Transcriber’s Note:

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCXC.      APRIL, 1848.      Vol. LXIII.

CONTENTS.

EDINBURGH:

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET;

AND 37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.

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

SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

BLACKWOOD’S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCXC.      APRIL, 1848.      Vol. LXIII.

FALL OF THE THRONE OF THE BARRICADES.

“Deus patiens quia Æternus.”—St Augustin.

Eighteen years ago, when the throne of Charles X. was overturned amidst the universal exultation of the liberal party in this country, we ventured, amidst the general transports, to arraign the policy and condemn the morality of the change. We pleaded strongly, in several articles,[^[1]] that that great event foreboded nothing but a long series of calamities to France and to Europe; that liberty had been rendered impossible in a country which, casting aside all the bonds of religion and loyalty, had left no other foundation for government but force; and that the external peace of the Continent would be put in imminent peril by an ardent military population, heated by the successful issue of one great revolt, placed in the midst of monarchies in which the feudal institutions and chivalrous feelings were still in ascendency. We doubted the stability of a government founded on the success of one well-organised urban insurrection: we distrusted the fidelity of men who had begun their career by treachery and treason. Nominally the aggressor, we concluded that Charles X. was really on the defensive; he attempted a coup d’état, because government in any other way had become impossible. We were told in reply, that these were antiquated and exploded ideas; that the revolution was necessary to save the liberties of France from destruction; that a new era had opened upon mankind with the fire of the Barricades; that loyalty was no longer required when the interest of mankind to be well governed was generally felt; and that a throne surrounded by republican institutions was the best form of government, and the only one in which the monarchical principle could any longer be tolerated in the enlightened states of modern Europe.

With how much vehemence these principles were maintained by the whole whig and liberal party in Great Britain, need be told to none who recollect the rise of the dynasty of the Barricades in the year 1830. To those who do not, ample evidence of the general delusion, and of the perseverance with which it was combated, will be found in the pages of this Journal for 1831 and 1832. Time has rolled on, and brought its wonted changes on its wings. More quickly than we anticipated, the perilous nature of the convulsion which had proved victorious was demonstrated—more clearly than we ventured to predict, was the necessity of Prince Polignac’s ordinances demonstrated. It soon became apparent that France could be governed only by force.

The government of Louis Philippe was a continual denial of its origin—an incessant effort to crush the spirit which had raised it. The repeated and sanguinary disorders in Paris; the two dreadful insurrections in Lyons; the awful drowning of the revolt of the cloister of St Méry in blood; demonstrated, before two years had elapsed, that the government had felt the necessity of extinguishing the visionary ideas which had been evoked, as the means of elevating itself into power. More than once it stood on the edge of the abyss; and it was saved only by the vigour of the sovereign, and the newly awakened terrors of the holders of property, which prevented them from openly coalescing with the determined republicans, who aimed at overturning all the institutions of society, and realising in the nineteenth century the visions of Robespierre and Babœuf in the eighteenth. In the course of this protracted struggle, the new government felt daily more and more the necessity of resting their authority on force, and detaching it from the anarchical doctrines, amidst the triumphs of which it had taken its rise. Paris was declared in a state of siege; the ordinances of Polignac were reenacted with additional rigour; the military establishment of the country was doubled; its expenditure raised from nine hundred millions to fifteen hundred millions francs; an incessant and persevering war waged with the democratic press; and Paris surrounded by a chain of forts, which effectually prevented any other will from governing France but that of the military who were in possession of their bastions. Such was the result to the cause of freedom in France of the triumph of the Barricades.

But in eighteen years an entirely new generation rises to the active direction of affairs. In 1848, the personal experience, the well-founded fears, the sights of woe which had retained the strength of France round the standards of the Barricades, were forgotten. The fearful contests with anarchy by which the first years of the reign of Louis Philippe had been marked, had passed into the page of history, that is, were become familiar to a tenth part only of the active population. To those who did learn it from this limited source, it was known chiefly from the volumes of M. Louis Blanc, who, in his “Ten years of the reign of Louis Philippe,” painted that monarch in no other light but as one of the most deceitful and sanguinary tyrants who ever disgraced humanity. Thus the lessons of experience were lost to the vast majority of the active citizens. The necessity of keeping at peace, which Louis Philippe so strongly felt, and so energetically asserted, became in the course of years an insupportable restraint upon a people fraught with revolutionary ideas, and heated by the glowing recollections of the Empire. A nation containing six millions of separate landed proprietors,[^[2]] the great majority of whom were at the plough, and not possessed of six pounds a-year in the world, necessarily chafes against any power which imposes the restraints of order and peace on the appetite for plunder and the lust of conquest. This was the true secret of the fall of the dynasties of the Restoration and the Barricades. They fell because they kept the nation at peace with its neighbours, and at peace with itself,—because they terminated the dream of foreign conquest, and checked the visions of internal utopia; because they did not, like Napoleon, open the career of arms to every man in the country capable of carrying a musket; or, like Robespierre, pursue the supposed advantage of the working classes by the destruction of every interest above them in society. Had either Charles X. or Louis Philippe been foreign conquerors, and the state of Europe had permitted of their waging war with success, they would have lived and died on the throne of France, and left an honoured crown to their successors. There never were monarchs who mowed down the population and wasted the resources of France like Napoleon and Louis XIV.; but as long as they were successful, and kept open the career of elevation to the people, they commanded their universal attachment. It was when they grew unfortunate, and could call them only to discharge the mournful duties of adversity, that they became the objects of universal execration. The revolution has ever been true to its polar star, viz.—worldly success.

In making these observations, we must guard against being misunderstood. We do not assert that the present leaders of the Revolution desire foreign war, or are insincere in the pacific professions which they have put forth in their public proclamations. We have no doubt that “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” is what they really desire; and that with England in particular they are sincerely desirous to remain, at present at least, on terms of amity. The early promoters of the Revolution of 1789—Siêyes, Bailly, Mirabeau, and Lafayette—were equally loud and probably sincere in their pacific protestations at the outset of the first convulsion. What we assert is another proposition entirely corroborated by past history, and scarcely less important in its present application—viz., that the members of the existing Revolutionary Government are placed in a false position; that they have been elevated to power by the force of passion, and the spread of principles inconsistent with the existence of society; that if they continue to fan them, they will ruin their country, if they attempt to coerce them, they will be destroyed themselves. This is the constant and dreadful alternative in which a Revolutionary Government is placed, and which has so uniformly led in past history to what is called a departure from the principles of freedom by its successful leaders. It was this which brought Lafayette into such discredit in Paris, that his life was saved only by his fortunate confinement in an Austrian dungeon: it was this which rendered Mirabeau in the end a royalist, and for ever ruined him in popular favour: it was this which made Robespierre strive to restore the sway of natural religion in the infidel metropolis: it was this which gave Napoleon such a horror of the metaphysical “Ideologues,” who, according to him, had ruined France, and rendered him the resolute and unbending opponent of the Revolution. But even Napoleon’s iron arm was unequal to the task of arresting the fiery coursers of democracy: he only succeeded in maintaining internal tranquillity by giving them a foreign direction. He turned them not against the Tuileries, but against the Kremlin; he preserved peace in France only by waging war in Europe. A “Napoleon of Peace” will never succeed in restraining the Revolution.

Observe the pledges with which the Provisional Government are commencing their career. They are, that the state is to provide employment for all who cannot procure it from private individuals; that an ample remuneration is to be secured to labour; that the right of combination to raise wages is to be protected by law; that the House of Peers is to be abolished, as well as all titles of honour, the bearing of which is to be absolutely prohibited; that a noble career to all Frenchmen is to be opened in the army; the national representation is to be placed on the most democratic basis of a National Assembly, elected by nine millions of electors; all burdens on subsistence are to be abolished; unlimited circulation is to be provided for newspapers and the extension of knowledge; but the taxes, in the mean time at least, are to undergo no diminution. These promises and pledges sufficiently demonstrate what interest in the state has now got the ascendency. It is the interest, or rather supposed interest, of labour, in opposition to that of capital—of numbers against property.

The Revolution that has taken place is a communist or socialist triumph; the chiefs who have been installed in power are the leaders of the party who think that the grand evil of civilisation is the encroachment of the profit of capital on the wages of labour, and that the only effectual remedy for them is to be found in the forcible diminution of the former and extension of the latter.

The doctrine of this party in France has long been, that Robespierre perished because he did not venture to pronounce the word, agrarian law. It would be to little purpose to pronounce that word now, when the Republic has got nearly six millions of separate proprietors, most of them not worth six pounds a-year each. There is little but sturdy resistance to be got by attempting to spoliate this immense and indigent body, as they have spoliated the old territorial proprietors. But the capitalists and shopkeepers of towns stand in a different situation. In their hands, since the fall of Napoleon, very considerable wealth has accumulated. The peace and order maintained by the governments of the Restoration and the Barricades, though fatal to themselves, has been eminently favourable to the growth of bourgeois opulence. It is against that opulence that the recent Revolution was directed. The shopkeepers, deluded to their own destruction, began the insurrection: they surrounded and compelled the abandonment of the Tuileries. All successful convulsions are headed, in the first instance at least, by a portion of the higher or middle ranks. But they were soon passed by the rabble who followed their armed columns; and when the tumultuous mob broke into the Chamber of Deputies, fired at the picture of Louis Philippe, and pointed their muskets at the head of the Duchess of Orleans, it was too late to talk of Thiers and Odillon Barrot; the cause of reform was already passed by that of Revolution; and nothing could serve the victorious and highly excited multitude, but the abolition of monarchy, peers, and titles of honour, and the vesting of government in the hands of dreamers on equality, and leaders of Trades’ Unions in France.

Let the National Guard, who brought about the Revolution, and seduced or overcame the loyalty of the troops of the line, explain, if they can, the benefit they are likely to derive from this triumph of Socialism over Bourgeoisie, of labour over capital, of numbers over property. The Revolution was the work of their hands, and they must reap its fruits, as unquestionably they will bear its responsibility. It is of more importance for us in this country to inquire how the promises made by government, and the expectations formed by the people, are to be realised in the present social and political state of France. Already, before the Io Pæans upon the fall of the Orleans dynasty have ceased, the difficulties of the new government in this respect have proclaimed themselves. Columns of ten and fifteen thousand workmen daily wait on the administration to insist on the immediate recognition of the rights of labour: their demands were promptly acceded to by the decree of 3d March, which fixes the hours of labour in Paris at ten hours a-day, and in the provinces at eleven hours. They were formerly eleven hours in Paris and twelve in the provinces. This is quite intelligible: it is reasonable that the Civil Prætorian Guards of the capital should work less than the serfs of the provinces. Cutting off an hour’s labour over a whole country would be deemed a pretty serious matter in “l’industrieuse Angleterre:” but on the other side of the Channel, we suppose, it is a mere bagatelle, important chiefly as showing from what quarter the wind sets. Other prognostics of coming events are already visible. Monster meetings of operatives and workmen in and around Paris continue to be held in the Champs de Mars, to take the interests and rights of labour into consideration: it is probable that they will still further reduce the hours of toil, and proportionately raise its wages. Already the stone-cutters have insisted on a minimum of pay and maximum of work, and got it. Eight hours a-day, and ten sous an hour, is their ultimatum. The journalists early clamoured for the immediate removal of all duties affecting them. They succeeded in shaking off their burdens; other classes will not be slow in following their example. Meanwhile government is burdened, as in the worst days of the first Revolution, with the maintenance of an immense body of citizens with arms in their hands, and very little bread to put into their mouths. How to feed this immense body, with resources continually failing, from the terrors of capital, the flight of the English from Paris, and the diminished expenditure of all the wealthier classes, would, according to the former maxims of government, have been deemed a matter of no small difficulty. But we suppose the regenerators of society have discovered some method of arriving, with railway speed, at public opulence amidst private suffering.

The melancholy progress of the first Revolution has naturally made numbers of persons, not intimately acquainted with its events, apprehensive of the immediate return of the Reign of Terror and the restoration of the guillotine into its terrible and irresistible sovereignty in France. Without disputing that there is much danger in the present excited and disjointed state of the population of that country, there are several reasons which induce us to believe that such an event is not very probable, at least in the first instance, and that it is from a different quarter that the real danger that now threatens France is, in the outset at least, to be apprehended.

In the first place, although the Reign of Terror is over, and few indeed of the actual witnesses are still in existence, yet the recollection of it will never pass away: it has affixed a stain to the cause of revolution which will never be effaced, but which its subsequent leaders are most anxious to be freed from. Its numerous tragic scenes—its frightful atrocity—its heroic suffering, have indelibly sunk into the minds of men. To the end of the world, they will interest and melt every succeeding age. The young will ever find them the most engrossing and attractive theme,—the middle-aged, the most important subject of reflection,—the old, the most delightful means of renewing the emotions of youth. History is never weary of recording its bloody catastrophes,—romance has already arrayed them with the colours of poetry,—the drama will ere long seize upon them as the finest subjects that human events have ever furnished for the awakening of tragic emotion. They will be as immortal in story as the heroes of the Iliad, the woes of the Atrides, the catastrophe of Œdipus, the death of Queen Mary. So strongly have these fascinating tragedies riveted the attention of mankind, that nothing has ever created so powerful a moral barrier against the encroachments of democracy. The royal, like the Christian martyrs, have lighted a fire which, by the grace of God, will never be extinguished. So strongly are the popular leaders in every country impressed with the moral effects of these catastrophes, that their first efforts are always now directed to clear every successive convulsion of their damning influence. Guizot and Lafayette, at the hazard of their lives, in December 1830, saved Prince Polignac and M. Peyronnet from the guillotine; and the first act of the Provisional Government of France in 1848, to their honour be it said, was to proclaim the abolition of the punishment of death for political offences, in order to save, as they intended, M. Guizot himself.

In the next place, the bloodshed and confiscation of the first Revolution have, as subsequent writers have repeatedly demonstrated, so completely extinguished the elements of national resistance in France, that the dangers which threatened its progress and ensanguined its steps no longer exist. It was no easy matter to overturn the monarchy and church of old France. It was interwoven with the noblest, because the most disinterested feelings of our nature,—it touched the chords of religion and loyalty,—it was supported by historic names, and the lustre of ancient descent,—it rested on the strongest and most dignified attachments of modern times. The overthrow of such a fabric, like the destruction of the monarchy of Great Britain at this time, could not be effected but by the shedding of torrents of blood. Despite the irresolution of the king, the defection of the army, the conquest of the capital, and the emigration of the noblesse, accordingly, a most desperate resistance arose in the provinces; and the revolution was consolidated only by the mitrillades of Lyons and Toulon, the noyades of the Loire, the proscriptions of the Convention, the blood of La Vendée. France was not then enslaved by its capital. But now these elements of resistance to the government of the dominant multitude at Paris no longer exist. The nobles have been destroyed and their estates confiscated; the clergy are reduced to humble stipendiaries, not superior in station or influence to village schoolmasters; the corporations of towns are dissolved; the house of peers has degenerated into a body of well-dressed and titled employés. Six millions of separate landed proprietors, without leaders, wealth, information, or influence, have seized upon and now cultivate the soil of France. Power is, over the whole realm, synonymous with office. Every appointment in the kingdom flows from Paris. In these circumstances, how is it possible that resistance to the decrees of the sovereign power, in possession of the armed force of the capital, the treasury, the telegraph, and the post-office, can arise in France elsewhere than in the capital? Civil war, therefore, on an extended scale over the country, is improbable; and the victorious leaders of the Revolution, delivered from immediate apprehension, save in their own metropolis, of domestic danger, have no motive for shocking the feelings of mankind, and endangering their relations with foreign powers, by needless and unnecessary deeds of cruelty. It was during the struggle with the patricians that the proscriptions of Sylla and Marius deluged Italy with blood. After they were destroyed, by mutual slaughter and the denunciations of the Triumvirate, though there was often the greatest possible tyranny and oppression under the emperors, there was none of the wholesale destruction of life which disgraced the republic, when the rival factions fronted each other in yet undiminished strength.

Although, however, for these reasons, we do not anticipate, at least at present, those sanguinary proscriptions which have for ever rendered infamous the first Revolution, yet we fear there is reason to apprehend changes not less destructive in their tendency, misery still more widespread in its effects, destined, perhaps, to terminate at last in bloodshed not less universal. Men have discovered that they are not mere beasts of prey: they cannot live on flesh and blood. But they have learned also that they can live very well on capital and property: and it is against these, in consequence, that the present Revolution will be directed. They will not be openly assailed: direct confiscations of possessions have fallen almost as much into disrepute as the shedding torrents of blood on the scaffold. The thing will be done more covertly, but not the less effectually. They will take a leaf out of the former private lives of the Italians, and the recent public history of Great Britain. We have shown them that, under cover of a cry for the emancipation of slaves, property to the amount of one hundred and twenty millions can be quietly and securely destroyed in the colonies; that, veiled under the disguise of placing the currency on a secure basis, a third can be added to all the debts, and as much taken from the remuneration of every species of industry, throughout the country. These are great discoveries, they are the glory of modern civilisation: they have secured the support of the whole liberal party in Great Britain. The objects of the French Revolutionists are wholly different, but the mode of proceeding will be the same. The stiletto and the poison bowl have gone out of fashion: they are discarded as the rude invention of a barbarous age. The civilised Italians have taught us how to do the thing. Slow and unseen poison is the real secret; there are Lucretia Borgias in the political not less than the physical world. The great thing is to secure the support of the masses by loud professions of philanthropy, and the warmest expressions of an interest in the improvement of mankind; and having roused them to action, and paralysed the defenders of the existing order of things by these means, then to turn the united force of the nation to their own purposes, and the placing of the whole wealth of the state at their disposal. Thus the ends of Revolution are gained without its leaders being disgraced: the substantial advantages of a transfer of property are enjoyed without a moral reaction being raised up against it. Fortunes are made by some, without a direct spoliation of others being perceived: multitudes are involved in misery, but then they do not know to what cause their distresses are owing, nor is any peculiar obloquy brought upon the real authors of the public calamities.

We do not say that the present Provisional Government of France are actuated by these motives, any more than we say that our negro emancipators or bullionists and free-traders meant, in pursuing the system which they have adopted, to occasion the wholesale and ruinous destruction of property which their measures have occasioned. We consider both the one and the other as political fanatics; men inaccessible to reason, insensible to experience; who pursue certain visionary theories of their own, wholly regardless of the devastation they produce in society, or the misery they occasion in whole classes of the state. “Perish the colonies,” said Robespierre, “rather than one iota of principle be abandoned.” That is the essence of political fanaticism; it rages at present with equal violence on both sides of the Channel. The present Provisional Government of France are some of them able and eloquent—all of them, we believe, well-meaning and sincere men. But they set out with discarding the lessons of experience; their principle is an entire negation of all former systems of government. They think a new era has opened in human affairs: that the first Revolution has destroyed the former method of directing mankind, and the present has ushered in the novel one. They see no bounds to the spread of human felicity, by the adoption of a social system different from any which has yet obtained among men. They have adopted the ideas of Robespierre without his blood,—the visions of Rousseau without his profligacy.

The writings of Lamartine and Louis Blanc clearly reveal these principles, particularly the “Histoire des Girondins” of the former, and the “Dix Ans de l’Histoire de Louis Philippe” of the latter. Lamartine says the Girondists fell because they did not, on the 10th August 1792, when the throne was overturned, instantly proclaim a republic, and go frankly and sincerely into the democratic system. If he himself falls, it will not be from a repetition of the error; he has done what they left undone. We shall see the result. Experience will prove whether, by discarding all former institutions, we have cast off at the same time the slough of corruption which has descended to all from our first parents. We shall see whether the effects of the fall can be shaken off by changing the institutions of society; whether the devil cannot find as many agents among the Socialists as the Jacobins; whether he cannot mount on the shoulders of Lamartine and Arago as well as he did on those of Robespierre and Marat. In the meantime, while we are the spectators of this great experiment, we request the attention of our readers to the following interesting particulars regarding the acts of the new government, the professions they have made, the expectations which are formed of them.

One of the most popular journals of the working classes of Paris—that is, the present rulers of France—the Democratie Pacifique, has adopted the following mottoes:—

“The Revolution of 1789 has destroyed the old Regime; that of 1848 should establish the new one.”

“Social reform is the end, as Republic is the means; all the Socialists are Republicans, all the Republicans are Socialists.”[^[3]]

The methods by which the plans of the Socialists are to be worked out, are in the same journal declared to be as follows:—

“PROGRAMME OF THE PEOPLE.

“A man with a heart,—a man greatly loved by the working classes, has lent his hand to the formation of a programme dictated by the popular will. The ideas on which it rests, treated as utopian yesterday, have no need to be discussed to-day. The last Revolution is an explosion of light which has dissipated the darkness. The Socialist ideas railed at yesterday, accepted to-day, will be realised to-morrow. Its principles are,—

“I. The rights of labour.—It is the duty of the state to furnish employment, and if necessary a minimum of wages, to all the members of society whom private industry does not employ.

“II. House of refuge for industry.

“III. Despotism must be for ever disarmed by the transformation of the army into industrial regiments, (en regiments industriels,) suited alike to the defence of the territory and the execution of the great works of the Republic.

“IV. Public education, equal, gratuitous, and obligatory upon all.

“V. Savings’ banks (caisses d’épargne) which keep capital dead, shall be vivified by labour: the people who produce all riches can afford to be their own bankers.

“VI. A universal reform of law courts, juries every where.

“VII. Absolute freedom of communications of thought.

“VIII. A progressive scale of taxation.

“IX. A progressional tax on machinery employed in industry.

“X. An effectual guarantee for a fair division of profits between the capitalists and the workmen.

“XI. A tax on luxury.

“XII. Universal suffrage.

“XIII. A national assembly.

“XIV. Annual elections by all.

“Vive la Republique!

Gardons nos armes!”[^[4]]

To carry out these principles, they propose a general centralisation of all undertakings in the hands of government, to be brought under the direct control of a simple majority of universal suffrage electors. In the same journal we find the following proposals:—

“ABSORPTION OF RAILWAYS BY THE STATE.

“Let us reproduce to-day, with the certainty of being heard by the country, the wishes which the Democratie Pacifique has announced every morning since its origin, seventeen years ago.

“I. All railways, roads, canals, and public ways, by which the life of France circulates, to be absorbed by the state.

“II. The state should undertake all stage-coaches, carriers, waggons, and means of conveyance or transport, of every description.

“III. All joint-stock banks should be absorbed by the state—(A l’état les banques confédérées.)

“IV. All insurance companies, mines, and salt-works, to be undertaken by the state.

“V. No more forestalling, accumulating, regrating, or anarchical competition. Feudal industry is pierced to the heart; let us not allow it to raise itself from the dust.”[^[5]]

Such are the proposals to be found in a single journal which represents the ideas that are now fermenting in the mind of France.

These propositions will probably “donnent à penser,” as the French say, to most of our readers. Some of them will perhaps be of opinion that our lively neighbours are getting on at railway speed in the regeneration of society. We recommend their projects to the consideration of the numerous holders of French railway and other stock, in the British islands. They will doubtless get good round sums for their claims of damages against the French government, when it has absorbed all the joint-stock companies of the country!—the more so when it is recollected, 1st, That the damages will be assessed by juries elected by universal suffrage. 2d, That they will be paid by a government appointed by an assembly elected in the same way. We are not surprised, when such ideas are afloat in the ruling and irresistible workmen of Paris, who have just overturned Louis Philippe, at the head of one hundred thousand men, that the French funds have fallen thirty-five per cent in these few days, and railway and other stock in a still greater proportion. The Paris 3 per cents are now (March 18) at 50; the 5 per cents at 72!

Nor let it be said these ideas are the mere dreams of enthusiasts, which never can be carried into practice by any government. These enthusiasts are now the ruling power in the state; their doctrines are those which will quickly be carried into execution by the liberal and enlightened masses, invested by universal suffrage with supreme dominion in the Republic. Most assuredly they will carry their ideas into execution: the seed which the liberal writers of France have been sowing for the last thirty years, will bring forth its appropriate fruits. What power is to prevent the adoption of these popular and highly lauded “improvements,” after the government of Louis Philippe and Guizot has been overturned by their announcement? These persons stood as the barrier between France and the “social revolution” with which it was menaced: when they were destroyed, all means of resisting it are at an end, and the friends of humanity must trust to prevent its extension to other states, mainly to the reaction arising from its experienced effects in the land of its birth.

Already there appears, not merely in the language of the popular journals, but in the official acts of the Provisional Government, decisive evidence that the socialist ideas are about to be carried into execution by the supreme authority in France. On March 1st, there appeared the following decree of the Provisional Government:—

“The Provisional Government, considering that the revolution made by the people should be made for them:

“That it is time to put an end to the long and iniquitous sufferings of the working classes:

“That the question of labour is one of supreme importance:

“That there can be no higher or more dignified preoccupation of the Republican Government:

“That it becomes France to study ardently, and to solve, a problem which now occupies all the states of Europe:

“That it is indispensable, without a moment’s delay, to guarantee to the people the fruits of their labours:

“The Provisional Government has decreed,—

“That a permanent commission shall be formed, which shall be entitled, ‘The Commission of Government for the Labourers,’ and charged, in a peculiar and especial manner, with their lot.

“To show the importance which government attaches to this commission, it names one of its members, M. Louis Blanc, president of the commission, and for vice-president, another of its members, M. Albret, mechanical workman.

“Workmen are invited to form part of the commission.

“It shall hold its sittings in the palace of the Luxembourg.

“Louis Blanc.

“Armand Marrast.

“Garnier Pages.”[^[6]]

How is the Provisional Government to find funds for the enormous multitudes who will thus be thrown upon them, or to satisfy the boundless expectations thus formed of them, and which their own acts have done so much to cherish? Already the want of money has been experienced. Nearly all the banks of Paris have failed; the savings’ banks have been virtually confiscated, by the depositors being paid only a tenth in specie, and the Bank of France has suspended cash payments. The government has got into an altercation with a class of the highest importance, under existing circumstances, which is striving to liberate itself from the imposts which are more immediately felt by it. So early as March 2d, the journalists claimed an exemption from the stamp duties on the public journals; and on the government hesitating to comply with their requests, they loudly demand the dismissal of M. Cremieux, the new minister of justice. The Democratie Pacifique of March 2d, observes—

“The greatest danger of our situation is, not that which comes from without, but that which comes from within. The most imminent danger would be the slightest doubt on the intentions of government, the least retrograde step in the presence of events. That disquietude, we are bound to admit, already exists in the minds of many—distrust is the precursor of revolutions.

“The government has had under its eyes the conduct of the people. Let it imitate it. Energy, constant energy, is the only way to do good. The people have proved it. It is by energy alone that the prolongation of struggles is prevented—the effusion of blood arrested—dangerous reactions averted.

“Forward, and Force to power! Such is the double cry of the Republic.

“The Chamber of Deputies and of Peers must not only be interdicted from meeting; like royalty, they must be abolished.

“M. Cremieux, the minister of justice, has forgotten his principles. He is not prepared for the part he has to perform. He blindly yields to old attachments and prejudices. At the moment when the most absolute liberty of the press, the most rapid and ceaseless emission of ideas, is the sole condition of the public safety—at the moment when we are in the midst of a chaos from whence we cannot escape if light does not guide our steps—at that moment M. Cremieux proposes to extinguish it—he proposes this, a retrograde step, to the minister of finance—the reestablishment of the stamps on journals.

“A revolution of yesterday cannot be thus braved.

“These gentlemen wish a republic surrounded by republican institutions.

“The people have not yet laid down their arms.”[^[7]]

The government, after having made a show of resistance, yielded to their masters. The duties on journals were abolished, and absolute freedom given to the pouring of the rankest political poisons into the mind of France.

It is easy to see, with a government resting on such a basis, where the first practical difficulty will be found. Embarrassment of finance is the rock on which it will inevitably split: the more certain that it has been preceded by a huge deficit created by the former government; the more galling that it will be accompanied by the flight or hoarding of capital from the measures of the present one. Capitalists are universally alarmed over the whole country. A monetary crisis, as is the case with all successful revolutions, and that too of the severest kind, has ensued. M. Gouin’s bank, the same which formerly bore the name of Lafitte, has failed under liabilities to the extent of three millions. Nearly all the other banking establishments of Paris have already followed the example. The payment of all bills was, by government, postponed for three weeks, from February 28: a farther extension of the time of payment for a month after March 20, has been petitioned for by eight hundred of the first bankers and merchants in Paris. This amounts to a declaration of a general public and private insolvency. Overwhelmed by the difficulties of his situation, the first minister of finance has resigned; the second, M. Garnier Pages, has published a financial account, which exhibits so deplorable a state of the finances, that it may almost be said to amount to an admission of national bankruptcy. Despite all the efforts made to uphold them, the French three per cents, on this publication, fell to forty-seven. The terrors of the holders of stock are extreme.

An able eye-witness gives the following account of the state of Paris, amidst this terrible social and financial crisis.—

“I have seen daily and intimately persons of all parties; Legitimatists, Conservateurs, or adherents of the late government—adherents of the Molé Ministry of half-an-hour—adherents of the Barrot Ministry, equally short-lived—friends and intimates of members of the Provisional Government. I can most truly and distinctly affirm, that I saw and heard nothing from any of them but alarm and consternation; mingled with the strongest condemnation of the two conflicting parties whose obstinacy had brought about a collision which every body had feared, though no one’s fears had come within the widest range of the reality. I heard only expressions of the conviction that the present order of things could not last; that, in spite of the heroic efforts, the excellent intentions, and the acknowledged talents of several members of the government, it had undertaken to construct an edifice which must fall and crush them under its ruins; that it was now forced by fear upon promises, and would be forced upon acts utterly inconsistent with the stability of any government whatever. In short, the profoundest anxiety and alarm sit at the heart of the educated classes of France, of whatever party—and, not the least, of those who have undertaken the awful task of ruling her. Of that you may be fully assured.

“English Liberals will perhaps say ‘This we expected; but the people?’ Well, I must affirm that, if by ‘people’ they mean the industrious, quiet working-classes, the real basis of society, the object of the respect and solicitude of all enlightened rulers—if they mean these men, the alarm and consternation are greater among them than in the higher classes, in proportion to the slenderness of the resources they have to fall back upon; in many cases this amounts to a sort of blank despair. The more clear-sighted among them see the terrible chances that await them; they see capital leaving the country, confidence destroyed, and employment suddenly suspended or withdrawn, to an extent never seen before.

“Let me mention a few small but significant facts:—

“My locksmith told me he had always employed four men; he has discharged three. An English pastry-cook, who has constantly employed fifteen journeymen, was about to discharge nearly all. Every body is turning away servants, especially men, as the more expensive. I was told that good carriage-horses had been sold for five hundred francs each. A vast number of houses are becoming tenantless; the removal of the English alone would make a visible change in this respect. And what, think you, are the feelings of all the tribe of water-carriers, washerwomen, and the humble dependents for existence on these houses? Nothing, during the three days, seemed to be more affecting and alarming than the sight of these humblest ministrants to the prime wants of life rushing from door to door, even in the quietest streets, to get their hard labour accomplished in safety. Our porteur d’eau was every morning our earliest informant of the events of the night, and I was struck with the good sense and clearness of his views. ‘Ces messieurs parlent d’égalité,’ he said: ‘est ce qu’ils veulent se faire porteurs d’eau? C’est absurde—ce sont des mensonges.’ (‘These gentlemen talk of equality: will they turn water-carriers? It is absurd—these are lies.’) ‘Ils vont nous ruiner tous.’ (‘They are going to ruin us all.’) These last words I heard frequently repeated by persons of the working classes. A poor commissioner, who, for high pay, and through long détours, conveyed a letter for me on the 23d, came in looking aghast. ‘Nous voilà sans maître.’ (‘Here we are without a master,’) said he. ‘Bon Dieu! qu’est ce que nous allons devenir?’ (‘Good God! what will become of us?’) ‘Un pays sans maître ce n’est plus un pays.’ (‘A country without a master is no longer a country.’) ‘Nous allons retomber dans la barbarie.’ (‘We shall fall back into barbarism.’) This, indeed, was so soon felt by all, that masters were appointed. But has that restored the feeling of reverence for authority, or of confidence in those who wield it, indispensable to civil society?

“I heard with astonishment English people on the road saying, ‘Oh, all is quiet now.’ ‘All is going on very well now.’ From no Frenchman have I heard this superficial view of the case. Paris is indeed quiet enough, but it is the quiet of exhaustion, fear, distrust, and dejection. The absolute silence of the streets at night was awful. But a few nights before the 22d, I had complained of the incessant roll of carriages during this season of balls. From the night of the 26th to the 3d of March, the most retired village could not have been more utterly noiseless. Not a carriage—not a foot-fall—except at intervals the steady and silent step of the patrol of the National Guard, listened for as the sole guarantee for safety. ‘Every man,’ said a grocer, wearing the uniform of the Guard, to me in his shop, ‘must now defend his own. We have no protectors but ourselves; no police, no army.’”—Times, March 8, 1848.

These are sufficiently alarming features in the political and social condition of any country: but they become doubly so, when it is recollected that they coexist with unbounded expectations formed in the labouring masses, in whom supreme power is now both practically and theoretically vested. The Revolution has been the triumph of the workmen over the employers, of the “proletaires” over the “bourgeois,” of labour over capital. How such a triumph is to eventuate with a vehement and indigent population, impelling the government on in the career of revolution, and capital daily leaving the country or hiding itself from the dread of the acts of a government about to be appointed by nine millions of electors, is a question on which it well becomes all the holders of property, in whatever rank, seriously to reflect in this country.

Some idea of the extravagance and universality of their expectations may be formed from the following passage in the description of a still later eye-witness:—

“Paris is to all appearance tranquil; but there is much agitation that does not show itself outwardly. The workmen of all trades are intent on legislation which shall secure more wages for less toil. They beset the Luxembourg with processions, and fill the Chamber of Peers with deputations. Louis Blanc has discovered that to organise labour in a pamphlet and put the theory into practice are two very different things. The walls are covered with the manifestoes of the several branches of occupation; every day sees a new crop; they reveal the existence of dissentions among the workmen themselves, though they are all based on nearly the same principles; the seven-hooped pot is to have ten hoops, and it is to be felony to drink small-beer. The cochers have secured a tariff, with an advance of wages; the tailors are demanding the same; the ‘cheap’ establishments are in despair, for they supply classes that cannot buy at higher prices. An anxious employer placed the difficulty before some of the men; the only answer recorded was the comforting assurance that every body will be able to pay five pounds for his coat ‘as soon as society is regenerated!’ What is to be said to such magnificence of hope? A citoyen coatmaker can only shrug his shoulders and wait for the end. One step has been taken that seems likely to lead to it—the Commission has opened a register of all employments, and all seeking to be employed, in Paris. Not till the stern truth is revealed by figures will the full difficulty be known, and some estimate formed of what a government can not do. All the edicts that can be forced from it by the pressure of the hour will break down under the weight of necessity, as they always have done.

“Parallel with this agitation, which is material, runs another, which is philosophical. The republic is not perfect enough, and some vile distinctions still exist, irritating to the eye of equality. The government is petitioned to abolish all marks of honour for civilians; the names of distinguished citizens can be recorded in a golden book, a livre d’or of the Republic, as the recompense of great services; but no cross or riband is to be worn. Equality devant la mort is also insisted on; the same place in the cemetery and the same bier for all are to render the grave in appearance, as in reality, the great leveller. This proscription of the poor vanities of life and death is made a serious object by some of the active spirits of the time, as if there were any real importance in them.”[^[8]]—Times, March 13th, 1848.

If, with material resources continually and rapidly diminishing, capital leaving the country, employment failing, bankruptcies general, the expenditure of the opulent at an end, the finances of the State in hopeless embarrassment, the French Government can satisfy these extravagant wants and expectations without plunging in a foreign war, they will achieve what has never yet been accomplished by man.

Who is answerable for this calamitous Revolution, which has thus arrested the internal prosperity of France, involved its finances in apparently hopeless embarrassment, thrown back for probably half a century the progress of real freedom in that country, and perhaps consigned it to a series of internal convulsions, and Europe to the horrors of general war, for a very long period? We answer without hesitation that the responsibility rests with two parties, and two parties only—the King and the National Guard.

The King is most of all to blame, for having engaged in a conflict, and, when victory was within his grasp, allowing it to slip from his hands from want of resolution at the decisive moment. It is too soon after these great and astonishing events to be able to form a decided opinion on the whole details connected with them; but the concurring statements from all parties go to prove that on the first day the troops of the line were perfectly steady; and history will record that the heroic firmness of the Municipal Guard has rivalled all that is most honourable in French history. The military force was immense; not less than eighty thousand men, backed by strong forts, and amply provided with all the muniments of war. Their success on the first day was unbroken; they had carried above a hundred barricades, and were in possession of all the military positions of the capital. But at this moment the indecision of the King ruined every thing. Age seems to have extinguished the vigour for which he was once so celebrated. He shrunk from a contest with the insurgents, paralysed the troops by orders not to fire on the people, and openly receded before the insurgent populace, by abandoning Guizot and the firm policy which he himself had adopted, and striving to conciliate revolution by the mezzo termine of Count Molé, and a more liberal cabinet. It is with retreat in presence of an insurrection, as in the case of an invading army; the first move towards the rear is a certain step to ruin. The moment it was seen that the King was giving way, all was paralysed, because all foresaw to which side the victory would incline. The soldiers threw away their muskets, the officers broke their swords, and the vast array, equal to the army which fought at Austerlitz, was dissolved like a rope of sand. Louis Philippe fell without either the intrepidity of the royal martyr in 1793, or the dignity of the elder house of Bourbon in 1830; and if it be true, as is generally said, that the Queen urged the King to mount on horseback and die “en roi” in front of the Tuileries, and he declined, preferring to escape in disguise to this country, history must record, with shame, that royalty perished in France without the virtues it was entitled to expect in the meanest of its supporters.

The second cause which appears to have occasioned the overthrow of the monarchy in France, is the general, it may be said universal, defection of the National Guard. It had been openly announced that twenty thousand of that body were to line the Champs Elysés in their uniform on occasion of the banquet; it was perfectly known that that banquet was a mere pretext for getting the forces of this Revolution together; and that the intention of the conspirators was to march in a body to the Tuileries after it was over, and compel the King to accede to their demands. When they were called out in the afternoon, they declined to act against the people, and by their treachery occasioned the defection of the troops of the line, and rendered farther resistance hopeless. They expected, by this declaration against the King of their choice, the monarch of the barricades, to secure a larger share in the government for themselves. They went to the Chamber of Deputies, intending to put up the Duchess of Orleans as Regent, and the Count of Paris as King, and to procure a large measure of reform for the constitution. What was the result? Why, that they were speedily supplanted by the rabble who followed in their footsteps, and who, deriding the eloquence of Odillon Barrot, and insensible to the heroism of the Duchess of Orleans, by force and violence expelled the majority of the deputies from their seats, seized on the President’s chair, and, amidst an unparalleled scene of riot and confusion, subverted the Orleans dynasty, proclaimed a Republic, and adjourned to the Hotel de Ville to name a Provisional Government! The account given of this whole revolt by an eye-witness, which has appeared in the Times, is so instructive, that we make no apology for transferring it to our columns:—

“On the afternoon of Wednesday, Feb. 23, Paris was greatly agitated, but no severe fighting had taken place; a few barricades had been raised and retaken by the troops; the plans of the government were complete—Marshal Bugeaud had been named to the command of the forces in Paris, and M. Guizot informed the King that he was confident that the Executive Government could put down the insurrection. The royal answer was—a dismissal. The King dismissed M. Guizot, and dissolved the Cabinet at that momentous instant, when all the energies of united power were required to fight in the streets a battle which it had itself deliberately provoked.

“Still, however, the mischief might yet have been repaired if vigorous measures had been taken. But, from that hour, nothing but the most extraordinary blunders and pusillanimity marked the conduct of the Court. Count Molé was sent for, and the evening of Wednesday passed in attempts, or no attempts, we hardly know which, on his part to form a semi-Liberal Cabinet. In the city, the fall of the Guizot ministry was hailed with acclamation and illumination, as the first sign of popular victory; and at that same critical juncture the fatal discharge of musketry took place opposite the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which stained the pavement with blood, and inflamed the people to a revolutionary pitch. The night was spent in preparation for a more terrible morrow; but as yet the army had neither fraternised nor laid down its weapons. It was, on the contrary, for the most part prepared to act; but a circumstance occurred at Court which totally paralysed its resistance.

“After Count Molé’s failure, the King sent for M. Thiers. That gentleman may be said to have actually formed a Cabinet in conjunction with M. Odillon Barrot and M. Duvergier de Hauranne, for they instantly proceeded to the discharge of the highest possible duty which could devolve on ministerial responsibility. The one act of their government was the publication of that inconceivable proclamation, stating that no further resistance should be made, and the promulgation of orders to the officers commanding regiments to withdraw them. This was of course the capitulation of the Monarchy. Marshal Bugeaud—who had the command of the troops, had now completed his preparations for the general attack of the barricades, and was confident of success—protested most energetically against this extraordinary order, and said that if it was acted on all was lost. The King’s then ministers, M. Thiers and M. Barrot, insisted; the King took their advice, and Marshal Bugeaud resigned the command of the troops, observing that it was useless for him to retain it if nothing was to be done. General Lamoricière was therefore named to the command of Paris, and M. Thiers and his friends proceeded to effect their pacific arrangements. The effects of their orders were immediately perceptible, although the declaration of their names was certainly not followed by the consequences they had anticipated. The officers of the army, indignant at so unexpected a termination of their duties, sheathed their swords; the men allowed themselves to be disarmed by the mob, whom they had been ordered not to resist, and the people, encountering no serious opposition except from the Municipal Guard, which was cut to pieces, rushed on to the conquest of the Palais-Royal and the Tuileries. To sum up this narrative in two words—the dismissal of the Guizot government rendered it impossible for the Executive Government to act effectually; the subsequent advice of M. Thiers and the resignation of Marshal Bugeaud, rendered it impossible to act at all. If this be, as we have every reason to believe it is, a correct narrative of these transactions, we are not surprised that M. Thiers and his colleagues should not have made themselves conspicuous in the subsequent passage of this Revolution.

“The mob of Paris, at no hour of the day, (the 24th,) was formidable to ten thousand men, much less to a hundred thousand, or at least eighty thousand. On the Thursday (24th) public opinion had abandoned the émeute. The National Guard would now have done any thing to reproduce order, but they had no time; there was no opportunity to reunite themselves; besides which, they wanted courage and support, and did not even dream of the extreme to which things might be pushed. There never was, at any time, any acharnement among the people; the troops were every where well received; not a hostile head looked from a window. It was hoped that something might be done by a demonstration of public opinion, but nothing more. The émeutiers the first and second day simply took advantage of the absence of the National Guard. They were all the time ill looked upon by the real people of Paris, but they were permitted to go on as a means of action on the court and government. The accident, or rather the gross and infamous blunder, committed before the Bureau des Affaires Etrangères (of which the accounts published are erroneous), produced a violent irritation, which was ably worked upon by the Republican committee, who were all along on the watch; but this irritation, which certainly changed the character of the contest, gave no arms to the people; and although it increased their numbers, they were never, even numerically, formidable, as I have said, to ten thousand men. As for the barricades, there was not one that was ever defended except against some weak patrol, and then, after a little popping, it was always abandoned. Literally, there was no fighting; there was skirmishing on the part of the brave Municipals—the only force that acted—and I presume it acted on orders which did not emanate from the chief military authority, but had some separate and general instructions of its own. Literally, I repeat, there was no fighting. How could there be? There were no arms; that is, not a musket to a hundred men, till eleven or twelve o-clock in the day, when the troops, without orders—except “not to fire,” or act against the people—became, in several parts of Paris, mixed up and united with them.”—Times, March 8 and 14, 1848.

Here, then, is the whole affair clearly revealed. It was the timidity of Government, and the defection of the National Guard, which ruined every thing; which paralysed the troops of the line, encouraged the insurgents, left the brave Municipal Guards to their fate, and caused the surrender of the Tuileries. And what has been the result of this shameful treachery on the part of the sworn defenders of order—this “civic” prætorian guard of France? Nothing but this, that they have destroyed the monarchy, ruined industry, banished capital, rendered freedom hopeless, and made bankrupt the state! Such are the effects of armed men forgetting the first of social duties, that of fidelity to their oaths. How soon were these treacherous National Guards passed in the career of revolution by the infuriated rabble! How soon were Odillon Barrot and Thiers supplanted by Lamartine and Arago! How rapidly were the Duchess of Orleans and the Count of Paris expelled at the point of the bayonet from the Chamber of Deputies—the cry for reform drowned in that of revolution! How many of the twenty thousand National Guards, who by their treachery brought about the Revolution, will be solvent at the end of two months? Not a tenth of their number. They will perish deservedly and ignobly; ruined in their fortunes, beggared in their families, despised by their compatriots, execrated by Europe! That they may anticipate what history will say of their conduct, let them listen to the verdict which it has pronounced on the National Guard which, on a similar crisis, 10th August 1792, betrayed Louis XVI., as pronounced by an authority whom they will not suspect of leaning to the Royalist side—M. Lamartine.

“The National Guard, on the 10th August, returned humiliated and in consternation to their shops and counting-houses; they had justly lost the lead of the people. Thenceforth it could no longer aspire but to be the parade force of the Revolution, compelled to assist at all its acts, at all its fêtes, at all its crimes; a vain living decoration of all the mechanists of the Revolution.”[^[9]]

Of which revolution is Lamartine now speaking; of that of 10th August 1792, or of 24th February 1848? Beyond all doubt history will pass a severer judgment on the treachery which overthrew Louis Philippe than on that which consummated the destruction of Louis XVI.: for the former had the example of the latter for its guide; they knew how soon the massacre of September followed the triumph of August, and what incalculable calamities the defection of their predecessors in the Place Carousel brought upon their country and Europe.

What benefit have the working classes derived, or are they likely to derive, from this deplorable convulsion? Great ones they doubtless expect, as it has issued in a triumph of labour over capital. But what has it realised? We shall mention one or two particulars to illustrate the benefits hitherto reaped by this class from its victory.

The savings’ banks of France had prospered immensely under the firm and pacific government of Louis Philippe. The following account of them is derived from official sources.

“The state of the savings’ banks in France at the time of the Revolution indicated an extraordinary degree of confidence in the stability of the late government. In 1834 there were only seventy savings’ banks in France, and the amount of deposits on hand was 34,000,000 francs. In 1839 there were four hundred and four banks, and the deposits had increased to 171,000,000 francs; in 1848, at the moment of the Revolution, the deposits had risen to 355,000,000 francs, or ten times the amount deposited fourteen years before. In 1839 the average value of each deposit was 550 francs, which is probably increased to 600 francs average at the present time. The partial suspension of payment by these institutions must affect at least half a million of persons of the most industrious and economical part of the population, chiefly belonging to the towns, and they are deprived of a large portion of their savings at the very moment they most need them.”—Times, March 14, 1848.

Now, these savings’ banks, holding deposits to the amount of about £14,000,000 at the commencement of the Revolution, and which had increased tenfold during Louis Philippe’s reign, have to all practical purposes been rendered bankrupt. Unable to stand the dreadful run upon them after the outbreak, or to realise the amount of their deposits by the sale of their funded property, in consequence of its prodigious fall, they had no resource but to suspend payment. By a decree of Government, the holders of deposits in the savings’ banks are to receive only a tenth in cash, the remainder being payable six months hence, in a paper now practically worth nothing. By this single result of the Revolution, above five hundred thousand of the most meritorious and hard-working of the operatives of France have been in effect deprived of the savings of a whole lifetime.

Nor is the condition of the labouring population in any degree more favoured. In the Times correspondent from Paris of March 14, we find the following account of their present condition:—

“The financial question, the state of trade and commerce, and the task of providing work and food for the people, with which the government has charged itself, are additional motives for seriousness, however. The credit of more than one banking-house is to-day said to be tottering. One firm, it is openly mentioned, has resolved to stop payment to-morrow. Trade is very bad. Work will soon become scarce, and distress and outcry must be expected; and with the knowledge of all these facts, and with the determination to do every thing possible for the relief of the working classes, possessed by the Provisional Government, this source of uneasiness is menacing to-day. I wish a more cheerful view of the situation of affairs were more general than it is, for it might check the departure of rich natives and foreigners from the capital, who continue to retire from it in alarming numbers, and, obviously, with no view to return, for we hear of sales of carriages and horses, for a fifth part of the value they bore three weeks since. Twelve thousand servants are said to be already discharged in Paris, and many houses or hotels in the fashionable quarters have become literally devoid of occupants.”—Times, 14th March 1848.

That such a state of things must in the end terminate in domestic or foreign war must be evident to all who have looked even on the surface of past events. The causes which at present uphold, and must ere long destroy the Republican Government in France, are thus ably stated by the Paris correspondent of the same well-informed journal:—

“The Provisional Government continues to exist at the moment only from two causes. The first is, that all respectable persons hasten to its support under the influence of fear. The other day every body expected to be robbed and murdered: as the Provisional Government showed a strong desire to preserve order, all those individuals, still surprised to find themselves unplundered and unassassinated, attributed the miracle to the government, and ran to its support in self-defence. The adhesions have been readier and more numerous many times over than in 1830. The second cause which gives a short reprieve to the government is, that it humours the ferocious monster that made it,—and which is ready at any moment to overturn it as it set it up,—by the most absurd indulgences, by still more fatal promises for the future. The same set of ruffians (heroes) who forced the Chamber, and who thrust the Provisional Government on the deputies, are still there to invade the Hotel de Ville, and substitute another idol for Lamartine & Co. Still I believe they will not do so just yet; perhaps we may get on till the constitutional or National Assembly meets, but I doubt it. But then, even then,—what is to take place? Faction, clubs, war to the knife. The French are precisely the same men they were in ‘89—they are not changed in the least. Classes have been modified by wealth, commerce, prosperity, &c.; but these are the quiet classes, who will be swallowed up in the course of the next five years. At the present moment the working, or the soi-disant working classes, who are literally the sovereign power, are looked upon with fear, disgust, and abhorrence by every man in France of a superior condition, including the National Guard; and they are all speculating how to get quit of them; while, on the other hand, Louis Blanc is keeping them quiet by preaching Utopianism. He is doing so, honestly and enthusiastically, it is said; and certain it is, that a great mass of the people is flattered and soothed by the idea of converting work into an amusement, of obtaining perpetual easy employment by the state, and a pension at fifty-five years of age. This pause, however, does not deceive the commerce, the capital, the education of France, and, as I said, the universal consideration is how to throw off the many-headed tyrant. The plan of doing so, most consonant with the French character, is war. The National Guard is convinced they must shortly fight these men themselves, or send them to fight the foreigner; the latter is the expedient that will be hit upon; and unfortunately the state of Europe incites them to interfere in the concerns of others, from whom they will receive invitations which, in the condition of men’s minds in this country, it will be impossible for any government to reject. Besides which, even Frenchmen of the best order are, on questions of national glory or honour, not to be relied on for a moment; the best of them may be carried away by a word, a paragraph, a rumour, and all rave ‘Frontier of the Rhine,’ ‘Waterloo,’ and a thousand other follies, which, however sad, may be excused in the present state of their neighbours, though not for that reason the less to be lamented. In all international questions whatever, the characteristics of the French are arrogance, and susceptibility of so extreme a nature, that no body of Frenchmen can be dealt with by foreigners. A sovereign and a minister or two in cold blood, and with all the weight of undivided responsibility upon them, are difficult enough to manage even by the ablest and most impartial of negotiators; but the masses must always be intractable.

“I give the present Provisional Government immense credit for their efficient exertions, and I have considerable reliance on the good intentions of the majority of them; but they will not last; and, above all, whether they last or not, they must obey and not pretend to guide. Lamartine, by his genius, has now and then gained a point; but he, as well as the rest, have been rather the organs of the sovereign of the day than his directors and guides.”—Times, March 13, 1848.

It is not surprising that views of this description should be entertained by all well-informed persons on the spot in France, for the new “National Assembly,” to whom the formation of a constitution is to be intrusted in that country, is to be composed in such a way, as renders the direct or indirect spoliation of property a matter of almost certainty. The following is the decree of the Provisional Government on the subject:—

“French Republic.

“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

“The Provisional Government of the Republic, wishing to resign, as soon as possible, into the hands of the Definitive Government the powers it exercises in the interest and by the command of the people,

“Decrees,

“Article 1.—The electoral assemblies are convoked in each district for the 9th of April next, to elect the representatives of the people in the National Assembly, which is to frame the constitution.

“Article 2.—The election shall have the population for its basis.

“Article 3.—The total number of the representatives of the people shall be 900, including those of Algeria and the French colonies.

“Article 4.—They shall be apportioned by the deputies in the proportion indicated in the annexed table.

“Article 5.—The suffrage shall be direct and universal.

“Article 6.—All Frenchmen, 21 years of age, having resided in the district during six months, and not judicially deprived of or suspended in the exercise of their civic rights, are electors.

“Article 7.—All Frenchmen, 25 years of age, and not judicially deprived of or suspended in the exercise of their civic rights, are eligible.

“Article 8.—The ballot shall be secret.

“Article 9.—All the electors shall vote in the chief town of their district, by ballot. Each bulletin shall contain as many names as there shall be representatives to elect in the department.

“No man can be named a representative of the people unless he obtain 2,000 suffrages.

“Article 10.—Every representative of the people shall receive an indemnity of 25f. per day during the session.”

Here is a tolerably democratic constitution, which will probably excite some little disquietude in the breasts of the holders of French stock and railway shares. Universal suffrage—a single assembly of nine hundred members, each of whom is to be paid a pound a-day during the session. To make the experiment still more perilous, the minister of public instruction to the Provisional Government has issued a circular to the ministers of instruction throughout the country, in which he enjoins them to recommend to the people “to avoid the representatives who enjoy the advantages of education or the gifts of fortune.”[^[10]] This circular excited, as well it might, such a panic in Paris, that the other members of the Provisional Government were obliged to disown it. But that only makes matters worse: it shows what the Provisional Government really meant, and how completely they have already come to stand on the verge of civil war. The projected decree for levelling the National Guard, by distributing the companies of voltigeurs and chasseurs (the élite) through the whole mass, has already produced an address by their battalion, in uniform, to the Provisional Government, which was received at the Hotel de Ville by an immense crowd with cries of “A bas les Aristocrats! on ne passe pas!” It is no wonder the National Guard are at length alarmed. The aristocracies of knowledge and property are to be alike discarded! Ignorance and a sympathy with the most indigent class are to be the great recommendations to the electors! This is certainly making root-and-branch work; it is Jack Cade alive again. Paris, it is expected, will return for its representatives

Truly the National Guard will soon reap the whirlwind; we are not surprised the French funds have undergone so prodigious a fall. The holders of Spanish bonds and American States’ debts know how universal suffrage assemblies settle with their state-creditors. Sidney Smith has told the world something on the subject.

The “pressure from without” on the Provisional Government becomes every day more severe and alarming as time rolls on: wages cease, stock falls in value, savings’ banks suspend payment, and all means of relief, save such as may be extorted from the fears of the government, disappear. The following is a late account of the state of matters in this important respect, from the French metropolis:—

“France, crowded, impoverished, indebted, and straitened at all points, sees an opening in the exercise of a sovereign people’s will. It gets a glimpse of light and life through the Hotel de Ville. Hence this desperate competition for the national resources; and hence, we grieve to add, this wasteful and improvident distribution.

“These deputations are a congenital evil. They began from the very moment the Provisional Government was proclaimed in the Chamber of Deputies. Its progress thence from the Hotel de Ville was a deputation. The members immediately began to thunder at the doors and clamour for admittance. A club orator has since boasted that, had it not been for this importunity, nothing would have been done—that not a step has been taken without external impulse—and that the people had to wait two hours, on that wonderful Thursday, before the Provisional Government would announce a republic. Since that moment the deputations may be said never to have ceased in Paris. For the first week they did not affect a distinctive character, but came as accident had thrown them together—ten thousand from this quarter, and twenty thousand from that; sometimes the people, and sometimes the National Guard, or a medley of all sorts. In those days they were armed. Lamartine had to turn out six times a-day, make gestures half an hour for a hearing, and then spend his brilliant eloquence on a field of bayonets and blouses. When the poet had sunk from sheer exhaustion, the indefatigable deputation adjourned to the Ministry of the Interior, and drew forth M. Ledru Rollin, who had not learned his way about the apartments, or the names of the officials, before he was required to promulgate, off-hand, a complete system for the internal administration of France. It is possible that his first thoughts might have been as good as his second on this subject; but the demand was nevertheless premature. The stream of deputation has since become less turbid, violent, and full; but it has been quite continuous, and, to all appearance, Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis œvum.

“We believe there is not a single branch of employment or of idleness in Paris, that has not marched en masse to the Hotel de Ville to demand more wages, less work, certainty of employment, and a release from all the rules and restrictions which the experience of their masters had found to be necessary. It is unwise to damp the expectations of five thousand armed men. In some cases, therefore, the government capitulated on rather hard terms. By and by it adopted what we really think the best possible alternative. It requested the trades to nominate their several deputies, and set the operative parliament to adjust all its rival pretensions at the Luxembourg. Then there came deputations of women, of students, of pawnbrokers’ tickets, of bankers, of bread-eaters, of bread-makers, of cabmen, of ’bussmen, of sailors, of porters, of every thing that had, or had not, an office and a name. France, of course, has had the precedence, having, in a manner, the first start; but the nations of the earth are beginning to find room in the endless procession. All the world will run into it in time. The vast column is just beginning to form in Chinese Tartary, and is slowly debouching round the Caspian Sea. Already we see a hundred European sections. They follow in one another’s trail. An Anacharsis Clootz is waiting to receive them at the barriers, and marshal them to the Hotel de Ville.”—Times, March 15, 1848.

This state of matters is certainly abundantly formidable to France and to Europe. A great experiment is making as to the practicability of the working-classes governing themselves and the rest of the state, without the aid of property or education. France has become a huge trades-union, the committee of which forms the Provisional Government, and the decrees of which compose the foundation of the future government of the republic. Such an experiment is certainly new in human affairs. No previous example of it is to be found, at least, in the old world; for it will hardly be said that the republic of 1793, steeped in blood, engrossed in war, ruled with a rod of iron by the Committee of Public Salvation, is a precedent to which the present regeneration of society will refer, in support of the principles they are now reducing to practice. We fear its state has been not less justly than graphically described by one of our most distinguished correspondents, who says—“They are sitting as at a pantomime; every thing is grand and glorious; France is regenerated, and all is flourish of trumpets. Meanwhile France is utterly insane—a vast lunatic asylum without its doctors.”

The present state of Paris, (March 21,) and the germs of social conflict which are beginning to emerge from amidst the triumph of the Socialists, may be judged of from the following extracts of the correspondent of the Morning Chronicle, dated Paris, 18th March:—

“Paris, Friday Evening.—There has been another day of great excitement and alarm in Paris. Upwards of thirty thousand of the working classes congregated in the Champs Elysés, and went in procession to the Hotel de Ville to assure the Government that it might depend upon their assistance against any attempt that might be made to coerce it, from whatever quarter it came. I need hardly inform you that this formidable demonstration is intended as a contre coup to the protest presented by the National Guards yesterday, against M. Ledru Rollin’s decree dissolving the grenadier and light companies of the National Guards. It is not the least alarming feature in this affair, that it exhibits an amount of discipline among the working classes, and a promptitude of execution, which are but too sure indications both of the power and the readiness of the leaders of the movement to do mischief. It was only yesterday that the demonstration took place which displeased the masses; yet, in one short night, the order goes forth, the arrangements are made, and before ordinary mortals are out of their beds, thirty thousand of the working classes are marshalled under their leaders, and on their march to make a demonstration of their force, in presence of the executive government—a demonstration which, on the present occasion, to be sure, is favourable to the Government, but which to-morrow may be against it. Who have the orders proceeded from that drew together these masses? How were they brought together? The affair is involved in mystery, but there is enough in it to show an amount of organisation for which the public was not prepared; and which ought to show all those within its operation that they are sitting upon a barrel of gunpowder. The fact is—and there is no denying or concealing it—Paris is in the possession of the clubs, who rule not only it, but the ostensible government. The National Guards, so powerful only a week ago, are now impotent whether for good or evil. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” The National Guards have quarrelled. The Chasseurs look with jealousy on the compagnies d’élite—the compagnies d’élite will not fraternise with the Chasseurs. The eighty-four thousand men, who formed the National Guards before the 24th of February, look with contempt on the one hundred and fifty thousand new men thrust into their ranks by M. Ledru Rollin, for election purposes, and call them canaille. The new levies feel that they cannot compete in wealth with the good company in which they so unexpectedly find themselves, and they call the old guards aristocrats. Add to this the discontent of the grenadier and light companies at being deprived of their distinctive associations and dress, the displeasure of the old officers, who are about to be deprived of their epaulettes by their new and democratic associates, and the intriguing of the would-be officers to secure a majority of suffrages in their own favour, and you may arrive at a judgment of the slight chance there is of the National Guards of the present day uniting for any one purpose or object. The result of this is obvious. In case of an outbreak, the National Guards, who were so useful in re-establishing order on the two days after the abdication of Louis Philippe, could no longer be depended on. Paris would be in the possession of the mob, and that mob is under the direction of leaders composed of the worst and the most unscrupulous of demagogues.”

The same correspondent adds:—

“The financial and commercial crisis which has created such ravages here for the last week is rapidly extending. I have already given you a distressing list of private bankers who have been obliged to suspend payment. Another bank, though not one of any great name, was spoken of yesterday as being on the eve of bankruptcy; but on inquiry, I find that the bank is still open this morning, although it is doubtful if it will continue so to the end of the day. I abstain from mentioning the name. The commercial world is just in as deep distress as the financial world. Every branch of trade is paralysed. It is useless to attempt to give particular names or even trades. I shall, therefore, only mention, that in one branch of trade, which is generally considered one of the richest in France, namely, the metal trade, there is an almost total suspension of payments. It is not that the traders have not property, but that they cannot turn it into cash. They have acceptances to meet, and they have acceptances in hand, but they cannot pay what is due by them, for they cannot get what others owe. In short, trade is paralysed, for the medium by which it is ordinarily carried on has disappeared. In other trades precisely the same circumstances occur; but I only mention this one trade as showing the position of all others. How long is this to last? No one can say; but one thing certain is, that no symptom of amelioration has hitherto shown itself.”—Morning Chronicle, March 20.

As the experiment now making in France is new, and in the highest degree important, so it is to the last degree to be wished that it may go on undisturbed. The other powers of Europe cannot be too much on their guard against it; but no armed intervention should be attempted, if France retains the pacific attitude she has hitherto held in regard to other states. The republicans of that country have never ceased to declare that the first Revolution terminated in internal bloodshed, military despotism, and foreign subjugation, because it was not let alone—because the Girondists plunged it into war, in order to provide a vent for the ardent passions and vehement aspirations of the unemployed multitudes in that country. Lamartine admits, in his celebrated circular, that in 1792 “war was a necessity to France.” He disclaims, as every man of the least knowledge on the subject must do, the idea that it was provoked by the European powers, who, it is historically known, were drawn into it when wholly unprepared, and as unwillingly as a conscientious father of a family is forced into a duel. Lamartine says the same necessity no longer exists—that the world has become pacific, and that internal regeneration, not foreign conquest, is the end of this revolution. We hope it is so. We are sure it is ardently desired in this country that pacific relations should not be disturbed with the great republic, provided she keeps within her own territory, and does not seek to assuage her thirst at foreign fountains. By all means let the long wished-for experiment be made. Let it be seen how society can get on without the direction of property and knowledge. Let it be seen into what sort of state the doctrines of the Socialists and St Simonians, the dictates of the trades-unions, the clamour of the working masses, will speedily reduce society. Theirs be the glory and the honour if the experiment succeeds—theirs the disgrace and the obloquy if it fails. Let all other nations stand aloof, and witness the great experiment—“a clear stage and no favour” be the universal maxim. But let every other people abstain from imitating the example, till it is seen how the experiment has succeeded in the great parent republic. It will be time enough to follow its footsteps when experience has proved it is conducive to human happiness and social stability.

But while, as ardently as any Socialist in existence, we deprecate the commencement of hostilities by any European power, and earnestly desire to see the great social experiment now making in France brought to a pacific issue, in order that its practicability and expedience may for ever be determined among men, yet it is evident that things may take a different issue in that country. It is possible—though God forbid we should say it is probable—that the great republic may, from internal suffering, be driven to foreign aggression. This, on Lamartine’s own admission, has happened once: it may happen twice. France has four hundred thousand regular troops under arms; and every man capable of bearing a musket is to be forthwith enrolled in the National Guard. Twenty-five thousand of that body have already been taken into regular and permanent pay, at thirty sous, or about fifteenpence, a-day, and sent to the frontier. It is impossible to say how soon this immense and excited mass, with arms in their hands, and little food in their stomachs, may drive the government, as in 1792 they did that of the Girondists, on Lamartine’s admission, into foreign warfare. It behoves Europe to be on its guard. Fortunately the course which its governments should pursue in such an event lies clear and open. They have only to resume the Treaty of Chaumont, concluded in 1813, to curb the ambition of the great military republic of which Napoleon was the head. Let that treaty be secretly but immediately renewed as a purely defensive league. Let no one think of attacking France; but the moment that France invades any other power, let the four great powers forthwith bring a hundred and fifty thousand each into the field. Let not the wretched mistake be again committed, of the others looking tamely on when one is assailed—“et dum singuli pugnant, universi vincuntur.”[^[11]] The moment the French cross the Rhine or the Alps, the states of Europe must stand side by side as they did at Leipsic and Waterloo, if they would avoid another long period of oppression by the conquering republicans.

Nearly sixty years have elapsed since Mr Burke observed—“The age of chivalry is gone; that of sophists, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex—that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life—the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiments—is gone. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half of its evil, by losing all its grossness.”[^[12]] What a commentary on these well-known and long-admired words have recent events afforded! It is indeed gone, the loyalty to rank and sex—the proud submission, the dignified obedience, the subordination of the heart, which formerly characterised and adorned the states of modern Europe. With more courage than the German Empress, the Duchess of Orleans fronted the revolutionary mob in the Chamber of Deputies; but no swords leapt from their scabbards in the Chamber of Deputies when her noble appeal was made to the loyalty of France—no generous hearts found vent in the words, “Moriamur pro rege nostro, Maria Theresa!” It could no longer be said—

“Fair Austria spread her mournful charms—

The Queen, the beauty, roused the world to arms.”

The infuriated rabble pointed their muskets at the royal heroine, and the few loyal members of the assembly were glad to purchase her safety by removing her from the disgraceful scene. Not a shot was thereafter fired; not a show even of resistance to the plebeian usurpation was made. An army of four hundred thousand men, five hundred thousand National Guards, thirty-four millions of men, in a moment forgot their loyalty, broke their oaths, and surrendered their country to the worst of tyrannies, the tyranny of a multitude of tyrants.

“The unbought grace of life,” says Mr Burke, “the cheap defence of nations, is at an end.” What a commentary has the triumph of the Barricades, the government of Louis Philippe, afforded on these words! M. Garnier Pages, in his Financial Report, has unfolded the state of the French finances, the confusion and disastrous state of which he is fain to ascribe to the prodigal expenditure and unbounded corruption of Louis Philippe. He tells us, and we doubt not with truth, that during the seventeen years of his government, the expenditure has been raised from 900,000,000 francs, (£36,000,000,) to 1700,000,000 francs, (£68,000,000;) that the debt has been increased during that period by £64,000,000; and that the nation was running, under his direction, headlong into the gulf of national bankruptcy. He observes, with a sigh, how moderate in comparison, how cheap in expenditure, and pacific in conduct, was the government of Charles X., which never brought its expenditure up to £40,000,000. It is all true—it is what we predicted eighteen years ago would be the inevitable result of a democratic revolt; it is the consummation we invariably predicted of the transports following the fall of Charles X. The republicans, now so loud in reprobation of the expenditure of the Citizen King, forget that his throne was of their own making; that he was a successful democratic usurper; that his power was established to the sound of the shouts of the republicans in all Europe, amidst the smoke of the Barricades. A usurping government is necessarily and invariably more costly than a legitimate one; because, having lost the loyalty of the heart, it has no foundation to rest on, but the terrors of the senses, or the seductions of interest. It was for precisely the same reason that William III. in ten years raised the expenditure of Great Britain from £1,800,000 a year, to £6,000,000; and that, in the first twenty years of the English government subsequent to the Revolution, the national debt had increased from £600,000 to £54,000,000. When the moral and cheap bond of loyalty is broken, government has no resource but an appeal to the passions or interests of the people. The Convention tried an appeal to their republican passions, and they brought on the Reign of Terror. Napoleon tried an appeal to their military passions, and he brought on the subjugation of France by Europe. Louis Philippe, as the only remaining resource, appealed to their selfish interests, and he induced the revolution of 1848. Mankind cannot escape from the gentle influence of moral obligations, but to fall under the reaction of conquest, the debasement of corruption, or the government of force.

But all these governments, say the republicans, fell, because they departed from the principles of the Revolution, and because they became corrupted by power as soon as they had tasted its sweets. But even supposing this were true,—supposing that Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre, Napoleon, and Louis Philippe were all overthrown, not because they took the only method left open to them to preserve the support of the senators, but because they departed from the principles of the Revolution; do the republicans not see that the very announcement of that fact is the most decisive condemnation of their system of government? Do they expect to find liberals more eloquent than Mirabeau, republicans more energetic than Danton, socialists more ardent than Robespierre, generals more capable than Napoleon, citizen kings more astute than Louis Philippe? Republican power must be committed to some one. Mankind cannot exist an hour without a government: the first act of the infuriated and victorious rabble in the Chamber of Deputies was to name a Provisional one. But if experience has proved that intellect the most powerful, patriotism the most ardent, genius the most transcendent, penetration the most piercing, experience the most extensive, are invariably shipwrecked amidst the temptations and the shoals of newly acquired republican power, do they not see that it is not a form of government adapted for the weakness of humanity; and that if the leaders of revolution are not impelled to destruction by an external and overbearing necessity, they are infallibly seduced into it by the passions which, amidst the novelty of newly acquired power, arise in their own breasts? In either case, a revolution government must terminate in its own destruction,—in private sufferings and public disasters; and so it will be with the government of M. Lamartine and that of the new National Assembly, as it has been with all those which have preceded it.

“Deus patiens,” says St Augustin, “quia æternus.”[^[13]]—What an awful commentary on this magnificent text have recent events afforded! Eighteen years ago Louis Philippe forgot his loyalty and broke his oath; the first prince of the blood elevated himself to power by successful treason; he adopted, if he did not make, a revolution. He sent his lawful monarch into exile; he prevented the placing the crown on the head of his grandson; he for ever severed France from its lawful sovereigns. What has been the result of his usurpation? Where are now his enduring projects, his family alliances, his vast army, his consolidated power? During seventeen years he laboured with indefatigable industry and great ability to establish his newly acquired authority, and secure, by the confirmation of his own power, the perpetual exile of the lawful sovereign of France. Loud and long was the applause at first bestowed by the liberal party in Europe on the usurpation; great was the triumph of the bourgeoisie in every state at seeing a lawful monarch overturned by a well-concerted urban revolt, and the National converted into a Prætorian Guard, which could dispose of crowns at pleasure. But meanwhile the justice of Heaven neither slumbered nor slept. The means taken by Louis Philippe to consolidate his power, and which were in truth the only ones that remained at his disposal, consummated his ruin. His steady adherence to peace dissatisfied the ardent spirits which sought for war; his firm internal government disconcerted the republicans; his vast internal expenditure drew after it a serious embarrassment of finance. He could not appeal to the loyal feelings of the generous, for he was a usurper; he could not rest on the support of the multitude, for they would have driven the state to ruin; he could not rally the army round his throne, for they would have impelled him into war. Thus he could rest only on the selfish interests; and great was the skill with which he worked on that powerful principle in human affairs. But a government which stands on selfish feelings alone is a castle built on sand; the first wind of adversity levels it with the dust. Napoleon’s throne was founded on this principle, for he sacrificed to warlike selfishness; Louis Philippe on the same, for he sacrificed to pacific selfishness. Both have undergone the stern but just law of retribution. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, has been meted out to both. To Napoleon, who had sent so many foreign princes into banishment, and subverted so many gallant states, a defeat in the field, a melancholy exile, and unbefriended death, in a foreign land; to Louis Philippe, who had dethroned his lawful sovereign, and carried the standard of treason into the halls of the Tuilleries, the fate which he allotted to Charles X., that of being expelled with still greater ignominy from the same halls, being compelled to eat the bread of the stranger, and see his dynasty driven from their usurped throne amidst the derision and contempt of mankind.

“If absolute power,” says M. De Tocqueville, “shall re-establish itself in whatever hands, in any of the democratic states of Europe, I have no doubt it will assume a form unknown to our fathers. When the great families and the spirit of clanship prevailed, the individual who had to contend with tyranny never found himself alone—he was supported by his clients, his relations, his friends. But when the estates are divided, and races confounded, where shall we find the spirit of family? What form will remain in the influences of habit among a people changing perpetually, where every act of tyranny will find a precedent in previous disorders, where every crime can be justified by an example; where nothing exists of sufficient antiquity to render its destruction an object of dread, and nothing can be figured so new that men are afraid to engage in it? What resistance would manners afford which have already received so many shocks? What would public opinion do, when twenty persons do not exist bound together by any common tie; when you can no more meet with a man, a family, a body corporate, or a class of society, which could represent or act upon that opinion; where each citizen is equally poor, equally impotent, equally isolated, and can only oppose his individual weakness to the organised strength of the Central Government? To figure any thing equal TO THE DESPOTISM which would then be established amongst us, we would require to recur not to our own annals; we would be forced to go back to those frightful periods of tyranny, when, manners being corrupted, old recollections effaced, habits destroyed, opinions wavering, liberty deprived of its asylum under the laws, men made a sport of the people, and princes wore out the clemency of heaven rather than the patience of their subjects. They are blind indeed who look for democratic equality in the monarchy of Henry IV. and Louis XIV.”[^[14]] What a commentary on this terrible prophecy have recent events supplied! The revolutionists say, that France is entering the last phase of the revolution.—It is true, it is entering it; but it is the last phase of punishment to which it is blindly hurrying. The sins of the fathers are about to be visited on the third generation. To talk of real freedom, stable institutions, protected industry, social happiness, in such a country, is out of the question. With their own hands, in the first great convulsion, they destroyed all the bulwarks of freedom in the land, and nothing remains to them, after the madness of socialism has run its course, but the equality of despotism. They have thrown off the laws of God and man, and Providence will leave their punishment to their own hands. “The Romans,” says Gibbon, “aspired to be equal: they were levelled by the equality of Asiatic bondage.”

Amidst so many mournful subjects of contemplation, there is one consideration which forces itself upon the view, of great importance in the present condition of this country. This revolution in France being a revolt of labour against capital, its first principle is a deadly hostility to the principle of free-trade. The recent barbarous expulsion of the English labourers from France, several thousands in number, after having enriched the country by their labour, and taught it by their example, proves what sympathy foreign industry meets with from the great and fraternising republic. The confiscation of their hard-won earnings by the cessation of the savings’ banks to pay more than a tenth in cash, shows what they have to expect from the justice and solvency of its government. With the rise of the communist and socialist party in France to power, whose abomination is capital, whose idol is labour, it may with certainty be predicted that the sternest and most unbending prohibition of British goods will immediately be adopted by the great philanthropic and fraternising republic. All other countries which follow in any degree the example of the great parent republic, by the popularising of their institutions, will, from the influence of the labour party, do the same. America already draws nineteen million dollars, or nearly £4,000,000 sterling, from its imports, the greater part of which is a direct tax levied on the industry of this country. Reciprocity, always one-sided, will ere long be absolutely isolated. We shall be,

“Penitus divisos orbe Britannos,”

even more by our policy than our situation.

What chance there is of free-trade doctrines being adopted by the present socialist and free-trade government in France, may be judged of by the following quotation from the Constitutionnel:—

“Is not, in fact, the consumer, such as the free-traders represent him to us, a strange creation? He is, as he has been wittily described, a fantastic being—a monster who has a mouth and a stomach to consume produce, but who has neither legs to move nor arms to work. We do not fear that the operative classes will suffer themselves to be seduced by those doctrines. We are aware that they have constantly rejected them through the organs of the press more especially charged with the defence of their interests; but it behoves them likewise that the Provisional Government should remain on its guard against principles which would be still more disastrous under existing circumstances. M. Bethmont, the minister of commerce, has declared, in a letter addressed by him to the association for the defence of national labour, that he would never grant facilities of which the consequences would be calculated to injure our manufacturers. We see by this declaration that the dispositions of the Provisional Government are good. The very inquiry which is now being held to devise means to ameliorate the moral and material condition of the operatives, ought to confirm the government in the necessity of maintaining the system which protects industry. Let us inquire what the consequence would be, in fact, if we were so imprudent as to suffer foreign produce to enter France free of duty. Political economy teaches us that wages find their balance in consequence of the competition existing between nations; but they find their equilibrium by falling, and not by rising. If that were not the case, there would be no possibility of maintaining the struggle. Now, if we opened our ports, this cruel necessity would become the more imperious for us, as, being placed opposite to England in conditions of inferiority, greater in respect to capital, to the means of transport, and to the price of matters of the first necessity, we could not redeem those disadvantages except by a reduction of wages. This, in fact, would be the annihilation of the operative.”—Constitutionnel, March 16, 1848.

This is the inevitable result of republican and socialist triumph in the neighbouring kingdom, and the impulse given to liberal institutions, an inlet thereby opened to manufacturing jealousy all over the world. Debarred thus from all possibility of reciprocal advantages; shut out for ever from the smallest benefit in return, is it expedient for Great Britain to continue any longer her concessions to foreign industry, or incur the blasting imputation of a suicidal policy towards her own inhabitants in favour of ungrateful and selfish foreigners, who meet concessions with prohibition, and industrial teaching with savage expulsion from the instructed territory.

“No revolution,” says Madame de Staël, “can succeed in any country, unless it is headed by a portion of the higher, and the majority of the middle classes.” Recent events have afforded another to the many confirmations which history affords of this important observation. Had the National Guard of Paris stood firm, the troops of the line would never have wavered; the government would not have been intimidated; a socialist revolution would have been averted; public credit preserved; the savings’ bank, the place of deposit of the poor—the public funds, the investment of the middle classes—saved from destruction. When we contemplate the dreadful monetary crisis which has been brought on in France by the revolution; when we behold the bank of France suspending payments, and all the chief banks of the metropolis rendered bankrupt by the shock; when we behold wealth in ship-loads flying from its menaced shores, and destitution in crowds stalking through its crowded and idle streets, we are struck with horror, and impressed with a deeper sense of thankfulness at the good sense and patriotic spirit of the middle classes in this country, which has so quickly crushed the efforts of the seditious to involve us in similar calamities. “The unbought loyalty of men,—the cheap defence of nations,”—still, thank God! subsists amongst us. The poison of infidelity has not destroyed the moral bonds of society—the rolling-stone of revolution has not crushed the institutions of freedom amongst us. There are hearts to love their country—arms to defend their Queen—not less among our civil than our military defenders. The pillage of Glasgow on the first outbreak of the disturbances there, their speedy suppression, by the energy of the inhabitants, has not been lost on the empire. It is not in vain that twenty thousand constables came forward to be enrolled in one day in Glasgow, and eleven thousand in Manchester. We see what we have to expect from the seditious; they see what they have to expect from the middle classes of society, and the whole virtuous part of the lower. With such dispositions in both, Great Britain may be exposed to local disorder or momentary alarm, but it can never be seriously endangered, or undergo that worst of horrors—a social revolution. Nor will she, with such dispositions in her people, be less prepared to assert the ancient glory of her arms, should circumstances render that alternative necessary. She has no internal reforms to make that she cannot achieve peaceably, by the means which her constitution affords. Her giant strength slumbers, not sleeps. Our ships of war, in the noble words of Mr Canning, “how soon one of those stupendous masses, now reposing on their shadows in perfect stillness,—how soon, upon any call of patriotism, or of necessity, it would assume the likeness of an animated thing, instinct with life and motion—how soon it would ruffle, as it were, its swelling plumage—how quickly it would put forth all its beauty and its bravery, collect its scattered elements of strength, and awaken its dormant thunder!”—how soon would the flag of Waterloo again be unfurled to the breeze!

A GERMAN DITTY.

The following is a very loose imitation of a popular German air.

While life’s early friends still surround us,

Yet another bright hour let us pass,

And wake the old rafters around us

With the song and the circling glass.

For it cannot thus long hold together

Here under the changeable moon;

To bloom for a time, then to wither,

Is the lot of all, later or soon.

Then here’s to the many good fellows

Who before us have tippled and laugh’d;

Be they under the turf or the billows,

To them let this goblet be quaff’d.

That if, after us, others as merry

Shall keep up as joyous a train,

One bumper of port or of sherry

To us in our turn they may drain—

As they keep up the charter of joyance,

As by us was maintain’d in our day;

Not to drown dull care and annoyance,

Not ignobly to moisten our clay;—

But to raise an extempore shrine,

Where Momus, revisiting earth,

May find humour and whim yet divine,

And the glorious spirit of mirth.

For ’twas not we were reckless of duty,

Or the sterner requirements of life;

’Twas not we were mindless of beauty,

Or are now, of home, children, and wife;

But ’tis,—that the wandering hours

Have a singular frolicsome way

Of scattering the fairest of flowers

O’er moments of fellowship gay;

When fancy leads off to a measure

That youth might mistake for its own,

As its wont were to seek after pleasure,

With feeling and wit for its tone;

And so vivid and bright the ideal

Her fairy-light shows us the while,

That wisdom asks nothing more real,

And genius applauds with a smile.

Mac.

TWO SONNETS.

BY GEORGE HUNTLY GORDON.

MONT BLANC.

AN IMAGINARY SONNET, BY SIR WALTER SCOTT, WHILE COMPOSING HIS SWISS STORY, ANNE OF GEIERSTEIN.

[When Captain Sherwill and Dr Edmund Clark ascended to the summit of Mont Blanc, they were much surprised to observe the greater apparent distance and feebler splendour of the moon and stars. “The cloudless canopy of heaven was of a very dark blue, but with a slight reddishness in the tinge, so as rather to resemble a beautiful deep violet than indigo.... The vault of heaven appeared prodigiously high and distant. After two days’ march upward, the blue expanse seemed to have receded from us much faster than we had climbed towards it.... Perhaps there are few phenomena (adds Dr Clark,) so calculated to take an impressive hold of the imagination.”]

When bold Emprise, by thrilling hopes and fears

Alternate sway’d, hath each dread peril pass’d,

And Mont Blanc’s snow-bound summit reach’d at last;

Remoter shine th’ eternal starry spheres,

More distant walks the moon ‘mid darkest blue,

Heaven’s cloudless dome dilates, and higher seems;

And way-worn pilgrim sees, with wond’ring view,

Each star decline, and pale its wonted beams!

So, when Ambition hath from life’s low vale

Our footsteps lured, when, danger’s path defied,

We’ve gain’d at length, with fortune’s fav’ring gale,

The “promised land,”—the pinnacle of pride,—

The phantom Bliss thus mocks our cheated eyes,

For, as we mount, the dear delusion flies!

TO ——.

Meekness, Sincerity, and Candour, seem

Enshrined in that sweet smile, and calm, clear brow;

Nor less within thy blue eye’s witching beam,

Affection warm, and Sympathy with wo;

Goodness and Grace ineffable illume

Thy mien:—when Music melts thy thrilling tone,

How could my heart its magic pow’r disown?

Thy siren strains oft snatch me from the gloom,

The dream-like forms, the anguish, and turmoil,

That haunt the Past. Alas! too soon again—

As on yon stormy strand the seas recoil,

Some weed sweeps back into its wave-worn den[^[15]]—

Wild Mem’ry’s spells resume their wonted might,

And sternly shroud me from thy world of light!

MY ROUTE INTO CANADA.

NO. II.

Lake Champlain was long known to the Dutch, and through them to the English, as the Lake of Corlaer. It seems that one Corlaer was for a long time the great man of a little Dutch settlement on the Mohawk, where for many years he swayed the civic sword so potently and with such terror to evil-doers among the Indians, that they adopted his name into their language to signify a white governor. This doughty Dutchman, therefore, left the title to his successors, and the Corlaers went through their decline and fall with as much dignity, in a small way, as history ascribes to the Pharaohs and the Cæsars. Like the founders of other dynasties, however, the original Van Corlaer came to a remarkable and tragic end; and as this deplorable event took place on the Lake, now known by the name of Champlain, the Dutch stubbornly regarded their own hero as having the best right to name it. For a time it seemed likely that fortune would decide for the Dutch; but, with a fickleness for which the flirt is proverbial, she suddenly declared for the French claim; and time having ratified the award, the name of Corlaer is no more heard among mortals, except when some one of antiquarian tastes, like myself, discovers, with a meditative sigh, that it once could start a ghost as soon as Cæsar, and come very near being “writ in water,” which, strange to say, would have rendered it immortal.

It seems that in those days there was, somewhere in the lake, a remarkable rock which the Mohawks regarded as the dome of a submarine palace, in which dwelt with his mermaids a wicked old Indian enchanter, who ruled over Boreas and Euroclydon. The superstition was quite coincident in its particulars with the more classical and familiar one which is served up in the story of Æneas: but this mischievous king of the winds had the merit of being easily propitiated; and the Indians, as they timidly passed his stronghold, never failed to send down to him the tributary peace offering of a pipe, an arrow, or any thing else, save their bottles of fire-water, of which the old fellow was dexterously cheated. The doughty Van Corlaer, undertaking a voyage to the north, was duly informed of these facts; but he swore “by stone and bone” that he would not pay the tribute, or ask any one’s permission to navigate the lake. I am sorry to add that he would not be argued out of his rash and inconsiderate vow. Tradition relates that, as he approached the rock, his mariners showed signs of fear, which appeared so puerile and idle to the enlarged soul of the hero, that he on the contrary steered close to the fearful citadel, and, shamefully exposing his person, made an unseemly gesture towards the abode of the Indian Æolus, and added some Dutch formula of defiance. It is almost needless to relate that the wrath of his ventose majesty was greatly excited. He scorned, indeed, to make a tempest about it; but despatching several angry little squalls after the insolent admiral, they bored him fore and aft, and beset him from so many quarters at once, in a narrow gorge of the lake, that, in short, he was effectually swamped, and thus made a warning example to all succeeding Van Corlaers. His name, as I said, was for a while bequeathed to the lake; but even this poor recompense for a disaster so terrible has proved as evanescent as the bubbles, in which the last sigh of the unfortunate Dutchman came up from the caves to which, like the great Kempenfelt, he went down in a moment.

The lake, therefore, retains its Gallic appellation, and preserves the name and memory of Samuel de Champlain, a servant of Henry IV., and justly surnamed the father of La Nouvelle France. The expedition in which it first received his name was a romantic one, and so well illustrates what I have already said of the border feuds of the seventeenth century, that I must be excused for relating its story. Champlain had come down to the shores of the lake with a party of Adirondacks, and was advancing through the forest towards the lands of the Iroquois, when suddenly they came in sight of a strong party of that nation, who showed no disposition to decline an encounter. On the contrary, setting up their warwhoop, they advanced pell-mell to the attack. The Frenchmen, betaking themselves to an ambuscade, made ready to receive them with their fusils; while their savage allies awaited the foe with their usual coolness and contempt of danger. The Iroquois were the more numerous, and, elated by their apparent superiority, came down with the sweeping violence of a whirlwind. The Adirondacks seemed in their eyes as chaff; and with howls and hatchets they were just pouncing upon their prey, when the blazing fusils of Champlain and his comrades laid the foremost of the Iroquois warriors in the dust. The remainder fled into the wilderness with the most frantic outcries of astonishment and despair. It was the first volley of fire-arms that ever reached the ear or the heart of an Iroquois—the first that ever startled the echoes of that lake, which was so soon destined to tremble beneath the bellowing thunders of navies. They were defeated they knew not how; but they retired to the depths of the forest, muttering the deadliest vows of revenge. It so happened that another collision of the same kind occurred soon after on the Saurel—a little river, much broken by rapids, through which the waters of the lake make their way to the sea. There was among the Algonquins a bold and dashing chief whose name was Pisquaret. He had made an incursion against the Iroquois, and was laden with the scalps which he had taken from an Indian village which he surprised at night and completely destroyed. As he was navigating the rapids of the Saurel with his Adirondacks and several Frenchmen, he was surprised by a powerful armament of Iroquois, who immediately bore down upon him, with great advantage from the current. The treacherous Algonquins feigned to give themselves up for lost, and, setting up the death-song of the Adirondacks, appeared to await their inevitable fate. The Frenchmen, throwing themselves flat in the batteaux, and resting the muzzles of their carbines upon the gunnels, coolly calculated the effects of the coming discharge; but Pisquaret and his warriors raised their voices in chanting the victories of their tribe, inflaming the Iroquois by vaunts of injuries which they had done them, and defying them in return not to spare any torture in seeing how the Algonquins could die. The exasperated foe was just pealing the war-cry, when the deadly blaze of the carbines changed their exultation in a moment to howls of agony and dismay. But these were tricks which could not be repeated; and, long after, the empire of the Grande Monarque paid dearly for these frolics in the unpruned wilderness. Those who are fond of tracing the greatest political events and changes to accidents inconsiderable in themselves, have maintained that the first volley of fire-arms that startled the echoes of Lake Champlain, decided the fate and fixed the limits of French dominion in America. Nor is this theory to be lightly dismissed as fanciful; for it cannot be doubted that the subsequent spread of the Anglo-Saxon race over the hunting-grounds of the Mohawks, and through them to the further west, was owing to the favourable treaties which the English were able to effect with the Iroquois in the days of their power,—treaties which, had they been secured by the French, would have opened the whole region now called New York to their countrymen, and filled it with a mongrel population under the absolute control of Jesuits and political adventurers. Nor can any thing be ascertained more decisive of what was at first a game and a problem, than the collisions I have described. The Iroquois soon found out the secret of their discomfiture, and associated the name of a Frenchman with that of the Algonquins in their inveterate hatred. And when they in turn found Pale-faces to seek their alliance, and supply them with arms, they became the barrier of British enterprise against the encroachments of France; and so it was that the beautiful vale of Mohawk, the shores of Erie and Ontario, and the rugged mountains of Vermont, came to be filled with the sons of Englishmen, and not with the dwarfish overgrowth of the French Canadian provinces. The laws, civil institutions, and the religion of England thus found a footing in that great territory, which, as more or less influencing all the other members of the American confederacy, is called the empire state:—and perhaps the bells that ring for the English service throughout that region would have been tolling for the Latin mass, but for those early encounters on the shores of Lake Champlain.

Our delay at Whitehall was owing to a blunder of Freke’s. He had assured us that we would certainly arrive in time to take the steamer down the lake to St John’s; but it had been several hours on its way when we arrived at the inn. Since the burning of a steamer several years before, there had been but one on these waters; and as it was now on its downward trip, it could not again leave Whitehall for several days. Here was a pretty mess for some half-dozen of us!

There was nothing for us but bedtime; and poor enough beds it brought us. I was up before the sun had found a chance to send a squint into the town over its rocky eastern wall; and I wonder not that the sun is slow to visit it, for it is altogether a disagreeable hole. For this I was unprepared. Whitehall hath a royal prestige, and the notion of the head of a lake had given me the pleasing expectation of a picturesque little harbour, and a romantic water view. There is nothing of the sort. The harbour is well called the basin; and Wood-creek, the canal, and the lake, just here, are all ditches together. Vessels of different sorts and sizes lie huddled and crowded at their confluence, and the waters are precisely of the colour of café-au-lait! Shade of merry Charles, how came they to change Skenesborough into Whitehall?

I have compared the ditch-water to café-au-lait; but all I can say of my breakfast is, that its coffee was not comparable to ditch-water. Freke was despatched to look us out a vessel willing to take us any where, for staying here was out of the question. He had given us the Indian name of the place as Kaw-ko-kaw-na, assuring us that this euphonious polysyllable was good Iroquois for the place where they catch fish. This little item of knowledge proved to us a dangerous thing, for it suggested a fishing excursion to fill up the hours of Freke’s anticipated absence. We rowed ourselves for some distance along a narrow channel, with marshes on both sides, which looked like the stronghold of that cohort of agues and fevers which, since the days of Prometheus, have delighted in burning and shaking the race of mortals. Wood-creek throws itself into the basin with a foaming cataract of waters; and beyond the marshes are precipitous walls of rocks, that confine the view. These rocks they call the Heights; and I doubt not they would look well at a distance, but the mischief is, there is no viewing them in so favourable a way. They rise like a natural Bastile, and so near your nose, that your only prospect is perpendicular; and you are consequently obliged to think more of your nose than the prospect. In the moonlight, the evening before, I did think there was something magnificent about the Heights; but this impression, like other visions of the night, did not survive the daybreak. I should think a geologist or a stone-mason might find them interesting; and an unprincipled inhabitant of Whitehall, out of patience with life in such a place, or emulous of the Lesbian Sappho, would doubtless find them suitable to the nefarious purpose of breaking his neck. This is all I can say for them; and as for the fishing excursion, we soon gave it up, and paddled back to the quay, out of patience with Freke for his instructions in Indian philology, and heartily tired of attempting to catch fish in Kaw-ko-kaw-na.

Freke, for once in his life, had been employed to some purpose. He met us on the quay, and immediately conducted us to a gay little sloop, to which he had already transferred our luggage, and which was ready for a start down the lake to Plattsburgh. We were introduced to a raw-boned, barethroated Vermonter as “Captain Pusher,” and, ratifying the bargain of our commissary, were soon snugly on board his vessel; of which I regret that I forget the name, though I distinctly remember the letters that shone on the painted sterns we passed—such as the Macdonough, the Congress, the Green-Mountain-Boy, and the Lady of the Lake. Whatever was its name, its deck contained several baskets of vegetables and joints of meat, which gave us promise of a good dinner; and scarcely were we under weigh, before Sambo the cook began to pare turnips, and grin from ear to ear over savoury collops of mutton, which he was submitting to some incipient process of cookery.

We were favoured with a good breeze; but the channel of which I have spoken seemed to drag its length like an Alexandrine. We reached a place where it is so narrow, and makes an angle so abrupt, that there is a contrivance on the bank which steamers are obliged to employ in turning. It is best described by the name which has been given to it by the sailors, from

“A pigmy scraper wi’ his fiddle,

Wha used at tryste and fairs to driddle,

Wi’ hand on haunch, and upward e’e.”

They call it the Fiddler’s Elbow; and as it seems the limit of Whitehall, we were glad to double the cape as speedily as possible. A squadron of ducks that were puddling in the dirty water of the marshes gave point to a quotation from Voltaire, with which one of our company paid his parting compliments to Kaw-ko-kaw-na, as its author did to Holland—Adieu! canards, canailles, canaux.

After clearing this place, we found an object of interest in the decaying hulks of the two flotillas that came to an engagement in Plattsburgh bay, in the year 1814. The British and America galleys lay there rotting together, with many marks of the sharp action in which they had well borne their part. The more imposing proportions of Captain Downie’s flag-ship the Confiance arrested our particular attention. She was a sheer hulk, charred and begrimed by fire, and a verdant growth of grass was sprouting from her seams and honourable scars. A few years before, she was a gallant frigate, cruising upon the open lake, and bearing proudly in the fight the red-cross of St George. Her commander fell upon her deck in the first moment of the action; and after a fierce engagement, during which she received 105 round-shot in her hull, she was surrendered. There was something in the sight of these rival squadrons thus rotting side by side, that might have inspired a moralist. How many brave fellows that once trode their decks were likewise mouldering in the dust of death! But in another view of the matter there was something inspiring. They were a witness of peace between the two nations who hold Lake Champlain between them; and long may it be before either shall wish to recall them from the nothingness into which they have long since crumbled!

The lake becomes gradually wider, and though not remarkable for beauty, affords scenes to engage the eye and occupy the mind. It is rather river scenery, than what we naturally associate with lakes. On the left are the mountain ridges that divide its waters from those of Lake George; on the right, is the rocky boundary of Vermont. The lake occupies the whole defile, lying very nearly due north and south. As we approached Ticonderoga, the region became more mountainous, and the view was consequently more attractive. Before us on the east was Mount Independence, and just opposite, on the west, rose the bold height of Mount Defiance, completely covering the fortress, which we knew lurked behind it to the north. By the help of a good wind, we were not long in reaching the spot where the outlet of Lake George debouches. It comes into Lake Champlain, apparently from the north-west, at the foot of Mount Defiance; the lake making a bend and winding eastward; and between the lake and the outlet, on a sloping and partially wooded promontory of some hundred feet in height, rise the rough but picturesque ruins of Ticonderoga. They present an appearance not usual in American scenery; and having every charm of association which Indian, French, British, and patriotic warfare can throw around such places, are naturally enough endeared to Americans, and gratifying to the curiosity of travellers.

This fortress was originally built by the French, in 1756; and subsequently, until the ascent of Mount Defiance by Burgoyne proved its exposure to attack on that point, it was contested, captured, and recaptured, and held by French, English, and Americans, as a stronghold of mastery and power. It commanded the avenue to the Hudson, and the pass to Lake George. The name Ticonderoga, in which every ear must detect a significant beauty, is said to denote, in the Indian dialect, the noise of the cataracts in the outlet; but the French called the fort Carillon, and afterwards Vaudreuil, in honour of one of their governors in Acadie, the Marquis de Vaudreuil. In 1757, when Montcalm (who fell in the defence of Quebec two years afterwards) was making his expedition against the English forts on Lake George, he remained at this place awaiting that powerful reinforcement of savages, whose treachery and thirst for blood rendered the campaign so lamentably memorable. To one who stands, as I did, on that beautiful peninsula, and surveys the quiet scene of land and water—sails betokening civilised commerce, and a trading village in Vermont, exhibiting every mark of prosperous thrift—it seems incredible that within the lifetime of persons yet surviving, that very scene was alive with savage nations who called it their own, and gave it to whom they would; but of whom nothing remains but wild traditions, and the certainty that they have been. Yet, only forty-three years before British and American flotillas were contending for this lake, in sight of a village with spires, and with none other than civilised arts of war, the same waters were covered with two hundred canoes of Nipistingues, Abnakis, Amenekis, and Algonquins, paddling their way to the massacre of a British force in a fortress at the head of Lake George. From Father Roubaud, a Jesuit priest who accompanied them, the particulars of that expedition have been handed down. He describes the savages as bedaubed with green, yellow, and vermillion; adorned with glistening ornaments, the gifts of their allies; their heads shaven, saving their scalp-locks, which rose from their heads like crests, stiffened with tallow, and decorated with beads and feathers; their chiefs bedizened with finery, and each nation embarked under wild but appropriate ensigns. Such were the Christians with whom Father Roubaud travelled as chaplain, and whom he led against his fellow Christians like another Peter the Hermit pursuing Turks. It is the plague of Popery that it often expends itself in inspiring the deepest religious sentiment, without implanting the least religious principle. The Italian bandit kneels at a wayside crucifix, to praise God and the Virgin for the plunder he has taken with bloodshed; the Irish priest, at the altar, devotes to death his unoffending neighbours, with the very lips which, as he believes, have just enclosed the soul, body, and divinity of the world’s Redeemer; and the Jesuit missionary of New France had no scruple in consecrating with the most awful rites of religion, an expedition whose object was the scalps of baptised men, and whose results were the massacre of women and children. The holy father himself is particular to relate the fact that he celebrated a mass before the embarkation, for the express purpose of securing the Divine blessing, and he compliments the fervour with which the savages assisted at the solemnity! He had described the English to them as a race of blasphemers, and they, at least, were not to blame for embarking in the spirit of crusaders “against black Pagans, Turks, and Saracens.” Daily, for a whole week, as the armament advanced, did the wily Jesuit land them on one of the many isles that gem the lower waters of Lake Champlain, on purpose to renew the august sacrament of the altar before their eyes: and he describes these savages as chanting the praises of the Lamb of God, with a fervour from which he augured the consummation of their character as Christians. At the end of a week, they descried with joy the French lilies as they waved over the walls of Carillon; and in order to make their approach more imposing, they immediately arranged their canoes under their ensigns, and advanced in battle array. From the height on which I stood, Montcalm beheld his allies, on a bright July morning, their hatchets and tomahawks gleaming in the sun; their standards and scalp-locks fluttering in the breeze; and their thousand paddles hurrying them through the waves of that beautiful water: such a sight as no eye will ever see again. To a nobleman fresh from the gallantries of Versailles, it must have been a spectacle full of wild and romantic interest; and the picture is altogether such a one as any imagination may delight to reproduce. Yet, when we reflect that it is even now but fourscore years and ten since such a scene was a terrible reality, how striking the reflection that it has as absolutely vanished from the earth, beyond the possibility of revival, as the display of tournaments, and the more formidable pageants of the Crusades.

The following year an expedition against this fort was made by the gallant Abercrombie, who approached it from Lake George, and endeavoured to take it by storm. It is commonly said that Lord Howe fell in this assault before the walls; but in fact he fell the day before, while leading an advanced guard through the forest. Ticonderoga was garrisoned by about four thousand men—French, Canadians, and Indians—and their entrenchments were defended by almost impregnable outworks. The British troops nevertheless made the attack with the greatest intrepidity, and in spite of a murderous fire, forced their way to the walls, and even scaled them, to be immediately cut down. But after repeated assaults, and the loss of two thousand men, General Abercrombie was forced to desist from the attempt; and the French kept the post for a time. It of course became English in the following year, when the French power in America was destroyed by the taking of Quebec.

I have already referred to its seizure by the eccentric Ethan Allen, on the breaking out of the American war in 1775. This officer was a native of Vermont, who had been an infidel preacher, and was notorious as the editor of the first deistical publication that ever issued from the American press. The revolution was hardly begun, when the province of Connecticut gave him a commission to capture Ticonderoga. With about three hundred of his hardy “Green-mountain-boys,” he was hastening to the spot, when he fell in with Arnold, bearing a similar commission from Massachusetts. After some dispute as to the command, Allen was made leader, and Arnold his assistant. They arrived by night on the Vermont shore, opposite the fort. There they found a lad who had been accustomed to visit the fort every day with provisions and pedlar’s wares, and crossing by his directions, without noise, they were shown a secret and covered entrance into the fort itself. Climbing up through this passage, Allen led his men within the walls, and drew them up in the area of the fortress, having silenced and disarmed the only sentry who guarded the entrance. The commander of the post, who hardly knew there was war, was actually startled from his sleep, by Allen’s demand for its surrender. The drowsy officer inquired—“By what authority?” And was answered by Allen, half in banter and half in bombastic earnest,—“In the name of the Great Jehovah, and of the Continental Congress!” To one in his straits, with a sword at his naked breast, such a reply, however unintelligible, was sufficiently overpowering, and the post was surrendered without resistance. Its reduction in 1777, by Burgoyne, has been already described; but Ticonderoga is for ever endeared to Americans from the fact, that the flag of their independence was so early given to the breeze from its summit.

A guide, who called himself Enoch Gold, led me over the ruins. He pretended to have been with St Clair, and to have seen Burgoyne and his men on Mount Defiance. He showed us the way through which Allen gained his entrance, and took us down into the vaults and magazines. A subterranean apartment was shown as a kitchen, and the old fellow declared he had eaten bread hot out of its ovens. We gave the soi-disant veteran the liberal rewards of a hero; but I suspect we were paying him for his imagination, rather than for his hardships.

The shadows of the fortress were beginning to lengthen on the lake before we returned to our bark. The mountains of Vermont, which are mostly well wooded, looked brightly green in the broad sunshine, and tempted us to wish we had time for an excursion to their heights. It was afterwards my happiness to go into Vermont, on a visit to Lake Dunmore, which lies among its mountains, and supplies delicious fish. I found it a truly Arcadian region, abounding with streams and pasturages, and rich in flocks and herds. It breeds a rugged race of men, with some characteristics decidedly Swiss. It is said, indeed, that a Switzer, who had come to settle in America, preferred these diminutive Alps, with their lakes and mountaineer population, to any other part of the country; and, fixing his dwelling accordingly, soon ceased to be home-sick, and sigh at the ranz des vaches.

Crown Point, the twin sister of Ticonderoga, is only ten miles beyond; but we did not reach it as soon as we had expected, for the wind had changed, and we were obliged to tack. Every now and then, the man at the helm, which was our gallant captain himself, would cry out,—“Heads!” and the boom would come sweeping across the deck, with woe to the head that wore a hat, or did not bow soon enough to save it. Several times I expected to see our friend Freke carried overboard bodily, and engulfed like another Corlaer; for so profoundly was he engaged with his cigar, as he sat, or rather squatted, on the hatches, that the captain’s monotonous warning failed to alarm him till the whole company had echoed “Heads!” and, with other demonstrations of affectionate solicitude, forced him to fall on all-fours.

At Crown Point the lake greatly improves. The water appears much clearer, and the width of the lake is nearly if not quite fourfolded. It continues to expand till it becomes ten or twelve miles in breadth, and islands begin to be numerous. To the northward the higher peaks of the Green Mountains stretch away with magnificent outlines; and on the west, a bleak and craggy range of hills, which are said to harbour even yet the wolf and the bear, approach, and then recede from the shore. Here, as early as 1731, the French built Fort Frederick, as the first move towards the seizure and claim of the whole surrounding territory; and from this point they made their bloody and atrocious incursions into New England, and towards the Mohawk, or dismissed their hireling savages to do it for them. The recesses of Fort Frederick are believed to have rivalled the dungeons of the Inquisition in scenes of misery and crime. In its gloomy cells were plotted the inhuman massacres which drenched the American settlements in blood. There, it is said, the Indian butchers received their commissions to burn, tomahawk, and scalp; and there, in the presence of Jesuit fathers, or at least with their connivance, was the gleaming gold counted down to the savages in return for their infernal trophies of success; the silvery locks of the aged colonist, the clotted tresses of women, and the crimsoned ringlets of the child. In 1759 this detestable hold of grasping and remorseless tyranny was blown up, and abandoned by the French to General Amherst. Soon after, the British Government began to erect a fortification in the vicinity of the ruins, and a noble work it was; though it proved of no use at all, after the enormous sum of two millions sterling had been expended on its walls of granite, and ditches blasted in the solid rock. The exploits of Arnold and Sir Guy Carleton in this vicinity have been already described. Since the close of the war of the Revolution, the costly works at Crown Point have been suffered to fall into decay; and they are now piles of ruin, covered with weeds, among which the red berries of the sumach are conspicuously beautiful in their time.

Though “Captain Pusher” made a landing at this point to procure a little milk for our tea, we did not go ashore, and were soon on our way once more with a freer prospect, and perhaps with somewhat expanded spirits. The setting sun, in the clear climate of America, is in fair weather almost always beautiful; and my recollections of the rosy and purple tints with which it adorned the feathery flakes of cloud that floated around the peaks of the Green Mountains, are to this day almost as bright in memory as when they first made my heart leap up to behold them in the soft summer sky of Vermont. As the lake grew wider and the darkness deeper, there was of course less and less to be seen; and the noble scenery at Burlington, where the width of the lake is greatest, and the shores assume a bolder and higher character of beauty, was to our great regret unavoidably passed in the night. Still, there is something in starlight upon the waters, in new and romantic regions, which peculiarly inspires me. The same constellations which one has long been accustomed to view in familiar scenes and associations, come out like old friends in the heavens of strange and untried lands; shining witnesses to the brotherhood of differing nations, and to the impartial benevolence and unsleeping love of God. But I have no reason to regret that the only night I ever passed on Lake Champlain was mostly spent in watching; for long before I was tired of gazing at Orion and the Pleiads, I was rewarded by the sight of one of the most splendid auroras that I ever beheld. In a moment, the whole northern heaven was illuminated with columnar light; and the zenith seemed to rain it down, so to speak—while the surface of the lake reflecting it, gave us, to our own eyes, the appearance of sailing in some bright fluid, midway between a vault and an abyss of fire. This display of glory continued to flash and quiver above us for several hours. There were, in quick succession, sheets and spires and pencils of variegated light, rolling and tremulous, wavy and flame-like, blazoning heaven’s azure with something like heraldic broidery and colours. Towards morning, the intense cold and heavy mountain dews drove me for a season to my berth; but I was on deck again in time to see the moon make her heliacal rising over the eastern peaks, in the wan paleness of her last quarter. The approach of day was attended with a fog; but it soon thinned off, and we made Plattsburgh in good time. Here we parted with our vessel, and her worthy commander; and though we neither gave him a piece of plate nor voted him an accomplished gentleman, we left him with such wishes as, if they have been fulfilled, have long since removed him from the helm of his sloop, and the waters of Lake Champlain, to a snug little cot at Burlington, and the company of any number of rosy little Green-Mountain boys and their interesting mother.

Plattsburgh is situated on the western bank of the lake, just where the crescent shore of a bold peninsula begins to curve round a broad semicircular bay, several miles in circumference, and of liberal depth. Here the American squadron, under Commodore Macdonough, was anchored on the 11th of September 1814, in order to assist the land forces under General Macomb, in repelling an expected attack from the British troops under Sir George Prevost. The English flotilla had been ordered up from the Isle-aux-Noix to engage Macdonough, and divert his fire from the shore; and accordingly, at about eight o’clock in the morning, was seen off the peninsula of Cumberland Head, and hailed by both armies with vociferous acclamations. The cannonade instantly began from the ships and on the land, and for two hours and twenty minutes the naval engagement was continued with the most stubborn resolution on both sides. Though the battle on shore was sorely contested, the action between the squadrons was anxiously watched by both armies, and by thousands of deeply interested spectators, who surveyed the field and the fleets from the neighbouring heights. Macdonough’s flag-ship, the Saratoga, was twice on fire; and though Downie had fallen in the first moment of the conflict, the Confiance had succeeded in dismantling all the starboard guns of her antagonist, when the bower-cable of the Saratoga was cut, and a stern-anchor dropped, on which she rounded to, and presented a fresh broadside. The Confiance was unable to imitate this manœuvre, and she was obliged to strike, the remainder of the flotilla soon following her example. A few of the British galleys escaped, but as there was not another mast standing in either fleet, they could neither be followed by friends or by foes. The decision of the contest was vociferously cheered from the shore; and Sir George, perceiving the fate of his fleet, commenced a retreat, having suffered the loss of nearly a thousand men. This brilliant action in Cumberland Bay has made the name of Macdonough the pride and glory of Lake Champlain; and deservedly so, for his professional merit appears to have been no greater than his private worth. The brave but unfortunate Downie, who, with a squadron wanting a full third of being as strong as that of his antagonist, maintained this gallant contest, sleeps in a quiet grave at Plattsburgh, under a simple monument erected by the affection of a sister. He is always mentioned with respectful regret; but Macdonough is, of course, the hero of every panegyric. An anecdote which we heard at Whitehall gives me a higher opinion of the latter, however, than all that has been justly said of his merits as an officer. A few minutes before the action commenced, he caused his chaplain to offer the appropriate prayers in the presence of all his fleet—the men standing reverently uncovered, and the commander himself kneeling upon the deck. An officer of the Confiance is said to have observed this becoming, but somewhat extraordinary, devotion through his glass, and to have reported it to Captain Downie, who seemed to be immediately struck with a foreboding of the result. The sailors on our little sloop told us another story of the action with great expressions of delight. It seems the hen-coop of the Saratoga was struck in the beginning of the action, and a cock becoming released flew into the rigging, and, flapping his wings, crowed lustily through the fire and smoke. The gunners gave chanticleer a hearty cheer, and taking the incident as an omen of victory, stood to their guns with fresh spirit and enthusiasm. Smaller things than this have turned the tide of battles far greater, and more important to nations and the world.

We spent a day at Plattsburgh surveying the field and the fort, and picking up stories of the fight. Relics of the battle were every where visible; and grape-shot and cannon-balls were lying here and there in the ditches. The evening was fair, and we drove out to an Indian encampment on the peninsula, the first thing of the kind I ever beheld. Entering one of the wigwams, or huts, I found the squaws engaged in weaving small baskets of delicate withes of elm, dyed and stained with brilliant vegetable-colours. An infant strapped to a flat board, and set like a cane or umbrella against the stakes of the hut, was looking on with truly Indian stoicism. The mother said her child never cried; but whether it runs in the blood, or is the effect of discipline, is more than I could learn. On the beach were canoes of bark, which had been newly constructed by the men. A squaw, who desired us to purchase, lifted one of them with her hand; yet it could have carried six or seven men with safety on the lake. We observed that males and females alike wore crucifixes, and were evidently Christians, however degraded and ignorant. They spoke French, so as to be easily understood, and some English. These poor and feeble creatures were the last of the Iroquois.

Next day, in post-coaches, we came into Canada. At St John’s, where we dined, Freke boisterously drank to his Majesty. So deep were the loyal feelings of our friend, however, that he continued his bumpers to “all the royal family,” which, though not quite so great an achievement then as it would be now, was quite sufficient to consign him to the attentions of our host, where we left him without an adieu. We were much amused by the novelties of our road, so decidedly Frenchified, and unlike any thing in the States. Women, in the costume of French peasants, were at work in the fields; and we saw one engaged in bricklaying at the bottom of a ditch or cellar. The men in caps, smock-frocks, and almost always with pipes in their mouths, drove by in light charettes, or waggons with rails at the sides, drawn by stout little ponies of a plump yet delicate build, and for cart-horses remarkably fleet. For the first time in my life I observed also dogs harnessed in the Esquimaux manner, and drawing miniature charettes, laden with bark or faggots. Every thing reminded us that we were not in England or America, but only in Acadie.

We were jaunting merrily along, when vociferous halloos behind us caused our whip to pull up with a jerk. A Yorkshire man, in terror of footpads, began to bellow Drive on! and our heads were thrust forth in farcical preparation for a stand-and-deliver assault, when a waggon was discovered approaching us, in which were two men, one without a hat, his hair streaming like a meteor, and both bawling Stop, stop! like the post-boy at the heels of John Gilpin. In a moment we recognised Freke. With any thing but a volley of compliments, he assailed the driver for carrying off his luggage, which sure enough was found in the boot, with his splendid initials inscribed in a constellation of brass nails. His hat had been blown off in the pursuit; but after adorning himself with a turban, he was again admitted to our company, though not without some reluctance expressed or understood. The fumes of his dinner had not entirely subsided; and I am sorry to say, that his enthusiasm for his king and country was about in inverse proportion to the honour he did them by his extraordinary appearance. I wish it had exhausted itself in song and sentiment; but it was evident that a strong desire to fight the whole universe was fast superseding the exhilaration of reunion with his friends. Unfortunately a poor Canadian, in passing with his charette, struck the wheels of our coach; and though he alone was the sufferer, being knocked into a ditch instantaneously, Freke was upon him in a second, inflicting such a drubbing as reminded me forcibly of a similar incident in Horace’s route to Brundusium. It was with difficulty that we succeeded in reducing our hero to a sense of propriety, and compelling him to console the astounded provincial with damages. The sufferer, who thanked him in French for the not over generous remuneration, seemed altogether at a loss to know for what he had been beaten; and I am happy to say that the politeness of the peasant seemed to restore our military friend to consciousness, and a fear that he had behaved like a brute. At the next stage he provided himself with a Canadian cap, and on resuming his seat overwhelmed us with apologies; so that we were compelled to forgive the aberration, which was doubtless, as he said, attributable solely to his loyal concern for the health of his Majesty, and to an overflow of spirits at finding himself once more in the pale of the British empire.

It was late in the afternoon when we arrived at Laprairie, that little old Canadian town on the St Lawrence, where passengers take the steamer to Montreal. Here was celebrating some kind of fête which had brought a procession of nuns into the street, around whom were congregated groups of smiling children in their holiday dresses. I entered a church, which I found nearly deserted. A few of the poorer sort of persons were at prayer, saying their aves and paters by the rosary—not, as is sometimes supposed, through voluntary devotion, but in performance of appointed penances, which they make haste to get through. Some funeral ceremony seemed to be in preparation; for the church was dark, and a catafalque near the entrance gave me a startling sensation of awe. All that Laprairie could show us was soon beheld; but our usual fortune had attended us to the last, and we were again too late for the steamer. It would not cross again till the morrow; yet there was the city of Montreal distinctly visible before our eyes. From the quay we could discern, down the river, the tin roof of the convent of Grayfriars, glittering brightly in the descending sun. In fact, the whole city was glittering, for every where its spires and roofs shone with a sheeting of the Cornish material, which somehow or other, in this climate, seems to resist oxidisation. In other respects, the scene was not remarkable, except that there was the river—the broad, free, and magnificent St Lawrence, with its rapids and its isles. Nuns’ Isle was above us, and abreast of the city, with its fortress, was the green St Helen’s, said to be musical with the notes of birds, and fragrant with its flowers and verdure.

We were regretting the premature departure of the steamer, when one of our party came to announce that some Canadian boatmen were willing to take us over in a batteau, if we would embark without delay. It was nine miles, and the rapids were high; but we were informed that our ferrymen were born to the oar, and might confidently be trusted with our lives. We therefore lost no time in stowing ourselves, and part of our luggage, into a mere shell of a boat, manned by half-a-dozen Canadians, who pulled us into deep water with an air and a motion peculiarly their own. Once fairly embarked, there was something not unpleasant in finding ourselves upon the St Lawrence in a legitimate manner; for steamers were yet a novelty in those waters, and were regarded by the watermen with the same kind of contempt which an old English mail-coachman feels, in the bottom of his soul, for stokers and railways. Finding ourselves, by a lucky accident, thus agreeably launched, we naturally desired to hear a genuine Canadian boat-song, and were not long in making the oarsmen understand that an augmentation of their pay would be cheerfully afforded, if they would but favour us with music. Every one has heard the beautiful words of Tom Moore, inspired by a similar adventure. He says of the familiar air to which they are set, that though critics may think it trifling, it is for him rich with that charm which is given by association to every little memorial of by-gone scenes and feelings. I cannot say that the air of our voyageurs was the same; yet I am quite inclined to think that the words which he gives as the burden of the Canadian boat-song which he heard so often, were those to which we were treated. Barbarous, indeed, was their dialect if they attempted to give us any thing so definite as the chanson,

“Dans mon chemin j’ai rencontré

Deux cavaliers, trés-bien montés;”

but there was a perpetually recurring refrain which sounded like do—daw—donny-day, and which I suppose to be a sort of French fol-de-rol, but which I can easily conceive to have been, as our English Anacreon reports it—

“A l’ombre d’un bois je m’en vais jouer,

A l’ombre d’un bois je m’en vais danser.”

Rude as was the verse and the music, however, I must own that, in its place on that majestic river, as we were approaching the rapids whose white caps were already leaping about our frail bark, with the meditative light of sunset throwing a mellow radiance over all, there was something that appealed very strongly to the imagination in that simple Canadian air. I am not musical, and cannot recall it; yet even now it will sometimes ring in my ears, when I go back in fancy to that bright season of my life when I too was a voyageur; and I have often been happy that accident thus gave me the pleasure of hearing what I shall never hear again, and what travellers on the St Lawrence are every year less and less likely to hear repeated. Indeed, I am almost able to adopt every word which Moore has so poetically appended to his song. “I remember,” says he, “when we entered at sunset upon one of those beautiful lakes into which the St Lawrence so grandly and so unexpectedly opens, I have heard this simple air with a pleasure which the finest conceptions of the finest masters have never given me; and now there is not a note of it which does not recall to my memory the dip of our oars in the St Lawrence, the flight of our boat down the rapids, and all the new and fanciful impressions to which my heart was alive during the whole of this very interesting voyage.”

But our trip was not all poetry and song. When we were fairly upon those bright-looking rapids, we found our little nutshell quite too heavily loaded, and were forced to feel our evident danger with somewhat of alarm. The billows whirled and tossed us about, till our Canadians themselves became frightened, and foolishly throwing up their oars, began to cross themselves and to call on the Virgin and all the saints. The tutelar of the St Lawrence is said to inhabit hard by, at St Anne’s,—but such was our want of confidence in his power to interfere, that we met this outbreak of Romish devotion with a protest so vehement that it would have surprised the celebrated diet of Spires. Certain it is that, on resuming their oars, the fellows did much more for us than their aspirations had accomplished, when unaided by efforts. We soon began to enjoy the dancing of our batteau, which gradually became less violent, and was rather inspiring. Still, as no one but a coward would sport in safety with dangers which were once sufficient to appal, let me confess that I believe I should be thankful that my journey and my mortal life were not ended together in those dangerous waters. I trust it was not without some inward gratitude to Him who numbers the very hairs of our head, that we found ourselves again in smooth tides, and were soon landed in safety on the quay at Montreal.

THE CONQUEST OF NAPLES.[^[16]]

The stirring period of the middle ages, rich in examples of bold emprise and events of romantic interest, includes no more striking and remarkable episode than the invasion and conquest, by the brother of St Louis, of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. As an episode it has hitherto been treated—introduced, and not unfrequently crushed into unmerited insignificance, in works of general history. By both historian and poet fragments have been brought into strong relief; as an independent whole, no writer, until the present time, has ventured and chosen to attempt its delineation. The virtues and misfortunes of the last legitimate descendant of the imperial house of Stauffen, a house once so numerous and powerful, have been wept over by the minstrels to whose fraternity he belonged, vaunted by indignant chroniclers, and sung by the greatest of Italy’s bards. The gallant and successful insurrection by which the brightest gem was wrenched from the French usurper’s fire-new diadem, and set in Arragon’s crown, has been repeatedly recorded and enlarged upon, and not unfrequently mistold. But the integral treatment of the conquest of Naples, in a work devoted to it alone, and worthy of the weight and interest of the subject—the narrative of the ousting of the German dynasty and establishment of a French one, including the circumstances that led to the change, and apart from contemporary and irrelevant history—were left for the elegant and capable pen of an author honourably known for extensive learning and indefatigable research. The puissant rule of Frederick the Hohenstauffe—the heroic virtues and Homeric feats of Charles of Anjou—the precocious talents, fatal errors, and untimely end of the luckless Conradin—have found a fit chronicler in the accomplished Count of St Priest.

Besides acknowledged talents and great industry, this writer has brought to his arduous task a familiar acquaintance—the result of long and assiduous study—with the times and personages of whom he writes, a sound judgment, and an honest desire of impartiality. In his quality of Frenchman the latter was especially essential, to guard him against the natural bias in favour of an illustrious and valiant countryman, that might lead, almost unconsciously, to an undue exaltation of the virtues, and extenuation of the crimes, of the hero of his narrative. Nor was this the only instance in which he was liable to temptation. The circumstances and causes of the massacre known as the Sicilian Vespers, were handed down, in the first instance, by Italian writers, in the adoption of whose views and assertions subsequent historians have perhaps displayed too great servility. If we consider the vindictive and treacherous instincts of the Sicilians, their fierce impatience of foreign domination, and the slight account made of human life by the natives of southern Europe generally, we cannot too hastily reject the assertions and arguments by which M. de St Priest props his opinion, that the vengeance was greater than the offence, the oppressed more cruel than the oppressor. History affixes to an entire nation the stigma of goading a conquered people to madness, by arrogance, injustice, and excess. M. de St Priest takes up the defence, and, without claiming for his client an honourable acquittal, strives, by the production of extenuating circumstances, to induce the world to reconsider its severe and sweeping verdict. He asks whether the evidence has been sufficiently sifted, whether the facts have been properly understood and appreciated, or even known. “I think,” he says, “they have not. The Sicilians themselves acknowledge this. One of their most distinguished writers has suspected falsehood, and sought the truth; but he has done so only in a very exclusive, and consequently a very incomplete point of view. He has aggravated the reproach that rests upon the memory of the French of the thirteenth century. In my turn, I have resumed the debate with a national feeling as strong, but less partial I hope, than that of most of the Italian and German annalists, in whose footsteps our own historians have trodden with undue complaisance. It is time to stand aloof from these, and to reply to them.” It would be inverting the order of our subject, here to dilate upon M. de St Priest’s views concerning the massacre, to which we may hereafter recur. He scarcely makes out so good a case for the French victims to Sicilian vengeance as he does for the most prominent personage of his book, Charles of Anjou, whose character he handles with masterly skill. He admits his crimes—sets off with their acknowledgment; and yet so successfully does he palliate them by the received ideas of the time, by the necessities and perplexities of a most difficult position, that the reader forgets the faults in the virtues of the hero, and receives an impression decidedly favourable to the first French sovereign of Naples. “Had I proposed,”—we quote from the preface—“to write a biography, and not a history, to paint a portrait instead of a picture, I might have recoiled before my hero. The blood of Conradin still cries out against his pitiless conqueror; but the crime of the chief must not be imputed to the army. Aged warriors were seen to weep and pray around the scaffold of a child. The end I propose is not that of a retrospective vindication—an ungrateful, and often a puerile task. Charles of Anjou was guilty. That fact admitted, he still remains the greatest captain, the sole organising genius, and one of the most illustrious princes of a period fertile in great kings. Like his brother Louis IX., from whom, in other respects, he was only too different, he valiantly served France. He carried the French name into the most distant countries. By his political combinations, by the alliances he secured for his family as much as by his victories, Charles I., King of Sicily, seated his lineage upon the thrones of Greece, Hungary, and Poland. Yet more—he saved the western world from another Mahomedan invasion, less perceived, but not less imminent, than the invasions of the eighth and seventeenth centuries. The bust of Charles of Anjou merits a place between the statues of Charles Martel and John Sobieski.”

This high eulogium, at the very commencement of the book, strikes us as scarcely according with the promise of impartiality recorded upon the following page. The meed of praise exceeds that we should be disposed to allot to the conqueror of Naples. Still, upon investigation, it is difficult to controvert his historian’s assertions, although some of them admit of modification. Here M. de St Priest rather veils and overlooks his hero’s faults than denies them to have existed. He says nothing in this place of the misgovernment that lost Sicily, within a few years of its reduction. Yet to such misrule, more even than to the excesses of a licentious soldiery—partly consequent on it—was attributable the temporary separation of that fair island from the Neapolitan dominions. Subsequently he admits the imprudent contempt shown by Charles to this portion of his new kingdom, his injudicious choice of the agents and representatives of his authority, the exclusion of the natives from public offices and employments—filled almost wholly by Frenchmen—with many other arbitrary, oppressive, and unjust measures, sometimes more vexatious in form than efficient for the end proposed; as, for instance, the decree disarming the Sicilians, which must have been wretchedly enforced, since the Palermitans, when the signal for slaughter was given, were at no loss for weapons to exterminate their tyrants. Whilst admitting the skill shown by Charles in his foreign policy, and in the formation of great and advantageous alliances, we must refuse him, upon his advocate’s own showing, the merit of able internal administration. His military virtues are less questionable, although the greatest of his victories, which placed his rival in his power and secured his seat on the Neapolitan throne, was due less to any generalship of his own than to the bold stratagem of a gray-headed crusader.

Apart from its historical importance, M. de St Priest’s work is valuable as exposing and illustrating the peculiar ideas, strange customs, and barbarous prejudices of a remote and highly interesting period, less known than it deserves, and whose annals and archives few have explored more industriously than himself. In this point of view are we disposed, whilst glancing at some of the principal events it records, especially to consider it; and under this aspect it will probably be most prized and esteemed by the majority. A greater familiarity than the general mass of readers possess with the complicated history of the second period of the middle ages is requisite for the due appreciation of the book, and especially of its first volume. This is purely introductory to the conquest. The name of the conqueror is mentioned for the first time upon its last page. The matter it contains is not the less essential. It sketches the establishment of the Norman dynasty in Sicily; the elevation of that country into a monarchy by Duke Roger II.; the fall of the family of Tancred, and the reign of Frederick II., (Emperor of Germany, and grandson of Barbarossa,) who inherited the crown of the Two Sicilies in right of his mother, the posthumous daughter of Roger, and the last of the Norman line. This brings us into the thick of the long-standing feud between the Pope and the Empire, which, after having had the whole of Europe for its battle-field, at last concentrated itself in a single country. “Towards the middle of the thirteenth century it was transported to the southern extremity of Italy, to the rich and beautiful lands now composing the kingdom of Naples. The quarrel of the investitures terminated by the crusade of Sicily; a debate about ecclesiastical jurisdiction ended in a dispute concerning territorial possession. But although reduced to less vast proportions and more simple terms, the antagonism of the pontificate and the throne lost nothing of its depth, activity, and strength. Far from becoming weakened, it assumed the more implacable and rancorous character of a personal encounter. The war became a duel. It was natural that this should happen. So soon as a regular power was founded in the south of Italy, Rome could not permit the same power to establish itself in the north of the peninsula. The interest of the temporal existence of the popedom, the geographical position of the States of the Church, rendered this policy stringent. The Popes could never allow Lombardy and the Two Sicilies to be united under one sceptre. A King of Naples, as King of the Lombards, pressed them on all sides; but as Emperor he crushed them. This formidable hypothesis realised itself. A German dynasty menaced the Holy See, and was broken. A French dynasty was called to replace it, and obtained victory, power, and duration.” When this occurred—when the Pope, beholding from the towers of Civita Vecchia his earthly sway menaced with annihilation, and the Saracen hordes of Sicily’s powerful King ravaging the Campagna, fulminated anathemas upon the impious invaders, and summoned to his aid a prince of France—Manfredi, Prince of Tarento, or Mainfroy, as M. de St Priest prefers to call him, the natural son of Frederick II., was the virtual sovereign of the Two Sicilies. Frederick, who died in his arms, left him regent of the kingdom during the absence in Germany of his legitimate son Conrad—named his heir in preference to his grandson Frederick, the orphan child of his eldest son Henry, who had died a rebel, conquered and captive. This was not all. “The imperial will declared the Prince of Tarento bailiff or viceroy of the Two Sicilies, with unlimited powers and regal rights, whenever Conrad should be resident in Germany or elsewhere. Things were just then in the state thus provided for. Mainfroy became ipso facto regent of the kingdom; and the lucky bastard saw himself not only eventually called to the powerful inheritance of the house of Suabia, but preferred to the natural and direct heir of so many crowns.”

The death of Frederick the Hohenstauffe, who for long after his decease was popularly known—as in our day a greater than he still is—as the Emperor, revived the hopes and courage of Pope Innocent IV., who resolved to strike a decisive blow at the power of the house of Suabia. Mainfroy was then its representative in Italy. He was only nineteen—a feeble enemy, so thought Innocent, whom a word from the pontifical throne would suffice to level with the dust. But where the sanguine Pope expected to find a child, he met a man, in talent, energy, and prudence. These qualities Mainfroy displayed in an eminent degree in the struggle that ensued; and when Conrad landed in his kingdom, which had been represented to him as turbulent and agitated, he was astonished at the tranquillity it enjoyed. He embraced his brother, and insisted on his walking by his side, under the same dais, from the sea to the city. This good understanding did not last long. Conrad was jealous of the man who had so ably supplied his place, and jealousy at last became hatred. He deprived Mainfroy of the possessions secured to him by his father’s will, banished his maternal relatives with ignominy, and did all he could, but in vain, to drive him to revolt. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that when Conrad died, at the age of twenty-six, leaving Berthold, Margrave of Hohemburg, regent of the kingdom during the minority of his son Conrad V., or Conradin—who had been born since his departure from Germany, and whom he had never seen—there were not wanting persons to accuse Mainfroy as an accessary to his death. Mainfroy had already been charged—falsely, there can be little doubt—of having smothered, under mattresses, his father and benefactor, the Emperor Frederick. There was more probability, if not more truth, in the accusation of fratricide; for, if Conrad had lived, doubtless Mainfroy would, sooner or later, have been sacrificed to his jealousy or safety. “The majority of chroniclers assign to Mainfroy, as an accomplice, a physician of Salerno; and add, with the credulity of the times, that he killed the King of the Romans by introducing diamond dust, an infallible poison, into his entrails. Others, bolder or better informed, give the name of the poisoner, and call him John of Procida.” Whether this death resulted from poison or disease, it was hailed as a happy event by the Italians, and with a great burst of laughter by the Pope, who at once renounced his project of calling a foreign prince to the throne of Sicily, and resumed, with fresh ardour, his plans of conquest and annexation. Advancing to the Neapolitan frontier, he was there met by the Prince of Tarento and the Margrave of Hohemburg, who came to place themselves at his disposal, and to supplicate him on behalf of the infant Conradin. The Pope, who saw a proof of weakness in this humility, insisted that the Two Sicilies should be delivered up to the Church; saying that he would then investigate the rights of Conradin, and admit them if valid. The Margrave, alarmed at the aspect of things, made over the regency to Mainfroy, who accepted it with affected repugnance. A powerful party called this prince to the throne: it was the aristocratic and national party, averse alike to papal domination and to the government of a child. They entered into an agreement with Mainfroy, by which they swore to obey him as regent, so long as the little King should live; stipulating that if he died a minor, or without direct heirs, the Prince of Tarento should succeed him as sovereign. The Margrave of Hohemburg, faithless to the trust reposed in him by Conrad, agreed to these conditions, and promised to deliver up to Mainfroy the late King’s treasures. Instead of so doing, the double traitor made his escape with them, leaving the new regent in such poverty that, in order to pay his German mercenaries, he was compelled to sell the hereditary jewels and gold and silver vases of his mother’s family.

If Mainfroy had made good fight in defence of Conrad’s rights, we may be sure he did not less strenuously strive when his own claim was to be vindicated. Unfortunate at first, and about to succumb to papal power and intrigues, he, as a last resource, threw himself into the arms of the Saracens of Lucera. These unbelievers had been greatly encouraged by his father, who was passionately addicted to things oriental. “From his infancy,” M. de St Priest says of Frederick, “he lived surrounded with astrologers, eunuchs, and odaliques. His palace was a seraglio, himself a sultan. This was quite natural. In Sicily all visible objects were Asiatic. The external form of the houses, their internal architecture, the streets, the baths, the gardens, even the churches, bore the stamp of Islamism. The praises of God are still to be seen engraved in Arabic on marble columns; and in the same language were they traced, in gold and diamonds and pearls, upon the mantle and dalmatica of Sicily’s Queens and Kings. Palermo was then called the trilingual city. Latin and Arabic were equally spoken there; and the Italian, the favella volgare, originated at the court of Frederick-Roger, under the Moorish arcades of his palaces at Palermo and Catania. The language of Petrarch was murmured, for the first time, beside the fountains of the Ziza. The outward forms of Islamism were then, in southern Europe, the ensign hoisted by that small number of liberal thinkers, the avowed enemies of ecclesiastical and monkish domination, who willingly assumed the name of Epicureans.” Further on we have the following, explanatory of the peaceable settlement of the infidel in Sicily, and curiously illustrating the contradictions and bigotry of the time. “With an audacity previously unheard-of, Frederick II., after fighting and conquering the Saracens who overran and disturbed Sicily, transported entire colonies of them to Lucera, in the Capitanata, in the immediate vicinity of the patrimony of St Peter, thus planting, in the heart of his kingdom, the Mahomedan standard he was about to combat in Syria. Decrepid though he was, Pope Honorius felt the danger and insult of such proximity. What were the arms of the holy see against an opponent that none of its anathemas could touch? The Pontiff became indignant, vented threats; but was soon appeased. When the wily Frederick saw him angry, he promised a crusade; whereupon the Pope calmed himself, and treated the Emperor as a son.” Subsequent Popes were less easy to pacify, and ban and excommunication were heaped upon the Emperor’s head. Gregory IX., in his bulls, called him “a marine monster, whose jaws are full of blasphemies;” to which complimentary phrase Frederick replied by the epithets of “great dragon, antichrist,” and “new Balaam.” A third extract will complete the sketch of the Saracens, and their position in Sicily. “Surrounded by odaliques and dancing women; giving eunuchs for guards to his wife, the beautiful Isabella Plantagenet, a daughter of the English King; often clothed in oriental robes; in war-time mounted on an elephant; in his palace surrounded by tame lions; always accompanied by a troop of Mussulmans, to whom he showed great indulgence, permitting them the violation of churches and women, debauch and sacrilege,—Frederick II., in the opinion of his subjects, was no longer a Christian prince. During the last ten years of his reign this state of things reached its height. The number of barbarian troops daily increased. Seventeen new companies, summoned from Africa, were dispersed, like an invading army, over the Basilicata and Calabria. Finally, the Emperor went so far as to instal them in the places of masters of ports, and in other offices that gave these Mussulmans jurisdiction over Christian populations.” And when a Saracen captain, named Phocax, in garrison at Trani, ill-treated a citizen of noble birth, Messer Simone Rocca, and grossly outraged his wife, the aggrieved man could obtain no satisfaction. “The Emperor only laughed. ‘Messer Simone,’ he said, to the complainant, ‘dov’è forza non è vergogna. Go, Phocax will not do it again; had he been a native of the country, I would have had his head cut off.’” On the death of this indulgent patron, the Saracen colony in the kingdom of Naples saw its existence menaced. The infidels were lost if Rome became mistress of the country. The triumph of the Pope would be the tocsin of their extermination. They resolved to defend themselves to the last. They held Lucera, Accerenza, and Girafalco, three impregnable fortresses; they also commanded at other points, less strong but still important. They felt themselves numerous, courageous, and determined. Mainfroy could not doubt that they would gladly rally round the banner of their benefactor’s son; and in this hope he set out for Lucera, where John the Moor then commanded. This man, a slave whom the Emperor’s caprice had raised to the highest dignities, promised Mainfroy the best of receptions. But when the Prince of Tarento reached Lucera, the traitor had gone over to the Pope, taking with him a thousand Saracens and three hundred Germans, and leaving the town in the keeping of a man of his tribe, Makrizi by name. On learning this treachery, Mainfroy still did not renounce his project of confiding himself to the Arabs—so cherished by his father, so favoured by himself. Only, instead of approaching the fortress with his little army, as regent of the kingdom, he preferred to go as a knight-errant, attended only by three esquires, like a paladin of the Round Table. This portion of Mainfroy’s life, as well as many other passages in M. de St Priest’s book, reads like an extract from some old romance of chivalry. After wandering about, in the gloom and rain of a November night, and losing his way repeatedly, Adenulfo, one of Mainfroy’s three men-at-arms, and formerly forester to Frederick II., perceived a white object in the darkness, and recognised a hunting-lodge built by the Emperor. He conducted the prince thither, and they lighted a large fire,—a most imprudent act, for the flame was easily perceptible at Foggia, where Otho of Hohemburg was then in garrison with a portion of the papal army. But Mainfroy was young and a poet. At sight of the splendid trees blazing on the hearth, he forgot the present, and thought only of the past; perhaps he recalled the time, not yet very distant, when as a child, on winter nights like that one, and perchance in that very place, he had seen his father, on his return from an imperial hunt, seat himself at that same hearth, and talk familiarly with his attendants of his wars and his amours, singing the praises of the lovely Catalanas,[^[17]] and venting curses on the Pope. The illusion was of short duration. At early dawn Mainfroy and his little escort took horse, and after an hour’s march they beheld, through the misty morning air, the tall hill of Lucera, and on its summit the Saracen citadel and its massive walls, crowned with two-and-twenty towers. But the guardians of the gate refused to open without orders from Makrizi, who moreover, it would appear, had the key in his keeping. Sure that he would deny admittance, they urged the prince to enter as he best might, for that, once within the walls, all would go well. Beneath the gate was a sort of trench, or gutter, to carry off the rain, and through this it was not difficult for a young man of twenty, slender and active like Mainfroy, to squeeze himself. He attempted to do so, but the Saracens could not support the sight of their Emperor’s son grovelling on the ground like a reptile. “Let us not,” they exclaimed, “allow our lord to enter our walls in this vile posture. Let his entrance be worthy of a prince! Let us break the gates!” In an instant these were overthrown; Mainfroy passed over their ruins, and was carried upon the shoulders of the Saracens to the public market-place, surrounded by a joyous multitude. He met Makrizi, who, furious at the news of his entrance, was summoning the garrison to arms. “Makrizi! Makrizi!” cried the Saracens and the people, “get off your horse, and kiss the prince’s feet!” The Arab obeyed, and prostrated himself. Mainfroy had valiantly played his last stake, and fortune favoured his audacity. In Lucera he found the treasures of Frederick II., of King Conrad, of the Margrave Berthold, and of John the Moor. Then, as ever, money was the sinew of war. Its possession changed the aspect of affairs. In less than a month, the proscribed and fugitive Mainfroy had dispersed the Pope’s army, taken and executed John the Moor, and marched upon Naples to seize a crown. And now, for many years, his career of success was unchequered by a reverse. His arms were uniformly triumphant in the field; he was the most magnificent prince, and passed as the richest sovereign, in Europe. At last the marriage of his daughter Constance with the Infante Don Pedro, son of King James of Arragon, crowned his prosperity. Concluded in defiance of the court of Rome, this marriage allied the bastard Prince of Tarento with the French royal family; for Isabella of Arragon, sister of his son-in-law Don Pedro, became the wife of Philip, son of Louis IX., and heir apparent to the crown of France. This last piece of good fortune nearly turned Mainfroy’s head. Instead of defending himself against the Holy See, he assumed the offensive, and invaded its territories. Moreover, he now openly professed, and established as a principle, that the right to dispose of the imperial diadem was not vested in the Popes, but in the senate and people of Rome. “It is time,” he added, “to put an end to this usurpation.” Such maxims, thus publicly proclaimed, rendered the Pope irreconcilable. The papal dream of annexing the Two Sicilies to the pontificate had long melted into air before the sun of Mainfroy’s arrogant prosperity; and Urban IV., convinced that the Church had need of a valiant and devoted defender, turned his eyes northwards, whilst his lips pronounced the name of Charles of Anjou.

Charles, the good Count of Anjou, as some of the chroniclers call him, was married to Beatrix of Savoy, Countess of Provence, whose hand he obtained in preference to two formidable rivals,—Conrad, son of the Hohenstauffe, and Pedro of Arragon. The latter we have just referred to as having subsequently married a daughter of Mainfroy. Through life Peter and Charles were destined to be rivals; and if the latter had the advantage at the outset, his competitor afterwards in some degree balanced the account by robbing him of the island of Sicily. In 1248, soon after his marriage, Charles embarked at Aiguesmortes with his brother Louis and their wives, on a crusade,—was sick to death at the island of Cyprus, but recovered, and performed prodigies of valour in fight with the Saracen. It seemed as if the scent of battle sufficed to restore him his full vigour; and he displayed a furious impetuosity and reckless daring that almost surpass belief. On arriving off Damietta, and at sight of the Saracen army waiting on the shore, he and St Louis sprang from their galley, and waded to land, with the water to their waists. Surrounded by the enemy, Charles raised a wall of corpses around him, until his knights came up to the rescue. Heading them, he charged the infidel host, ordering to strike at the horses’ breasts. The noble Arab chargers fell by hundreds; the Saracens fled; Louis and Charles pursued; Damietta was the prize of the Christians. “The adventurous prince feared the elements as little as he did man. One day the Saracens threw Greek fire upon the crusaders’ tents. Struck with surprise at sight of this mysterious enemy, the Christians were so terrified that they dared not attempt to extinguish the flames. ‘I will go,’ cried the Count of Anjou. They tried to retain him by force, but he broke from them like a madman, and succeeded in his design. At another time, St Louis, from the top of a hill, saw him engaged single-handed with a whole troop of Saracens, who hurled at him darts with flaming flags, which stuck into and burnt his horse’s crupper. Thus did Charles display the first symptoms of a will incapable of receding even before impossibilities,—a dangerous application of a great virtue; but then, these feats of the Count of Anjou delighted every body. Other exploits followed. Like a Christian Horatius, Charles one day stopped the whole Mussulman army upon a wooden bridge.” This great bravery was accompanied by pride, egotism, and hardness of heart, and these qualities caused bickerings between him and St Louis. Nevertheless, the brothers were fondly attached to each other; and when Charles returned to Provence he displayed a depth of emotion on parting from his king that surprised the army, which did not give him credit for so much fraternal affection. There was great contrast of character between him and his royal brother. “They had in common,” says M. de St Priest, “military courage, chastity, probity, and respect to their plighted word.... St Louis was a Frenchman, Charles of Anjou a Spaniard. St Louis had that communicative disposition, that taste for social enjoyment, that necessity of expansion and gentle gaiety, generally attributed to our nation. He was evidently the man born beside the waters of Loire or Seine. Charles, on the other hand, seemed to have received life upon the rugged rocks of Toledo, or in the naked and melancholy plains of Valladolid. He was proud and gloomy; no smile ever curved his lips. Uncommunicative, he confided his designs to no one. Although hasty, violent, and passionate, he strove to conceal his emotions. He slept little, spoke less; never forgot a service or an injury. His indulgence for his partisans and servants was unbounded: if he was passionately fond of gold, it was especially that he might shower it upon them. Charles and Louis were a contrast even in form and colour of face. Louis was fair and ruddy; Charles had black hair, an olive skin, nervous limbs, and a prominent nose. Goodness was the characteristic of the king, severity of the count. Both of imposing aspect,—one as a father, the other as a master—Louis inspired respect and love, Charles respect and terror. By the admission of all his contemporaries, nothing could be more majestic than the look, gait, and stature of the Count of Anjou. In an assemblage of princes he eclipsed them all. A poet who knew him well, and who calls him the most seignorial of men, shows him to us at the court of France in the midst of his brothers, and characterises him by this energetic line—

‘Tous furent filz de roy, mais Charles le fut mieux.’”

Such was the man who, on the 15th May 1265, embarked at Marseilles for Rome, with a thousand chosen knights upon thirty galleys, leaving the main body of his army at Lyons to cross the Alps with the Countess Beatrix, under the nominal command of the young Robert de Bethune Dampierre, heir to the county of Flanders, and the real guidance of Gilles de Traisignies, constable of France. At the moment of his departure, timid counsellors magnified the peril of the enterprise, and the superiority of the hostile fleet that watched to intercept him; but nothing could shake the determination of the Count of Anjou. “Good conduct,” he said, as he put foot on his galley’s deck, “overcomes ill fortune. I promised the Pope to be at Rome before Pentecost, and I will keep my word.” If fortune had not favoured him, however, it is doubtful if he would have succeeded in running the gauntlet through the sixty Sicilian galleys, manned with the practised mariners of Pisa, Naples, and Amalfi, that waited to pounce, like hawk on sparrow, upon his feeble armament. Independently of this formidable squadron, the entrance of the port of Ostia was encumbered, by Mainfroy’s order, with beams and huge stones, against which the French ships were expected inevitably to shatter themselves. Altogether, the marine preparations were so formidable, they were proclaimed with such ostentation, and Mainfroy appeared so convinced of their efficacy, that at Rome the partisans of Charles and the Pope lost courage. The decisive moment arrived, and no fleet appeared; when suddenly a rumour spread that Charles was shipwrecked and drowned. The Ghibellines, or imperialists, hailed the report with delight, the Guelfs with terror. Friends and enemies alike believed the fatal intelligence, when at break of day, on the eve of Pentecost, a boat, containing ten men, entered the Tiber. Amongst these ten men was Charles of Anjou. He owed his safety to his peril; deliverance had grown out of impending destruction. A violent storm had had a double result: Mainfroy’s fleet, which for some days past had blockaded the Tiber, was compelled to put to sea, and the thirty Provençal galleys were dispersed in view of Pisa. Charles was wrecked on the coast of Tuscany; to escape capture by one of Mainfroy’s lieutenants, he threw himself into a skiff, and the wind guided him into the Tiber, which he entered unperceived by the Sicilian admiral. Such was the fortunate chance that served him. Men believed him at the bottom of the sea, and at that moment he landed in Italy.

Mainfroy prepared for defence, affecting boundless confidence in the result of the approaching strife, but in reality uneasy at the approach of his formidable foe. His hatred found vent in sarcasm and abusive words. “Although the name of the terrible Charles of Anjou did not encourage childish diminutives, Mainfroy and his flatterers never spoke of him otherwise than as Carlotto” (Charley.) This was not very dignified or in good taste. But Charles was at no loss for a retort. When his wife had joined him, at the head of thirty thousand men, and the royal pair had been crowned in the Church of the Lateran, in sight and amidst the acclamations of an immense multitude, King and Queen of Sicily, he marched upon Naples. At the frontier, Mainfroy, after a vain attempt to intimidate the Pope, endeavoured to delay his progress by negotiation. “Tell the Sultan of Lucera,” replied Charles to the Swabian envoys, “that between us there can be neither peace nor truce; that soon he shall transport me to paradise or I will send him to hell.” And having thus branded his opponent as an infidel, and his opponent’s cause as unjust, he resolutely entered the Neapolitan states. The first barrier to his progress, the fortified bridge of Ceprano, was opened to him by Riccardo d’Aquino, Count of Caserte, out of revenge for the alleged seduction or violation of his wife by Mainfroy. The count was about to defend the post, when news of his dishonour reached him. He vowed a terrible revenge; but, scrupulous even in his anger, he sent to consult the casuists of the French camp, whether a vassal had the right to punish the liege lord who had outraged him in his honour. The casuists made an affirmative reply, and Caserte gave free passage to Charles of Anjou. History is more positive of the count’s treason than of the outrage said to have induced it. The occupation of the bridge was but a small step towards the conquest of the Two Sicilies. Charles’s path was beset with obstacles, augmented by the difficulty of transporting his warlike engines, and by fierce dissensions in his army. These alone were sufficient to ruin the enterprise; but the valour and military science of the French prince supplied all deficiencies. His operations were sometimes, however, a little impeded from pious scruples; as, for instance, when he put off the assault of a town for two days, in order not to fight on Ash Wednesday. Nevertheless his progress was rapid and triumphant, and soon the silver fleur-de-lis of France, and the crimson ones of the Guelfs, floated above the walls or over the ruins of Mainfroy’s strongest forts. All the Saracens who fell into Charles’s hands were immediately put to the sword. At last, in the valley of Santa Maria de Grandella, and at four miles from the town of Benevento, the French army—to which were now united the levies of many disaffected Neapolitan nobles—came in sight of Mainfroy’s host, drawn up in order of battle. The strength of the two armies is variously stated, but it appears certain that the numerical advantage was considerably on the side of Charles. Before engaging, each leader made a speech to his troops. That of Charles reminds us of Cromwell’s well-known exhortation to his men, to trust in God and keep their powder dry. “Have confidence in God,” said the valiant and pious Frenchman, “but neglect not human means; and be attentive, when battle begins, to what I now tell you: strike at the horses rather than at the men, not with edge, but with point; so that, falling with his horse and being unable to rise quickly, on account of the weight of his armour, the cavalier may immediately have his throat cut by the ribauds. Let each of you be always accompanied by one of those varlets, and even by two. Forget not that, and march!” The manœuvre prescribed by Charles of Anjou, and which he had already essayed in Palestine, was forbidden by chivalrous etiquette, which stigmatised as disloyal the act of striking at the horses’ heads. But Charles was not at a tournament. His aim was victory, and his injunction was well received by his knights, whom his words excited, says a chronicler, as the huntsman excites the dogs. There was neither blame nor murmur. Nevertheless his chevaliers were the flower of nobility; but they did not hold themselves engaged in a regular war; they looked upon the expedition as a crusade against infidels. The bishop of Auxerre gave a final benediction; the trumpets sounded, and the signal of battle echoed through both camps.

Neither army had left its ground when the clamour of many thousand voices was heard; and, like a whirlwind, the Saracen archers from Lucera poured upon the field. Crossing the little river Calora, they fell upon the French infantry with a discharge of arrows. The French, with loud cries of “Down with the Saracens! Down with the swine!” rushed furiously to meet them. The medley was terrible, and at first victory favoured the turban. Charles’s troops broke and fled, when Ruggiero San Severino rallied them, waving, by way of banner, a bloody shirt, stripped from a soldier’s corpse. Philip de Montfort brought up the reserve, and threw himself upon the Saracens, whom he cut to pieces with cries of “Montfort, chevaliers!” “Swabia, chevaliers!” replied Gualvano Lancia, who, without waiting orders from Mainfroy, hurried forward a thousand men of the best German troops. He fell upon the French, who were weary with striking, and made a great slaughter of them. Charles of Anjou, who in his part of the field performed, as usual, prodigies of valour, now left the wing he commanded and attacked Gualvano Lancia. The Germans and Saracens were cut to pieces and dispersed; but the Italian battalions, commanded by nobles of the country, had not yet shared the combat. Mainfroy had kept them as a reserve, and now called upon them to follow him. Instead of so doing, they turned their backs and fled. At the same moment a silver eagle, surmounting Mainfroy’s helm, fell and broke in pieces. At this evil omen, the son of the Hohenstauffe felt himself lost. He turned towards the faithful few who still stood by him, and said in the words of the Catholic Church: Hoc est signum Dei. Then, followed by Tibaldo Annibaldi, he plunged into the thickest of the hostile squadrons, and was seen no more alive. For three days nothing was heard of him, and Charles of Anjou thought he had escaped, when a soldier led his war-horse past the window of Gualvano Lancia and two other Ghibelline prisoners. On recognising the steed, the captives burst into tears, and implored the soldier, a Picard, to tell them the fate of its rider, whether prisoner, slain, or fugitive. “The Picard, having learned who the prisoners were, replied thus: ‘I will tell you the truth; during the fight, the man who mounted this horse came up, uttering terrible cries. He rushed into the mêlée, followed by another cavalier much less than himself, and fell upon us with such courage that, had he been supported by others as brave, he would have beaten us or given us much to do. I showed front to this knight and wounded his charger in the head with a lance-thrust; the horse, feeling itself wounded, threw its rider; then the ribauds despoiled him of his arms and made an end of him. As his scarf was very beautiful, I took it, as well as his horse; and here they both are.’ Such was the noble end of Manfred, or Machtfried, of Stauffen, whom the French were wont to call Mainfroy of Sicily.” With great difficulty, the royal corpse was found, amidst heaps of slain, and the French chevaliers entreated Charles to allow it honourable burial. “Willingly,” replied Charles, “were he not excommunicated.” The new King of Sicily could not reasonably be expected to grant ecclesiastical interment to the man, whom he had fought and supplanted on the sole ground of his being out of the pale of the church. So a trench was dug at the foot of the bridge over the Calora, the body was laid in it, the army filed by, and each soldier, as he passed, threw a stone upon the unconsecrated grave. As great warriors have had worse monuments. But papal hatred followed Mainfroy even beyond the tomb. Under pretence that the remains of the excommunicated hero infected the pontifical soil, Clement IV.’s nuncio had them unearthed and dragged at night, without torches, to the banks of the Garigliano. There they were abandoned to the pelting storm and prowling beast of prey. “Whilst a savage fanaticism thus insulted the ashes of Sicily’s King, poetry prepared him a glorious revenge. Eight months before the battle of Benevento, a child was born at Florence, in May 1265, whose name was Dante Alighieri. Dante protected the memory of Mainfroy.”

For eight days the unfortunate town of Benevento was abandoned to the horrors of the sack. At the end of that time Charles called his greedy soldiers from pillage and excess, rallied them round his standard and marched to Naples. The magnificence of his entrance dazzled and delighted the people, surpassing even the vaunted splendour of the proud Hohenstauffen. In every respect Charles’s victory was complete. The Anjevine banner floated throughout the kingdom of Naples; and after very slight resistance on the part of Gualvano Lancia and of Conrad of Antioch, an illegitimate grandson of the Emperor Frederick, Sicily and Calabria were also reduced and tranquillised. But the triumphant king was still surrounded with difficulties. His pecuniary obligations were numerous and heavy, and his new kingdom offered no resources for their acquittal. The population was greatly reduced, agriculture had disappeared, commerce was at the very lowest ebb, the nobility were ruined, and revenue there was none. On the other hand, Charles’s troops were clamorous for arrears; and the Pope, who had pledged the treasures of the Roman churches to Tuscan bankers for funds to carry on the war, was urgent in his demands of repayment, and went so far as to threaten his debtor with excommunication. Charles the First was in great perplexity. The clergy, who alone had some means, he was forbidden to tax, by the terms of his treaty with the Pope. In this dilemma, the King was compelled to resort to imposts and extortions, which rendered him odious to his subjects. In this respect he was no worse, perhaps, than his immediate predecessors, who seldom scrupled to raise a forced contribution, even by the armed hand; but his manner of procuring his supplies was particularly obnoxious to the Neapolitans. He reduced it to a regular system, based upon the French fiscal forms. The people preferred the occasional swoop of a party of Saracens to the tax-gatherer’s systematic spoliation. The irritation became general. Murmurs and complaints were heard on all sides, mingled with regrets for Mainfroy. The Pope, unwilling to share Charles’s unpopularity, dissatisfied at the nonpayment of his advances, and but slightly appeased by the present of a golden throne and candelabra sent him from the sack of Benevento, wrote harsh letters to his ally, and sent him long lectures and instructions as to how he should govern, bidding him, above all things, to be amiable. This was not much in Charles’s way; neither did his political views at all agree with those of his Holiness Clement IV. He was certainly by no means amiable, and, moreover, he committed a grievous blunder, common enough with his countrymen, and which alienated the affections of his subjects. He tried to Frenchify his new dominions. Obstinately bent on moving the mountain, he would not even meet it half-way. He scorned to take a lesson from the Norman founders of the kingdom, who “governed Sicily not as conquerors but as old hereditary sovereigns,” and were cautious of the too sudden introduction of foreign innovations. His object, according to M. de St Priest’s own showing, was at least as much the increase of the power and importance of France, as the happiness of the people he had come to reign over. His historian admires him for this, and for his wish “to make half Europe, not a vassal, but a dependency of France.” He introduced the forms of French administration, abolished the offices and etiquette that had existed since the days of King Roger, and replaced them by those of the court of Vincennes, changes which excited great hatred and dislike to their author. He abandoned the Castel Capuano, the residence of Frederick II., and built the Castel Nuovo, on the model of the Paris Bastile. The copy has survived the original. But we must pass over, for the present, the merits and errors of Charles, and his ambitious designs upon Italy and the East, to bring upon the scene the last heir of the house of Stauffen.

Conrad, known in history by the diminutive of Conradin,[^[18]] was born at Landshut, in Bavaria, on the 25th of March 1252, and was hailed in his cradle by the high-sounding titles of king of Jerusalem and Sicily, king of the Romans, future emperor, &c. Not one of these imaginary crowns did he ever enjoy; even his paternal heritage was wrested from him whilst yet an infant; the grandson of Frederick II. knew want and poverty, and was more than once indebted to faithful friends and adherents for a roof to cover his head. The events of his life were as remarkable as the years composing it were few. “Born in 1252, he died in 1268. The interval embraces but sixteen years, and yet that short period is animated by all the passions, emotions, and tumult of a virile mind. We find in it, in a high degree, ambition, courage, friendship, and, in a more doubtful perspective—love. In reality, Conradin had no childhood. His life had nothing to do with the laws regulating human growth. From the cradle his existence was one of agitation.”

An anecdote, whose truth modern writers have contested, but to which M. de St Priest gives credit, confirms, in conjunction with many other circumstances, the child’s extraordinary precocity of intelligence and feeling. Considering his mother as widow of an emperor, although his father had never legally borne the imperial title, since he had not been crowned at Rome, Conradin treated her with the utmost ceremony and observance of etiquette. Suddenly, weary of living in dependence at the court of her brother, Louis the Severe, Duke of Bavaria, Queen Elizabeth-Margaret married Meinhard de Gorice, brother of the Count de Tirol, and from queen became a mere countess.[^[19]] This alliance, unequal but not low, greatly shocked Conradin: in the words of a chronicler, he was moved by it beyond power of expression, and from that moment he abstained from paying his mother the usual honours. She asked him the reason. “Mother,” replied Conradin, “I rendered you the homage due to an emperor’s widow; now you are married to one less than him, and I, a king and an emperor’s son, can no longer render you the honours due to an empress.” He who spoke this was but seven years old, and hence many writers have treated the words as fiction. But it must be borne in mind that from his very cradle he had been nourished with the hopes of his party, whose pretensions and dreams of triumph had been unceasingly instilled into him. The talk of all around him had been of sceptres to reconquer, victories to win, rebels to chastise; and the pathetic but deceitful picture of an oppressed people, sighing for his return, had been kept continually before his eyes. Every act of his life was premature. Brought up in a political hot-bed, he showed early symptoms of imperfect mental growth, and was crushed and annihilated by the first storm. Whilst yet a very young child, he was surrounded by the empty forms of sovereignty, and made to think himself both a man and a king. His uncle and stepfather dragged him from town to town, dressed in regal robes, and compelled him to hold provincial diets. Whilst thus parading, they unscrupulously despoiled him. Before he was ten years old, the Duke of Bavaria made him sign a will bequeathing to him the whole of his possessions, in case of his death without heirs. Even this did not satisfy the greedy Bavarian, who soon afterwards extracted from him, by manner of donation, some of his richest domains in Rhineland and the Palatinate. The example found imitators. Princes, bishops, cities, and abbeys fell tooth and nail upon the heritage of the unfortunate child. The bishops of Augsburg and Constance, the counts of Wurtemburg, the burgraves of Nuremberg, the king of Bohemia, and several others, shared the spoils. The houses of Austria and Prussia date their rise from that time—the nucleus of the two monarchies was formed by fragments of Conradin’s dominions; and the whole of Germany as it now appears, in its kingdoms and divisions, may be traced back to the fragments of this total wreck and infamous spoliation. Thus plundered, nothing remained but to start the victim on his travels; a royal Quixote in search of a crown. At first he showed small disposition to such an adventure, and more than one deputation of Ghibellines, and even of Guelfs, departed unsuccessful from before the young king’s footstool; until at last Gualvano Lancia, Mainfroy’s relative and faithful adherent, and Corrado and Marino Capece, presented themselves at the gate of the ancient castle of Hohenschwangau. Lancia had been amnestied after the battle of Benevento, at the request of the Pope, but much against the will of Charles of Anjou. He took the oaths to the new king, but soon afterwards left the kingdom, and now appeared before Conradin as deputy from the whole body of Ghibellines, which had reconstituted itself throughout the entire kingdom of the Sicilies, and sent to the grandson of the Emperor Frederick assurances of its devotion, the promise of an army, and considerable sums of money. Lancia was the bearer of one hundred thousand gold florins. Thus was it, says the chronicler, Saba Malaspina, that the little sleeping dog was roused up: “ad suscitandum catulum dormientem.” In spite of the tears and entreaties of his mother, who had a foreboding of his fate, and urged him to remain with her, Conradin published a lengthy manifesto, asserting his rights to the crown of Sicily, put himself at the head of ten thousand men, hired by Ghibelline gold, and entered Italy, full of confidence, hope, and enthusiasm, accompanied by his bosom friend, Frederick, Duke of Austria, son of the Margrave of Baden, and followed by the Duke of Bavaria, and by other nobles, who promised him support, but shamefully abandoned him at Verona, upon the most absurd and frivolous pretexts. The poor boy was born to be every body’s dupe. He believed implicitly the hypocritical professions of his treacherous kinsman, made over to him one of the last shreds of his German possessions, and parted from him with tears in his eyes, remaining alone at Verona, with Frederick of Austria, who was only three years his senior, for sole ally—his troops reduced by the defection of his uncle and the others to about three thousand men. Instead of marching at once to Pisa, and taking ship for Sicily, whose inhabitants were ripe for insurrection, he sent Corrado Capece thither, and himself lingered two months in total inaction. Pisa was devoted to the house of Swabia; Capece had no difficulty in obtaining a galley (Conradin would have found a fleet as easily), and after calling at Tunis for the Spanish Infante Don Fadrique, with four hundred Spaniards and Saracens, he landed at Sciacca, gained an advantage over the French, and saw the greater part of Sicily declare for Conradin. After a while, Conradin, having raised money from the Ghibelline towns, and recruited his forces, moved forward to Pavia; whilst Charles of Anjou, advancing northward to meet his rival, entered Pisa sword in hand, upset its towers and ruined its port. It would lead us too far, and be of no great interest, to trace the singular complications of Italian affairs at this moment, and the perplexities of the Pope, who was at least as jealous of the abode of Charles in Tuscany, as of the feeble attempt of the old German dynasty to regain its seat upon the Neapolitan throne. We must confine ourselves to the career of Conradin, and follow his fortunes, now drawing to a lamentable close. There was a bright flash, however, before the final setting of his star. He occupied Pisa—still the first port in Italy—in spite of the devastations of Charles of Anjou; on all sides the Ghibelline party raised its head, and his enterprise assumed a serious aspect. Clement IV. became alarmed, and sent, for the third time, an order to Conradin to lay down his arms, and appear in person before the pontifical chair to justify his conduct, under pain of all manner of excommunication. Conradin, who seems to have inherited a wholesome contempt for the Pope, replied by despatching a fleet of four-and-twenty Pisan galleys to Sicily. This was another blunder. He should have gone himself, with all his forces, and certain success awaited him. Charles of Anjou absent, his troops dispersed and surprised, Sicily was lost to the French dynasty. But Conradin, like a child as he was, thought only of a triumphant march on Rome and Naples. For a paltry pageant, he threw away a kingdom. Whilst his adherents gained ground in Sicily, Apulia, Calabria, and other provinces, he nullified their advantages by folly and delay. His only forced marches were upon the road to ruin. A successful but unimportant ambuscade, in which fifty of the enemy were cut off, completely turned his head. The prisoners were conducted in triumph to Sienna; and Conradin and his army, brimful of confidence, scoffing at pontifical anathemas, and followed by a crowd of Ghibellines which every hour augmented, marched upon Rome, taking the longest route by way of Viterbo, in order to show themselves to Clement IV., then resident in that city. They passed under its walls, crowned with verdure and flowers, more like bacchanals and vintagers than men-at-arms. From the window of his palace Clement witnessed the loose array. “Behold!” said he, “the sheep led to the slaughter!” The prelates surrounding him remained silent, in respectful doubt. The pontiff, penetrating their thoughts, persisted in his assertion. “Truly,” he said, “in eight days nothing will remain of that army.” His firm voice, his imposing countenance, his fervent piety, impressed the hearers with a conviction that he spoke prophetically. The event justified the prediction, the result of political clear-sightedness rather than of divine inspiration.

Conradin’s reception at Rome completed his intoxication. He was accompanied into the city by a chorus of young girls, singing and tambourine-playing in the midst of the soldiers. Magnificently dressed ladies showed themselves at the windows of the palaces; the people thronged the streets. Every where he passed under triumphal arches, hastily raised in his honour. They consisted of cords tied across the street, and supporting, instead of the usual garlands of laurels and flowers, the most precious objects the Romans possessed; rich furs and garments, bucklers, rings, bracelets, arms and jewellery of all kinds. Amidst public acclamations in honour of his courage and beauty, Conradin ascended to the Capitol, escorted by the most illustrious Romans of the Imperial party. What head of sixteen would not have been turned by such incense! At last he quitted Rome at the head of five thousand German and Italian men-at-arms, and of nine hundred Spanish cavaliers; surrounded and pressed on all sides by a clamorous and jubilant multitude. He had formed a plan which showed resolution and some military skill. Instead of marching to Ceprano, the usual route of the conquerors of Naples, and in which direction he was persuaded Charles (then besieging Lucera) would advance to meet him, he conceived the bold project of turning his enemy’s flank by penetrating into the Abruzzi, effecting a junction with the Saracens of Lucera, and thence proceeding to Naples. But Charles was too old a soldier to be easily outwitted. Advised from Rome of Conradin’s departure and route, he abruptly raised the siege he was engaged in, and marched day and night to Aquila, the key of the Abruzzi. Thence he pushed on to the heights of Androssano, near the ruins of the old Roman town of Alba, and appeared before the astounded Conradin, who thus suddenly beheld in his immediate front an enemy he deemed far in his rear. A day passed without blows: Charles made a reconnaissance; Conradin, to frighten his opponent, to whom the fidelity of the inhabitants of Aquila was most important, caused false deputies to be introduced into his camp, dressed in municipal robes, and bearing apparently the keys of their town. Informed of this event, Charles felt very uneasy, but concealed his anxiety from all but three knights, with whom he set out at nightfall and galloped to Aquila. He arrived at midnight; the inhabitants were asleep. He struck upon the gates of the citadel, and cried with a loud voice, “For whom do you hold this fort?” “For King Charles,” replied the sentinel. “Then open, for I am the king!” Reassured by the joyful reception he met, Charles returned to his camp, weary with a ride that had lasted all night. But he had little time for repose. Both armies were early afoot: on the one side the flower of French and Provençal chivalry; on the other a medley of Germans, Spaniards, and Italians. The forces were very unequal. Conradin brought 6,000 horsemen into the field; Charles only half the number. On both sides were equal fury, hatred, and eagerness to commence the fray. Charles of Anjou’s audacity and impetuosity might possibly have had disastrous results, but for the opportune arrival of Erard de Valéry, constable of Champagne, his earliest friend and companion in arms. “Erard was then very old, but still full of vigour. His colossal stature, herculean vigour, and white hair gave him resemblance to the centenary giant of an Arabian tale. Formerly he had refused to become a priest, that he might remain in the society of princes and noble ladies. Now, a true Christian soldier, he lived only in God. The old chevalier was on his way from the Holy Land, returning to France with a hundred good knights in his train. Whilst traversing the kingdom of Naples, he heard of the king’s presence, and would not proceed without visiting him.” Charles urged him to take part in the approaching fight. Erard refused, alleging his age, his wish to die in peace far from human turmoil, and, finally, a vow to fight only against infidels. Charles overruled all objections, replying to the last one that his opponents were excommunicated, and consequently worse than infidels. Then the wary old chief arranged an ambush, which would have been utterly unsuccessful with an ordinarily prudent foe, but which answered well enough with the unlucky Conradin, who had not even made the necessary reconnaissances. Charles, who had great deference for the Sire de Valéry, willingly put himself under his orders, leaving him the direction of all things. The army was divided into three bodies, of which the strongest, commanded by Charles himself, was placed in ambush behind a hill in rear of the Neapolitan position. The other two, sent forward against Conradin, were beaten and cut to pieces, after a combat that lasted from sunrise till six in the evening. Henry de Cousance, a French marshal, who resembled Charles in stature and appearance, and who, with a purple mantle over his armour and a crown upon his helm, took post in the centre of the army, to personate the king, was killed early in the action. “Meanwhile Charles of Anjou, in ambuscade with Erard de Valéry and his eight hundred knights, trembled with rage. Burning with eagerness to strike in, he rode up and down in rear of the hill, like a lion in his cage; he was dying with impatience and grief, (moriva di dolore, says Villani, vedendo la sua gente cosi barattare.) With inflamed eyes, he from time to time looked Valéry in the face, thus silently demanding permission to show himself and fight. He might have foreseen the massacre of his two squadrons. The plan of battle adopted was likely to entail this disaster. But what he had not foreseen was that it would be impossible for him to support such a sight.” When the gallant Cousance fell, pierced with a thousand blows, and Conradin’s army made the welkin ring with exulting shouts of “Victory! the tyrant is dead!” Charles wept with rage. But his promise to Valéry chained him to his rock of agony. What follows is highly romantic and chivalrous. The knights who surrounded him said, ‘So noble a fate is it to die for the justice of a royal cause, that we would infinitely rejoice thus to lose our lives. Be well assured, sire, that we will follow you every where, even to death.’ With feverish impatience they waited the signal of Erard de Valéry, who remained imperturbable. Suddenly Guillaume de l’Estendard (one of the commanders of the troops already engaged) crossed the battle-field at speed, feigning to fly, in order to draw the Spaniards on. They followed. Then the old knight raised his enormous head and gigantic person above the brow of the little hill, and said to the King, ‘Marchons!’ Charles was off like a dart, followed by Valéry and the eight hundred chevaliers; they swept across the plain, and found Conradin, Gualvano Lancia, and Frederick of Austria seated unhelmed and unarmed on the bank of the little river Salto, like conquerors reposing; whilst the German mercenaries were dispersed in search of booty, stripping the dead and loading the spoils on carts. Charles and his reserve of fresh and picked men had a cheap bargain of them, as also of the Spaniards, who were taken prisoners, on their return from the pursuit of Estendard, almost to a man. A complete victory, alloyed only by a heavy loss of brave and devoted followers, remained to Charles of Anjou. “Such,” says M. de St Priest, “was the celebrated battle of Alba, improperly named the battle of Tagliacozzo, after a village more than six miles from the scene of action. It is one of those deeds of arms of which history will ever preserve the memory, less on account of the greatness of the result, than for the dramatic interest attaching to the quarrel and the men. On the one hand we see a young prince in the flush of youth and brilliant valour, full of conviction of his good right, the noblest and most unfortunate of pretenders; on the other, a warrior terrible even to ferocity, but not less convinced of the legitimacy of his cause, one of the greatest princes, and, beyond contradiction, the greatest captain of his time.” M. de St Priest proceeds to attribute the chief merit of the victory to his hero. “In this bloody game at bars, full of snares, traps, surprises, where we see these terrible condottieri, covered with blood, running after each other like schoolboys at play, success was due less to the odd stratagem of Valéry than to the rapid march, the four days’ race in the mountains, from Lucera to Aquila. If Charles showed himself a great general, it was less when in ambuscade behind the hill of Capello, than when, like a bird of prey hovering above the wild Abruzzi, he fell with a swoop upon the imprudent band, who deemed him astray in the defiles, lost in the ravines, or fallen amongst precipices.”

Meanwhile Conradin, his army destroyed, his hopes shattered, was a fugitive, with scarcely a follower. One or two days he abode in Rome, protected by the Ghibellines; then, driven forth by the return of the Guelfs, consequent on the ruin of his cause, he fled with Frederick of Austria and a few Italian nobles, to the sea-coast, near the castle of Astura, a fortress of the Frangipani family. Hiring a boat, they set sail for Pisa, but were pursued and overtaken by a fast galley, whose commander summoned them to bring to, and ordered the passengers to repair to his quarter-deck. Conradin asked in astonishment who this man was, and heard in reply that it was Giovanni Frangipani, master of the neighbouring castle. At this name Conradin was overjoyed. “Giovanni is a Roman,” he said; “his family have always been devoted to the house of Swabia; they have been loaded with benefits by the Emperor Frederick; a Frangipani will assuredly defend and befriend me.” Full of confidence, he went on board the galley. “I am King Conrad V.,” was his hasty speech to the lord of Astura, “and I have sought to reconquer the kingdom of my ancestors.” Frangipani made no reply: the prince was astonished at his silence, asked him to assist his flight, descended at last to entreaties, offered, it is said, to marry his daughter; but the stern pirate remained mute, and on reaching land, threw the prince and his companions into a dungeon. Delivered up to Charles, they were led to Rome on foot and in chains. “Oh, my mother!” cried Conradin, with bitter tears, “you foretold this, and I was deaf to your words. Oh, my mother! what grief for your old age!” He did nothing but sob the whole of the road, Saba Malaspina tells us, and seemed half dead, and as if out of his senses. But this weakness, which, in such misfortune and in a mere child, was not unnatural, soon gave way to tranquil fortitude and Christian resignation.

The ashes of the fires lighted in Rome to celebrate Conradin’s triumphant passage had scarcely cooled, when he re-entered the walls of the Eternal City, a fettered captive marching to his doom. Thence he was taken to Naples, where an imposing and numerous tribunal assembled to judge him. Many of its members were for a mild punishment, some for none at all; others remained silent; one only opined for the death of the accused. But Charles had determined on his young rival’s destruction; he threw his word and influence into the scale, and sentence of decapitation was pronounced on Conradin of Swabia, Frederick of Baden, known as Duke of Austria, and the barons taken in their company. The two princes had not expected such severity, and were playing at chess in their prison when it was announced to them. They piously confessed, were absolved by the Pope, who relented at this extreme moment, and were led to the scaffold, which was covered with a red cloth in honour of the victims’ royal blood. The executioner was there, with naked arms and feet, and axe in hand. Conradin embraced him, having previously done the same by his friend Frederick and the other sufferers—then laid his head upon the block. When the axe rose, the French chevaliers who stood around the scaffold fell upon their knees and prayed; and as they did so, the head of Conradin rolled upon the crimson cloth. At this sight the Duke of Austria started up as if crazed with despair; he was seized and executed, uttering horrible cries. This butchery at last roused the indignation of the French knights. Robert de Béthune threw himself upon the prothonotary, who had read Conradin’s sentence, and with a blow of his sword cast him down half dead from his platform. This strange and unreasonable act, proceeding from a generous but savage impulse, was greatly applauded by the spectators. Even Charles himself was compelled to feign approval of his son-in-law’s violence.

No funeral honours were paid to Conradin and his companions. They were buried secretly in the sand, on the shore of the sea, at the mouth of the river Sebeto. Of their captivity, judgment, and death, M. de St Priest declares himself to have given, with the fidelity of a conscientious historian, an exact and truthful account. At the same time, he subjoins various details that have obtained more or less credence, but which he treats as fables. It has been said, that when Conradin embarked at Astura, he gave a ring in payment of his passage; that the boatmen who received the jewel took it to Frangipani, and that the fugitive was recognised and arrested upon this romantic indication. According to traditions, the Duke of Austria was executed the first, and Conradin kissed his head, which, all severed and bleeding as it was, still invoked the Holy Virgin. Robert de Béthune killed, it has been affirmed, the prothonotary Robert de Bari, whose signature is found, however, in many subsequent acts. And to crown all these marvels, it has been confidently asserted that, after the execution of the two princes, a masked stranger stabbed the headsman. Very recent and trustworthy writers have recorded as fact, that Conradin, just before receiving the fatal blow, threw a glove amongst the crowd, to be taken to Peter of Arragon, to whom he bequeathed his vengeance and crown. A German chevalier, Truchsess de Waldburg, (M. de St Priest calls him Waldburg de Truchsess,) gathered up the gage, and with much risk and difficulty bore it to its destination. The present historian discredits the whole of this glove-story—a fiction, he says, of the invention of Sylvius Piccolomini. He is more unwilling to doubt the following touching tradition:—“One day the inhabitants of Naples beheld in their bay a vessel of strange form and colour; hull, sails, and rigging were all black. A woman in deep sables left the ship,—it was Queen Elizabeth-Margaret, Conradin’s mother. At the rumour of her son’s captivity she embarked all her treasures, and, gaining intrepidity from her maternal love, this Elizabeth, previously so feeble and fearful that she dared not leave her castles in Swabia and the Tyrol, exposed herself to the perils of the sea, as bearer of her child’s ransom. But it was too late. When she reached Naples, Conradin was dead. Then the unhappy mother implored a single favour: she desired to erect a monument to him she wept, on the spot where he had perished. Charles would not consent, although he authorised the erection of a church upon the place of execution, and contributed a considerable sum towards the work,—an expiatory offering which, in conjunction with the useless ransom, attested at once the grief of an inconsolable mother, and the tardy remorse of a pitiless victor.” The church is to be seen at Naples, upon the square of Santa Maria del Carmine; beneath its altar is the tomb, with its inscription; the statue of Elizabeth stands there with a purse in its hand. Surely this is confirmation strong of the truth of the tradition! Unfortunately, church, inscription, and statue are all of a recent date.

The events just detailed left Charles of Anjou at the pinnacle of power and greatness. The magnitude of the danger he had run added to the lustre of his triumph. Nothing now resisted him; he might almost be styled the master of Italy. Every where the Guelfs drove the Ghibellines before them; every where the Swabian eagle fled before the red and silver lilies. The cause of the Ghibellines was lost. The fortunate conqueror was on every point successful. His domestic prosperity kept pace with his political and military success. Charles, then forty-two years old, beheld himself surrounded by a numerous posterity. He had two sons and three daughters. His queen, Beatrix of Provence, was dead; but soon he contracted a second marriage with the young and beautiful Margaret of Burgundy. Nature herself seemed to favour him; for in the short space of three years, all his enemies, in any way formidable, disappeared from the scene. Amongst others, the valiant and adventurous Corrado Capece, taken prisoner by the implacable Guillaume de l’Estendard, had his eyes put out, and was hung upon a gibbet of extraordinary altitude, erected for the purpose upon the coast of Catania. The Saracens of Lucera still held out. Besieged by a powerful army, with Charles at its head, they resisted for six months, till reduced to eat hay and roots. The bodies of stragglers from the town being opened by the besiegers, only grass was found in their bellies. At last they gave in. Charles, with a wise policy, showed them mercy, contenting himself with banishing them from Lucera, and distributing them amongst the towns of the interior. Although the piety of the first French king of Sicily was carried almost to an exaggerated extent, it did not degenerate into fanaticism; at least not into that fanaticism which engenders persecution. He never adopted the prejudices of the time against the Jews; on the contrary, he delivered them from the hands of state inquisitors, and suppressed the distinctive mark they were compelled to wear upon their garments. Financial considerations may not improbably have stimulated, at least as much as the dictates of reason and humanity, this enlightened spirit of tolerance; but still it is to the credit of Charles that he did not, like many very Christian kings and nobles of his and subsequent centuries, smite the Israelite with one hand whilst stripping him with the other. The King of Jerusalem was merciful to his subjects. Charles it was who first added this title to that of King of Sicily, by purchase from the old Princess Mary of Antioch, who called herself Mademoiselle de Jerusalem, and claimed that crown, then little more than a name. When Charles, for a pension of four thousand livres tournois, acquired her rights, he hastened to vindicate them. They were disputed by Henry, King of Cyprus, who had the advantage of possession; for he held Ptolemais, the last fragment of the christian kingdom of Palestine. The Knights of St John supported him; Venice and the Templars backed King Charles. The latter carried the day.

Master of southern Italy, armed protector of the north, Charles I. had no longer aught to check him; the East was open before him. Already he occupied a part of Greece. All that mountainous coast of Albania, celebrated in our days for the devotedness of the Suliots, belonged to him by the death of Helena Comnenus, Mainfroy’s widow, daughter of the despot of Thessaly and Epirus. He also held the island of Corfu, that natural bridge thrown between Italy and the East. The town of Durazzo revolted in his favour, and called him within its walls. He swayed Achaia and the Morea, and had constituted himself candidate for the throne of Constantinople by marrying his daughter to Philip de Courtenay, nominal heir to the Latin Empire, but living in reality on the alms of his father-in-law. It seemed, then, that he had nothing to do but to bid his fleet sail for Byzantium. But in the midst of his ambitious projects he was interrupted by the new crusade, the last undertaken, got up by Saint Louis, and in which Charles could not refuse to join. The death of St Louis terminated the expedition; and after dictating terms of peace to the sultan of Tunis, in whose dominions the adventurers had landed, their return to Europe, by way of Sicily, was decided upon. It was not consistent with Charles’s character to forget or abandon an enterprise he had once decided upon; and on landing at Trapani, he assembled the council of crusading kings and princes, and proposed to them to re-embark for Constantinople. It was a bold and sagacious idea to take advantage of this unusual assemblage of naval forces to establish French power in the East; but Charles, indefatigable himself, spoke to disheartened and disgusted men. All refused, and Edward Plantagenet (afterwards Edward I. of England) rejected with insulting energy his uncle’s proposition, declaring that he would winter in Sicily, and afterwards return to Syria, which he did, without other result than the wound cured by the well-known trait of conjugal affection and courage of the virtuous and intrepid Eleanor of Castile. Subsequently, the realisation of Charles’s ambitious designs upon the East, long entertained, was continually prevented by one circumstance or another, until at last the affairs of Sicily gave him occupation at home, effectually precluding aggrandisement abroad. Essentially a man of war, he nevertheless, in time of peace, showed skill, intelligence, and activity in the administration of the kingdom of Naples. Had the distant provinces of his dominions been as well governed, M. de St Priest affirms that the Two Sicilies would not, during more than two centuries, have been sundered and at enmity. But Charles abandoned the island Sicily to his lieutenants. He positively disliked and ill-treated it, and determined to dispossess Palermo of its title of capital, in favour of the city of Naples, of which he was enthusiastically fond. Palermo was too devoted to the house of Swabia; and, moreover, to maintain correspondence with the north of Italy, with Rome, and especially with France, it suited Charles far better to fix his headquarters and seat of government at Naples. From the very first moment, he had been greatly struck by the aspect of the latter city. The bright sky and sunny sea and mountain amphitheatre that still charm and fascinate the tourist, had a far stronger effect upon the prince whom conquest rendered their master. He at once mentally fixed upon Naples as his capital, and gradually accomplished his project—without, however, announcing it by public declaration, and even continuing to give to Palermo the titles establishing its supremacy. But, whilst retaining the empty name of superiority, the Sicilian city felt itself substantially fallen; and this may have been a cause, and no slight one, that its inhabitants were the first to rise in arms against the galling yoke and insolent neglect of their French rulers.