little maid was an orphan, whose mother had died in the house, and whom old Sarah had taken charge of. A father, however, she had never had, at least to his knowledge. Thenceforward, I went nowhere so willingly as to the town. I no longer cared that the passengers avoided us, and that boys pursued us with scoff and insult. I knew that a kind greeting and a loving kiss awaited me, and little Elizabeth was soon as dear to me as my blessed mother; so that, in my dreams, their two figures blended into one. It was very different afterwards, when the heavenly purity, in whose full glory my mother had departed, had left Elizabeth for ever.

“Thus, I came to the age of twelve, and grew a tall strong lad, skilful and active; already I was so expert with the sword that with a horizontal cut I sent the blade between blocks piled on each other, and without in the least injuring them. I also tied a noose with a dexterity that filled Arnulph with proud joy, and he declared me fully qualified to officiate upon the scaffold. It happened one day that my father, plagued with the gout, ordered me to go alone to the town, and to fetch the tribute from the well-known house of the Elephant. He made me promise not to let the women caress me, and to lose none of the bright pfennings they had to give me. I obeyed his orders, and brought him home the full amount. But I did not tell him what had happened to me by the way. When the boys, who usually ran after us, saw that I was alone, they ventured much nearer than formerly; and amongst them I particularly remarked a fair-haired lad, who had always been the most spiteful and violent of them all, and whom his companions sometimes called Engolf, sometimes by the nickname of Bully-bird. He was the son of a patrician, of the noble Herr Hahn of Baumgarten, and was somewhat older than myself. This time he followed me to the very threshold of the house, and just as the door was opened he struck at me. I warded his blow, and returned it with one upon the nose, which knocked him down, and gave me time to enter the house.”

Berthold’s persecutors awaited his exit to take their revenge, but he provided himself with a stick for defence, and, moreover, Elizabeth showed him an opening in the garden wall, choked with bushes and rubbish, and leading into a timber-yard, through which he passed unseen, and of which he thenceforward availed himself on his frequent visits to his playfellow. Engolf, however, watched him, and at last, on a certain afternoon, as he turned into the timber-yard, he heard a shout of “Huzza! the hangman’s boy!” and was set upon by a number of lads, from whom he escaped with difficulty, and severely beaten, by the help of Elizabeth, who dragged him into the garden as he fell senseless from a blow on the head. In the house of the Elephant he lay for some time, too ill for removal, carefully tended by his child-mistress, and by the wretched but kind-hearted women. About that period, however, the “Lutheran heresy” had begun to take root in the town, and a certain Dr Neander preached furiously against gambling and drunkenness, and against such establishments as that in which Berthold was confined by his wounds; “against all those things, in short, which, according to old usage and to the emperor’s statutes, paid tribute to the headsman. This pleased the women beyond measure; with yellow envy they had long seen their husbands, lovers, and sons, wager away their fair white groschen at skittles and dice and cards; the headsman‘s daughters in the Rosenthal were a yet sharper thorn in their eyes; and now, supported by the preacher‘s frantic harangues, they raised such an infernal outcry that a noble councillor trod our rights under foot for the sake of peace, forbade all games of chance, and sent his officers to seize the loose women at the Elephant, and put them across the frontier. This occurred just at the time I lay ill in the Rosenthal.” Berthold was carried home to his stepmother, who would not receive him, and Arnulph made him a bed in the hounds’ kennel, for which piece of humanity his violent mistress beat him, and procured his dismissal. And throughout the book we hear no more of the rough but well-meaning journeyman hangman. Berthold’s father came to visit his son and dress his wounds, but the henpecked headsman dared not take him into his house. The poor boy lay suffering and hungry, tormenting himself on account of Elizabeth, whom the authorities had removed from the Rosenthal, and given in charge to people of better repute than those who had had care of her infancy; but who those people were, and where he should seek his little friend, Berthold knew not. And when he recovered, his stepmother and her son ill-treated him, and drove him from their presence; and, Arnulph having left, he had no friend or companion but the shaggy hounds with which he slept.

At this point of his youthful tribulations, Master Hammerling ceases to discourse of himself, and abruptly transports us to the sign of the Thistle, an isolated public house, consisting partly of the ruins of an old watch-tower, and much frequented by students, who on bright summer evenings loved to sit under the trees and lie upon the grass before its door, until the tolling bell warned them to return to the town before gates and bridges were closed for the night. This inn was kept by a strange old couple, childless, avaricious, and, as it was reported, passing rich, who went by the names of Father Finch and Mother Blutrude. They professed great poverty, and were furious if any doubted it, which few cared to do, since a certain rash scoffer had suddenly fallen sick, and gradually withered away and expired, in consequence, it was supposed, of certain unholy incantations of Mother Blutrude. The fear of her incantations, however, did not deter a reckless and debauched student from laying a plan for appropriating her concealed treasures. He found means to ingratiate himself with the old people, and to conceal himself in a nook at the top of the old tower, whence he saw them in the dead of night counting a large sum in silver coin. He only waited their departure to possess himself of the store, when he heard them talk of removing to the same place a large amount of Hungarian ducats they had bestowed elsewhere, and he resolved to wait where he was for this richer booty. He waited so long, that hunger, thirst, want of sleep and greed of gold bewildered his weak brain, and drove him mad. With delirious eagerness he filled his cap and pockets with the silver, rushed down the high steep staircase, forced the door with his foot, and bursting into the public room, seized Father Finch by the throat, and demanded his gold. The guests came to the rescue, dollars and crowns were scattered on the floor, and at last the madman was dragged away to prison, whilst old Finch drove every one from his house, barred the door, and set to work with his wife to collect the treasure. Benz and his son were in the town when the lunatic student was carried by, and soon afterwards a boy came running in with news that Father Finch had committed suicide from anxiety and despair. Straightway the headsman ordered one of his men to fetch his great sword and get ready his cart, and then he took the road to the Thistle, followed by an inquisitive mob, pressing as close to his heels as their aversion to his calling would allow. He went to exercise one of the most remarkable privileges of his office. What this was may best be told in the words of Mr Chézy’s hangman.

“We found the old house surrounded by gaping idlers, whom nothing short of my father’s presence could have induced to open a path. They gave way before his threatening gesture and raised voice, and we reached a loft where the gray-headed sinner hung from a strong staple, his stiffened feet almost touching an iron chest, from which Blutrude, who, cowered in a corner, never diverted her gaze. Soon after us came councillors, writers, and bailiffs, then a man bearing the sword, which the headsman took, and after cutting down the dead, he drew a circle round the corpse as far as his weapon’s point could reach. Then he raised his voice and said:

“‘I stand as headsman on my property and heritage, or do any here say nay?’

“Then one of the council replied: ‘None say nay. You are headsman within the precincts of the city and in the Count’s domain, Master Benz; act then according to your sealed rights and privileges, and with God’s help, as we are ready to give you ours.’

“My father continued: ‘Thus runs the emperor’s decree: Wheresoever any one, with sinful hand, shall take his own life, there is every thing, in hall or chamber, cellar, barn, or stable, the headsman’s property, so far as he, standing beside the corpse, can reach with his sword above his head, below his feet, and on all sides. Have I spoken well?’

“‘On my soul and conscience,’ replied the councillor, ‘you have spoken well. And so take hence what to thee pertaineth.’”

And, in spite of old Blutrude’s screams and protestations, the treasure-chest was conveyed away in the headsman’s cart. Whilst this went on, Berthold, in rambling over the house, found Elizabeth, who had been given into the untender care of the hostess of the Thistle. The little hand-maid was delighted to meet her old friend, and they were engaged in affectionate colloquy when Blutrude, furious at the loss of her pelf, fell upon them with blows and abuse. Berthold cared little for her violence to himself, but when she attacked Elizabeth his forbearance deserted him, and, apostrophising her as a witch, he expressed a passionate hope that the day would come when he should set fire to her death-faggots. The effect of this wish is described in a singular passage:—“She shrank from me and was silent. Whether it was that my words sounded prophetically to her evil conscience, or that my boyish glance already possessed that peculiar power which has since often made strong men quake, and given noble horses the mad staggers, Blutrude reeled aside like a drunken person, allowed me to take leave of Elizabeth undisturbed, and for some time afterwards did not regain her usual vigour and malice.” This strange power, attributed to himself by the headsman, is referred to further on in the volume, when a horse shies and is seized with staggers at the mere glance of Berthold’s eye. That the gaze of the public executioner might have a strong effect upon men, in an age when he was regarded with a feeling of superstitious horror, would have nothing to surprise; nor is it astonishing that an old woman, already suspected of witchcraft, should be terrified and tongue-tied by a hint of tar-barrels from the mouth of the hangman’s son. The power of his evil eye upon horses is more difficult to explain and credit. But admitting the substance and incidents of the book before us to be extracted from bona fide chronicles, and there is not wanting a certain amount of internal evidence corroborative of the editor’s assertion to that effect, such passages as this are highly curious illustrations of the superstitions of that day. In most parts of the world the evil eye has been a favourite belief. The French have their Mauvais-œil, the Germans their Schelauge, the Italians the Malocchio; and if in any of those countries mesmerism had been invented and practised two or three hundred years ago, its disciples would, in all probability, have been held endowed with the power attributed to himself by Berthold Benz.

The dismissal of Arnulph, his chief aide-de-camp, had left the headsman short-handed, and in vain he sought some one to supply his place; so that after having, for very many years, put his hand to no instrument of punishment save the broad short sword, the chief emblem of his office, he suddenly found himself compelled to descend to lower functions, and to break a murderer on the wheel. At this execution a rare incident occurred, showing another of the Scharfrichter’s privileges. The culprit was bound upon the grating, and Benz dealt him the first blow, upon the shin. The bone snapped, and the unhappy victim, a man of gigantic frame and strength, maddened by extremity of agony, wrenched out the cramp-iron to which his right wrist was bound, and extended his arm to ward off the coming blow. Thereupon a forward young man stepped thoughtlessly out of the crowd, seized the criminal’s arm and drew it back, whilst one of the executioner’s assistants again drove in the iron. Then the headsman laid down his wheel, stepped up to the imprudent youth, clapped his hand upon his shoulder and said, “Now art thou mine till thy day of death.” Voluntary aid given to the executioner entailed perpetual servitude, inevitable and infamous. In this instance, the volunteer, by trade a turner from Nuremberg, and who was also a professional pugilist, was compelled, in spite of prayers and repugnance, to, strip his jerkin and assist in the horrible execution then going forward, after which he mournfully accompanied his new mates to the executioner’s dwelling. House and home, his honest name, and a loving and expectant bride, were all for ever lost to him by this one rash act. And the only hope he dared indulge was, that his family and friends might never learn his fate, but deem him dead in distant parts. The cruel severity with which Master Benz enforced his privilege was requited to him by his pressed recruit, who found undue favour in the eyes of Grethel. The Nuremberger, however, absorbed in grief, took little heed of the lady’s amorous advances; and she, incensed by his indifference, applied to old Blutrude for a love-philter. All this forms a part of the romantic plot which is made the vehicle for exhibiting the public and private existence of the headsman of the middle ages, and we need but briefly touch upon it. The Nuremberg Joseph drank the potion, which reminded him, by its exhilarating effects, of “the foaming, reaming drink he had once tasted at his master’s wedding at Namur, in Brabant, and which the Walloons fetch from the county of Champagne, in France, to thin their blood, clogged by thick barley beer.” Soon, however, the young man repented of deceiving Benz, who was kind to him after his rough fashion; and one morning that the headsman called him to his room, to eat a savoury pottage his wife had prepared, but for which he himself felt little appetite, Veit (the Nuremberger) thought the moment opportune to make a clean breast, and, whilst eating, began his confession. Meanwhile Grethel, superintending in the kitchen the breakfast of her household, missed and asked for her favourite. “He is in the master’s room,” was the reply, “eating the pottage.” The headsman’s wife grew pale as death, for the pottage was poisoned. She hurried into the room just as Veit, after completing his confession, fell in convulsions upon the floor; and her husband, indignant at her infidelity, stripped his leathern girdle and furiously beat her, loading her with opprobrious epithets. She escaped from his hands, and ran into the town, exhibited the cuts upon her face and arms to the authorities, accused her husband of this ill-treatment, and of having poisoned his assistant in a moment of groundless jealousy. Benz was forthwith arrested. Appearances were strong against him. He had gone out of his way to invite his servant to eat the mess intended for himself. And when the effects of the poison manifested themselves, he had beaten his wife instead of rendering assistance to the sufferer, who had died soon afterwards. His protestations of innocence were discredited; and as he persisted in not confessing a crime he had not committed, he was conducted to that torture-chamber whose horrors he had so often superintended. He shrunk not at sight of the rack, but stood upon his rights and privileges; repudiated the jurisdiction of the city council, and appealed to a higher tribunal. “My lords would not listen to this, and appealed, in their turn, to the special privileges of the town; but the strange headsman, whom they had summoned to their assistance, pulled down to the wrist the shirt sleeves he had rolled up, put on his doublet, and declared, with steadfast voice, that he must certainly, in execution of a legal judgment, torture his own son, if required, but that he would not act against the Emperor’s ordinances, or lay hand upon a brother-craftsman in obedience to an arbitrary command.” So the counsellors, finding the executive fail them, and being also, as it would appear, legally in the wrong, were compelled to concede Master Benz’s claim to be arraigned before another court of judicature. The delay was the headsman’s salvation. Count Ruprecht, a sort of lord of the manor, and nobleman of great weight in the district, obtained admission to his dungeon, under pretence of consulting him about a disease, which “leech and surgeon, wise-women and farriers, had been unable to cure.” From this it would appear that in those days the executioner either dabbled in the medical art, or was supposed to possess prescriptions (perhaps charms) of efficacy in certain cases. We have been unable to trace any particulars connected with this belief; and Mr Chézy, although he must have access in Germany to many more sources of such information than are open to us, leaves his readers, as usual, wholly in the dark.

The brief dialogue in the dungeon is curious and characteristic. The Count, straitened in his finances, covets the iron chest with a golden lining, taken by Benz from beneath the feet of Father Finch the suicide. In consideration of its receipt, he engages to rescue the executioner from his unpleasant position. The latter, although innocent, is by no means confident of acquittal, and accepts the terms. Then says the Count to the headsman, with touching confidence, “You have been known to me for many years as an honourable man, I require no other guarantee than your word. And I pledge my honour as a nobleman to rescue you, either by craft or by the strong hand.” Recourse to violence was unnecessary. The Count revived an old tribunal, long in disuse, which sat under an aged oak by the river’s brink, and consisted of himself alone. The council had little fancy for giving up their prisoner, but yielded to menaces in the emperor’s name, and Benz was brought before this primitive court. The burgomaster supported the accusation, but, on the other hand, seven nobly-born persons deposed on oath to the prisoner’s innocence, and Etzel the cup-bearer, a stalwart retainer of the Count’s, renowned in all the country-side for his reckless courage and powerful arm, threw his glove into the ring, and challenged to mortal combat any who should question it. Thrice the herald proclaimed the defiance, but none took it up; the sun went down, and the Count declared the charge unfounded and the prisoner free. This was the first and last time Count Ruprecht asserted his right to hold this penal tribunal. And subsequently an imperial decree declared the judgment null and the Count’s privilege obsolete. But before that came to pass, the headsman’s innocence was established, and the true culprit discovered.

During his captivity, Benz had reflected on his unkindness to his first-born, and resolved to repair past injustice by better treatment. On returning home, his first inquiry was for Berthold. The answer was, that the boy had run away. The truth was, that his stepmother had had him conveyed to a long distance from his father’s house, and by frightful menaces deterred him from returning. And now she wheedled her husband out of a pardon, and things resumed their old course in the headsman’s house. We pass over a good deal of episodical matter, having little to do with the main subject of the book; amongst other things, a long account of a son of Count Ruprecht, who was sent on his travels in charge of a learned preceptor and bad horseman, one Dr Wohlgemuth, on whom the scamp of a pupil played an infinity of mischievous tricks, proving that travelling tutors three hundred years ago had by no means a sinecure. After an absence of some duration, Berthold returns home in the suite of this young Count Ulrich, finds Elizabeth still at the sign of the Thistle, and his old enemy Engolf and other dissolute companions persecuting her with their insolent addresses, to which she turns a deaf ear. She has not forgotten Berthold; their childish affection has grown into love, and they mutually plight their troth. Soon afterwards, Berthold sets out on a three years’ pilgrimage, during which to learn surgery and farriery, and Count Ruprecht promises that, on his return, none but he shall shoe his horses and cure his servants. But the headsman’s son has higher aspirations, and resolves to become a physician. At Heidelberg and Paris the three years pass quickly by in diligent study, and at the end of that time he has conquered the doctor’s gown, and returns to his native place as Dominus Bertholdus. As he draws near to the town, he prays in heart for a good omen to welcome his return; but none is vouchsafed him, and in its stead he meets Engolf and has an angry colloquy. At the little inn he sees Elizabeth, who betrays great agitation on beholding him, for a report had been set about of his death. At a ball to which he accompanies her, held at the old house of the Elephant, now converted into a respectable inn, he meets Engolf, who coarsely taunts him with taking up with his cast-off mistress. Elizabeth cannot repel the imputation, Berthold spurns her from him, and strikes Engolf; a fight ensues, blood is shed, and the headsman’s son is obliged to conceal himself for a while. Then comes some more extraneous matter, until we find Berthold established as assistant in the house of Master Baldwin the physician, who one day sends him to attend the infliction of torture on an old woman accused of witchcraft. In the wrinkled wretch bound upon the rack, he recognises old Blutrude, and here, after seven years’ separation, he meets his father.

“The headsman had grown old in those seven years: his silver hair hung scantily over his temples; his high bald brow was crossed with furrows; his long beard resembled thick snow-flakes; but still he was strong and vigorous. From his short and muscular neck his broad shoulders spread in powerful development; his long arms were nervous, his fists of iron; his eyes glittered as in the days of his prime; and the dusky red of his countenance bore witness that the old man had not yet abandoned the pleasures of the bottle, in spite of the gout, whose presence was indicated by his wide shapeless boots of soft buckskin. On beholding him, a cold shudder came over me; and yet it needed an effort not to fall into his arms and greet him with the name of father, and offer my aid in his horrible office. Behind him stood his assistant, a stout young fellow, in whose features and reddish hair I recognised Grethel’s son.” Here a touch of witchcraft comes in; Blutrude, after terrible tortures, confessing her dealings with the demon, and implicating Grethel and her son, the former of whom had long been in the habit of accompanying her once in the year to a witches’ sabbath upon the Blocksberg, whilst an evil spirit assumed her form in her husband’s couch. Upon receiving this startling information, old Benz falls down, struck with apoplexy, and presently expires, in spite of the remedies applied by Berthold, who in his emotion betrays himself as the headsman’s son. He is immediately seized, and put in irons. His life is in danger, for he has incurred the penalty of the gallows by daring to mix with his fellow-men, and to forget the stigma and isolation prescribed by his birth. But the executioner being dead, his youngest son accused of witchcraft, and the prison full of criminals, several of whom are soon to be put to the torture, the authorities let Berthold, go free, on condition of his assuming his father’s office. To this he consents, as the only means of escaping the halter, and at once takes possession of the house whose threshold he had expected never again to cross.

The closing chapter of the volume, entitled “The Headsman’s Wedding,” is perhaps the most striking and original of the whole book. Berthold’s installation in his father’s house and office had not long occurred, when he was called upon to exercise the latter, and to put to the rack his old and bitter foe Engolf of Baumgarten, accused of conspiracy against the state. Even under the torture, the profligate found sneers and sharp words to address to his executioner, and boasted of his base triumph over the unhappy Elizabeth, then in prison on the charge of murdering her infant. Whilst in a state of frenzy, she had thrown it into the water. Maddened by his enemy’s taunts, the headsman exercised to the very utmost the tortures at his command, and tugged and strained till every joint of the unhappy wretch was dislocated, and the foam stood upon his lips. At last Engolf confessed his crime and was released from the hands of him who had crushed his body, and whose heart he had broken. Then Berthold received orders to hold himself ready, in three days from that time, to execute Elizabeth, condemned to die by the sword.

“It was a hard trial for me, when, upon the eve of this execution, I had to betake myself to her prison, to share, according to old custom, the culprit’s last meal. The priest had just left her when I entered the narrow cell, and she sat buried in thought, her head sunk upon her breast, her long black hair falling like a veil over her face, her hands folded in her lap.” The poor girl could not make up her mind to die, and wildly implored her former lover to save her, ignorant that she was to perish by his hand. But his feelings towards her had undergone a total change; indignation and contempt had replaced affection; and he beheld her despair and heard her entreaties without a spark of compunction. “You must die, Elizabeth,” he said, “and truly by no other hand than mine.”

“She gazed at me with expanded eyeballs, her features, distorted by despair, gradually assumed a milder expression, a scarcely perceptible smile crossed her pale lips. ‘Death from your hand is sweet,’ she at last said. ‘Here is my heart, strike! why delay? I am ready.’ These gentle words broke down my anger; I had to lean against a pillar in order not to sink to the ground, and had hardly strength to reply. ‘Will you not understand me, Elizabeth? Have you forgotten whose son I am?’” Then she told him how a traveller had come to the inn, and had said (probably at Engolf’s instigation) that Berthold was dead. And how, after that, the seducer had perseveringly environed her with his wiles, and at last, by aid of a potion old Blutrude supplied, had effected her ruin. And as the headsman heard her sad tale, his anger was converted into pity. He partook her last repast, and at parting they pressed each other’s hands in friendship. But the love Berthold once had cherished for the orphan playmate of his boyish days had fled for ever.

That same night the tribunal condemned Engolf to the gallows. All the grace his anguished parent could obtain for him was that he should die by the hands of the headsman himself, not of an inferior executioner—and in his own clothes, booted and spurred. This favour cost fifty marks of gold, and a bequest to the hospital of all the property his father could will away.

With the dawn, Berthold repaired to the city, where the sentence was read in the public market-place, and “a white wand was broken and thrown in fragments at the feet of the child-murderess.” Then Elizabeth was delivered over to the executioner, who lifted her into the cart, where a Capuchin monk took his place beside her, and the melancholy procession to the scaffold began. On the way, Berthold’s men encouraged him, exhorting him to strike the blow on Elizabeth’s slender neck with the same firmness and precision with which, just before he left the house, he had severed that of an old wether. They considered him fortunate, that his first essay with the sword should be made on a meek and unresisting girl, and not on some tough old culprit, who would spitefully shrug his shoulders, so as to disappoint the aim and bring shame upon the headsman. “At last we stood, Elizabeth and I, face to face between the three pillars, gazed at each other, and shook hands for the last time. Then I bound her eyes, bid her kneel down, and whilst an assistant, standing on one side, with body bent forward, and outstretched arm, held up her head by the long hair, I threw off cloak and doublet, grasped the sword with both hands, and, settling myself firmly on my feet, prepared to give the cut that should deprive her of life. Mute and breathless with expectation, the mob looked up at the scaffold; the monk ceased to mutter his prayers aloud, but moved his lips in silence; the stillness of death reigned around. I felt a dizziness in my brain; instead of one head I saw three, and I turned about, and asked in a loud voice, which of them the law commanded me to strike off. The populace began to murmur, my assistants exchanged meaning smiles and scornful glances, the magistrate impatiently called to me to make an end; Elizabeth stirred not and made no sign. Then I had pity on the youth and beauty of the murderess; I felt I should never be able to strike her death-blow, and a sudden resolution took possession of my soul, the resolution to save her. I sank the sword’s point, leant upon its hilt, and, claiming my privilege, demanded Elizabeth for my wife. Thereupon the murmurs of the crowd were converted into loud rejoicings, and whilst I supported the fainting girl in my arms, the people insisted I should at once conduct her to the altar. My Lords of the Council knew well that I was in my right, and none ventured to hinder or object. Followed by the noisy mob, we returned to the city, and within the hour the priest of St Kummerniss united me to Elizabeth. Then she once more ascended the cart, which drove away with her, this time at a brisk trot instead of a funeral pace, whilst I went to the council-house to hang Engolf.... The body remained hanging till sunset, then I took it down, laid it in the coffin, and went my way home.”

“There was revel and jubilee in the house. With song and dance, and play, and flowing jugs, the servants celebrated the headsman’s wedding day. And when the hour came, I led Elizabeth to her chamber, drew my father’s sword from its scabbard, and placed it in the bridal bed between her and myself. There it has ever since remained.”

With this singular and thoroughly German incident, the headsman’s memoirs, as conveyed in autobiographical form, conclude, although we may presume the greater portion of the other volumes to be derived from similar records, moulded into a different shape by Mr Chézy. The second volume consists of one long narrative, entitled “Hildebrand Pfeiffer,” a story of the seventeenth century. An executioner plays an important part in it, but is not the hero of the tale, as in Benz’s narrative. Hildebrand Pfeiffer is a man of five-and-thirty, of handsome face and person, who has studied long and successfully at Heidelberg, Prague, and Paris, and has learnt surgery at Cologne, where we now find him. Possessed by the demon of pride and ambition, he sees no better way of attaining the brilliant position he covets, than through the medium of the philosopher’s stone, at whose discovery he ardently labours under the guidance of Doctor David da Silva, or Master Wood, as the vulgar translated his Portuguese name—a learned physician and ex-teacher at the high school, to whom Hildebrand serves as assistant and amanuensis. Besides dabbling in white magic, the old Jew-leech is shrewdly suspected of dealing in the blacker sort, but this does not prevent scholars flocking to gather wisdom from his lips, and sick persons sending for him so often as their fears of death prevail with their avarice to pay his heavy fee. And he has long been left unmolested to his mysterious pursuits, when, in an evil hour, he sends his old servant, in company with a young maiden, to gather mandragora at the gallows’ foot. The plant is to be employed in some alchemical conjuration, and is valuable only if gathered at the witching hour by a perfect virgin. The one selected is Adelgunde, a beautiful girl, who loves Hildebrand, and is beloved by him. Unfortunately, upon the night selected for plucking the mystical mandrake, the headsman and his assistants repair to the place of execution to inter the corpse of a suicide, and there detect and seize the two women, the elder of whom throws the blame of her unholy proceedings upon Da Silva and Hildebrand. There is, perhaps, rather too much of witchcraft in the volume, but some of the incidents are very wild and original. With more skill and care, and power of description, Mr Chézy might have constructed a three volume romance of a striking kind out of the materials he has loosely and hastily crammed into a third of the space. There is a certain Count Philippus, or Philipps, of whom much was to be made, but he is neglected, and roughly sketched. He comes to Cologne to raise troops for the emperor, and is very successful in his recruiting, having mustered a strong body of idle artisans, debauched students, and desperadoes of all kinds. In the joy of his heart he drinks himself ill; Hildebrand attends him, and wins his heart by tolerating the flagon, when the soldier had expected to be put on a diet of drugs and spring water. The Count’s levies are drawn up, and about to march away, when the police make their appearance at Dr Da Silva’s door, to arrest him and his assistant on a charge of witchcraft. Warned in time, Hildebrand conceals himself amongst the men at arms, and follows Philipps to the field as body-surgeon. It is the period of the thirty years’ war, and the ambitious mediciner, interrupted in his pursuit of the grand secret of gold-making, conceives the more feasible project of rising to eminence and wealth by deeds of arms. He is confirmed in his new aspirations by the gift of a sword, manufactured by the headsman, and supposed to confer invincibility on him who wields it. There is a remarkable chapter, from which we gather the details of this superstition. Hannadam, the executioner, has his fortified dwelling in the suburbs of Cologne, and one evening a Lutheran officer rides up from the adjacent Swedish camp, and endeavours to induce him, by the bribe of a well-filled purse, to make him a charmed sword. From the battlements of his little fortress, Hannadam holds converse with the Swede, who complains that he has had his foot in the stirrup for twenty years, and is still a cornet, whilst his comrades of equal standing have risen to high rank. He holds it high time to look after his promotion.

“‘Undoubtedly it is,’ said the headsman jeeringly. ‘A forty-year-old cornet cuts a poor figure. I will promote you to a majority.’

“‘So you shall,’ replied the horseman, ‘and I will tell you how. But first answer a question,—you are a popish idolator?’

“‘Infernal heretic!’ shouted the executioner. ‘Would you have me set my dogs at you?’

“The Swede was astounded by this burst of anger. He had intended no harm, but in the simplicity of his heart had designated the Roman Catholics by the epithet that from childhood upwards he had heard and used.

“‘If you are no idolator,’ he replied very quietly, ‘give me back my purse.’

“The headsman laughed.

“‘I am papist enough,’ he said, ‘to take example by my priests, and restore no offering.’

“‘Indeed,’ said the cornet. ‘But I begin to see what offended you. Never fear, you shall not hear the word again.’

“‘You will do wisely not to repeat it. And now say what you would for your money.’

“‘Did I not tell you I cannot get promotion?’

“‘Well—’

“‘Well? In the name of all the idols, I would have a charmed sword, such as only a headsman and a Romanist can make.’

“The purse fell jingling at the Swede’s feet.

“‘Begone!’ cried the headsman. ‘I am no sorcerer.’

“‘The charmed sword is a matter of white magic, seeing it is made under invocation of the holy Trinity and of the blessed cavalier, St Martin, without aid of the powers of darkness. To-night is favourable to its forging—such a night will not for a long time recur—for me, perhaps, never—with the like concurrence of fortunate circumstances. Do my bidding, and take the rich reward. After midnight, red Mars is in the ascendant, and in the direct aspect of Venus. That is the lucky hour to put the weapon together. The blade must be a sword that has served upon the scaffold, and severed a criminal’s head from his body; the wood of the hilt must be part of the wheel upon which some poor sinner has been broken; the guard must be of the metal of chains in which a murderer has been hung. You need put it but loosely together; the armourer shall complete the work. The blade is the most important; let it be long and slender, not above two fingers broad, and with a single edge. The Tubal’s-fire you of course have: our executioners, also, keep that. Will you prepare the sword, master?’

“‘I would do so,’ replied the headsman, ‘and have all things needful;—but the fire is wanting.’

“‘Impossible!’ exclaimed the cavalier.

“‘But nevertheless true,’ replied Hannadam. ‘I have only lately inherited my charge; I found the lamp in the forge extinguished, and since then no oak has been struck by lightning.’

“The Swede cursed and swore like a blind heathen, rode disconsolately away, and forgot, in his disappointment, to reclaim the purse he had again thrown up to the headsman. The latter whistled a peasant’s dance between his teeth, and gave orders to raise the drawbridge.

“‘You told the man an untruth,’ said his wife gently; ‘the lamp now burning in the smithy received its light from a blasted oak.’

“The headsman laughed. ‘I know it right well, darling,’ he replied; ‘but it will be long before I give such a sword to an unbelieving heretic, for him to use against those he styles idolators. I will at once to work, and prepare the weapon. In our days a blade is not to be despised, from whose mere glitter the foe will fly by dozens.’”

At midnight the sparks flew fast in the headsman’s smithy, and the wondrous weapon was prepared. The Swede might well have found it useful in the severe action between his countrymen and the Imperialists, which took place the following day within sound and sight of the city. The battle over, Count Philipps and Hildebrand rode up to Hannadam’s dwelling; and the Count, whose vassal the headsman was, demanded admittance and lodging. Hildebrand showed some repugnance to enter the house of the executioner. “No need to fear,” said the Count. “According to imperial charter, the headsman’s office is honourable; and, moreover, he and his household will have sufficient sense not to touch us. His bread, his wine, his meat do not defile those partaking them, neither does his roof dishonour those it covers. But you must have the goodness to see to our horses yourself. At the worst, my nobility is good enough to shield us from stain even in the knacker’s dwelling.”[^[5]] So the count and the leech take up their quarters in the house of Hannadam, whose wife is no other than that beautiful Adelgunde, with whom Hildebrand had been deeply in love, and whom he had now long mourned as dead. She had been tried at Cologne on a charge of witchcraft, having been detected gathering mandragora at midnight beneath the gallows, and had been put to the torture; but Hannadam, to whose lot it fell to inflict it, was touched by her beauty, and handled her gently. In a conversation with Count Philipps, he explains to him how it is in the executioner’s power greatly to aggravate or lighten the agony he is ordered to inflict. Finally, Hannadam marries her, in virtue of the privilege already exemplified in the story of Berthold Benz. She is a somnambulist, and having seen her former lover enter the house, (although her husband does all in his power to keep her from sight of him, and even confines her in her room,) she gets up in the night, and by a most perilous path across the roof of the house, reaches Hildebrand’s chamber, bearing with her the sword of her husband’s manufacture, which she gives to her lover, bidding him use and conquer with it. Taking little heed of the supposed power attributed to the weapon, Hildebrand nevertheless girds it on, and the next day joins Colonel Madelon’s regiment of cuirassiers. Distracted at finding Adelgunde the wife of another man, he covets death, and resolves to seek it in action. The count unwillingly parts with him, on condition of his returning that evening to his post. But evening comes, the fight is over, the wounded count looks anxiously for his leech, and Hildebrand appears not. The cuirassiers are far away, pursuing the beaten foe.

Time passes—the exact period is not defined—and we again meet the warlike physician, who is brought before us in a very remarkable chapter, detailing the punishment and degradation, at the headsman’s hands, of an entire regiment that has disgraced itself in action. At that period the affairs of the Imperialists were in any thing but a flourishing state. At Leipsig—on the same ground where, eleven years previously, Gustavus Adolphus had beaten Tilly—the Swedes, under the gallant Torstenson, had gained a signal victory over the Archduke Leopold-William; a victory shameful to the German name from the cowardice and want of discipline of a portion of the troops engaged. The remnant of the beaten army rallied near Prague, whose gates, some time after the fight, a regiment of cavalry was seen to approach, its ranks thinned less by hostile sword than by scandalous desertion. Deep shame sat upon the bearded countenances of the horsemen, and their hearts were oppressed by apprehension of punishment; for rumour said that the corps was ordered to Prague to answer for its misconduct. The officers were even more cast down than the men; they spoke in whispers, consulting each other how they might best justify themselves, and proposing to throw all the blame on their subordinates. On the other hand, the private soldiers did not scruple to say above their breath, that “a sensible housekeeper begins to sweep his stairs from the top.” The regiment was close to the town, ordering its ranks previous to entrance, when a young officer came up at full gallop, saluted the colonel courteously but coldly, and said:

“I am the bearer of an unpleasant order.”

“Duty is duty, Sir,” replied the commanding officer; “be good enough to deliver your message.”

This was to the effect that the men should dismount, lead their horses into the town with lowered colours and without trumpet-sound, and then, so soon as the beasts were put up, repair to the market-place with swords at side, officers as well as men. This reception was ominous of even worse things than had been anticipated; and many a soldier regretted he had not followed an example abundantly supplied him, and deserted immediately after the battle. In two hours time, however, the regiment arrived with downcast eyes at the appointed place of muster. They marched two and two, with long intervals between the files. At the entrance of the narrow streets were pickets of dismounted dragoons, four deep, their musketoons on their arms, their drawn swords hanging from their wrists; the doors and windows of the houses were lined with carabineers, their weapons at the recover. A major and a provost-marshal were there on horseback, the latter attended by his men, who stood round a couple of carts. As each rank of the cuirassiers reached the square, the major commanded them to halt, and then gave the word “Draw swords!” followed by “Ground arms!” Whereupon every man, without distinction, had to lay his naked sword upon the ground, before he was allowed to move forwards. The cornets did the same with their colours, and the provost’s men took up swords and standards and put them in the carts. The disarmed soldiers formed up as prisoners in the square, and their hearts misgave them when they saw it arranged as for an approaching execution. True, there was neither scaffold nor gallows, but in the centre stood the gloomy man in the red cloak, his assistants behind him, between an iron vice and a pile of brushwood. A hedge of halberds surrounded the whole square. On one side a crowd of military officials of high rank sat upon their horses, to try the offenders, if indeed trial could be said to await men manifestly already condemned. Hard upon the circle of military pressed the populace; windows, roofs, and balconies were thronged with curious spectators; but it was as much as the nearest of them could do to catch a few words of what passed, when the disarmed regiment appeared before the court-martial.

The heads of accusation were tolerably well known, and resolved themselves into the one undeniable fact that the regiment, at first victorious, but afterwards repulsed, had fled in shameful haste and confusion, communicating its panic to the rest of the cavalry, leaving the infantry exposed, and causing the loss of the already half-won fight. These circumstances were too notorious to need proof; and the chief question was, whether the soldiers had fled in spite of every exertion of their officers, or whether the latter had been, by their pusillanimity, the chief causes of the disaster. This question it probably was that was debated for nearly two hours, and produced such violent dissensions amongst the prisoners, that the intervention of the guard was required to keep them from coming to blows. The bystanders could not distinguish words, but only a confused clamour of voices, which suddenly ceased at the blast of a trumpet. The prisoners drew back; the judges, consulted together for a moment; and then there was an abrupt and uneasy movement, amongst, behind, and in front of them, the motive of which immediately became apparent. The spectators knew not whither first to turn their eyes. Here policemen bound the officers’ hands behind their backs; in another place the provost’s men separated the soldiers by tens, something in the way in which a tithe-owner counts the sheaves in a field. Drums were placed on end, with dice upon their heads: yonder the brushwood blazed up in bright flames, which the headsman’s helpers fed with the colours and decorations of the regiment, whilst their master snapped sword-blade after sword-blade in his iron vice. With mournful eyes the officers saw their flags consumed and their weapons broken at the hangman’s hands. The most painful death would have been sweet and welcome compared to this moral agony. Despondingly they sank their heads, and those esteemed themselves fortunate whose hair was long enough to hide their shame-stricken countenances.

Whilst the officers endured the curious or spiteful gaze of the throng, the men threw dice for their lives upon the sheepskin tables. He of each ten who threw the lowest, was immediately seized by the executioners, who bound his hands and placed him with the group of officers. And the closing act of this terrible ceremony was performed by the public crier, who proclaimed the whole regiment, from the lieutenant-colonel down to the last dragoon, as “Schelme” or infamous knaves. After which the mob dispersed, streaming through lanes and alleys to the place where the officers and tenth men were to be hanged. The remainder of the regiment were conveyed to a place of security, till such time as they could be sent to dig fortifications in Hungary, or to labour on the wharves of a seaport.

Hildebrand Pfeiffer is amongst those saved from death to undergo slavery; but he contrives to escape his doom, and is next seen dwelling, a pious ascetic and penitent, in a mountain hermitage, under the name of Father Gregorius. Enthusiastic in whatever he does, he passes his time prostrate before a crucifix, lacerating his shoulders with many stripes. His despair arises partly from grief at the loss of Adelgunde, and partly from shame at having been branded as a dastard with the rest of Madelon’s cuirassiers. His old friend and patron, Count Philipps, finds him out, reasons with and consoles him, and makes him his chaplain. But after he has long been esteemed for his piety and eloquence, he offends the Count by a diatribe against the prevalent belief in witchcraft, whose absurdity his good sense and early education enable him to recognise. There is an extraordinary scene at a convent, where Adelgunde, who deserted her husband’s house on the night of her interview with Hildebrand, has taken refuge. She falls into a manner of ecstasy, repeats Solomon’s Song in Latin, and commits other extravagancies, greatly to the scandal of the sisterhood, and of Father Bonaventura, the convent chaplain. Finally, both Hildebrand and Adelgunde are burnt for sorcery. There is a vein of interest in the tale to the very end, although the book, in an artistical sense, is roughly done. The style is crabbed, and the dialogue quaint, but often effective. The final volume of the Malefizbuch, under the agreeable title of “Galgenvögel,” (Gallowsbirds) contains four tales of very middling merit, and is altogether the worst. It differs from the other two as saying little concerning the headsman and his functions, further than that he steps in at the close of each tale, to execute the sentence of the law on the criminals whose offences and adventures it narrates. M. Chézy announces his store of materials to be by no means expended, and promises a further series should this one find favour. If it does so, he must attribute the success to the interest inseparable from the subject, not unlikely to attract readers in spite of the editor’s negligence, and of the book’s manifold deficiencies.

EDINBURGH AFTER FLODDEN.

The great battle of Flodden was fought upon the 9th of September 1513. The defeat of the Scottish army, which was mainly owing to the fantastic ideas of chivalry entertained by James IV., and his refusal to avail himself of the natural advantages of his position, was by far the most disastrous of any recounted in the history of the northern wars. The whole strength of the kingdom, both Lowland and Highland, was assembled, and the contest was one of the sternest and most desperate upon record.

For several hours the victory seemed doubtful. On the left the Scots obtained a decided advantage; on the right wing they were broken and overthrown; and at last the whole weight of the battle was brought into the centre, where King James and the Earl of Surrey commanded in person. The determined valour of James, imprudent as it was, had the effect of rousing to a pitch of desperation the courage of the meanest soldiers; and the ground becoming soft and slippery from blood, they pulled off their boots and shoes, and secured a firmer footing by fighting in their hose.

“It is owned,” says Abercromby, “that both parties did wonders, but none on either side performed more than the King himself. He was again told that by coming to handy blows he could do no more than another man, whereas, by keeping the post due to his station, he might be worth many thousands. Yet he would not only fight in person, but also on foot; for he no sooner saw that body of the English give way which was defeated by the Earl of Huntley, but he alighted from his horse, and commanded his guard of noblemen and gentlemen to do the like and follow him. He had at first abundance of success, but at length the Lord Thomas Howard and Sir Edward Stanley, who had defeated their opposites, coming in with the Lord Dacre’s horse, and surrounding the King’s battalion on all sides, the Scots were so distressed that, for their last defence, they cast themselves into a ring; and being resolved to die nobly with their sovereign, who scorned to ask quarter, were altogether cut off. So say the English writers, and I am apt to believe that they are in the right.”

The combat was maintained with desperate fury until nightfall. At the close, according to Mr Tytler, “Surrey was uncertain of the result of the battle: the remains of the enemy’s centre still held the field; Home, with his Borderers, still hovered on the left; and the commander wisely allowed neither pursuit nor plunder, but drew off his men and kept a strict watch during the night. When the morning broke, the Scottish artillery were seen standing deserted on the side of the hill; their defenders had disappeared; and the Earl ordered thanks to be given for a victory which was no longer doubtful. Yet, even after all this, a body of the Scots appeared unbroken upon a hill, and were about to charge the Lord-Admiral, when they were compelled to leave their position by a discharge of the English ordnance.

“The loss of the Scots in this fatal battle amounted to about ten thousand men. Of these, a great proportion were of high rank; the remainder being composed of the gentry, the farmers, and landed yeomanry, who disdained to fly when their sovereign and his nobles lay stretched in heaps around them.” Besides King James, there fell at Flodden the Archbishop of St Andrews, thirteen earls, two bishops, two abbots, fifteen lords and chiefs of clans, and five peers’ eldest sons, besides La Motte the French ambassador, and the secretary of the King. The same historian adds—“The names of the gentry who fell are too numerous for recapitulation, since there were few families of note in Scotland which did not lose one relative or another, whilst some houses had to weep the death of all. It is from this cause that the sensations of sorrow and national lamentation occasioned by the defeat were peculiarly poignant and lasting—so that to this day few Scotsmen can hear the name of Flodden without a shudder of gloomy regret.”

The loss to Edinburgh on this occasion was peculiarly great. All the magistrates and able-bodied citizens had followed their King to Flodden, whence very few of them returned. The office of Provost or chief magistrate of the capital was at that time an object of high ambition, and was conferred only upon persons of high rank and station. There seems to be some uncertainty whether the holder of this dignity at the time of the battle of Flodden was Sir Alexander Lauder, ancestor of the Fountainhall family, who was elected in 1511, or that great historical personage, Archibald Earl of Angus, better known as Archibald Bell-the-Cat, who was chosen in 1513, the year of the battle. Both of them were at Flodden. The name of Sir Alexander Lauder appears upon the list of the slain; Angus was one of the survivors, but his son, George, Master of Angus, fell fighting gallantly by the side of King James. The city records of Edinburgh, which commence about this period, are not clear upon the point, and I am rather inclined to think that the Earl of Angus was elected to supply the place of Lauder.[^[6]] But although the actual magistrates were absent, they had formally nominated deputies in their stead. I find, on referring to the city records, that “George of Tours” had been appointed to officiate in the absence of the Provost, and that four other persons were selected to discharge the office of bailies until the magistrates should return.

It is impossible to describe the consternation which pervaded the whole of Scotland when the intelligence of the defeat became known. In Edinburgh it was excessive. Mr Arnot, in the history of that city, says,—

“The news of their overthrow in the field of Flodden reached Edinburgh on the day after the battle, and overwhelmed the inhabitants with grief and confusion. The streets were crowded with women seeking intelligence about their friends, clamouring and weeping. Those who officiated in absence of the magistrates proved themselves worthy of the trust. They issued a proclamation, ordering all the inhabitants to assemble in military array for defence of the city, on the tolling of the bell; and commanding, ‘that all women, and especially strangers, do repair to their work, and not be seen upon the street clamorand and cryand; and that women of the better sort do repair to the church and offer up prayers, at the stated hours, for our Sovereign Lord and his army, and the townsmen who are with the army.’”

Indeed the council records bear ample evidence of the emergency of that occasion. Throughout the earlier pages, the word “Flowdoun” frequently occurs on the margin, in reference to various hurried orders for arming and defence; and there can be no doubt that, had the English forces attempted to follow up their victory, and attack the Scottish capital, the citizens would have resisted to the last. But it soon became apparent that the loss sustained by the English was so severe, that Surrey was in no condition to avail himself of the opportunity; and in fact, shortly afterwards, he was compelled to disband his army.

The references to the city banner, contained in the following poem, may require a word of explanation. It is a standard still held in great honour and reverence by the burghers of Edinburgh, having been presented to them by James the Third, in return for their loyal service in 1482. This banner, along with that of the Earl Marischal, still conspicuous in the Library of the Faculty of Advocates, was honourably brought back from Flodden, and certainly never could have been displayed in a more memorable field. Maitland says, with reference to this very interesting relic of antiquity,—

“As a perpetual remembrance of the loyalty and bravery of the Edinburghers on the aforesaid occasion, the King granted them a banner or standard, with a power to display the same in defence of their king, country, and their own rights. This flag is kept by the Convener of the Trades; at whose appearance therewith, it is said that not only the artificers of Edinburgh are obliged to repair to it, but all the artisans or craftsmen within Scotland are bound to follow it, and fight under the Convener of Edinburgh as aforesaid.”

Edinburgh after Flodden

I.

News of battle!—news of battle!

Hark! ’tis ringing down the street:

And the archways and the pavement

Bear the clang of hurrying feet.

News of battle? Who hath brought it?

News of triumph? Who should bring

Tidings from our noble army,

Greetings from our gallant King?

All last night we watched the beacons

Blazing on the hills afar,

Each one bearing, as it kindled,

Message of the opened war.

All night long the northern streamers

Shot across the trembling sky:

Fearful lights, that never beckon

Save when kings or heroes die.

II.

News of battle! Who hath brought it?

All are thronging to the gate;

“Warder—warder! open quickly!

Man—is this a time to wait?”

And the heavy gates are opened:

Then a murmur long and loud,

And a cry of fear and wonder

Bursts from out the bending crowd.

For they see in battered harness

Only one hard-stricken man,

And his weary steed is wounded

And his cheek is pale and wan.

Spearless hangs a bloody banner

In his weak and drooping hand—

God! can that be Randolph Murray,

Captain of the city band?

III.

Round him crush the people, crying,

“Tell us all—O tell us true!

Where are they who went to battle,

Randolph Murray, sworn to you?

Where are they, our brothers—children?

Have they met the English foe?

Why art thou alone, unfollowed?

Is it weal, or is it woe?”

Like a corpse the grizzly warrior

Looks from out his helm of steel,

But no word he speaks in answer,

Only with his armed heel

Chides his weary steed, and onward

Up the city streets they ride;

Fathers, sisters, mothers, children,

Shrieking, praying by his side.

“By the God that made thee, Randolph!

Tell us what mischance hath come;”

Then he lifts his riven banner,

And the asker’s voice is dumb.

IV.

The elders of the city,

Have met within their hall:

The men whom good King James had charged

To watch the tower and wall.

“Your hands are weak with age,” he said,

“Your hearts are stout and true;

So bide ye in the Maiden Town,

While others fight for you.

My trumpet from the Border-side

Shall send a blast so clear,

That all who wait within the gate

That stirring sound may hear.

Or, if it be the will of heaven

That back I never come,

And if, instead of Scottish shouts,

Ye hear the English drum,—

Then let the warning bells ring out,

Then gird you to the fray,

Then man the walls like burghers stout,

And fight while fight you may.

’Twere better that in fiery flame

The roofs should thunder down,

Than that the foot of foreign foe

Should trample in the town!”

V.

Then in came Randolph Murray—

His step Was slow and weak,

And, as he doffed his broken helm,

The tears ran down his cheek:

They fell upon his corslet,

And on his mailed hand,

As he gazed around him wistfully,

Leaning sorely on his brand.

And none who then beheld him

But straight were smote with fear,

For a bolder and a sterner man

Had never couched a spear.

They knew so sad a messenger