BLACKWOOD'S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCXLIII. MAY, 1844. VOL. LV.

Transcriber's notes: Minor typos have been corrected. Table of contents has been generated for HTML version. Footnotes have been moved to the end of the articles.

Contents

IMPRISONMENT AND TRANSPORTATION.

NO. 1.

THE INCREASE OF CRIME.

Among the many causes of anxiety which the present state of society in the British empire must occasion to every thoughtful or reflecting mind—one of the most extraordinary and alarming is, the constant and uninterrupted increase of crime. The Liberals shut their eyes to this, because it affords a sad illustration of the effect of their favourite theories, which for a quarter of a century have been, under the direction of his Majesty's Ministry or his Majesty's Opposition, in almost ceaseless operation. The selfish and inconsiderate (and they form the vast majority of men) give themselves no sort of trouble about the matter: they care not though their neighbours are murdered or robbed, plundered or swindled, so as they escape unscathed themselves; and without either thinking on the subject, or suggesting one remedy for its evils, interfere only, with stentorian lungs, to resist any project to arrest them having the remotest tendency to terminate in an assessment. Their principle is to take of civilisation only its fruits, and steadily to withstand the concomitant evils; and the simple way by which they think this is to be effected—is quietly, and without saying a word, to reap the benefit of manufacturing industry in the doubling or tripling of their incomes; but to roar out like madmen if the smallest per centage is proposed to be laid on them, to arrest or mitigate the evils which that industry brings in its train. Government meanwhile, albeit fully aware of the danger, is not sufficiently strong to do any thing to avert it; its own majority is paralysed by the inherent selfishness of mankind; and nothing but some great and stunning public calamity can, it is universally felt, awaken the country to a sense of the evils growing out of its greatness, but threatening in the end to endanger its existence. Thus nothing is done, or at least nothing effectual is done, to avert the dangers: every one shuts his eyes to them, or opens them only to take measures to avert an assessment; and meanwhile crime advances with the steps of a giant, sweeping whole classes of society into its vortex, and threatening to spread corruption and vice, in an incredible manner, through the densest and most dangerous classes of the community.

Authentic and irrefragable evidence of the magnitude of this danger exists in the statistical tables of committals which have now, for a very considerable time, been prepared in all parts of the British empire. Since the year 1805, when regular tables of commitments first began to be kept in England, commitments have increased sixfold: they have swelled from five to thirty-one thousand. During the same period population has advanced about sixty per cent: in other words, detected crime has advanced FOUR TIMES AS FAST AS THE NUMBERS OF THE PEOPLE. Unwilling as we are to load our pages with statistical tables—which, attractive to the thinking few, are repulsive to the unthinking many—we must yet request our readers to cast their eyes to the bottom of the pages, where these appalling truths are demonstrated by the parliamentary returns. In Scotland and Ireland the returns of commitments have not been kept, until within the last twenty years, with such accuracy as can be relied on; but they exhibit an increase still more alarming. Ireland, as might be expected, exhibits a growth of crime which has fully kept pace with that of England during the same period: but Scotland exhibits a change which fairly outstrips all the others in the race of iniquity. In 1803, Lord Advocate Hope said in Parliament, that more crime was tried at one Quarter Sessions at Manchester than over all Scotland in a whole year; and the proceedings of the criminal courts to the north of the Tweed, at that period, amply demonstrated the truth of his assertion. In the year 1805, eighty-nine criminals were brought before the whole tribunals, supreme and inferior, in Scotland; but in the year 1842, the committals for serious offences were nearly four thousand—in other words, serious crime, in less than forty years, had augmented in Scotland above THIRTY-SIX FOLD. During the same period population has advanced about fifty per cent, viz. from 1,800,000 to 2,660,000; so that in moral, staid, and religious Scotland, serious crime, during the last forty years, has risen TWENTY-FIVE TIMES as fast as the number of the people.[1]

Overlooked as this prodigious change has been, as all things are which arise gradually in this country, it has yet attracted, as well it might, the astonishment of writers on the Continent. Nine yeas ago, M. Moreau observed, speaking of the increase of crime in Scotland—"In the year 1805, the criminal commitments in Scotland were eighty-nine: they are now 2864—that is, they have increased in thirty years thirty-fold. It would appear that Scotland, in becoming a manufacturing state, has in a great degree lost the virtue and simplicity of character by which she was formerly distinguished."[2]

What renders this prodigious increase of crime in so short a period, in all parts of the British Empire, in a peculiar manner extraordinary and alarming, is, that it has taken place at the very time when unheard-of efforts were made, in every part of the country, for the moral and religious instruction of the people. We are very far indeed from saying that enough has been done in this way: no one is better aware that the vast debt, which the prosperous wealth of Britain owes in this respect to its suffering indigence, is still in great part undischarged, and that till it is taken up and put on a proper footing by the state, it never can be completely liquidated;—still, more has been done to discharge it during the last thirty years, than in the whole previous centuries which have elapsed since the Reformation. The churches of England and Scotland, during that period, have improved to an astonishing degree in vigour and efficiency: new life, a warmer spirit, a holier ambition, has been breathed into the Establishment; the dissenters of all denominations have vied with them in zeal and effort; churches and chapels have been built and opened in every direction; and though they have by no means, in the manufacturing districts, kept pace with the increase of population, yet they have advanced with a rapidity hitherto unheard of in British history. The laity of all denominations have made extraordinary efforts to promote the cause of education. In this great and good work, persons of all descriptions have, though from very different motives, laboured together; but much remains to be done. We well know how many tens and hundreds of thousands, in the manufacturing districts, are now wandering in worse than heathen darkness in the midst of a Christian land;—we well know what insurmountable obstacles mere voluntary zeal and exertion meet with in the most praiseworthy efforts, from the selfish resistance of property and the reckless dissipation of indigence. But still, no one acquainted with the subject can deny, that during the last thirty years, incomparably more has been done to promote education among the poor than in the preceding three centuries. Yet this period of anxious solicitude, awakened fear, and general effort to stem, by all the known methods, the deluge of profligacy and depravity with which the country has been flooded, has been characterized by an increase of crime, and a general loosening of morals among the labouring classes, hitherto unprecedented in the country—certainly not equaled during the same period in any other European state, and, so far as we know, without an example in the previous history of mankind.

Struck with astonishment at this extraordinary and painful phenomenon, and wholly at a loss to explain it on any of the principles to which they have been accustomed to give credit, the Liberals have generally endeavoured to deny its existence. They say that the returns of commitments do not afford a correct measure of the crime that really exists in the country; that a police force is now more generally established, and is incomparably more vigilant than heretofore; that crimes are classified in a different way from what they formerly were; and that though the figures do not err, yet the results to which they point are not the real ones. There is some truth in these observations. It is true that a police force is more extensively established, and is more efficient than it formerly was;—it is true that crimes are now differently classified, and enter different columns, and appear in different returns from what they formerly did;—it is true that there are specialties in the case;—but it is not true that those specialties tend to make the returns of crime appear greater than the reality; on the contrary, they all tend the other way. They show that the returns as now constructed, and the police force as it at present exists, do not by any means exhibit the growth of crime in its true colours; that it is in reality incomparably greater than these returns or this agency has brought to light; and that, great as the evil appears from an examination of the Parliamentary returns, it is in truth far more colossal and alarming.

How is a police force established in any part of Great Britain? If we except the metropolis, where the vast concourse from all parts of the empire unavoidably forced upon government, fourteen years ago, the establishment of a central police, since found to be attended with such admirable effects, it is every where set on foot by the voluntary act of the inhabitants, or a certain portion of them, in a peculiar manner cognizant of the necessity which exists for such an addition to the means of public defence. In boroughs, it is generally the magistrates, elected by a suffrage little superior to household suffrage, who introduce such a measure. In counties, it can only be proposed by the justices of peace in England, or commissioners of supply in Scotland—both of which bodies are thoroughly imbued with, and fairly represent, the general voice of the community. In all cases, whether in the metropolis or in the provinces, a police imposes an immediate and heavy burden on all householders. In London £40,000 a-year is given by government to aid in the support of the police; but the whole remainder of the cost, amounting to four times as much, falls on the ratepayers. In the provinces the whole cost of every police force falls on the householders; and our readers need not be told how heavy it sometimes is, and how universally it is every where complained of.

Now, if there is any one peculiarity more than another by which this generation is distinguished, it is aversion to assessment. People may differ in other respects as to the designation by which the age should be characterized; but we believe all will agree that it is a tax-hating age. What did this nation first do on being liberated from danger by the battle of Waterloo? Throw off the income-tax. What alone induced them to submit to it again on the modified scale of three per cent? The disasters in Affghanistan; the perils of our Indian empire; the rocking of Britain to its foundation. When therefore, in such a country and in such an age, we see numerous bodies of men—popularly elected in some cases, in all swayed by the popular voice—concurring, in a great many places, in the taxation of themselves for the establishment of a police, we may rely upon it that some very general and grinding sense of necessity has been at work to produce the effect. Nothing but this could overcome, in men really and practically invested in this particular with the power of self-government, the universal and almost invincible repugnance to assessments. Rely upon it, for every crime which is brought to light, and made the subject of commitment and trial by the institution of a police force, ten previously existed, undetected and unpunished, before men were driven to the flebile remedium, the ultimum malum, of taxing themselves for the establishment of a force to repress them.

To illustrate the strength of this resistance, and the important bearing it has upon the present question, we shall refer only to two instances—one in England, and one in Scotland. It is well known what a scene of confusion and disorder South Wales has for years past been. The bloodshed at Merthyr-Tydvil, the strikes in Glamorganshire, the attack on Newport, and the Rebecca riots, had for a series of years fixed the attention of all parts of the empire upon this, as one of the most inflammable and dangerous portions of the community. Nor did these disorders appear surprising to those who were practically acquainted with the state of the country, overrun as it is in many places by vast iron-works, which have brought together a great and reckless population, and inhabited in all by a discontented and ill-instructed peasantry. Population had advanced with unexampled rapidity—having increased, from 1831 to 1841, thirty-six and a tenth per cent in Monmouthshire; the greatest increase during the same period of any county in the British empire.[3] Here then, if anywhere, it might have been expected that a general feeling of insecurity, the sense of an overbearing necessity, would have overcome the general repugnance of men towards local assessment, and led to the establishment of a police force in all the counties of South Wales, on a scale adequate to the magnitude of the danger with which they were threatened. Was it so? Had the counties taken the requisite steps to avoid the calamity? Quite the reverse; the aversion to a police assessment was so strong, that nothing whatever had been done. Glamorganshire had only established one on a small scale, after repeated and earnest efforts on the part of its able and public-spirited lord-lieutenant, the Marquis of Bute; and the Rebecca riots surprised the adjoining counties without any preparation whatever. And even after those disgraceful disorders had continued several weeks, and rendered South Wales the scandal of the empire, and the astonishment of Europe; still the repugnance to assessment was such, that it was only after a severe struggle, and by no small exertions, that it was at length carried; and the public-spirited member for the county, who to his infinite credit brought forward the measure, stated at the county meeting on the subject, that he was aware he endangered his seat by so doing!

The Scotch have shown themselves not a whit behind their southern compatriots in repugnance to a police assessment. In Lanarkshire, as it is well known, the iron and coal trades have made unexampled progress during the last ten years. Its population, in consequence, has enormously increased; having risen from 316,000 to 434,000 in ten years, from 1831 to 1841—an increase of thirty-six per cent in that short time—the next to Monmouthshire of the whole empire. Crime had, of course, enormously increased. In 1835, the committals for serious offences were 401: in 1842, they had risen to 696—being an increase of seventy-five per cent in seven years.[4] Serious crime, therefore, so far as detected, was doubling in ten years, while population was doubling in thirty—in other words, detected crime was increasing three times as fast as the numbers of the people. Disturbances, as a matter of course, of a very serious nature had arisen. In 1837, the great cotton-spinners' conspiracy, which led to the memorable trial, had kept above twenty thousand persons in Lanarkshire, for four months, in a state of compulsory destitution. In 1842, the colliers' strike threw a still greater number into a state of idleness for five months, which led to a general system of plunder, and forcible seizure of the farmers' produce in the fields; only repressed, with infinite difficulty, by the introduction of a large military force, aided by the yeomanry of the county, who were on permanent duty for six weeks, and the establishment for a few months, by subscription, of a powerful police. In October 1842, twenty policemen, who had some prisoners in charge for combination offences, were assaulted by a furious mob of two thousand persons on the streets of Airdrie, in the centre of the mining district of the county, the house in which they had taken refuge set on fire, and the prisoners by main force rescued from the hands of the law.[5] These facts were known to the whole county, and the terror which, in consequence, pervaded the agricultural inhabitants of the mining districts was so great, that in a petition to government praying for protection, they stated—that they would be better if law were altogether abolished, and every man were allowed to defend himself by fire-arms, than they were now; for that, if they used lethal weapons in defence of their property, they ran the risk of being transported for culpable homicide—if they did not, they were certain of being plundered by the combined workmen. And what did the county do to arrest this disgraceful and perilous system of outrage and plunder? Why, in the full knowledge of all these facts, they passed a solemn resolution at Lanark, on 30th April 1843, that they never would again, on any occasion, or under any circumstances of necessity whatever, sanction the employment of any police or defensive force raised at their expense.

We do not suppose that the inhabitants of South Wales or the banks of the Clyde are particularly short-sighted or selfish, or more inclined to resist assessment for objects of public utility or necessity than those of other parts of the empire. On the contrary, we know that they are in a remarkable degree the reverse; and that in no part of the world are undertakings in public improvement or charity entered into with more alacrity, and supported with more liberality. We suppose the Scotch and Welsh are what other men are—neither better nor worse. We adduce these facts, not as tending to fasten any peculiar charge on them, but as indicating the general character of human nature, and the universal repugnance to taxation, which, when men are really and practically, and not in form only, invested with the power of self-government, appears the moment that any proposition of subjecting them to assessment for the purpose of local defence and protection, even under the most aggravating circumstances, is brought forward. How great, then, must have been the mass of experienced, but undetected and unpunished, crime which pervades the state, when this all but invincible repugnance has been generally overcome, and men in so many cities and counties have been induced to submit to the certainty of the visit of the tax-gatherer, rather than the chance of a visit from the thief or the burglar!

And for decisive evidence that the new establishment of a police force is not, by the crimes which it is the means of binging to light, the cause of the prodigious increase of crime of late years in the British empire, we refer to the contemporary examples of two other countries, in which a police force on a far more extensive scale has been established, and has been found the means of effecting a signal diminution of crime and commitment. In Hindostan, as is well known, a most extensive and admirably organized system of police has been found absolutely indispensable to repress the endless robberies of which its fertile plains had long been the theatre; and the force employed, permanently or occasionally, in this way amounts to a hundred and sixty thousand! The consequence has been a diminution of crime and commitments, during the last forty years, fully as remarkable as this simultaneous increase in the British islands. The official reports which have been compiled in India by the British authorities, exhibit of late years the pleasing prospect of a decrease of serious crime to a third or fourth part of its former amount.[6]

Look at France during the same period. That there is in that great country a numerous and well-organized police force, will not probably be denied by those who know any thing, either of its present circumstances by observation, or its past from history. Unlike Great Britain, it is universally established and raised, not by separate acts of Parliament, local effort, and contribution, but by a general assessment, under the name of "Centimes Additionels," yet varying in particular districts, according to the necessity and amount of the defensive force, but, in all, imposed by the authority and levied by the officers of government. And what has been the result? Is it that crime, from being generally brought to light, evinces the same steady and alarming increase which is conspicuous in all parts of the British islands? Quite the reverse: criminal law and a powerful system of police appear there in their true light, as checking and deterring from crime. Population is advancing steadily though slowly in that country, crime is stationary or declining;[7] and while the most powerful and efficient police in Europe only bring to light about 7000 serious criminals annually out of 34,000,000 souls—that is, 1 in 6700—in Great Britain, out of a population, including England and Scotland, of 18,000,000 in round numbers, there were in 1842 no less than 34,800 persons charged with serious crimes before the criminal tribunals, or 1 in 514—in other words, serious crime is fourteen times as prevalent in Great Britain as it is in France. Nothing can more clearly demonstrate the deplorable fallacy of those who ascribe the present extraordinary frequency and uninterrupted growth of crime in this country, as attested by the criminal returns, to the vigilance of the police in bringing it to light.

In truth, so far from its being the case that crime is now better looked after, and therefore more frequently brought to light than formerly, and that it is that which swells our criminal returns, the fact is directly the reverse. So weak, feeble, and disjointed, are the efforts of our various multiform and unconnected police establishments over the country generally,[8] that we assert, without the fear of contradiction by any person practically acquainted with the subject, that the amount of undetected and unpunished crime is rapidly on the increase, and is now greater than it was in any former period. We would recommend any person who doubts this statement, to go to any of the criminal establishments in the country, and compare the list of informations of serious crimes lodged with those of offenders committed; he will find the latter are scarcely ever so much as a third of the former. These facts do not appear in the criminal returns, because they are not called for; and the police-officers are in no hurry to publish facts which proclaim the insufficiency of the means of repressing crime at their disposal. But occasionally, and under the pressure of immediate danger, or a strong sense of duty on the part of the public functionaries, they do come out. For example, it was stated by Mr Millar, the head of the Glasgow police, (a most able and active officer,) in a letter read at the county meeting of Lanarkshire on 21st January 1843, on the subject of a police for the rural district of that and the adjoining counties, that in the three months immediately preceding that date, ninety-one cases of theft, chiefly by housebreaking, had been reported at the Glasgow police-office, committed in the neighbourhood of Glasgow, but beyond the police bounds; and that from his own information, and that of the other officers of his establishment, this number, great as it was, was not a third of the crimes of that description which had actually been committed during that period. On the other hand, it was stated by the sheriff of the county at the same meeting, that in only fourteen of these ninety-one cases had any trace whatever been got of the delinquents. In other words, the number of instances in which any clue was obtained to the criminals was only fourteen out of 273, or one in twenty nearly. And yet this miserable driblet of one in twenty, exhibits in the criminal returns for Lanarkshire an increase of 75 per cent in seven years, or a duplication in ten. This instance, to which hundreds of others might be added from all parts of the country, shows how extreme is the illusion of those who lay the flattering unction to their souls, that serious crime is not now more prevalent than it was formerly, but only better brought to light.

In truth, it has long been known, that in consequence of the relaxation of the severity of our criminal code, and the astonishing increase of serious crimes which cannot be passed over, a vast number of criminals are now disposed of in the police courts, and never appear in the criminal returns at all, who, twenty years ago, were deemed felons of the very highest class, and visited often with death, always with transportation. It was stated in parliament as a subject of complaint against the Lancashire magistrates, that during the insurrection of 1842 in that county, nearly ten thousand persons were imprisoned, and let go after a short confinement, without ever being brought to trial. During the disturbances in the same year, in Lanarkshire and many other counties of Scotland, (especially Ayrshire, Fife, and Mid-Lothian,) the accumulation of prisoners was so great, that not only were none detained for trial but those against whom the evidence was altogether conclusive; but that great numbers were remitted for trial before the summary tribunals, and escaped with a month or two of imprisonment, who had committed capital crimes, and a few years before would infallibly have been transported for fourteen years. We are getting on so fast, that nothing is more common now than to see hardened criminals, both in England and Scotland, disposed of by the police magistrates, and for capital crimes receive a few months imprisonment. Their names and crimes never appear in the returns at all. There is no fault attached to any one for this seeming laxity. The thing is unavoidable. If the class of cases were all sent to the higher tribunals which formerly were considered privative to them, the judges, were they twice as numerous as they are, would sit in the criminal courts from one year's end to another, and the jails would still be choked up with untried criminals, numbers of whom would linger for years in confinement.

The Liberal party, in the beginning of the present century, were unanimous in imputing the vast increase of crime to the defects of our criminal law. The nominal severity of that system, it was said, and said justly, with its uncertain punishments and frequent opportunities of escape, afforded in fact a bounty on the commission of crime. Injured parties declined to give information for fear of being bound over to prosecute; witnesses were reluctant to give evidence, judges caught at legal quibbles, juries violated their oaths, in order to save the accused from a punishment which all felt was disproportioned to the offence; and thus the great object of criminal jurisprudence, certainty of punishment, was entirely defeated. There was much truth in these observations, but much fallacy in the hope that their removal would effect any reduction in the number of offences. The object sought for was carried. Humane principles were triumphant. The labours of Sir Samuel Romilly and Sir James Mackintosh, aided by the cautious wisdom and experienced ability of Sir R. Peel, produced a total revolution in our criminal jurisprudence. The old stain has been removed: we need no longer fear a comparison With the laws of Draco. For the last fifteen years so many offences, formerly capital, have had that dreadful penalty removed, that the law in Great Britain, as now practically administered, is probably the mildest in Europe. Death is scarce ever inflicted except for murder; in cases of housebreaking, even when attended with personal violence, it is never thought of. The executions in Great Britain now range from twenty-five to thirty-five only a-year, instead of a hundred and fifty or two hundred, which they formerly were. And what has been the result? Has the promised and expected diminution of crime taken place, in consequence of the increased certainty of punishment, and the almost total removal of all reasonable or conscientious scruples at being concerned in a prosecution? Quite the reverse. The whole prophecies and anticipations of the Liberal school have been falsified by the result. Crime, so far from declining, has signally increased; and its progress has never been so rapid as during the last fifteen years, when the lenity of its administration has been at its maximum. An inspection of the returns of serious crimes already given, will completely demonstrate this.

Next, it was said, that education would lay the axe to the root of crime; that ignorance was the parent of vice; and, by diffusing the school-master, you would extinguish the greater part of the wickedness which afflicted society; that the providing of cheap, innocent, and elevating amusements for the leisure hours of the working-classes, would prove the best antidote to their degrading propensities; and that then, and then only, would crime really be arrested, when the lamp of knowledge burned in every mechanic's workshop, in every peasant's cottage. The idea was plausible, it was seducing, it was amiable; and held forth the prospect of general improvement of morals from the enlarged culture of mind. The present generation is generally, it may almost be said universally, imbued with these opinions; and the efforts accordingly made for the instruction of the working-classes during the last twenty-five years, have been unprecedented in any former period of our history. What have been the results? Has crime declined in proportion to the spread of education? Are the best instructed classes the least vicious? Has eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge diminished the power of the Tempter? So far from it, the consequences, hitherto at least, have been melancholy and foreboding in the extreme.

The criminal returns of Great Britain and Ireland for the last twenty years, demonstrate that the uneducated criminals are about a third of the whole: in other words, the educated criminals are to the uneducated as two to one.[9] In Scotland, the educated criminals, are about four times the uneducated; in England, just double; in Ireland, they are nearly equal. Nay, what is still more remarkable, while the number of uneducated criminals, especially in Scotland, is yearly diminishing, that of educated ones is yearly increasing.[10] In France, the criminal returns have for long demonstrated that the amount of crime, in all the eighty-four departments of the monarchy, is just in proportion to the number of educated persons which each contains; a fact the more remarkable, as three-fifths of the whole inhabitants of the country have received no education whatever.[11] Of the criminals actually brought before the Courts of Assize, which correspond to our Old Bailey and Circuit Courts, it appears that about four-sevenths are educated, and three-sevenths destitute of any instruction; which gives a greater proportion of criminals to the educated than the uneducated class, as three-fifths of the people are wholly uninstructed.[12] But what is most marvellous of all, the criminal returns of Prussia, the most universally educated country in Europe, where the duty of teaching the young is enforced by law upon parents of every description, and entire ignorance is wholly unknown, the proportion of criminals to the entire population is TWELVE TIMES greater than in France, where education of any sort has only been imparted to two-fifths of the community.[13] These facts are startling—they run adverse to many preconceived ideas—they overturn many favourite theories; but they are not the less facts, and it is by facts alone that correct conclusions are to be drawn in regard to human affairs. In America too, it appears from the criminal returns, many of which, in particular towns and states, are quoted in Buckingham's Travels, that the educated criminals are to the uneducated often as three, generally as two, to one. These facts completely settle the question; although, probably, the whole present generation must descend to their graves before the truth on the subject is generally acknowledged.

But to any one who reflects on the principles of human nature, and the moving powers by which it is impelled, whether towards virtue or vice, such a result must appear not only intelligible but unavoidable. It is our desires which are our tempters. All the statistical returns prove that the great majority of educated persons, generally at least three-fourths of the whole, have received an imperfect education. They have just got knowledge enough to incur its dangers; they have not got enough either to experience its utility or share in its elevation. Their desires are inflamed, their imaginations excited, their cravings multiplied by what they read; but neither their understandings strengthened, their habits improved, nor their hearts purified. The great bulk of mankind at all times, and especially in all manufacturing communities, can only receive an imperfect education. It is not in the age of twelve hours' labour at factories, and of the employment of children without restraint in coal and iron mines, that any thing approaching to a thorough education can be imparted to the working classes, at least in the manufacturing districts. The conclusion to be drawn from this is, not that education is hopeless and should be abandoned, in relation to the great bulk of men—for we every day, in detached instances, have proof of its immense and blessed influence; the conclusion is, that it is by the active, not the intellectual powers, the desires, not the understanding, that the great majority of men are governed; that it is the vast addition civilisation and commerce make to the wants and passions of men, which constitutes the real cause of its demoralizing influence; and that these dangers never will be obviated till means are discovered of combating sin with its own weapons, and by desires as extensively felt as its passions. We must fight it, not only with the armour of reason, but the fire of imagination. It is by enlisting the desires on the side of virtue and order, that we can alone generally influence mankind.

It is astonishing how many ways men will turn before they can be brought to admit the simple truth unfolded in the book of Jeremiah and enforced in every page of the gospel, that the heart is "deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." Driven from the chimeras of mild punishment and general education as antidotes against the antagonist power of sin, philanthropists have at last taken refuge in the infallible effects of solitary confinement. Punishment, it was said, is the real demoralizer of society; it is our jails which are the hotbeds and nurseries of crime. Reform them—separate the hardened criminal from the apprentice to crime—let solitary confinement teach its impressive lessons, and confer its regular habits; and vice, with all its concomitant evils, will disappear from the land. At the same time a great impression was made on the legislature by a graphic, and, in some respects, just description of the suffering in the penal colonies of New South Wales; and the result has been a general adoption, over the whole empire, of the system of long imprisonment instead of transportation, to an extent previously unknown since the system of forced convict-labour in the colonies was introduced. All persons practically acquainted with the subject were aware of the result in which their experiment would terminate, and the fearful multiplication of irreclaimable criminals to which it would lead in the heart of the empire. But unfortunately the persons practically acquainted with the subject had scarcely a voice in the legislature—the current ran strong in favour of lengthened imprisonment, and the abolition, except in very bad cases, of transportation. The judges gave ample scope to the new system, and it received in every point of view a fair experiment. Highway robbers, housebreakers, and habitual thieves, received, in great numbers of cases, sentences of imprisonment, instead of transportation for life or fourteen years. The jails at the same time were every where improved; a general system of prison discipline was adopted and enforced; and solitary confinement, with hard labour, became almost universal. And what has been the result? Why, that it has been now demonstrated by experience, that even the longest imprisonments, and the best system of prison discipline, have no effect, or scarce any, in reclaiming offenders; and that the only effect of the new system has been, to crowd the jails with convicts and the streets with thieves; to load the counties with assessments and the calendars with prisoners; to starve New South Wales for want of compulsory labour, and oppress Great Britain by the redundance of hardened idleness. We speak of a matter the subject of universal notoriety: ample proof of it will be furnished in a future Number.

But, what is most alarming of all, it has now been completely demonstrated, that we are not to look even to the general spread of religious instruction for any immediate or even rapid diminution of crime, or amelioration of the habits of the labouring classes. We say immediate or rapid, because none can be more sensible than we are, that it is thus alone that crime in the end is to be arrested, and that the efforts now making in this respect in all parts of the British empire, are laying the only foundation whereon in future times the superstructure of a moral and orderly society are to be laid. But, as every system must be tested by its fruits, and these fruits in the present forced and artificial state of society are so rapidly brought forth—it is worse than useless to go on encouraging expectations of an early reformation of society from the extension of church establishments, the zeal of dissenters, or the efforts of clerical instructors. Depend upon it, half a century must elapse before these praiseworthy and philanthropic efforts produce any general effect on the frame of society. We shall be fortunate indeed, if in a whole century the existing evils are in any material degree lessened, and society has gone on so long without one of those terrible convulsions, like the French Revolution, which at once destroy the prospects of the present generation and the hopes of the next.

The reason is, that degraded and sensual men have an instinctive aversion to religious truth, and a still greater distaste for religious restraint. The carnal man is at war with God. When will this great truth, so loudly proclaimed in every page of the gospel, be practically acknowledged and acted upon? To those who are acquainted with the anatomy of crime, and who see exemplified in real life the courses of the wicked, its truth becomes not only evident, but of overwhelming importance. The strength of the world consists in its pleasures and enjoyments. It is the vehemence of the desire for these pleasures and enjoyments, which constitutes the fearful force of its temptations. The whole progress of society, the whole efforts of man, the whole accumulations of wealth are directed, in its later stages, to augment these desires. Necessities in a large portion of society being provided for, pleasures only are thought of. Civilisation increases them, for it augments enjoyment: commerce, for it multiplies the wealth by which it is purchased: ingenuity, for it adds to the instruments of luxury: knowledge, for it spreads an ardent, and often exaggerated picture of its gratifications. The whole efforts of man in civilized life are directed to the increase of human enjoyment, the incitement of human desire. Need we wonder, then, if religion, which prescribes an abstinence from the pleasures of sin, which enjoins continence to the sensual, sobriety to the drunkard, reflection to the unheeding, gentleness to the irascible, restraint to the voluptuous, probity to the avaricious, punishment to the profligate, meets in such an age with very few votaries? Some, doubtless, will always be found, who, disgusted with the profligacy with which they are surrounded, are led only the more rapidly to a life of rectitude and duty by such vice; but how many are they amidst the crowd of sensual and unreflecting? Perhaps one in twenty. The great mass pass quietly by on the other side; they do not say there is no God, but they live altogether without God in the world. In vain are efforts made to reclaim the vicious, to bring up their children in the way they should go, in the hope that when they are old they will not desert it. The grown-up will not go to church; in manufacturing towns they will not even put on Sunday's clothes, but revel in intoxication or sloth in their working-dresses all the Lord's day; except when softened by misfortune, or roused by calamity, they will not listen, even at home, to the voice of religious counsel. Children may learn their catechism, and repeat their responses at school; but when they become men and women, will they resist the temptations by which they are surrounded? Numerous congregations are often suddenly formed by the planting of an eloquent and earnest divine into a densely peopled and neglected locality; but where does the congregation in general come from? Go into the thinned or deserted churches or chapels in its vicinity, and you will find you have only transferred the serious and Christian community from one place of worship to another.

Nor let it be said that these dangers affect only a limited portion of the community, and that, provided only society holds together, and property is upon the whole secure, it is of little consequence to the great bulk of the nation whether its criminals are doubling or tripling every ten years, whether its convicts are hanged, imprisoned, or transported. Doubtless that is the view taken by the majority of men, and which ever makes them resist so strenuously any measures calculated to arrest the general evils by a forced contribution from all classes of the state. But is such a view of so very serious a matter either justified by reason, or warranted by a durable regard to self-interest? Considered in reference only to immediate advantage, and with a view to avert the much-dreaded evil of an assessment, is it expedient to allow crime to go on increasing at the fearful rate which it has done in this country during the last forty years? Can we regard without disquietude the appalling facts demonstrated by the Parliamentary returns of population and commitments—that the people are augmenting three times as fast in the manufacturing as the agricultural districts—that detected and punished crime is multiplying in the former three times as fast as the people—and crime really committed three times as much as that which is brought to light? What can be expected from a state in which crime, in the manufacturing districts, is thus increasing TWENTY-SEVEN TIMES as fast as mankind in the rural? From what sources does this overflowing stream of recklessness, profligacy, and misery, which overflows our workhouses and fills our jails, mainly spring, but from this prodigious and unrestrained increase of crime and depravity among the working classes in the manufacturing districts? Must not such a state of things lead to a constant augmentation of poor-rates, county rates, and jail assessments? And how short-sighted is the policy which allows these oppressive burdens to go on constantly increasing, merely from terror of incurring additional expense in striving to arrest them, and hopes to avoid danger, like the partridge, by putting its head in the bush, and ceasing to look it in the face?

But most of all, in a public and political view, is this extraordinary increase of crime in our manufacturing districts, a subject of serious and anxious consideration to all classes in the state. It is in vain to seek to conceal, it is folly to attempt to deny, that in the dense masses of the manufacturers the real danger of Great Britain is to be found. Though not amounting, upon the whole, to more than a tenth part of the nation, they are incomparably the most alarming from their close proximity to each other, the fierce passions which the revolutionary press has long nourished among them, and the perfect organization which, under the direction Of the leaders of their trades' unions, they have long attained. The insurrection in the manufacturing districts of England, and violent strikes in Scotland in 1842, may warn us of the danger of such an outbreak, especially when combined, as the next will almost certainly be, with a general rebellion of the Irish Repealers. Infinite local mischief, incredible destruction of life and property, would inevitably follow any serious and general insurrection among them; even though crushed, as in the end it certainly would be, by an united effort of the other classes in the state. But is the shock to credit, the destruction of capital, the breaking of the bread of hundreds of thousands, nothing in a national point of view? And what can augment the dangers of such local insurrections so much as the acknowledged fact, that crime is making unprecedented progress amongst them; that so general have the causes of dissoluteness become, that whole masses are brought up in depraved and reckless habits, on the verge of, if not actually committing crime; and that "les classes dangereuses" are daily receiving additional accessions on the depraved, the dissolute, and abandoned from all the other ranks in the state.

Let us therefore no longer deceive ourselves, or attempt to deceive others. Crime is making extraordinary and unprecedented progress amongst us; it is advancing with a rapidity unparalleled in any other European state: if not arrested, it will come to render the country unbearable; and will terminate in multiplying to such an extent "les classes dangereuses," as they have been well denominated by the French, as, on the first serious political convulsion, may come to endanger the state. It has advanced with undeviating and fearful rapidity through all the successive delusions which have been trusted to in the country to check its progress. With equal ease it has cast aside the visions of Sir Samuel Romilly and the advocates of lenient punishment—the dreams of Lord Brougham and the supporters of general education—the theories of the Archbishop of Dublin and the enemies of transportation—the hopes of Lord John Russell and the partizans of improved prison discipline at home. Even the blessed arm of the gospel has hitherto failed in checking its advance amongst us; and it nowhere appears in more appalling colours than in the districts where the greatest and most strenuous efforts have been made for the moral and religious instruction of the people. "Nous avons donnés à penser," as the French say. Ample subject for serious reflection has been furnished to our readers till a future occasion, when the cause of this general failure, and the means requisite for the diminution of crime, will be considered.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Table showing the progress of crime in the British islands since 1805, in so far as can be ascertained.

—Porter's Progress of the Nation, iii. 172, 227.

[2] Moreau, Stat. de la Grande Bretagne, vol. ii. p. 317.

[3] Census of 1841.

[4] Porter's Parliamentary Tables.

[5] These facts were all proved in the subsequent trial of the leaders of the riot, at Edinburgh.

[6] Table showing the diminution of crime in British India:—

[7] Table showing the persons accused at the Assize Courts of France in the under mentioned years:—

—Porter's Parl. Tables, vi. 346.

[8] We except the police of London, which is admirable, and also that of Liverpool, Glasgow, Manchester, and Edinburgh; where, though there is great room for improvement, much has been done in this way to repress crime.

[9] Table showing the instruction of criminals over the British Empire in 1841.

—Porter's Progress of the Nation, iii. 201, 214, 215, 232.

[10] Table showing the centesimal proportion of crime in relation to education in the under-mentioned years.

[11] See Guerry's Stat. Tables of France.

[12]

[13]

RHINE AND RHINELANDERS

"On the Rhine, I am never more than twenty years old!" says the Countess Ida Hahn Hahn, in her Erinnerungen. "There only do I feel myself quite at home. Whether arriving from the Baltic or the Guadalquivir, I have always a recurrence of the same nameless home-feeling, which renders me at once happy and tranquil. O, the Rhine! the Rhine! What are other rivers—your Seine, and Garonne, and Tagus—compared with him? But small and secondary streams beside the mighty Rhine. There are certain rivers which represent nations, and ideas, and periods of history—the Scamander for instance, bringing to our thoughts the days of Grecian heroism; when men fought with gods, and in so doing seemed to wrest from them a portion of their supernatural strength and beauty—the Nile, the priestly Nile, mysterious as a dogma, but rich in blessings as the agency of a divine spirit; concealed in its source, but manifest in its operation—then the Jordan, the stream of revelation, on whose banks is heard the rushing of the wings of the dove, while a voice, other than that of man, murmurs over the waters—and the Tiber, a small and muddy stream, but the gigantic and sparkling reflex of Rome's immortal turrets. But the Rhine, that heroic river, which nations never cross without buckling on their armour for the fight; and yet, on whose banks life is so free, so safe, and so delightful. Hark to the clatter of wine-cups, the echoes of music, the whispered legends, and the clash of weapons! while the old river flows on so cheerily, murmuring as he goes words of encouragement to his children.

"I embrace thee, O Rhine! and wherever I go I will not cease to love thee.

"When I pass in review all the beautiful scenes I have visited, and then ask myself the question, Where I would fain see the sun set for the last time? the answer is unhesitating and heartfelt, and invariably the same—'Behind Stobzenfels, on the Rhine.'"

It would be difficult better to illustrate German veneration and affection for the Rhine, than by the above passages from one of the most intellectual female writers of the day—a writer whose works will bear comparison with those of George Sand for genius and masculine vigour of style, (exempt, however, from much that is objectionable in the French-woman;) while for elegance, taste, and a fine feeling for art and poetry, they may be placed on the same line with those of our own "Ennuyée." What the Countess Hahn Hahn feels and expresses with all the fervour of a poetical imagination—the sort of exhilarating and exulting love for the most classical stream of modern story—is felt in a greater or less degree by all intellectual classes of Germans. Their veneration for the old river that waters one of the sunniest and fairest districts of the Vaterland, is profound; their admiration of the natural beauties, and of the vestiges of days gone by, that abound upon its banks, unceasing. German patriotism is comprehensive: it hails as one country all the wide lands in which the Teuton tongue is spoken; and in nearly all those lands is the Rhine thought and talked of with an admiration amounting to enthusiasm. By a contradiction, however, of not unfrequent occurrence, the people who seem least capable of sharing this feeling, are those who ought to be most under its influence—the inhabitants of the Rhine-country itself. The well known and often quoted passage of Jean Jacques, applied by him to the dwellers on the shores of Lake Leman, is equally applicable to the denizens of the Rhineland. "Je dirois volontiers à ceux qui ont du goût et sont sensibles—allez à Vevey, visitez le pays, examinez les sites, promenez vous sur le lac; et dites si la nature n'a pas fait ce beau pays pour une Julie, pour une Claire, et pour un St Preux; mais—— ne les y cherchez pas." In like manner we would say—Visit the Rhine, not as most tourists do, by rushing in a steam-boat from Rotterdam or Cologne to Basle or Baden, but deliberately, on shore as well as on the water, climbing the mountains and strolling through the valleys, seeking out the innumerable and enchanting points of view, and contemplating them by sunset and sunrise, in the broad glare of noon and by the subdued evening light; and then say whether such a country is not worthy of different inhabitants from the mongrel race, part German, part Flemish, part French, which it now possesses—a population which, when it has consumed its five or six heavy meals, smoked a dozen or two pipes, and slept its long sleep of repletion, considers it has done its duty to God and man, and troubles itself little with such intangible matters as poetical reveries or mental cultivation.

But we are running away from our subject, and losing sight of the intention we had in commencing this paper, which was, to hook ourselves on to the dexter arm of that indefatigable rambler, M. Alexander Dumas, and accompany him in an excursion up the Rhine. He thinks proper to proceed thither by way of Belgium, and we must conform to his arrangements. In due time we shall return to our Rhenish friends.

M. Dumas's earliest care, on arriving at Brussels, was to deliver to King Leopold a letter of recommendation with which he had provided himself for that monarch; and he hastened to the palace, where he obtained admission, he tells us, more easily than he could have done at Paris at the house of a second-rate banker. We were not aware that the French bureaucratie of the day were of such difficult access, and would strongly advise them, since it is so, to take pattern by his Belgian majesty; who in this instance, however, was not at Brussels at all, but at his country palace of Lacken, whither M. Dumas proceeds. Here he is immediately ushered into the king's presence.

"After a quarter of an hour's conversation," says our traveller, "which his Majesty was pleased to put at once upon a footing of familiar chat, I became convinced that I was speaking with the most philosophical king who had ever existed, not excepting Frederick the Great."

We congratulate M. Dumas sincerely upon the exquisite keenness of perception which enabled him to make this discovery, and from so decided an opinion in the course of a quarter of an hour's familiar chat. At the same time we cannot repress a fear, that he is apt to be a little dazzled by the sparkling halo that surrounds a diadem. This we do not say so much with reference to the King of the Belgians, who may be a very philosophical, as he has proved himself to be a very judicious sovereign; but it has struck us more than once, during the perusal of M. Dumas's wanderings in various lands, that he exhibits a slight, an inconceivably small, tendency to tuft-hunting, hardly consistent with his ultra-liberal principles, and difficult to reconcile with the cynical tone that he habitually adopts in speaking of most existing governments and institutions. To say the truth, we have conceived a great affection for our friend Alexander, and feel every disposition to glide lightly over his faults and exalt his virtues; to treat him tenderly, in short, even as one we love. We do not expect perfection from him, although we are anxious to believe that he approaches as near to that angelic state as it is given to a child of clay to do. We would pardon his recording in some detail the gracious words spoken to him by the King of this, and the Prince of that—showing how he was treated on a footing of perfect equality and familiarity by the mighty ones of the earth—how they caressed and complimented him, and wore out the boots of their aides-de-camp and chamberlains by sending after him—and how they told him to "Venez me demander à diner," or in other words, to go and take a chop with them whenever he could make it convenient. At all these interesting and carefully recorded incidents we should indulgently smile, were they narrated by any one but our much-esteemed Alexander—the confirmed democrat, the political Utopian, the declared disciple of the subversive school, the worthy representative, when he gets upon the chapter of politics, of that recently discovered zoological curiosity, the tigre-singe. It is the inconsistency of the thing that strikes and afflicts us.

Of M. Dumas's very ultra views on political subjects, we have abundant proof in the section headed "Waterloo," which is an amusing specimen of the rabid style. The tone is pretty much the same as that of the most violent of the French democratic and anti-English journals. We should like to extract it all, but it is too lengthy, and we must content ourselves with the last ten lines. Here they are, breathing saltpetre and bayonets:—

"A quarter of a century has elapsed since that date, (June 1815,) and France is only now beginning to understand that the defeat of Waterloo was necessary for the liberty of Europe; but she not the less cherishes at the bottom of her heart a poignant grief and rage at having been marked out for a victim. On that plain where so many Spartan-like warriors fell for her sake—where the pyramid of the Prince of Orange, the tomb of Colonel Gordon, and the monument of the Hanoverians, serve as mementoes of the fight—no stone, or cross, or inscription recalls the name of France. But the day shall come when God will bid her (France) recommence the work of universal liberation—the work begun by Bonaparte and interrupted by Napoleon; then, when that work is done, we will turn the lion of Nassau with its head towards Europe, et tout sera dit."

As this rather high-flown passage might not be generally intelligible to our readers, we will put it into plain English. It will then run thus:—

"When France shall again become a republic, or when she shall find a king mad or wicked enough to give in to her worst propensities, she will pour her legions across every frontier, sweep all opposition before her, revolutionize and emancipate Europe, and hoist the triumphant and blood-stained tricolor over the ashes of sovereignties, and the ruins of every old and time-honoured institution."

It is strange to see a man of undoubted talent, and who ought to be amongst the enlightened ones of his country and his age, indulging in such absurd visions and insane prophecies. Rhapsodies of this kind would be merely laughable, were it not for the weight which they unquestionably have with the younger and less reflecting classes of Frenchmen, especially when proceeding from a writer of M. Dumas's abilities and reputation. It is by this style of writing, which abounds in French periodical literature, and in the works of some, fortunately a minority, of the clever littérateurs of the day, that the attacks of war fever, to which France is subject, are aggravated, if not frequently brought on.

We do not intend following M. Dumas step by step through Belgium, to which country he devotes a volume. We prefer passing at once to the Rhine, which he ascends from Cologne to Strasburg, making continual pauses, and enlivening the description of what he sees by agreeable and spirited versions of what he has read and heard. Much of what he tells us has been already printed in the numerous tours and guide-books, which, in conjunction with steam-boats and railways, have familiarized most Englishmen with the Rhine and its legends. It acquires a fresh charm, however, from the present narrator's agreeable and pointed style, and from his calling in the aid of his imagination to supply any little deficiencies; rounding and filling up stories that would otherwise be angular and incomplete. He also gives some agreeable caricatures, if caricatures they may be called, of certain German eccentricities. Yet we should have thought that so keen an observer of men and manners, might have made more than he has done of the peculiarities of German society and habits; but unfortunately M. Dumas appears to understand little, if any, of the language, and this has doubtless been a great hindrance to him, and has prevented him from making his book as characteristic as his Italian sketches. Nevertheless he is piquant enough in some places. We will give his droll account of his entrance into Rhenish Prussia. After being robbed by the innkeeper at Liege, he gets into the Aix-la-Chapelle diligence; and, on reading the printed ticket that has been given to him at the coach-office, finds that he has the fourth seat, and that he is forbidden to change places with his neighbours, even by mutual consent.

"This military sort of strictness, still more than the abominable jargon of the postilion, made me aware that I was about to enter the dominions of King Frederick William. As I had a corner of the coach, the tyranny of his Prussian majesty was tolerably endurable, and I soon fell fast asleep. About three in the morning, just as day was breaking, I awoke, and found that the diligence was standing still. I at first thought there was an accident, and put my head out of the window to see what was the matter. No accident had happened; no other coach was near—the road was excellent. We were alone and motionless. I took my ticket out of my pocket, read it from one end to the other, and having satisfied myself that it was not forbidden to speak in the diligence, I asked my neighbour if we had been standing there long.

"'About twenty minutes,' was the answer.

"'And pray,' continued I, 'can you tell me what we are doing here?'

"'We are waiting.'

"'Ah! we are waiting. And for what?'

"'For the time.'

"'What time?'

"'The time at which we are allowed to arrive.'

"'There is a time fixed for arriving, then?'

"'Every thing is fixed in Prussia.'

"'And if we arrived before the time?'

"'The conductor would be punished.'

"'And if after?'

"'He would also be punished.'

"'Ah! that is very well arranged.'

"'Every thing is well arranged in Prussia.'

"I bowed assentingly. Not for worlds would I have contradicted a gentleman possessed of such an exalted opinion of his country and its institutions, and who answered my questions so courteously and laconically. My acquiescence appeared to gratify him. I felt encouraged, and continued my enquiries.

"'Pardon me, sir, but at what hour ought the diligence to arrive at Aix-la-Chapelle?'

"'At twenty-five minutes to five.'

"'But if the conductor's watch were slow?'

"'His watch can never be slow.'

"'Indeed! And why so?'

"'Opposite to where he sits, and under lock and key, there is a watch which is regulated before starting by the clock at the coach-office. The conductor knows at what hour he should pass through each town and village on his route, and he makes the postilions hurry or slacken their pace accordingly, so as to arrive at Aix-la-Chapelle exactly at the right time.'

"'But with those precautions, how is it that we are obliged to wait upon the road?'

"'The conductor has doubtless followed your example, and slept, and the postilions have taken advantage of that to go quicker.'

"'Well, since we have still some time to remain here, I will get out and stretch my legs a little.'

"'It is not allowed to get out of the diligence in Prussia.'

"'Indeed! That is very agreeable. I wished particularly to look at that castle on the other side of the road.'

"'That is Emmaburg. It is the scene of the famous legend of Eginhard and Emma.'

"'Really! Be so obliging as to change places with me for a moment, that I may look at it through the window.'

"'I should be most happy, sir; but in Prussia it is not allowed to change places.'

"'True, true! How could I forget it? I beg your pardon, sir.'

"'These tamned Frenchmans, they do noting but shatter and talk!' said a fat German sitting opposite to me, opening his mouth for the first time since we had left Liege, but still keeping his eyes shut.

"'You were saying, sir——?' said I, not particularly gratified by the remark.

"'I say noting—I shleep.'

"'Shleep as much as you like, but try not to dream aloud, eh? Or, if you dream, dream in your mother tongue.'

"The German began to snore.

"'Postilion, vorwarts!' shouted the conductor.

"We were off at a gallop. I put my head out of the window to try to get a view of the ruins, but it was vain; they had disappeared behind an angle of the road. At twenty-five minutes to five, not a second later or earlier, we drove into the coach-yard at Aix-la-Chapelle."

At Cologne M. Dumas pauses, and fills a hundred pages with the cathedral, and the legend attaching to it. Most of our readers are probably aware that the above-named church was commenced by an architect whose name has been forgotten, and who procured the design for the building from Satan himself, upon the usual condition of giving a promissory note for his soul. A certain Father Clement, however, a very knowing priest, of whom the arch-tempter stood in almost as great awe as he had ever done of St Dunstan of nose-pulling celebrity, came to the assistance of the builder, and put him up to a stratagem, by which he avoided signing away his spiritual part, although he still obtained possession of the plan for the cathedral. Satan confessed himself outwitted, but prophesied that the building should never be finished, and that its builder's name should not go down to posterity. The latter part of the prediction has been accomplished; but as the present King of Prussia has declared his intention of finishing the work that has been so magnificently begun, it seems probable Beelzebub may prove mistaken in one portion of his prophecy.

Cologne being a large city, somewhat Frenchified in its ways, M. Dumas manages pretty well as regards eating and drinking; but, as he ascends the river, matters get worse. He arrives at Bonn at the hour of the one o'clock meal, called the first dinner, and we find him expatiating on the subject of German appetites and feeding.

"The Germans eat from morning till night. On opening their eyes, at seven o'clock in the morning, they take their coffee—at eleven, breakfast—at one, the little dinner, (a sort of luncheon)—at three, dinner—at five, another meal, nondescript, nameless, and abundant—at nine, a tremendous supper, preparatory to going to bed. Tea, cakes, and sandwiches, fill up the intervals."

This is really only a moderate exaggeration on the part of M. Dumas. Five meals a-day, three of them solid, meat-devouring, wine-bibbing feeds, are the regular allowance of every well-conditioned, well-to-do, comfortable Rhinelander. We do not consider Frenchmen small eaters, whatever they may consider themselves—if they eat little of each dish, they eat of a vast number; but for examples of positive voracity, commend us to a German table-d'hôte. A coachful of French commis voyageurs, assembled, after a ten hours' fast, round the luxurious profusion and delicacies of a Languedocian dinner, would appear mere babes and sucklings in the eating way, compared to a party of Germans at their one o'clock feed. The difference is nearly as great as between the Lady Amine eating rice with a bodkin, and the same fair one battening ghoulishly upon the cold meat in the cemetery. Nothing can equal the persevering industry with which a German crams himself at a public table, where, having to pay a fixed sum for his dinner, he always seems desirous to get as much as he can for his money. The obligato bowl of soup is followed by sundry huge slices of boiled beef, sufficient of themselves for an ordinary man's dinner, but by no means sufficing for a German's; then come fowl and meat, fish, puddings and creams, and meat again; sweet, sour, and greasy—greasy, sweet, and sour, alternating and following one another in inextricable and interminable confusion. Every body eats of every thing largely and voraciously, and the short pauses between the appearance of the dishes are filled up by nibblings at such salutary and digestible extremets as raw hams and herrings, pickled cucumbers, and pickled grapes! German cookery is famous for odd mixtures. M. Dumas is rather amusing on this head.

"At Bonn, the dinner they served me consisted of an unintelligible sort of soup, full of round balls of a pasty substance; beef stewed with prunes, hare dressed with preserves, wild boar with cherries; it was impossible to take more pains to spoil things which separately, would have been very commendable eating. I tasted them each in turn, and each time sent away my plate. When I sent away the wild boar, the waiter could stand it no longer.

"'Does not monsieur like wild boar with cherries?'

"'I detest it!'

"'That is singular; a great poet like monsieur.'

"'You are mistaken, my man: I make verses perhaps; but that is no reason for calling me a great poet, nor for ruining the coats of my stomach with your infernal fricassees. Besides, supposing I were a great poet, what has poetry got to do with pig and cherry sauce?'

"'Our great Schiller adored that dish.'

"'Our tastes differ, then. I have no objection to William Tell or Wallenstein, but—— take away your pig.'

"The waiter carried off the wild boar: meantime I tasted the beef and prunes, but, to do more than taste it, was out of the question; and, when the man returned, I bid him change my plate. His astonishment was greater than ever.

"'What!' cried he, 'does not monsieur like beef and prunes?'

"'No.'

"'M. Goethe was passionately addicted to it.'

"'I am sorry not to have the same addictions as the author of Faust. Make me an omelet.'

"In a few minutes back came the waiter with the omelet. It looked uncommonly nice, and I was uncommonly hungry. Nevertheless, I could not swallow the first mouthful.

"'What the devil have you put into your omelet? An omelet should be made with butter, eggs, salt, and pepper.'

"'Certainly, sir. It is made with butter, eggs, salt, and pepper.'

"'And what else?'

"'A little flour.'

"'And besides?'

"'A little cheese.'

"'Go on.'

"'Some saffron.'

"'And then?'

"'Cloves, nutmeg, and a little thyme.'

"'Enough, enough! Take away your omelet.'"

The master of the hotel, who is an intelligent personage, now makes his appearance, and M. Dumas at last finds that, by ordering a dinner à la Française, he can get something eatable. Encouraged by this success, he ventures, when bedtime comes, to petition for a bed in which a Frenchman can sleep. This requires a little explanation, which will be best given in his own words.

"In France we are pretty much accustomed to sleep in a bed; that is to say, on a couch consisting of a frame some three and a half or four feet wide, and some six or six and a half feet long. On this frame or bedstead we place two or three mattresses and a feather bed, a pair of sheets, a counterpane, a pillow and bolster; we then tuck in the edges of these coverings, the person for whom the bed is intended slips in between the sheets, and if his health is good and his conscience clear, and he has not been drinking too much green tea or strong coffee, he goes to sleep. In a bed of this description any body can sleep, whether German, Spaniard, Italian, Hindoo, or Chinese, unless he makes up his mind not to do so. But in Germany things are very different. A German bed is composed as follows:—

"First, a bedstead two or two and a half feet wide, and five to five and a half feet long. Procrustes must decidedly have been a German. On the bedstead they place a sack of shavings, on the sack of shavings an enormous feather bed, and then a sheet, shorter and narrower than the feather bed, and which we should call a towel. Upon this sheet or towel comes a quilted coverlet of the same size, and a sort of cushion stuffed with feathers. Two or three pillows, piled up at the head of the bed, complete this singular edifice.

"When a Frenchman gets into a bed of this kind, as he does not think of taking any particular precautions, in about five minutes the pillows fall on one side, the coverlet on the other; the sheet rolls itself up and disappears; so that the aforesaid Frenchman finds himself with one side of his body uncovered and frozen, and the other side sunk in the feather bed and perspiring profusely. This arises, say the Germans, from the circumstance of the French being so impetuous and lively. With a calm and phlegmatic German the case is quite different. The latter raises the counterpane very cautiously, creeps underneath, and places himself with his back against the pillows, and his feet against the bottom of the bed, screwing himself up into the shape of the letter Z: he then draws the covering over his knees, shuts his eyes, goes to sleep, and awakes the next morning in the same position. To do this it is necessary to be a German, and as I am not one, I had not slept a wink since I had been in the country; I was growing as thin as a lath, and I had a cough that seemed to tear my chest open. This is why I asked for a bed à la Française. Mine host had fortunately six of them. When I heard that, I could have embraced him with pleasure."

The villages of Winnebourg and Metternich near Coblentz, the former the birthplace, the latter the property, of Prince Metternich, lead M. Dumas into a little digression on the subject of the celebrated diplomatist. The family name, we are informed, was originally Metter, but received the addition of the last syllable in the following manner:—

"In one of the great battles of the fifteenth century, the emperor of Germany saw an entire regiment take to flight with the exception of one man, who stood his ground and defended himself gallantly, till he fell covered with wounds. The emperor enquired his name. It was Metter."

That night at supper the emperor said, talking of the regiment in question—"They all fled, but Metter nicht." Every body knows that "nicht" is the German for not. The family adopted the additional syllable, and hence the origin of the name of Metternich.

M. de Metternich, it appears, is a great collector of autographs, and of course his position has facilitated the gratification of this taste. His collection is rich in royal, imperial, and princely letters; nor is there any lack of odes from German poets, and sonnets from Italian improvisatori. One day, however, it occurred to him that, now the public press had become a power in many countries, he ought to have the autographs of a few journalists, in order to complete his collection; and as in Italy and Germany, thanks to the censorship, there are plenty of journals but no journalists, he was obliged to send to France. Amongst others, M. Jules Janin (one of the editors of the Journal des Debats) received a most polite request for an autograph from the rival of M. de Talleyrand. Janin immediately took up his pen, and wrote as follows:—

"Received from his Excellency Prince Metternich, twenty-four
bottles of Johannisberg, first quality.
"Paris, 15th May 1838."

A month afterwards there arrived at Paris the twenty-four bottles of wine, of which Janin, with a confidence that the prince no doubt knew how to appreciate, had acknowledged receipt beforehand. M. de Metternich has preserved Janin's witty autograph with the greatest care. I doubt very much if Janin has preserved M. de Metternich's wine.

M. Dumas finds some compensation for the badness of German beds in the excellence of German roads. His soundest sleep is always obtained in the diligence. He takes a nap from Mayence to Frankfort; but on entering the latter city is shaken out of his slumbers by an Austrian soldier, who demands his passport. In consequence of an incident that had lately occurred, the soldiery were particularly on the alert with regard to passports. M. Dumas relates the anecdote in his usual pointed and effective manner.

"The free city of Frankfort, which, in its capacity of a free city, is garrisoned by an Austrian and a Prussian regiment, had been laid under contribution during the spring fair by a most expert pickpocket, whom the police had in vain endeavoured to detect and capture. The fair was nearly at an end; and, in order that the thief might not escape, the sentries at the gates were directed to allow no man to leave the town without sending him into the guard-house to have his passport examined, and to see if his height, features, and appearance corresponded with the description on the paper. This order given, the authorities did not trouble their heads any more about the matter, feeling quite certain that the offender could not escape.

"On the other hand, the unfortunate thief felt very uncomfortable. Nature had endowed him with rather a remarkable physiognomy, and it was difficult to find a passport to fit him unless it were made on purpose; so that out of five or six which he had in his possession, not one would do. At last he made up his mind to walk out of the town without a passport, as if he were one of the town's-people going for a stroll. He accordingly took a cane in his hand, and lounging along with an affectation of great indifference, approached a gate at which the Austrians were on guard. But the sentry had his orders, and when the stranger drew near—

"'Who goes there?' he vociferated.

"'A friend,' answered the thief.

"'Advance, friend!' said the sentry with a significant rattle of his musket—a sort of intimation that non-compliance might be rewarded by a bullet.

"The thief walked up to the soldier.

"'Your passport,' demanded the latter.

"'My passport!' repeated the thief in tone of infinite astonishment, 'I have none.'

"'All the better for you,' said the sentry, shouldering his musket. 'If you had had one I should have been obliged to send you into the guard-house to have it examined, and that would have detained you a good half hour. But since you have no passport you can't show one, so you may pass.'

"And the intelligent warrior recommenced his monotonous promenade; while the thief, profiting by his obliging permission, walked out of the town."

Mannheim, the scene of Kotzebue's death, and his assassin's execution, could hardly fail to detain M. Dumas. At Frankfort he applies to a friend for an introduction to some person likely to give him details concerning Kotzebue and Sand, and his friend procures him a letter addressed to Mr Widemann, surgeon, Heidelberg. He has no letter for any body at Mannheim, and after visiting Kotzebue's house, leaves that town to proceed to Heidelberg. Just outside Mannheim he causes the postilion to stop, while he contemplates the place of the mad student's execution, which goes by the name of "Sand's Himmelfahrtwiese," or the meadow of Sand's ascension to heaven. It is a green meadow intersected by a rivulet, and situated within a few hundred yards of the town. While gazing at this field, and trying to conjecture the exact spot where the scaffold had stood, a stranger approaches of whom our traveller makes an enquiry. They fall into conversation, and the newcomer proves to be the governor of the prison in which Sand had been confined. Delighted at this rencontre, M. Dumas turns back and stops a day or two longer at Mannheim, copying some letters of Sand's, and collecting materials which fill several chapters of his book. He learns from his new friend that the Mr Widemann at Heidelberg, for whom he has a letter, is not only a surgeon but also the public executioner, although as yet his services have not been called into request in the latter capacity. It was his father who decapitated Sand. The Heidelberg executioner is noble by right of descent. The origin of his family's nobility is given by M. Dumas as follows:—

"The evening of the day on which King Louis of Bavaria was crowned emperor, there was a splendid ball at the town-hall, at which the empress was present. Amongst the guests was a cavalier dressed entirely in black, and having his face covered with a black mask. He invited the empress to dance: she accepted, and, whilst they were dancing together, another mask approached the emperor and asked him if he knew who his wife's partner was. 'No,' replied the emperor, 'but I suppose it is some sovereign prince.'

"'Lower than that,' said the mask.

"'Some nobleman then—a count or baron.'

"'Lower than that.'

"'Perhaps with a knight.'

"'Lower still.'

"'With an esquire?'

"'Less than that.'

"'A page?'

"'You have not guessed it—lower still.'

"The emperor flushed crimson with anger.

"'A groom?' "'If that were all!' answered the unknown with a strange laugh.

"'But who is it then?' cried the emperor.

"'Tear off his mask and you will see.'

"The emperor approached the sable cavalier, and tore off his mask. It was the headsman.

"'Miscreant!' shouted the emperor, as his sword flashed from the scabbard, 'commend thy soul to God before thou diest.'

"'Sire!' replied the headsman, falling on his knees, 'you may kill me if you will; but the empress has not the less danced with me, and the dishonour, if dishonour there be, is already incurred. Do better than that: knight me; and if any one dares to speak evil of her majesty, the same sword that executes justice shall vindicate her fame.'

"The emperor reflected for a moment.

"'The advice is good,' said he at last. 'Henceforward you shall no longer be called the headsman, but the last of the judges.' Then, giving him three blows on the shoulder with his sword flat,

"'Rise!' he continued; 'from this hour you are the lowest among nobles, and the first amongst burghers.'

"And accordingly since that day, in all public processions and ceremonies, the executioner walks by himself, in rear of the nobles and in front of the commoners."

Truly a most fantastical history, and one which leaves us in some doubt whether it be a genuine legend of Heidelberg, or one of M. Dumas's dreams in the diligence after dining upon pig and cherry sauce. At any rate, if not true it is ben trovato.

Heidelberg, whither M. Dumas next proceeds, is to our mind one of the pleasantest places near the Rhine, from which river it is now, thanks to the railroad, within half an hour's journey. The country around is delightful, and the town itself, owing to its possessing an university, and to the vast number of strangers who visit and pass through it during the summer months, is far more lively than most small German towns. The kind of liveliness, however, caused by the presence of seven or eight hundred students, is not always of the most agreeable character. It has been the fashion in England to talk and write a vast deal about German universities; and sundry well filled, or at least bulky tomes have been devoted to accounts of the students' mode of life, their duels and drinkings, and peculiarities of all kinds. Friend Howitt favoured us a year or two ago with a corpulent volume—translated in part from the MSS. of some studiosus emeritus—a sort of life in Heidelberg, entering into great detail concerning university doings, and with illustrations of a very sportive description; wherein mustached and bespurred cavaliers are slashing at each other with broad swords, or cantering over the country mounted upon gallant steeds, and looking something between Dick Turpins and field-marshals in muftee. 'Tis a sad thing to have too much imagination—it tempts a man to mislead his neighbours; and no one who has read friend William's picturesque descriptions of Student Leben, but would feel grievously disappointed when he came to investigate the subject for himself. Nothing can be more puerile and absurd, and in many instances disgusting, than the habitual pastimes and amusements of the students; or at least of that large majority of them who attend no lectures and study, nothing that they can possibly avoid, but look upon their residence at the university as three or four years to be devoted to smoking, beer-drinking, and scratching one another's faces in duels. These duels, by the by, are pieces of the most intense humbug that can be imagined. They take place now in the large room of the inn at Ziegelhausen, a village on the banks of the Neckar, about two miles from Heidelberg, and are fought with straight swords, square but sharp at the extremity, and having guards as big as a soup-plate.

Before the fight begins, the combatants don their defensive arms, consisting of a strong and broad-brimmed hat protecting the head and eyes, an immense leathern breastplate defending the chest and stomach, a padded case, also of leather, which shields the arm from wrist to shoulder, and an impenetrable cravat which protects the neck up to the ears. The nose, and a bit of each cheek, is all that can be possibly wounded. Thus equipped the heroes set to work, slashing away at each other, (it is forbidden to thrust,) shaving off pieces of their padded armour, and looking exceeding fierce and valiant the while; until, after a greater or less time, according as the combatants are equal in skill or not, one of them gets a scratch across the nose, or small eyelet hole in the cheek, which terminates this caricature of a duel. Since "young Germany" finds amusement in so harmless a practice, it might very well be allowed them; provided they afterwards, like good boys, took their books and learned their lessons. But such a proceeding would be by no means consistent with the Burschen-Freiheit—the academic freedom of which these hopeful youths make their boast. To celebrate the valour of the victory, and show sympathy with the sufferings of the vanquished—whose wound is by this time dressed with an inch of sticking plaster—the party repairs to a tavern to breakfast; and there the morning is killed over beer and Rhine wine till one o'clock, by which time some of them are usually more than half tipsy. They then repair to the table-d'hôte, dine, drink more, and finally stagger home to sleep off their libations. We have more than once, in German university towns, seen students reeling-drunk at four in the afternoon.

About seven in the evening, the kneipes or drinking-houses begin to fill. In all of these there are rooms set apart for the different clubs of students to assemble in; and in those sanctuaries they put on the caps and colours of their communities, which they have of late years been forbidden to wear in public. On the ribands which they wear round their necks, are inscribed the date of their various duels. A barrel of beer is now broached, pipes are loaded and lighted, and they sit the whole evening, sotting, smoking, and singing songs about the Rhine, liberty, and fatherland, with ear-splitting and interminable choruses of Viva lera lera. A German student's song generally consists of couplets of two lines, with a chorus that lasts a quarter of an hour.

The quantity of beer consumed by some of these heroes is almost incredible. They become actually bloated with it. One of the most important and respected persons at a German university is the Beer King, who ought to be able to drink, not any given quantity, but an unlimited one; to be perpetually drinking, in short. M. Dumas tells us, that the reigning monarch of malt at Heidelberg is able to absorb twelve schoppens of beer, or six of wine, while the clock strikes twelve. A Heidelberg schoppen is very nearly an English bottle. This is rather hard to swallow, M. Dumas. Either the drinker is very fast, or the clock very slow. We can vouch, however, for the scarcely less astonishing fact, of there being drinkers at the universities who will imbibe twenty-five bottles of beer at a sitting. The German beer is, of course, not of a very intoxicating nature.

From beer to tobacco the transition is natural enough; and we cannot conclude our gossip about the Rhine without a word or two as to the frightful abuse made by the Germans of the Indian weed. We are not of the number of those who condemn the moderate use of tobacco, but, on the contrary, know right well how to appreciate its soothing and cheering effects; but the difference is wide between a limited enjoyment of the habit, and the stupefying, besotting excess to which it is carried by the Germans. The dirty way, too, in which they smoke, renders the custom as annoying to those who live amongst them, as it must be unwholesome and detrimental to themselves. It is possible to smoke much, and yet cleanly: take the Spaniard for instance—unquestionably a great smoker; yet the difference between smoking on the Rhine or Elbe, and on the Manzanares or Ebro, is immense—the one the gluttony and abuse, the other the refinement of the practice. While Don Español, with his fragrant puro, or straw or paper covered cigarrito, smoketh cleanly, spitteth not, uses his tobacco, as he uses most things, like a gentleman; the werther Deutscher takes his huge pipe, rarely cleaned and with the essence of tobacco oozing from every joint, and filling it from a bag, or rather sack, of coarse and vile-smelling tobacco, puffs forth volumes of smoke, expectorating ad nauseam at intervals of a minute or less. No considerations of place or person hinder him from indulging in his favourite pastime. In steam-boats, in diligences, in the public walks and promenades, into the dining-rooms of hotels, every where does the pipe intrude itself; carried as habitually as a walking-cane; and even when not in actual use, emitting the most evil odour from the bowl and tube, saturated as they are with tobacco juice.

However unpleasant all this may be to foreigners, especially to English ladies accustomed to the more cleanly habits of their own countrymen, the German dames are perfectly reconciled to it. Had we to draw a picture of domestic felicity on the Rhine, we would sketch it thus:—a summer evening—a flower garden—a table with tea or coffee—a dozen chairs occupied by persons of both sexes—the women big-feeted, blue-eyed, placid creatures, knitting stockings—the men heavy and awkward, each with a monstrous signet-ring on the dirty forefinger of his right hand, smoking unceasingly, and puffing the vapour into the faces of their better halves, who heed it not, and occasionally may even be seen replenishing with their own delicate digits the enormous porcelain or meerschaum bowls of the pipes. If you doubt the accuracy of our description, reader, go and judge for yourself. The distance is short, and summer is at hand. Put yourself on board a steamboat, whisk over to Ostend or Antwerp, and thence rail and rattle it down to the Rhine. You shall not be three days on German soil without encountering a score such groups as the one we have just sketched.

THE MONSTER-MISERY OF LITERATURE.

BY A MOUSE BORN OF THE MOUNTAIN.

Be under no apprehension, gentle public, that you are about to be kept in suspense touching the moral of our argumentation, as too often in the pamphlets addressed in Johnsonian English to Thompsonian understandings, wherein a pennyworth of matter is set forth by a monstrous quantity of phrase. We mean to speak to the point; we mean to enlighten your understanding as by the smiting of a lucifer-match. Refrain, therefore, from running your eye impatiently along the page, as you are doing at this moment, in hopes of discovering, italicized, the secret of the enigma; for we have no intention of keeping you another moment ignorant that the monster-misery of literature is—guess! Which of you hath hit it? The monster-misery of literature is—The Circulating Library!

In this devout conviction, devote we to the infernal gods the memory of the Athenian republic—the first keeper of a circulating library. Every tyro is aware that this Sams or Ebers of antiquity lent out to Ptolemy of Egypt, for a first-rate subscription of fifteen talents, the works of Euripides, Eschylus, and Sophocles; thereby affording a precedent for the abominable practice, fatal to bookmakers and booksellers, which has converted the waters of Castalia into their present disgraceful puddle!

Every scribbler of the day who has a Perryian pen in hand, is pleased to exercise it on the decline of the drama; one of the legitimate targets of penny-a-liners. But how inadequately are the goose quills, and ostrich quills, phoenix quills, and roc quills, of the few standard critics of the age, directed towards the monstrous abuse of public patience which will render the Victorian age the sad antithesis of the Elizabethan, in the literary history of the land! Content so long as they can get a new work, tale quale, as a peg whereon to hang the rusty garments of their erudition, not a straw care they for the miserable decline and fall of the great empire of letters; an empire overrun by what Goths—what Huns—what Vandals!—by the iniquitous and barbarous hosts of circulating libraries!

It has been agreed for some centuries past, that the only modern Mæcenas is the publisher. The days of patrons are past; and the author is forced to look for the reward of his labour to the man who, by selling the greatest number of copies to the public, can bestow the greatest number of pounds upon his pains. In order to augment this amount, the bibliopole naturally consults the taste of his customers; and nearly the sole remaining customers of the modern bookseller are—the circulating libraries. For what man in his senses who, for an annual mulct of half-a-dozen sovereigns, commands the whole range of modern literature, would waste his substance in loading his house with books of doubtful interest? Who that, by a message of his servant into Bond Street, procures the last new novel cut and dry, instead of wet from the press, and demanding the labour of the paper-knife, would proceed to the extremity of a purchase? And the result is, that Messrs Folio and Duodecimo, in order to procure satisfactory orders from the circulating libraries of the multitudinous cities of this deluded empire, issue orders to their helots, Mr Scribblescrawl and Mrs Wiredrawn, requiring them to produce per annum so many sets of three volumes, adapted to the atmosphere wherein they are fated to flourish.

It is an avowed fact, that the publishers of the day will purchase the copyrights of only such works as "the libraries will take;" which libraries, besotted by the mystic charm of three volumes, immutable as the sacred triad of the Graces or Destinies, would negative without a division such a work as the "Vicar of Wakefield" were it now to undergo probation. "Robinson Crusoe" or "Paul and Virginia" would be returned unread to their authors, with a civil note of "extremely sorry to decline," &c. "The Man of Feeling" would be made to feel his insignificance. "Thinks I to Myself" might think in vain; and the "Cottagers of Glenburnie" retain their rural obscurity. So much for the measure of the maw of the circulating library. Of its taste and palate it is difficult to speak with moderation; for those of Caffraria or Otaheite might be put to the blush.

The result, however, of this fatal ascendancy is, that not a publisher who has the fear of the Gazette before his eyes, presumes to hazard a guinea on speculations in the belles-lettres. Poetry is seldom, if ever, published except at the cost of the poet; and the foreman of one of the leading London houses is deputed to apprize aspiring rhymesters, that "his firm considers poetry a mild species of insanity"—Anglice, that it does not suit the appetite of the circulating library! For behold! this despot of bookmakers must have length, breadth, and thickness, to fill the book boxes dispatched to its subscribers in the country, as well as satisfy in town the demands of its charming subscriber, Lady Sylvester Daggerwood, and all her daughters.

It happens that the said Lady Sylvester does not like Travels, unless "nice little ladylike books of travels," such as the Quarterly informed us last year, in a fit of fribbledom, were worthy the neat little crowquills of lady-authors. Nor will she hear of Memoirs, unless light, sparkling, and scandalous, as nearly resembling those of Grammont as decency will allow. Essays she abominates; nor can she exactly understand the use of quartoes, unless, as Swift describes the merit of

"A Chrysostom to smooth his band in"—

to serve for flattening between the leaves her rumpled embroidery or netting!

Now you are simply and respectfully asked, beloved public, what must be the feelings of a man of genius, or of any sensible scholarly individual, when, after devoting years of his life to a work of standard excellence—a work such as in France would obtain him access to the Academy, or in Russia or Prussia a pension and an order of merit—he is told by the publisher, who in Great Britain supplies the place of these fountains of honour and reward, that "the public of the present day has no taste for serious reading;" for Messrs Folio and Duodecimo cannot, of course, afford to regard a few dons of the universities, or a few county bookclubs, parsonically presided, as representatives of the public! What the disappointed man, thus enlightened, must think of "glorious Apollo" when he goes to bed that night, we should be sorry to conjecture!

"The public of the present day"—Ang. the subscribers to the circulating libraries—constitute, to his cultivated mind, a world unknown. The public he has been wasting his life to address, is such a public as was addressed by Addison, by Swift, by Steele, or by the greater writers of the days of Elizabeth. "Bless his fine wits," we could laugh at his misconception, were we not rather inclined to cry! In instances easy to be cited, (but that there were miching malecho in the deed,) insult has been added to injury, and the anguish depicted in the face of the mortified man of letters been assuaged by friendly advice to "try his hand at something more saleable—something in the style of Harrison Ainsworth or Peter Priggins!"

O ye Athenians! to what base uses have we come, by the influence of your malpractices of old!

But all this is far from the blackest side of the picture. You have seen only the fortunes of the rejected of the circulating libraries; wait till you have studied the fate of their favourites—victims whom, like the pet-dogs of children, the publishers force to stand on their hind-legs, and be bedizened in their finery; or pet pussy-cats, whom they fondle into wearing spectacles and feeding on macaroones, instead of pursuing their avocations as honest mousers. The favourite author of the circulating libraries has a great deal to envy in the treadmill!

In the days when there existed a reading, in place of a skimming public—in the days when circulating libraries were not—the writer who followed his own devices in the choice of the subject, plot, title, treatment, and extent of his book, and made his labour a labour of love, had some chance of being cherished as the favourite of the fireside; installed on the shelf, and taken down, like Goldsmith or Defoe or Bunyan, for an hour's gossip; cried over by the young girl of the family, diverting the holiday of the schoolboy, and exercising the eyesight of the good old grandmother. But how is this ever to be achieved nowadays? Who will be ever thumbed over and spelled over as these have been?

"Invent another Vicar or another Crusoe," say the critics, "and you will see."

We should not see! No bookseller would publish them, because "no circulating library would take them;" for these bibliopoles know to a page what will be taken. Several of them have got, and several others have had, the conduct of a circulating library on their hands; and so far from venturing to present a single-volumed or double-volumed work to their subscribers, they would insist upon the dilution of the genius of Oliver or Daniel into the adequate number of pages ere they risked paper and print. O public! O dear, ingenuous public! Think how you might have ceased to delight in even the cosmogony-man, if his part had been a hundred times rehearsed in your ears; or what the matchless Lady Blarney and the incomparable Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs (I love, as old Primrose says, to repeat the whole name) might have become, as the "light conversationists" of three octavo volumes! Shakspeare was forced to kill Mercutio early in the play, lest Mercutio should kill him. We feel a devout conviction that Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs would have burked Goldsmith!

And then the incomparable Robinson! Conceive the interlarding of a funny Mrs Friday to eke out the matter, with a comical king of the Cannibal islands "to lighten the story"—according to circulating library demand! Unhappy Defoe! thy standing in the pillory had been as nothing compared with such a condemnation!

We beseech you, therefore, deluded public, when assured by critical misleadment that such writers no longer exist, do, as you are often requested to do by letters in the newspapers—from parties remanded by the police-offices for some hanging matter—"suspend your judgment," or you will deserve credit for very little. We promise you that there are giants on the earth in these days, ay, and famous giants of their cubits! But when a giant is made to drivel, his drivelings are very little better than those of a pigmy. And we swear to you, (under correction from the parish vestry, which is entitled to half-a-crown an oath,) that the circulating libraries would make a driveler of Seneca! Under the circulating library tyranny, Johnson himself would have been forced to break up his long words into smaller pieces, to supply due volume for three volumes.

Above all, we have no hesitation in declaring that the circulating libraries are indictable for manslaughter, in the matter of the death of Scott. They killed him, body and soul! In better times, when books were bought, not hired, the sale of the first half dozen of his mighty novels would have sufficed both the public and the author for thrice as many years. They would have been purchased by all people of good condition, as the works of Richardson were purchased, and read, and conned, and got by heart. But behold! the circulating libraries "wanted novelty." It suited them better to invest their capital in half a dozen new and trashy books—such as extend their catalogue from No. 2470 to 2500—instead of half a dozen copies of the one sterling work, which increases their stock in trade and diminishes their stock in consols, but leaves the catalogue, which is the advertisement of their perfections, halting at No. 2470.

Now, as it happened that the same boss of constructiveness which has endowed our language with such a world of creations from the pen of Scott, betrayed him also into inventiveness per force of brick and mortar—just as the same bent of genius which created the Castle of Otranto, created also that other colossus of lath and plaster, Strawberry Hill—the author of the Scotch novels was fain to sacrifice to the evil genius of the times; and behold! as the assiduous slave of the circulating libraries, he extinguished one of the greatest spirits of Great Britain. But for the hateful factory system of the twice three volumes per annum, he would have been still alive among us—happy and happy-making, in a green old age—watching over the maturity of his grandchildren, and waited upon by the worship of the land.

Therefore again we say, as we said a short time ago,—O ye Athenians! what have ye not to answer for in the consequence of your malpractices of old!

The only great success of the day in works of fiction, (for the laurels of Bulwer have been spindled among the rest by the factitious atmosphere of the circulating libraries), is that of Boz. And we attribute, in a great measure, the enormous circulation of his early works, to their having set at defiance the paralysing influence of the monster-misery. Shilling numbers were as the dragon's teeth. They rose up like armed men, and slew the circulating librarians. People were forced to buy them if they wanted to read them; and they were bought. Those who desired to read "Night and Morning," were not forced to purchase it, and it was not bought; and the circulation of the two works consequently remains as 2000 to 35,000 copies.

The state and prospects of authors, however, concerns you less, dear public, than the state and prospects of literature. You are a contemplative body of men, and can see into a millstone as far as most nations. You make leagues and anti-leagues for the sake of your morsel of bread; and teach the million to sing to your own tune; and, weary of keeping your heads above water, tunnel your way below it; nor will you allow the suffering shirtmakers of your metropolis to be put upon, nor Don Carlos, nor Queen Pomaré, nor any other victim of oppression. You applauded Alice Lowe, and shook hands with Courvoisier at the gallows; and it is clear you stand no nonsense, and bear no malice.

Be so good, therefore, as seriously to consider what sort of figure you will cut in the eyes of posterity, if this kind of thing is suffered to go on.

There is not one publisher in the three kingdoms (we throw down the gauntlet) who would give an adequate sum of money for any new historical work. There is not one publisher in the three kingdoms who would give even a moderate sum for a poem. We state the case liberally; for our conviction is, that they would refuse one poor half-crown. So much for the prospects; for, without a premium production is null.

As regards the state of literature, take out your pencils, (you all carry pencils, to calculate either the long odds or the odds on 'Change,) and make out a list of the works published during the last five years, likely to be known, even by name, a hundred years hence! It is some comfort to feel, that by sight they cannot be known—that few of them will survive to disgrace us—that the circulating libraries possess the one merit of wear and tear for the destruction of their filthy generation, like Saturn of old; for it would grieve us to think of even the trunks of the two thousandth century being lined with what lines the brains of our contemporaries. So that in the year of grace two thousand and forty-four, we shall have the Lady Blarney of Kilburn Square (the Grosvenor Square of that epoch,) enquiring of the Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs of Croydon Place (the Belgium Square)—"My dear soul, what could those poor people do to amuse themselves? They had positively no books! After Scott's time till the middle of the nineteenth century not a single novelist; after the death of Byron, not a poet! I believe there was an historian of the name of Hallam, not much heard of; and the other day, at a book-stall, I picked up an odd volume of an odd writer named Carlyle. But it is really curious to consider how utterly the belles-lettres were in abeyance."

To which, of course, Miss C. W. A. S.—(even Dr Panurge could not get through the whole name again!)—"My dear love! they had Blackwood's Magazine, which, like the Koran after the burning of the Alexandrian library, supplied the place of ten millions of volumes!"

But, alas! some Burchell may be sitting by, to exclaim "fudge!" Some groper into archives will bring forth one of those never-to-be-sufficiently-abominated catalogues of Bond and other streets, showing that, on a moderate calculation, twenty books were published per diem, which, at the end of three months, possessed the value of so many bushels of oyster-shells!

And then, pray, what will you have to say for yourselves, O public! from your tombs in Westminster Abbey or your catacombs at Kensal Green? Which among you will dare come forward, with blue lights in his hand and accompanied by a trombone, like the ghost of Ninus in Semiramide, and say—"We warned these people to write for immortality. We told them it was their duty to stick in a few oaks for posterity, as well as their Canada poplars and Scotch firs. It was not our fault that they chose to grow nothing but underwood. It was the fault of the circulating libraries, which, instead of allowing the milk of human genius to set for cream, diluted it with malice prepense, and drenched us with milk and water even to loathing!"

No, dear public! you will put your hand in your breeches' pocket like a crocodile, as you do now, and say nothing. Yon are fully aware how much of the fault is your own; but you are stultified and hardened to shame. With the disgrace of your National Gallery, and National Regency Buildings, and Pimlico Palace, and all your other vulgarisms and trivialities on your shoulders, you bully your way out of your disgrace of duncehood, like Mike Lambourne on forgetting his part in the Kenilworth pageant. "For your part, you can do very well without book-learning. You've got Shakspeare, and if with that a nation can't face the literature of Europe, the deuce is in it! With Cocker's arithmetic and Shakspeare, any public that knows what it's about, may snap its fingers at the world!"

Such, such are the demoralizing results of the ascendancy of the circulating libraries! Such is the monster-misery of literature!

Again, therefore, we say, confound those fifteen talents! What have ye not to answer for, O ye Athenians! in the consequences of your malpractices of old!

MARSTON; OR, THE MEMOIRS OF A STATESMAN.

PART XI.

"Have I not in my time heard lions roar?
Have I not heard the sea, puft up with wind,
Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat?
Have I not heard great ordnance in the field,
And Heavens artillery thunder in the skies?
Have I not in the pitched battle heard
Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets clang?"

Shakspeare

Our procession had more than the usual object of those dreadful displays: it was at once an act of revenge and an act of policy. During the period while the gates of the convent shut out the living world from us, a desperate struggle had been going on between the two ruling factions. In this contest for life and death, the more furious, of course, triumphed; such is the history of rabble revolution in all ages. The Girondist with his eloquence naturally fell before the Jacobin with his libel; the Girondist, affecting a deference for law, was trampled by the Jacobin, who valued nothing but force; the tongue and the pen were extinguished by the dagger; and this day was the consummation. A debate in the Convention, of singular talent and unexampled ferocity, had finished by the impeachment of the principal Girondists. Justice here knew nothing of the "law's delay;" and the fallen orators now headed our melancholy line, bound, bareheaded, half naked, and more than half dead with weariness, shame, and the sense of ruin;—there could scarcely be more in the blow which put an end to all their perturbations on this side of the grave.

We had frequent halts, and I had full leisure to gaze around; for, rapidly as the guillotine performed its terrible task, our procession had been extended by some additional victims from every prison which we passed; and we passed so many that I began to think the city one vast dungeon. What strange curiosity is it that could collect such myriads to look upon us? Every street was crowded with a living mass; every casement was filled; every roof presented a line of eyes straining for a glance below. Instead of the crowd of a populous city, I could have believed that I saw the population of a kingdom poured in and compressed into the narrow streets through which we wound our slow way. From time to time a shout arose, as some conspicuous member of the Convention made his appearance in the vehicle of death: then execrations, scoffs, and insults, of every bitterness, were poured upon the unfortunate being; who seldom attempted to retaliate, or make any other return but a gesture of despair, or a supplication to be suffered to die in peace. Yet all was not cruelty nor insensibility. I saw instances, where friends, bold enough to brave the vengeance of the government, rushed forward to take a last grasp of the hand that must so soon be cold; and my heart was wrung by partings between still dearer objects and the condemned;—wives rushing forward through the multitude; children held up to their father's arms; beautiful and graceful young women, forcing their wild way through the line of troops, to take a last look, and exchange a last word, with those whom they would have rejoicingly followed to the tomb.

Our progress lasted half the day, and the sun was already near its setting, when the waggon in which I sat turned into the Place de Grève. But I must, I dare, describe no more. I shall not say what I saw in that general receptacle of the day of horror—the range of low biers which lay surrounding the scaffold, now the last resting-place of men who had but a few hours before flourished in the full possession of every faculty of our being; and, still more, with all those faculties in the full ardour of public life—with brilliant ambition to stimulate, with prospects of boundless power to reward, and with that most exhilarating and tempting spell of human existence, popular acclamation, resounding in their ears. I had known some of them, I had seen then all; and now I saw those highly gifted, vigorously practised, and fiery-souled men, shaken down in an instant like a shock of corn; swept to death as if they were but so many weeds; extinguished in a moment, and in another moment flung aside, a heap of clay, to make room for other dead. And this was Republicanism—this the reign of knowledge, the triumph of freedom, the glory of political regeneration! Even in that most trying moment, when I saw the waggon, in which I remained the last survivor but one, give up my unfortunate companion to the executioner, my parting words to him, as I shook his cold hand, were—"Better the forest and the savage than republicanism! Doubly cursed be murder, when it takes the name of freedom!"

I then resolved to see and hear no more; gave a brief and still a fond recollection to England; and, committing my spirit to a still higher care, I bowed my forehead on my hands, like one laying down his head for the final blow!

But while I was still thus absorbed I heard a sudden shout, the trampling of cavalry, and the sound of trumpets. I again raised my eyes. A strong body of French troopers, covered with the dust of the high-road, and evidently exhausted by a long journey, were passing along the quai which bordered the scene of execution. In the midst of these squadrons were seen Austrian standards surmounted by the tricolor, and evidently carried as trophies. The rumour now ran quickly through the spectators, that Flanders had been entered, that the enemy had been routed, and that a column of Austrian prisoners was passing through the streets, of which those squadrons formed the escort.

What could now detain the multitude? The public curiosity would probably have defied grape-shot; with one burst they poured from the square. When the populace went, why should the National Guard stay behind?—were they not as much entitled to satisfy their curiosity? Three-fourths of the guard instantly piled their muskets, leaving them in care of their less zealous or more lazy fellow warriors, and ran after the multitude. The executioners were like other men; equally touched by their "country's glory," and fond of a spectacle. They dropped by twos and threes quietly from the sides of the scaffold, and made their way to the quai. In the mean time I was left disregarded; but I was still fettered, or I should have jumped from the waggon, and taken my chance for escape. All had evidently come to a full stop, and even that horrible machine, above my head, had ceased to clank and crush; for what is a spectacle in France without an audience? The chief headsman, with two or three of his assistants, true to their post, alone remained—waiting for the return of the people; yet even they cast many a lingering glance towards the pageant, whose plumes, flags, and kettledrums, passing across the entrance of the square, made their patriotism more difficult from minute to minute. At length the trumpets died away, and, to my renewed despondency, I saw the crowd again thicken towards me and the few remaining vehicles, which that day, now sinking into twilight, was to empty of their victims.

But I was again respited. While I awaited the summons to mount the fatal steps, a party of dragoons rode into the square, seized every waggon without a moment's delay, and ordered the whole to be driven out for the reception of a column of wounded, both French and Austrians; who, having been brought to the city gates, now waited the means of transport to the great military hospital at Vincennes.

In this country of expedients, the first suggestion is always the best. The colonel of dragoons in charge of the column, had applied to the government for the means of carriage; they referred him to the municipality, who referred him to the staff of the National Guard; who referred him to the subprefect; who referred him to his subordinate functionaries; who knew nothing on the subject; until the colonel, indignant at the impertinences of office, accidentally heard that the requisite conveyances were to be seen in front of the Hotel de Ville. Regarding it as the natural right of the soldier to be first served in all cases, he sent off a squadron at full speed to make his seizure. Nothing could be more complete. The affair was settled at once. The remonstrances of the civil officers against our being thus withdrawn from their grasp, were answered by bursts of laughter at their impudence, and blows with the flat of the sabre for their presumption; for, next to the open reprobation of the army for the civic cruelties, was their scorn of the civic functionaries. The National Guard made some feeble display of resistance, but soon showed that they had no wish to try their bayonets against those expert handlers of the sword; and the event was, that the whole train of fifty or sixty waggons, of which about a tenth remained full, were hurried away at full gallop down to the Boulevard, leaving the scaffold a sinecure. At the barrier a new arrangement took place; the wounded were piled into the carriages along with us, and the whole were marched under escort to the grand depot of the garrison of Paris.

I had seen Vincennes before, and under trying circumstances; its frowning physiognomy had not been altered, nor, as a prison, was it more congenial to my feelings than before. Yet, on hearing the hollow tread of our horses' feet over its drawbridge, and seeing myself actually within its massive walls, I experienced a feeling of satisfaction which I had never expected to enjoy within bolts and bars. In this world contrast is every thing. I had been so fevered with alternate peril and escape, so sick of doubt, and so perplexed with the thousand miseries of flight; that, to find myself secure from casualty for the next twenty-four hours, and relieved from the trouble of thinking for myself, or thinking of any thing, was a relief which amounted almost to a pleasure. I never laid myself down to sleep with greater thankfulness, than when, stretched on the wooden guard-bed of the barrack-room, where the whole crowd of prisoners were packed together, I listened to the beat of the night-drum and the changing of the guard. They told me that, for once at least, I might sleep without a police-officer, to bid me, like Master Barnardine, "arise and be hanged."

Time in a garrison is the most lingering of all conceivable things, except time in a prison. I had it, loaded with the double weight. There was no resource to be found in the fractured and bandaged portion of human nature round me. The Austrians were brave boors, who spoke nothing but Styrian or Carinthian, or some border dialect, which nothing but barbarism had ever heard of, and which nothing but Austrian organs could have ever pronounced. The French recruits were from provinces which had their own "beloved patois," and which, to the Parisian, held nearly the same rank of civilized respect as the Kingdom of Ashantee. Besides, it was to be remembered, that all round me was a scene of suffering—the dismal epilogue of a field of battle; or rather the dropping of the curtain on the royal stage, when the glitter and the noise were gone by, and the actors reduced from their pomps and vanities, and sent home to the shivering necessities of poor human existence.

Life to me was now as stagnant as the ditch round the fortress; all feeling was as languid as the heavy air of our casemates. The mind lost all curiosity relative to the external world; and, beyond the casual knowledge which dropped, with all official mystery, from the lips of our worthy governor, and which told us that the war still continued, and that the armies of the Republic were "invincible beyond all power of human resistance;" we could not have been much more separated from sympathy, even with the capital itself, if we had been transported to one of the belts of Jupiter.

But a new alarm now seized me. The extreme indifference with which I had begun to regard all things, at length struck the eye of one of the military surgeons, who had been sent from Paris in consequence of the influx of prisoners. He seemed to take some interest in my consumptive visage and lack-lustre eye; asked me whether "some of my family had not died early in life," and offered to dictate my pursuits and regimen. The French are by nature a kindly people, with this one proviso, that, though every Frenchman on earth is more or less a persifleur, you must never practise the art upon himself. M. Rossignol Perigord Pantoufle would have been an incomparable subject for the exercise, for he was eccentricity from top to toe. But the state of my spirits prevented my taking any share in the burlesque which too frequently befell this worthy person; and he attached himself to me as a sort of refuge from the sly, but stinging, persecution of his fellow-officers. When the hen-wife plucks the goose's bosom it makes her nestle more closely to her goslings. It was the calamity of my friend Pantoufle to be born with what the novelists call a "too feeling heart;" he was always in love with some one or another, and always jilted. But misfortune was thrown away upon him; he was still a complete sensitive plant, shivering and shrinking at every new touch: a dish of blancmange could not have shaken with a slighter impulse, nor a shape of jelly more easily dissolved. He was now past fifty; and, never much indebted to nature in his youth, time, the foe to beauty, had been more than a foe to the doctor. I never recollect to have seen a figure or physiognomy less fitted to disturb the female soul. But he made me the confidant of his woes; and if I did not, like Desdemona, "to him seriously incline," at least I never laughed, amusing as were his agonies, and diverting as was his despair. I had either the presence of mind, or the feebleness of pulse, to look and listen;—the art has succeeded in higher places than prisons.

Yet all was not sentimentality with him. He was an honest and high-spirited man in the main. He questioned me—and no question could then be a bolder one at the time—in what manner he could best serve me. My answer was immediate—"Find out the commercial house of Elnathan, and tell the head of the family that I am here." The service was done, and I received for answer, on my friend's return from his ride to the Rue Vivienne—"That the firm kept no account with any person of my name; and that they had no desire to have any further application on the subject." The doctor, too, had been received with such gathering of black brows, and such murmurs between indignation and astonishment; that if Rabbi Elnathan had not been deemed altogether beneath the vengeance of "an officer in the service of the Republic," the consequence would have been a proposal to choose his own time to be run through the body in the Champs Elysées.

It was late when my ambassador had returned, and I had begun to feel some alarm for his peril by other than the shafts of Cupid in the rashness of exposing him to the jealous eye of his government, or perhaps to the denunciation of the Jewish firm, who, to screen themselves, might hasten with the intelligence to the first police-office. And I had an uneasy walk of a couple of hours, gazing from the ramparts, for every movement in the direction of the capital. The night was calm, and the glow of the lamps in the streets strikingly marked their outline; when on a sudden the sky was filled with flame of every colour, shot up in all directions, the cannon round the barriers began to roar, and Montmartre was in a perpetual blaze. It was plain that some extraordinary event had occurred; but whether this were the fall of the triumvirate or of their enemies, a new revolution or a new monarch, was beyond our knowledge; we were all hermetically sealed up in Vincennes; and if Paris had been buried in its own catacombs at the moment, the news would have been doled out to us only in the segments which suited the dignity of the governor.

But Pantoufle for once was popular in the fortress. If he had brought nothing to raise my spirits, his tidings threw the garrison into ecstasy. The Republic "had gained a great victory," whose value was enhanced by the previous disasters of the campaign. The favourite of the French armies, too, had gained that victory. This was another feature of the rejoicing. Dumourier was one of the people; "no noble, no aristocrat, no son of landed wealth, no lord of forests and feeder on privileges." He had been a simple captain of engineers; he was now conqueror of those Austrian provinces on which France had cast an eager eye for centuries. That prize, which all the monarchs of France, with all their titled marshals, had never been able to seize, "the Republic, with a republican army and a republican general, had won in the first month of her first invasion."

The garrison, of course, had its fireworks, its salute from the ramparts, and its feu de joie. But, in the midst of the festivity, I observed Pantoufle's countenance loaded with some mighty secret. He broke it to me with the air of a man revealing a conspiracy. Taking me on one side, while the ramparts were blazing with blue-lights, and every man, woman, and child of the garrison were chattering, huzzaing, and waltzing round us; he communicated to me the solemn fact, that his heart had been pierced again. This execution had been done while he was waiting in Elnathan's counting-house: a young Rachel or Rebecca had accidentally glanced across his sight, with such inimitable eyes, that his fate was decided for life. The world was valueless without her; and my particular advice was requested as to the way in which he was to make his approaches. I advised a sonnet. He smiled, and acknowledged that he had anticipated my advice, and had spent an hour of that twilight, dear to love and the muses, during which he had kept me in all the discomforts of suspense, devoting all the energies of his soul to the composition of a song to the beauties of the irresistible Israelite. Boileau has told the world, that a poet once insisted on his listening to an ode of his composition, while they were kneeling together at high mass. Our situation might not be quite as solemn, but the doctor was quite as pressing; and seated on the corner of a bastion, while the guns were roaring above our heads, I listened to an effusion in the most established style of sexagenarian poetry.

"Rachel est sans désirs,
C'est un bouton de rose,
Que la nature arrose,
Et dispose à s'ouvrir.

Dans son cour sans detour,
Il n'est pas jour encore;
Il attend pour eclore
Un rayon de l'amour!"

I listened without a laugh, and won the eternal gratitude of the writer. Nothing could be clearer than that, whatever the effusion might owe to the inspiration of Cupid, Apollo had no share in its charm. On my part, it would probably have been an act of the truest friendship, to have bid him burn his tablets, forswear poetry for ever, and regard himself as forbidden the temptations of the maids of Parnassus. But I should have broken his heart. I took the simpler but more effectual cure—I bade him find out this idol, and marry her. Before I forget him and his sorrows, let me mention, that he took my advice, and that, on my return to the Continent some years after, I found the poet transferred into the benedict, with a pretty wife at his side, and a circle of lively children at his knee—an active, thriving, and rational member of the community. I always quote the doctor, for the superiority of the soothing system. The vinegar of criticism would have festered the wounds of his vanity; the art of (must I call it) flattery healed them. It left a scar, I acknowledge; for the doctor still wrote verses, and still had a lurking propensity for climbing the slippery slope of poetic renown. But the realities of life are fortunate correctives to this passion, and, like Piron, luckily

"Il ne fut rien
Pas même academician."

But on this night our "intercourse of souls" was interrupted by one of those painful evidences of the renewal of hostilities which shows war in its truest aspect. A long column of vehicles, which we had seen moving for some time across the plain, and whose movement, by the torches of the escort, looked from the ramparts like the trailing of an immense phosphoric serpent, approached the gates. The announcement was soon made that it was a large detachment of prisoners and wounded, who had arrived from the desperate but decisive battle in Flanders. All the medical officers of the garrison were immediately in requisition; and the sights which I saw, even when standing at the gate, as the carts and cars rolled over the drawbridge, were sufficient to startle feelings more used to such terrible demonstrations of the folly or the frenzy of the world. But this was no time to indulge indolent sensibilities. Of course, I have no desire to enter into the startling details of that spectacle. But mastering myself so far, as to volunteer my attendance for the time in the hospital, the thought often occurred to me, that there could be no better lesson for the love of conquest than a walk through a military hospital after the first battle.

This anxious service lasted during the greater part of the night; for the wounded amounted to little less than a thousand, both French and foreign. But as I was returning to my mattress, I recollected the countenance of a prisoner standing at the door of one of the chambers set apart for officers of the higher rank. The man put his hand to his shako, and addressed me in German;—he was one of the squadron of Hulans whom I had commanded in the Prussian retreat, and who had rejoined his regiment after the skirmish with the French dragoons. He expressed great delight in finding that I was a survivor. But "on whom was he now in attendance?" "On Major-General Count Varnhorst." He told me that the general had volunteered to join the Austrian army in the Netherlands, and taking the Hulan with him, had been wounded in covering the retreat, been found on the field, and was now in the hands of the surgeons in that chamber!

I pass briefly over this scene. I found my brave friend apparently at the point of death; he had been wounded by the sabre, trampled under horses' hoofs, and crushed in every imaginable way, in the course of the desperate defence which he made against an overwhelming force of the enemy's cavalry. The officers of the escort were loud in reports of his almost frantic gallantry; but he was now so exhausted by the length of the march as to be almost insensible: he knew no one; and his case, after a day or two, was pronounced beyond all cure. It was then that I obtained permission to watch over him, and at least provide that he should not be disturbed in his closing hours. Care is often more than science, and care succeeded in this instance, against all the ominous looks of the medical staff. I so much delighted Pantoufle, by having thus overthrown the authority of a pragmatical confrère, who had been peculiarly stern in his prognostics; that he made the proposal to me of joining him in the chances of his profession. "I shall fix myself in Paris," said he; "fame will be the inevitable consequence, and fortune will follow; here you shall be my successor." I fought off the prospect as well as I could, and pleaded my want of professional knowledge. His countenance, at the words, would have been an incomparable study of mingled burlesque and scorn. He instanced a whole crowd of leading men, whom he unceremoniously designated as having made fortunes, not by knowledge, but simply by its absence. "Their ignorance," said he, "gives them effrontery, and effrontery is the grand secret of fame. You are an Englishman and a philosopher,"—the latter expression uttered with a curl of the lip and an elevation of the brow, which evidently translated the word, a fool. "You take things circuitously, while success lies in the straight line; thus you fail, we triumph."

I admitted the rapidity of his countrymen.

"In France," said he, or rather exclaimed, "two things conduct to renown; and but two—to stop at nothing, and never to admit ignorance in any thing; in medicine, to cure or kill without delay; in surgery, to operate at all risks. If the patient dies, there are fifty reasons for it; if the surgeon hesitates, the public will allow of but one. Politics are not within my line, and the subject is just now a delicate one; but you see that the secret of renown is, to run on the edge of the scaffold. In soldiership the principle is the same—always to fight, whenever you can find any body to fight with; you will deserve to be famous, or deserve to be guillotined.'

"Perhaps both," I remarked.

"Nothing more probable. But still something is done; inaction does nothing. Look at Dumourier; he has had no more necessity for fighting this battle, than for jumping from the parapet of Notre-Dame. But he has fought, he has conquered; and, instead of throwing himself from the parapet of Notre-Dame, which he probably would have done in the next fortnight's ennui in Paris, all Paris is placarded with his bulletins."

"But he might have been beaten; he might have been ruined, or brought to trial for rashness; or to an Austrian prison, like La Fayette."

"Of course he might. But the question is of the fact—let prophets deal with the future. He has beaten the Austrians; he has conquered Flanders; he has made himself the first man of France by the act, for which, if he had been an Austrian general, he would have been brought to a court-martial, his victory pronounced contrary to rule, his bravery a breach of etiquette, and the rest of his days, if he was not shot on the ramparts of Vienna, spent in a dungeon in Prague. Take my advice; dash at every thing; risk is the grand talent—adventure, the philosopher's stone. So, listen to me; you shall be admitted to the Hotel Dieu as an élève; become my assistant, and make your fortune."

I stared at this sudden explosion of the doctor's rhetoric; but I should have remembered, that he was under the double inspiration of new-born love and reluctant rhyme.

Varnhorst at length attempted to walk as far as the ramparts, and I was enjoying the pride of being able to exhibit my patient to the garrison; when, just as we were issuing from the long and chill corridors into the fresh air and sunshine, I observed the commandant coming towards me with a peculiar air of gravity, attended by several of his officers. Bowing to Varnhorst with military etiquette, he took him aside and communicated to him a few words, which made his pale countenance look paler still. "My friend is brave," was the Prussian's reply, turning a glance to where I stood. "I have seen him in the field. I am satisfied that, wherever he is, he will do his duty."

The commandant now walked up to me, and with an air of embarrassment put a sealed letter into my hands. It was from the minister of foreign affairs, and was marked secret and immediate. I opened it, and I shall not say with what feelings I saw—an order for my attendance at the office of the minister, signed Robespierre.

If the grim majesty of death had put his signature in person to this order, it would not have borne a more mortal aspect. It was a pang! yet the pang did not continue long. Inevitable things are not the hardest to be borne. At all events, there was no time for pondering on the subject. The carriage which had brought the order and the government huissier, was at the gate. Varnhorst gave me one grasp of his honest hand as I left him; the commandant wished me "good fortune." I hurried into the carriage, and we flew on the road to Paris.

On reaching the barrier, we turned off to the quarter of the Luxembourg, and stopped at the gate of a moderate-sized house, where my conductor and I entered. I was shown into a small and simple room; where I found a man advanced in years, and of a striking aspect. He said not a word; I had no inclination to speak. The one or two hesitating syllables which I addressed to him were answered only by a bow and a look, as if he did not understand the language; and I awaited the approach of the terror of France, the horror of Europe, during half an hour, which seemed to me interminable. The door at last opened, a valet came in, and the name of "Robespierre" thrilled through every fibre; but, instead of the frowning giant to which my fancy had involuntarily attached the name, I saw a slight figure, highly dressed, and even with the air of a fop on the stage. Holding a perfumed handkerchief in one hand, which he waved towards his face like one indulging in the fragrance, and a diamond snuff-box in the other, he advanced with a sliding step; and after a sallow smile to me, and a solemn bow to the old man, congratulated himself on the "honour of the acquaintance, which he had been indebted to his friend Elnathan for making, in my person." I was all astonishment: I had come in expectation of receiving my death-warrant—I had a reception like an ambassador. I now perplexed myself with the idea, that I had been mistaken for some stranger in the foreign diplomacy; but I was instantly set right by his pronouncing my name, and making some allusions to "the influence of my family in the British Parliament."

Yet, I was still in the tiger's den, and I expected to feel the talons. I was happily disappointed; the claw was sheathed in velvet. A slight refection was brought in by an embroidered domestic, and it was evidently the wish of this tremendous demagogue to appear the man of refinement, at least in my instance.

"My friend Elnathan," said he, "has informed me that you wish to return to England?"

This was pronounced in the meekest tone of interrogatory; and, with eyes scarcely raised to either of us, he awaited my confirmation of his idea.

It was given unhesitatingly; and my glance at the countenance of the old man was answered by another, which told me that I saw the correspondent of my friend Mordecai.

"The circumstances are simply these," said the dictator in the same delicate tone; "the government has occasion to arrange some matters of importance with the British cabinet. The successes of the Republic have raised jealousies, which it is for the advantage of human nature that we should reconcile if possible. France and England are the only free countries: their hostility can only be injurious to freedom."

He paused, and his cold grey eye, after traversing the floor, was slowly raised to me.

I admitted my perfect agreement in the opinion, that "wherever national conflict could be avoided, it was the business of all rational men to maintain peace." I saw a grim smile pass over his sallow features, probably at having found another dupe. Elnathan sat in profound silence, without a muscle moved.

Robespierre, rising, took from a portfolio a letter, and put it into the Jew's hand. He now had got over that strange embarrassment with which his habitual nervousness had marked his first address, and spoke largely, and with a considerable expression of authority.

"The English government," said he, "have expressed some unnecessary uneasiness at the progress of opinion in Europe. The late victory, which has decided the fate of the Austrian Netherlands, will probably increase that uneasiness. Communications through the usual channels are slow, imperfect, and open to espionage on all sides. I have, therefore, applied to my friend Elnathan to point out some individual in whom he has perfect confidence, and through whom the communication can be made. He has named you."

Elnathan, with his huge hands clasped on his breast, and his bushy brows drawn deep over his eyes, bent forward with almost oriental affirmation.

"When will you be ready to set out for Calais?"

"This moment," was my willing answer.

"No, we are not quite prepared." He walked for a while about the room, pondering on the subject; then, turning to Elnathan, he directed the Jew to get ready some papers connected with the financial dealings which his English brethren were then beginning to carry on extensively throughout Europe. Those were to be arranged by next day, and for those I must wait.

"You shall be under the care of Elnathan," said the master of my fate. "He will obtain your passports from the Foreign Office, and you will leave Paris to-morrow evening at furthest. We must avoid all suspicion, Elnathan," said he, turning to the Jew. "Paris is a hot-bed of spies. Apropos, where do you propose to spend the evening?"

My mind glanced at Vincennes, and his eye, cold as it was, caught my startled conception.

"No, your return to-night to the fortress would only set all the tongues of Paris in motion to-morrow. You must be seen in public to-night, at the opera, the theatre, or where you will. You must figure as an Englishman travelling at his pleasure and his leisure—a Milor."

"Madame Roland gives a soiree to-night," humbly interposed the Jew.

"Ha!—that is the best of all. You must go there. You will be seen by all the world. Elnathan will introduce you to the 'philosophic lady' of the circle." He then resumed his pacing round the room. I could observe the vulpine expression of his visage, the twitching of his hands, the keen sidelong look of a man living in perpetual alarm.

We prepared to take our leave; but he now suddenly resumed the petit-maître, flourished his perfumed handkerchief again, gave a passing smile at the mirror, and offered me the honours of his snuff-box with the affectation of the stage. But, as we reached the door of the apartment, he made a long, single stride, which brought him up close to me. "Remember, sir," said he, in a stern voice, wholly unlike the past—"You have it in charge from me to inform the government of your country of the actual feeling of France. It is true that there are madmen among us—Brissotins, Girondists, and other enthusiasts—who talk of war. I tell you that they are madmen, and that I will have no war.—There may be conspirators, who think to shake the existing régime of the republic, and look to war as the means of raising themselves on its ruins.—I tell you, and you may tell your cabinet, that they will not accomplish their objects here; and that, if they accomplish them, it will be the fault and the folly alone of England. Impress those truths on the minds of your countrymen: the Republic desires no war; her principle is peace, her purpose is peace, her prosperity is peace. There will be, there shall be, there can be, no war." He folded his arms, and stood like a pillar till we withdrew.

I happened to ascertain shortly afterwards, that on this very day Robespierre had presided at a council which has sent off orders to Dumourier to open the Scheldt, the notorious and direct preliminary to war with England. Such is the sincerity of diplomacy!

I remained during the rest of the day with Elnathan. His hotel was splendid, and all that surrounded him gave the impression of great opulence; but it was obvious that he lived like a man in a gunpowder magazine. He had several sons and daughters, whom, in the terrors of the time, he had contrived to send among his connexions in Germany; and he now lived alone, his wife having been dead for some years. All his wealth could not console him for the anxiety of his position; and doubtless he would have perished long before, in the general massacre of the opulent, except for the circumstance of being the chief channel of moneyed communication between the government and Germany. In the course of our lonely but most recherché dinner, he explained to me slightly the means of my recent preservation. The police-officer had acquainted him with my being the bearer of a letter from Mordecai. The intelligence reached him just in time to save me, by a daring claim of my person as an agent of the English ministry. He had then lost sight of me, and began to think that I had perished; when the application of my friend the doctor told him where I was to be found. The message of the head of the Republic, requiring a confidential bearer of documents, struck him as affording an opportunity of my liberation; and though the palpable absurdity of my worthy friend Pantoufle prevented any communication with him, no time was lost in proposing my name to authority.

"And now," said my entertainer, after drinking my safe arrival in a bumper of imperial tokay, "En avance, for Madame Roland."

We drove to a splendid mansion in the Rue de la Revolution. The street in front was crowded with equipages, and it was with some difficulty that we could make our way through the long and stately suite of rooms. The house had belonged to the Austrian ambassador; and on the declaration of war it had been taken possession of by the Republic without ceremony.

I observed to Elnathan, that "to judge from the pomp of the furniture, republicanism was not republican every where."