BLACKWOOD’S
Edinburgh
MAGAZINE.
VOL. LXI.
JANUARY-JUNE, 1847.

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, EDINBURGH;
AND
37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.
1847.

BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCLXXV. JANUARY, 1847. Vol. LXI.

EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET;
AND 37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.
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SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCLXXV. JANUARY, 1847. Vol. LXI.

THE COURT OF LOUIS PHILIPPE.[1]

The schoolboy, agape at the tinsel splendour and seeming miracles of a holiday pantomime, longs for a peep behind the pasteboard parapets that limit his view. When the falling curtain puts a period to Clown’s malicious buffoonery and to the blunders of persecuted and long suffering Pantaloon, he marvels as to the subsequent proceedings of the lithe and agile mimes who have so gloriously diverted him. He is tempted to believe that Harlequin sleeps in his motley skin, that Columbine perpetually retains her graceful rose-wreaths and diaphanous muslin. He can hardly realize the relapse of such glittering apparitions into the prosaic humdrum of every-day life, and would gladly penetrate the veil of baize that shrouds from his eager eyes the mirth-provoking crew. Better that he should not. Sadly would his bright illusions fade, sore be his disenchantment, could he recognise the brilliant Harlequin in yon shabby-genteel gentleman issuing from the stage door, and discern her of the twinkling feet rewarding herself with a measure of Barclay for the pirouettes and entrechats that lately ravished his youthful vision.

Not unlike the boy’s desire for a peep behind the scenes, is the popular hankering after glimpses of royal privacy. The concealed is ever the coveted, the forbidden the most desired. Keep an ape under triple lock, and fancy converts her into a sylph; it was the small key, the last of the bunch, that Bluebeard’s bride most longed to use. For the multitude, the Chronicles of Courts have ever a strong and peculiar attraction. With what avidity is swallowed each trivial detail concerning princes and their companions; how anxious are the humble many to obtain an inkling of the every-day life of the great and privileged few, to dive into the recesses of palaces, and contemplate in the relaxation of the domestic circle, those who in public are environed by an imposing barrier of ceremony, pomp, and dignity. In the absence of more precise and pungent particulars, even the bald and fulsome paragraphs of a court circular find eager readers, who learn with strange interest the direction and extent of a king’s afternoon ride, and the exact hour at which some infant principule was borne abroad for an airing. Less meagre and more satisfactory nourishment is afforded to popular inquisitiveness by the writings of those who have lived in the intimacy of courts. Seldom, however, do such appear during the lifetime both of the writer and of the personages to whom they chiefly refer, and when they do they are often valueless, further than as a sop to public curiosity. Truth is rarely told of kings by those who enjoy, seek, or hope aught from their favour. These split upon the reefs of flattery, as a disgraced courtier does upon those of spite and disappointed ambition. And again, history affords us examples of men, who, having, through misconduct or misfortune, lost the countenance of their sovereign, resorted, to regain his good graces, to shameless adulation and servile panegyric.

We do not include in any of the three categories just named, the author of the book before us. We should not be justified in attributing to interested motives his praises of his former patrons; but believe, on the contrary, that, although familiar with courts, he is no mere courtier. Had he been more of one, his fortunes might now be better. From a very early age, Monsieur Appert devoted himself to the prosecution of philanthropic plans and researches, having for their chief objects the amelioration of the condition of the lower classes, the reform of convicts, the education of the army, and that of children who, by the desertion or vices of their parents, are left destitute and unprotected. He has frequently been employed by the French government, and has occupied various important posts. When only one-and-twenty, he was appointed director of a model-school for the army. With reference to his humane schemes, he has published many volumes on the education of soldiers and orphans, on the prisons, schools, and other correctional and benevolent institutions of France. With these we have nothing to do. His present book is of a lighter and more generally interesting character. For ten years he held the office of almoner to the Queen of the French, and to her sister-in-law, Madame Adelaide. The charities of these royal ladies are, as we shall presently show, on a truly princely scale. To this almonership no salary was attached; M. Appert performed its arduous duties gratuitously, and esteemed himself well rewarded by the confidence and good opinion of the illustrious persons he served. His income from other sources was ample; his position honourable, and even distinguished; his friends, true or false, were reckoned by hundreds. But misfortune, swift of foot, overtook him in the zenith of his prosperity. Heavy pecuniary losses, chiefly resulting, as he implies rather than informs us, from ill-advised loans and generous assistance to unworthy persons, impaired his means. Concerning his disgrace at court, he is more explicit. He attributes it to the envy and intrigues of courtiers, against whom, as a class, he bitterly inveighs. That his office was one well calculated to make him enemies, if he conscientiously fulfilled its duties, is made evident by various passages in his book. During ten years that he was in the daily habit of seeing them, and of distributing the greater portion of their charities, the queen and Madame Adelaide, he tells us, never made him the slightest reproach; but, on the contrary, invariably approved his proposals and requests, none of which, he adds, tended to his personal advantage. The king, on various important occasions, showed great confidence in him, and a strong sympathy with his philanthropic labours. Nevertheless, the occult, but strong and persevering influence employed against M. Appert, at last prevailed, and he was removed from the court, laden with costly presents from the royal family, who assured him that they would never forget, but always acknowledge, his long and devoted services. After his disgrace, he sold a villa he possessed at Neuilly, and left Paris, with the intention of founding an experimental colony of released convicts, and of the children of criminals. Whether this experiment was carried out, and how far it succeeded, he does not inform us. He is now travelling in Germany, visiting the schools, prisons, and military institutions, and writing books concerning them. The King of Prussia has received him favourably, and given him every encouragement; the sovereigns of Belgium, Denmark, Bavaria, Saxony, and Wurtemberg, have written him flattering letters, and promised him all facilities and assistance during the stay he proposes making in their respective dominions.

It was at Berlin, in the spring of the present year, that M. Appert completed, after very brief labour, his three volumes of Memoirs. He confesses that they were written in haste, and whilst his mind was preoccupied with the objects of his German tour. This is to be regretted, for the result proves that the work was too quickly done to be well done. The motive of his precipitation is unexplained, and we are not told why it was necessary to complete, by the 15th of March, a book destined to appear but in late autumn. Did the snail-wagen pace of the German buchdruckerei need half a year for the printing of a thousand pages? Surely not; and surely M. Appert might have given himself a little more time,—have indulged us with more detail,—have produced, instead of a hasty outline, a finished picture. His materials were ample, his subject most interesting; he is no novice in the craft of authorship. Besides his opportunities of observation at court, he has enjoyed the acquaintance, in many cases the intimacy, of a vast number of notable persons, military, diplomatic, scientific, literary. Ministers and deputies, peers of France and nobles of the old regime, generals of the empire and distinguished foreigners, were reckoned upon his list of friends; many of them were regular partakers of his periodical dinners at his Paris hotel and his Neuilly villa. It was in his power, we are convinced, to have produced a first-rate book of its class, instead of these hasty and unsatisfactory sketches. Each night, he tells us, especially since the year 1826, when he was first attached to the Orleans family, he wrote down, before retiring to rest, the events of the day. And yet such is his haste to huddle over his work that he cannot wait to receive his voluminous memoranda and correspondence, but trusts entirely to his memory. As far as it goes, this serves him pretty well. “Whilst correcting the last page of these souvenirs, I have received the enormous mass of notes and autograph letters which ought to have been of great utility in the composition of the book; and, on referring to the various documents, I am surprised to find that my memory has served me faithfully upon every subject of interest, and that I have nothing to rectify in what I have written.” Nothing, perhaps, to rectify, but much, we should think, to add. Monsieur Appert’s notes, judging from one or two verbatim specimens, were both copious and minute, and must include very many interesting particulars and anecdotes of the remarkable persons with whom he came in contact during the varied phases of a busy and bustling life. Could he not, without indelicacy or breach of confidence, have given us more of such particulars? His memoirs would have gained in value had he deferred their publication some ten or fifteen years; for then many now living would have disappeared from the scene, and he might have spoken freely of things and persons concerning whom he now deems it prudent or proper to be silent. But personal recollections of the present French court, even when loosely and imperfectly set down, cannot fail to command attention and excite interest. And much that is novel and curious may be culled from M. Appert’s pages, although we regret, as we peruse them, that they should have suffered from too great haste and an overstrained discretion.

M. Appert opens his memoirs in the year 1807, in the prosperous days of Napoleon, whose ardent admirer he is. The earlier chapters of his book, relating to the Empire and the Restoration, have less to recommend them than the later ones, and we shall pass them rapidly over. At the age of fifteen he became a pupil of the imperial school of drawing. Here he carried off the first prizes, was made sub-professor, and hopes were held out to him that he should take a share in the education of the King of Rome. But this was in 1812; the decline of the empire had begun, Russia had given the first blow to Napoleon’s seemingly resistless power;—the hopes of the young professor were never realized. Upon the return of the Bourbons, after Waterloo, he lost his sub-professorship, on account of his well-known Bonapartism; and because, whilst giving a lesson in mathematics, he employed, to mark the curves and angles of a geometrical figure, letters which made up the words “vive l’Empereur!” Soon afterwards, however, he again obtained occupation, although of a far humbler description than that to which he had once aspired. He was employed in the organization of elementary and military schools, upon the plan of mutual instruction. In this he was most successful, and his reports to the Minister of war proved that, in three years, one hundred thousand men might be taught to read, write, and cipher, at the small expense of three hundred thousand francs, or half-a-crown per man. In 1820, although then only twenty-three years old, he was intrusted with the inspection of the regimental schools of the royal guard and first military division; and his connexion with the army brought him acquainted with many of the Bonapartist plots at that time rife. Although often confided in by the conspirators, who were aware of his attachment to the Emperor, he took share in none of their abortive schemes for placing Napoleon the Second on the throne of France; but, nevertheless, he was looked upon with suspicion by the government of the Bourbons. Still, however, he was permitted to become the director, without a salary, of a school established in the prison at Montaigu, appropriated to military criminals. To this prison, in the year 1822, were sent two non-commissioned officers, by name Mathieu and Conderc, implicated in the conspiracy for which General Berton lost his head. Yielding to his sympathies and to the prayers of these two young men, who were bent upon escape or suicide, M. Appert promised to assist their flight. He did so, successfully, and the consequence was his own imprisonment at La Force, where he was placed in the room subsequently occupied by the poet Beranger. Pending his trial, he had for servant a celebrated thief of the name of Doré, of whom Vidocq, the thief-taker, more than once makes mention in his curious books. This Doré, who, for a robber, was a very decent fellow, and who served M. Appert with the greatest punctuality and fidelity, once had the audacity, alone and unassisted, save by his own ingenuity, to stop a diligence full of passengers. With a skill that would have made him an invaluable confederate for a London or Paris kite-flyer, he constructed several excellent men of straw, the size of life, and quite as natural—at least in the dark. These he invested with the needful toggery—neither fresh nor fashionable, we presume, but serving the purpose. Finally, he fastened sticks, intended to represent muskets, to the shoulders of the figures, which he posted in a row against trees bordering the high road. Up came the diligence. “Halt!” shouted Doré, in the voice of a Stentor; “Halt! or my men fire!” The frightened driver pulled up short; conductor and passengers, seeing a row of figures with levelled fire-arms, thought they had fallen into the power of a whole army of banditti, and begged for mercy. Doré came forward in the character of a generous protector, sternly ordered his men to abstain from violence and remain where they were, and collected from the trembling and intimidated passengers their purses, watches, and jewels. “I forbid you to fire,” he shouted to his quaker gang, whilst pocketing the rich tribute; “they make no resistance; I will have no useless blood-shed.” The conductor, delighted to save a large sum of money secreted in a chest, quietly submitted: the passengers were too happy to get off with whole skins, and the women thanked the spoiler, called him a humane man, and almost kissed him, out of gratitude for him sparing their lives. The plunder collected, the driver received permission to continue his journey, which he did at full speed, lest the banditti should change their minds and forget their forbearance. Doré made his escape unmolested, leaving his straw regiment on picket by the road side, a scarecrow, till daybreak, to the passing traveller.

The few persons acquainted with M. Appert’s share in the escape of Mathieu and Conderc, proved stanch upon his trial: nothing could be proved against him, and he was acquitted. The affair gave rise to long and bitter controversy between the Liberal and Royalist newspapers. Of course M. Appert lost his place under government, and he now had full leisure to busy himself with his philanthropic investigations. To these he devoted his time; but the police looked upon him as a dangerous character, and, in May, 1823, orders were again issued for his arrest. Forewarned, he escaped by the garden-gate at the very moment that his pursuers knocked at the front door. The cause for which he was persecuted, that of Bonapartism and liberal opinions—the anti-Bourbon cause, in short—made him many friends, and he had no difficulty in concealing himself, although prudence compelled him frequently to change his hiding-place. One of his first retreats was the house of Lafayette, then looked upon as an arch conspirator, and closely watched by the police, but who, nevertheless, afforded a willing shelter to young Appert. A happy week was passed by the latter in the hotel and constant society of the venerable general.

“I had his coachman’s room, and a livery in readiness to put on, in case of an intrusion on the part of the police. I dined with him tête-a-tête, and we spent the evenings together; the porter telling all visiters, excepting relatives and intimate friends, that the general was at his country house of La Grange.

“Monsieur de Lafayette’s conversation was most interesting, his language well chosen, his narrative style simple and charming; his character was gay and amiable, his physiognomy respectable and good. His tone, and every thing about him, indicated good humour, kindness, and dignity, and the habit of the best society. He had the exquisitely polished manners of the old regime, blent with those of the highest classes of the present day. His vast information, the numerous anecdotes of his well-filled life, his immense acquaintance with almost all the celebrated persons in the world, his many and curious voyages, the great events in which he had borne a leading part, the historical details that he alone could give on events not yet written down in history, constituted an inexhaustible conversational treasure, and I look upon it as one of the happiest circumstances of my life to have passed a week in the intimacy of that excellent and noble general.”

All, however, that M. Appert thinks proper to record in print of these anecdotes, historical details, &c., consists of a short conversation with M. Lafayette, who predicted the final downfall of the Bourbons, and the advent of a more liberal order of things. In 1828, many besides Lafayette were ready with the same prophecy. M. Appert then asked the general whether, in the event of a revolution, the Duke of Orleans, who appeared sincerely liberal, who encouraged the progress of art and science, sent his sons to the public colleges, cultivated the opposition members, and was generally popular with the advocates of the progress, might not become King of France.

“‘My dear Appert,’ replied the general, ‘what you say is very true, and I myself greatly esteem the Duke of Orleans. I believe him sincere in his patriotism, his children are very interesting, his wife is the best of women. But one can answer for nothing in times of revolution. Nevertheless, the Duke would have many chances in his favour; and for my part, were I consulted, I should certainly vote for him.’

“Seven years after this curious conversation, which I wrote down at the time, General Lafayette still entertained, and expressed at the Hotel de Ville, the same opinion of the Duke of Orleans, now King of the French.”

From Lafayette, M. Appert transferred himself to the Duchess of Montebello, the ex-lady of honour and confidential friend of the Empress Maria Louisa. In her hotel he abode a month, and then went into the country. After a while, the police, who, by not capturing him, had shown great negligence or impotence, discontinued their persecutions, and he was again able to appear in public.

To arrive the sooner at the reign of Louis Philippe, M. Appert does little more than briefly recapitulate the principal events of the last few years of the Restoration, introducing, however, here and there, a remark or anecdote not unworthy of note. Take the following, as a Frenchman’s opinion of the military promenade of 1823, and of its leader, the Duke d’Angoulême.

“The battles were unimportant, our troops showed themselves brave as ever; but, in order to flatter the prince, so much fuss was made about the military feats of this campaign, about the passage of a bridge, for instance, that all sensible men in France and throughout Europe, laughed to hear so much noise for such small conquests. At last the Duke of Angoulême returned to Paris; entertainments were given him, triumphal arches erected, Louis XVIII. and the Count d’Artois told him he was the greatest captain of the age; the old generals of the empire, now become courtiers and flatterers, added the incense of their praise to the royal commendations. The poor prince came to believe that he really was a great warrior. A lie, by dint of repetition, acquires the semblance of a truth, especially when it flatters our self-love, our vanity and pride. Behold, then, Louis Antoine, Fils de France, a greater captain than Bayard or Turenne. Napoleon I do not name; of him the Restoration had made a Corsican marquis, who had had the honour to serve, with some distinction and bravery, in the French army under the orders of the princes, during the reign H.M. Louis XVIII., King of France and Navarre.

“Before his departure for this famous war, the Duke of Angoulême’s disposition was simple, modest, and good; when he returned he was subject to absence of mind and to fits of passion, and his understanding appeared weakened. Exaggerated praise, like a dizzy height, often turns the head.

“Louis XVIII., long a sufferer from the gout, at last died, and Monsieur became king under the title of Charles X. The priests and ultra-royalists rejoiced; they thought their kingdom was come.”

In another place we find a description of the personal appearance of the valiant commander, who, duly dry-nursed and tutored by his major-general, Count Guilleminot, won imperishable laurels in the great fight of the Trocadero. “Short in stature, and red in the face, his look was absent, his gait and shape were ungraceful, his legs short and thin.” M. Appert describes a visit paid by the duke, then dauphin, to his cousins at the Palais Royal. “This visit, a rare favour, lasted about twenty minutes, and when the Duchess of Orleans, according to established etiquette, had replaced the dauphine’s cloak, the duke and duchess conducted their illustrious visiters to the first step of the grand staircase. Here the dauphin had a fit of absence, for, instead of saying adieu, he repeated several times ‘word of honour, word of honour.’ The dauphine took hold of his arm and they returned to their carriage.” This absent man is next shown to us in a very unprincely and unbecoming passion, for which, however, he received a proper wigging from his royal dad. The anecdote is worth extracting.

“The sentries at the gates of the château of St. Cloud had orders to allow no person in plain clothes and carrying a parcel, to enter the private courts and gardens. One of the dauphin’s servants, not in livery, wished to pass through a door kept by the Swiss guards. The sentry would not allow it, and the servant appealed to the subaltern on guard, who was pacing up and down near the gate. ‘You may be one of Monseigneur’s servants,’ the officer politely replied, ‘and that parcel may, as you say, belong to His Royal Highness, but I do not know you, and I must obey orders.’ The lacquey got angry, was insolent, and attempted to force a passage. Thereupon, the officer, a young man of most estimable character, pushed him sharply away, and told him that if he renewed the attempt he should be sent to the guard-house.

“From his window the dauphin saw admission refused to his servant. Without reflection or inquiry, he ran down stairs like a madman, went up to the lieutenant, abused him violently, without listening to his defence, and at last so far forgot himself as to tear off his epaulets, and threaten him with his sword. Then the officer, indignant at seeing himself thus dishonoured in front of his men, when in fact he had done no more than his duty, took two steps backwards, clapped hand on hilt, and exclaimed, ‘Monseigneur, keep your distance!’ Just then, the dauphine, informed of this scene, hurried down, and carried off her husband to his apartments. ‘I entreat you, sir,’ said she to the officer, ‘forget what has passed! You shall hear further from me.’

“The same evening the king was told of this affair, which might have had very serious consequences, for all the officers of the Swiss guards were about to send in their resignations. As ex-colonel-general of the Swiss, Charles X. was too partial to them not to reprimand his son severely for the scandal he had caused. To make the matter up, and give satisfaction to the corps of officers, he desired the dauphine to send for the insulted lieutenant, and, in presence of that princess, who anxiously desired to see her husband’s unpardonable act atoned for and forgotten, the king addressed the young officer with great affability. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘my son has behaved most culpably towards you, and towards me, your former colonel-general. Accept these captain’s epaulets, which I have great pleasure in offering you, and forget the past?’ With much emotion the dauphine added a few gracious words, and the officer, not without reluctance, continued in the royal guard as captain. The dauphin, who was good in the main, did not fail, the next time he saw the new made captain, to offer him his hand in sign of reconciliation, and, by a singular chance, this officer was one of the last Swiss on duty with the royal family when it departed for Cherbourg on its way into exile.”

How striking the picture of regal dignity here presented to us! The heir to the French throne scuffling in his own palace yard with a subaltern of foreign mercenaries, and rescued by his wife from possible chastisement at the hands of his opponent. The king compelled to apologize for his son’s misconduct, and almost to crave the acceptance of a captain’s commission as plaster for the wounded honour of the Swiss guardsman. There is an unmistakeable Bourbon character about the story. And truly, both in great things and small, what a pitiful race of kings were those older Bourbons! Fit only to govern some petty German state of a few dozen square miles, where they might revel in etiquette, surround themselves with priests and flatterers, and play by turns the tyrant and the fool. High time was it that a more vigorous branch should oust them from the throne of a Francis, a Henry, and a Napoleon. The hour of their downfal was at hand, although they, as ever, were blind to the approaching peril. And little thought the glittering train of gay courtiers and loyal ladies who thronged to Rheims to the coronation of Charles the Tenth, that this ceremony was the last sacrifice offered to the last descendant of St. Louis, and that the corpse of Louis XVIII. would wait in vain, in the regal vault at St. Denis, for that of his successor.[2]

In 1826, M. Appert was elected member of the Royal Society of Prisons, of which the Dauphin was president, and about the same time he became a frequent visiter at the Palais Royal. The Duke of Orleans took much notice of him, and begged him to pay particular attention to the schools and prisons upon his extensive domains. Madame Adelaide (Mademoiselle d’Orleans, as she was then styled) desired his assistance for the establishment of a school near her castle of Randan; and the Duchess of Orleans craved his advice in the distribution of her charities. He passed some time at Randan, where the whole Orleans family were assembled, and he describes their rational, cheerful, and simple manner of life. It was that of opulent and well-educated country gentlemen, hospitable, charitable, and intellectual. Kingly cares had not yet wrinkled the brow of Louis Philippe; neither had sorrow, anxiety, and alarm furrowed the cheeks of the virtuous Marie Amélie. “At that time, both Mademoiselle and Monseigneur were gay and cheerful. Since royalty has replaced that life of princely retirement, I have never seen them enjoy such calm and tranquil days; I might say, never such happy ones.” From Randan, M. Appert started on a tour to the south of France, and to visit the galleys. When he returned to Paris, he undertook to assist the Duchess of Orleans and Mademoiselle in their charities; and from that time he saw them every two or three days, sometimes oftener. At last came the July Revolution. The Orleans family were at Neuilly, and whilst the result of the fight between king and people was still uncertain, the duke, apprehensive of violence from the royalist party, shut himself up in a little pavilion in the park. There his wife and sister secretly visited him, and took him the news as it arrived from Paris. From his retreat, he plainly heard the din of battle raging in the streets of the capital. On the 28th of July, a cannon-ball, fired from Courbevoye, fell near the palace, and at a short distance from the duchess and her sister-in-law. There could be little doubt of the intention of the shot. This circumstance made Mademoiselle think, that in their fury the royalists might attack Neuilly, and carry off the family. Accordingly, the duke, accompanied only by his faithful adherent Oudard, left his retreat, and crossed the country on foot to Raincy, another of his seats, situated near Bondy. This was on the 29th July; the duke was dressed very simply, and wore a gray hat with a tri-colored cockade. As soon as the cannon shot was fired from Courbevoye, Mademoiselle said to the duchess, “My dear, we cannot stand by those people any longer; they massacre the mob, and fire at us; we must take a decided part.” Hastening to her wardrobe, she tore up several silk dresses, white, blue, and red, made them into cockades, and distributed them to the household. From that moment, it is evident, that if the royalists had had the upper hand, the house of Orleans was ruined.

On their way to Raincy, the duke and Oudard fell in with a peasant, digging his field as if nothing extraordinary was occurring. They asked him the news. “Ma foi, Monsieur,” replied the man, “they say that the people are thrashing the royal guard, that those stupid Bourbons have run, and that liberty will once more triumph.”

“And the Duke of Orleans?” was the next question. “What do they say of him?”

“No doubt he is with his cousins, since he has not shown himself at his Palais Royal. He’s no better than the rest; a fine talker, and nothing else.”

Not overpleased at the peasant’s reply, the duke asked no more questions, but continued his pedestrian journey. Forty-eight hours afterwards, however, he was at the Palais Royal, with the men of July for his body-guard; and ten days later he was King of the French. How far he owed his elevation to intrigues and manœuvres of his own—how far he had aimed at the crown which thus suddenly settled upon his brows—are questions that have been much discussed, but never satisfactorily elucidated. M. Appert’s opinion is worth recording. To us it appears a temperate and rational one.

“I consider it proved that the Duke of Orleans did not, as many believe, work for the overthrow of his cousins. As a shrewd and clever man, he could not forget the chances given to his family by the retrograde policy of the Bourbons; he remembered that he had five sons, brought up in the public colleges, partaking the intelligence and opinions of the rising generation, and therefore secure of public sympathy; he bore in mind also, that the Duke of Bordeaux, who alone stood above his sons, in the sense of legitimacy, but far below them in the opinion of the masses, was still very young, and liable to the diseases of childhood. All these were so many motives for him to court that popularity which the Tuileries each day lost. He did not omit to do so. He showed himself cordial and affable with the popular members of the Chambers, adopted and sustained the system of mutual instruction, which was protected by the liberal section of the nation, in opposition to the priests, and founded schools on that plan on his estates. A generous patron of artists and men of letters, for political refugees, Poles, Greeks, and Italians, he was ever ready to subscribe. In short, without conspiring, the Duke of Orleans did as much to advance the royal destiny of his family as the elder branch, by a completely contrary line of conduct, did to compromise theirs.”

If these were the sole arts and conjurations used by Louis Philippe to compass his ends, certainly no crown was ever more fairly come by than his. And verily so uneasy a station, so thorny a seat as that of King of the French, was scarce worth more active efforts; it would have been dearly bought by a sacrifice of honour and principle. The life of Louis Philippe, is one of incessant toil and anxiety; his leisure is less, his work harder, than that of his meanest subject. Late to bed, he rises early, rarely sleeping more than four hours; after a careful, but rapid toilet, his day’s labour begins. He seldom breakfasts with his family; it would take too much time; but has his frugal repast brought on a tray to the room where he happens to be. When he was Duke of Orleans, he read all the letters and petitions addressed to him, writing upon each an opinion or an order for the guidance of his secretaries. This practice he was of course obliged to discontinue when he became king. At the commencement of his reign, the number of letters and applications of various kinds, sent to the different members of the royal family, amounted to the astonishing number of a thousand or twelve hundred a-day. Although, upon an average, not above fifty of these possessed the least interest, or deserved an answer, the mere reading and classing of such a chaos of correspondence gave employment to several secretaries. After a while, the flood of petitions abated, but M. Appert estimates them, in ordinary times, at six to eight hundred daily. Of the letters, only the important ones are laid before the King, who answers many of them himself. He examines the reports, projects, and nominations brought to him by his ministers, and, at least twice or thrice a-week, presides at the council-board. Private audiences occupy much of his time; his conferences with architects, with the intendants of the civil list and of his private estates, are of frequent occurrence. The galleries of Versailles, and the improvements at Fontainebleau—all made after his plans, and in great measure under his personal superintendence—court-balls and dinners, diplomatic audiences, correspondence with foreign courts, journeys of various kinds, visits to the castle of Eu and to military camps—such are a portion of the innumerable claims upon the time of the King of the French. But, by a clear-headed, active, and earnest man, endowed with the faculty of order, which Louis Philippe possesses in a very high degree, much is to be got through in a day of twenty hours; and, after doing all that has been enumerated, and many other things of less importance, the king still finds time to devote to his family, for the necessary healthful exercise, and for the perusal of the principal newspapers and publications, both English and foreign. “Each morning, either before or after breakfast, all the newspapers, political pamphlets, even caricatures, were laid upon the table, and the king and the princes were the first to read aloud the articles published against them. They examined the caricatures, and passed them to the bystanders, saying, ‘What do you think of this?’”

The taunt of parsimony has ever been prominent amongst the weapons of offence employed against the July monarchy by the French opposition press. The avarice of the Civil List, the candle-end economies of the Château, the maigre chère of M. de Montalivet, have been harped upon till they have become bywords in the mouths of the mob, always eager to detect the petty failings of their superiors. They have been a fertile subject of pun, sneer, and witticism for those pasquinading periodicals which care little for truth or justice so long as they can tickle the popular palate, and keep up their circulation; a perfect treasure for such loose and ephemeral prints as the Charivari and the Corsaire, the Figaro and the Tintamarre. Even graver journals, the dull and fanatical organs of the Legitimatists, have, in a graver tone, made scornful reference to degrading and unkingly avarice, whilst that witty monomaniac, the editor of the “Mode,” has launched the keen shafts of his unsparing ridicule against the mesquinerie of the usurping princes. It is easy to get up and sustain such a cry as this, against which it would be beneath the dignity of the persons assailed, and of their newspaper organs, to contend; and, when supported by a rattling fire of squib and jeer, daily printed for the reading of a people who, of all others, are most apt to prefer their jest to their friend, it is any thing but surprising that a fabrication should acquire credit, a falsehood be accepted as truth. We believe there is no ground for accusing the Orleans family of avarice. True, they do not, in imitation of some of their predecessors, indulge in a reckless prodigality, and squander enormous sums upon profligate courtiers and lewd women. They better understand the proper distribution of their great wealth. They do not gamble, or maintain petites maisons, or establish a Parc-aux-cerfs, or commit any other of the disgraceful extravagancies for which so many Bourbons have made themselves conspicuous. In this respect they have improved upon the traditions even of their own house. Louis Philippe must be admitted to be a great improvement, both as a private and public man, upon his dissolute and disreputable forefathers, even by those bitter and malicious foes who convert his habits of order and proper economy into a grave offence. We learn from M. Appert to what extent he sins in these particulars. To preserve his health, which is excellent, he lives very simply. At dinner, he rarely eats any thing but soup and a solid slice of roast beef; but the twenty-five or thirty persons who daily surround his board are subjected to no such frugal diet. The royal table is perfectly well served; the wines, especially, are old and delicious, and the king takes as much care of his guests as if he were a private gentleman giving a dinner. The intendant of the household submits each day’s bill of fare for the queen’s approval. Such, at least, was the custom in the time of M. Appert, whose personal experience of the court, as far as we can judge from his Memoirs,—for he is sparing of dates,—extends up to the year 1837.

“The king takes particular care of his clothes; and I once saw him in a very bad humour because he had torn his coat against a door. The papers in his private study, the books in his library, are arranged with great order, and he does not like to have their places changed in his absence. Whilst conversing, his majesty amuses himself by making envelopes for letters, and often makes those for the large despatches serve twice, by turning them. He has the habit of wasting nothing, not even a thing of small value, that can again be made available. He loves neither play nor field-sports: of an evening, in his domestic circle, he sometimes amuses himself with a game at billiards, but seldom for long together; for it is very rare that he can get more than an hour to himself, uninterrupted by the arrival of important despatches, by the visits of ministers or foreign ambassadors.”

We discern nothing very reprehensible in the harmless little peculiarities here enumerated. It may be stingy and unkingly to dislike being robbed, and in that case Louis Philippe is to blame, for we are told that he keeps a watchful eye over the expenses of his household. On the other hand, he is generous to prodigality in the repairs and embellishments of his palaces and domains; thus giving employment to many, and preparing for posterity monuments of his magnificence and of his princely encouragement of the artists and men of genius of his day. He has no abstract love of gold, no partiality for gloating over money-bags: his expenses, on the contrary, often exceed his income, and entail debts upon his civil list and private fortune. He has an open hand for his friends, a charitable heart for the poor. Party feeling should not blind us to private virtue. Even those who least admire the public conduct of Louis Philippe, who dislike his system of government, and blame his tortuous foreign policy, may, whilst censuring the conduct of the king, admit and admire the good qualities of the individual.

“I remember,” says M. Appert, when speaking of the subordinate officers of the royal household, “that one of these gentlemen, having amassed, a great deal too rapidly, a certain competency, asked the king’s permission to leave his service, and return to his own province, where an aunt, he said, had left him a pretty income. ‘I have not the least objection,’ replied his majesty; ‘I only hope that I have not been your uncle!’” And with this good-humoured remark, the heir, whether of dead aunt or living uncle, was allowed to retire upon his new-found fortune. Another anecdote, highly characteristic of him of whom it is told, may here be introduced. The burial-place of the house of Orleans is at Dreux. From an exaggerated feeling of regard or friendship, or whatever it may be called, the dowager-duchess, mother of the king, inserted in her will an earnest wish, indeed an injunction, that her intendant, M. de Folleville, should be buried in the outer vault, which precedes that of the Orleans family, and that a slab with his name and quality should close his grave. The king duly complied with his mother’s wish, but caused the inscribed side of the slab to be placed inwards, thus fulfilling the desire of the duchess without exposing her to the ill-natured comments of future generations.

M. Appert takes us even into the royal bed-chamber. He does so with all proper discretion, and we will venture to follow him thither.

“The king and queen always occupy the same bed, which is almost as broad as it is long, but whose two halves are very differently composed. On one side is a plain horse-hair mattress, on the other an excellent feather-bed. The latter is for the queen. The princes and princesses are accustomed, like the king, to sleep on a single mattress. There is always a light in their majesties’ apartment, and two pistols are placed upon a table near the king.”

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown!” In this instance, however, the pistol practice is the result probably of an old habit rather than of any apprehension of a night attack upon the Tuileries. We have passed the days when kings were stabbed in their beds or poisoned in their cups; and the attempts of the Fieschis and Lecomtes do not appear to prey upon the robust health or dwell upon the imagination of their intended victim. With Marie Amélie it is very different. The anxieties and sorrows she has experienced since 1830 have been terrible; and doubtless she has wished many times that her husband had never exchanged his retirement at Neuilly, his circle of friends at the Palais Royal, for his present exalted but difficult and dangerous station. “Ah! M. Appert,” she more than once exclaimed, “he who invented the proverb, ‘Happy as a king,’ had certainly never worn a crown!” When we contemplate the careworn and suffering, but benevolent and interesting countenance of the virtuous Queen of the French, and call to mind all her trials during the last fifteen years, the constant attempts on the king’s life, the death of the Princess Mary and of the much-loved Duke of Orleans, and the perils incurred by her other sons in Africa, how can we doubt the sincerity of this exclamation? In unaffected piety, and in charity that blushes to be seen, this excellent princess finds consolation. M. Appert becomes enthusiastic when he speaks of her unassuming virtues, to which, however, his testimony was scarcely needed. None, we believe, not even her husband’s greatest enemies, have ever ventured to deny them.

“The queen disposes of five hundred thousand francs a-year for all her personal expenses; and certainly she gives more than four hundred thousand in charity of all kinds. ‘M. Appert,’ she would sometimes say to me, ‘give those five hundred francs, we spoke of, but put them down upon next month’s list, for the waters are low, my purse is empty.’” Imposture, ingratitude, even the insolent form of the petitions addressed to her, fail to discourage her in her benevolent mission. “Madam,” an old Bonapartist lady one day wrote to her, “if the Bourbons had not returned to France—for the misfortune of the nation—my beloved mistress and protectress, the Empress Maria Louisa, would still be upon the throne, and I should not be under the humiliating necessity of telling you that I am without bread, and that the wretched mattress upon which I sleep is about to be thrown out of the garret I inhabit, because my year’s rent is unpaid! I dare not ask you for assistance, for my heart is with my real sovereign, and I cannot promise you my gratitude. If, however, you think proper to preserve a life which, since the misfortunes of my country, has been so full of bitterness, I will accept a loan: I should blush to receive a gift. I am, madam, your servant, Ch——r.”

Here was a pretty letter to set before a queen; a mode of imploring alms that might well have disgusted the most charitable. But what was Maria Amélie’s reply to the precious epistle. She was accustomed to open all the petitions addressed to her—and numerous indeed they were—with her own hand, and to write upon many of them instructions for M. Appert. When the impertinent missive of the Bonapartist reached that gentleman, the following lines had been added to it:—“She must be very unhappy for she is very unjust. A hundred francs to be sent to her immediately; and I beg M. Appert to make inquiries concerning this lady’s circumstances.” M. Appert, indignant at the tone of the letter, ventured to remonstrate; but the queen insisted, and even tripled her intended donation, in case it should be required by her singular petitioner, whom her almoner accordingly proceeded to visit. “I knocked at a worm-eaten door, on the fifth floor of a house in the Rue St. André des Arts, and a lady dressed in black (it was her only gown,) opened it.

“‘Sir,’ said she, much agitated, ‘are you the commissary of police come to arrest me for my shameful letter to the queen? You must forgive me: I am so unhappy that at times I become deranged. I am sorry to have written as I did to a princess whom all the poor call good and charitable.’

“‘Be not alarmed, madam,’ I replied, taking her petition from my pocket. ‘Read her majesty’s orders; they will enable you to judge of her better than any thing I could tell you.’

“Madame C. read the affecting words added by the queen; then, bursting into tears, she pressed the paper to her lips. ‘Sir,’ she exclaimed, ‘give me nothing, but leave me this holy relic. I will die of hunger with it upon my heart.’

“Madame C. proving in all respects worthy of the queen’s generosity, I left her the three hundred francs, but had much difficulty in prevailing on her to give up the petition, which I still preserve with respect and veneration. This trait of the Queen of the French is only one of ten thousand.”

Madame Adelaide d’Orleans vies in charity with her sister-in-law; and, although she has no separate establishment at Paris, but lives always with the king, her generosity and the expenses of frequent journeys, and of a certain retinue which she is compelled to maintain, have sometimes caused her temporary embarrassments. “Thus is it,” she one day said to M. Appert, with reference to a loan she had contracted, “that royalty enriches us. People ask what the king does with his money, and to satisfy them, it would be necessary to publish the names of honourable friends of liberty, who, in consequence of misfortunes, have solicited and obtained from him sums of twenty, thirty, forty, and even of three hundred thousand francs. They forget all the extraordinary expenses my brother has had to meet, all the demands he has to comply with. Out of his revenues he has finished the Palais Royal, improved the appanages of the house of Orleans, and yet, sooner or later, all that property will revert to the State. When we returned to France, our inheritance was so encumbered, that my brother was advised to decline administering to the estate; but to that neither he nor I would consent. For all these things, people make no allowance. Truly, M. Appert, we know not how to act to inspire the confidence which our opinions and our consciences tell us we fully deserve.”

This was spoken on the 23d January, 1832, and written down the same evening, by M. Appert. Madame Adelaide had then been too short a time a king’s sister, to have become acquainted with the bitters as well as the sweets of that elevated position,—to have experienced the thorns that lurk amongst the roses of a crown. Doubtless she has since learned, that calumny, misrepresentation, and unmerited censure, are inevitable penalties of royalty, their endurance forming part of the moral tax pitilessly levied upon the great ones of the earth.

So liberal an almsgiver as the Queen of the French, and one whose extreme kindness of heart is so universally known, is of course peculiarly liable to imposition; and the principal duty of M. Appert was to investigate the merits of the claimants on the royal bounty, and to prevent it, as far as possible, from passing into unworthy hands. For this office his acquaintance with the prisons and galleys, with the habits, tricks, and vices of the poor, peculiarly fitted him. He discovered innumerable deceits, whose authors had hoped, by their assistance, to extract an undeserved dole from the coffers of the queen. Literary men, assuming that designation on the strength of an obscure pamphlet or obscene volume, and who, when charity was refused them, often demanded a bribe to exclude a venomous attack on the royal family from the columns of some scurrilous journal; sham refugees from all countries; old officers, whose campaigns had never taken them out of Paris, and whose red ribbon, given to them by l’Autre, on the field of Wagram or Marengo, was put into their button-hole on entering the house, and hastily taken out on leaving it, lest the police should inquire what right they had to its wear: such were a few of the many classes of imposters detected by M. Appert. One insatiable lady sent, regularly every day, two or three petitions to various members of the royal family, considering them as so many lottery tickets, sure, sooner or later, to bring a prize. She frankly confessed to M. Appert the principle she went upon. “Petitions,” she said, “like advertisements in the newspapers, end by yielding a profit to those who patiently reiterate them. Persons who constantly see my name, and hear that I have eighteen children, come at last to pity and relieve my distress, which is real.” This woman was, as she said, in real difficulties, but nevertheless it was impossible to comply with all her demands. When, by M. Appert’s advice, the queen and Madame Adelaide refused to do so, this pertinacious petitioner got up a melodramatic effect, borrowed from the Porte St Martin, or some other Boulevard theatre. She wrote a letter, announcing that if she did not receive immediate assistance she had made every preparation to suffocate herself with charcoal that same evening. “Then this good queen would send for me, and say, ‘Mon Dieu! M. Appert, Madame R. is going to kill herself. It is a great crime, and we must prevent it. Be so good as to send her forty francs.’ And to prevent my raising objections to this too great goodness, her majesty would add immediately, ‘I know what you are about to say: that she deceives me, and will not kill herself; but if it did happen, God would not forgive us. It is better to be deceived than to risk such a misfortune.’”

There exist regular joint-stock companies, composed of swindlers leagued together for the plunder of the charitable. Some of the members feign misfortune and misery, and send petitions to the queen, and ministers, or to any one known as rich or benevolent; whilst others, well dressed and decorated, assume the character of protectors of the unfortunate, and answer for the respectability and deserts of the protégés. M. Appert describes a lodging rented by one of these companies. It might have furnished Eugene Sue with a chapter in his “Mysteries of Paris.” “It consisted of two rooms. In one were a wretched truckle-bed, two broken chairs, an old table; the other was well furnished with excellent chairs, a mahogany table, and clean curtains. The door connecting the rooms was carefully masked by a hanging of old paper, similar to that of the outer one; the bed was a dirty straw mattress. The impostor who occupied these lodgings received her visiters in the shabby room, and there she looked so miserable, that it was impossible to help relieving her. The charitable person or persons gone, she transferred herself to the inner apartment, and led a joyous life with her confederates and fellow-petitioners. There are in Paris as many as fifty of these immoral associations, which the police does not interfere with, because it finds most of their members serviceable as spies.” The suicide-dodge seems a favourite resource of male as well as female impostors. “Mr. B., formerly in the army, now a gambler, always carried two loaded pistols in his pocket, (the balls forgotten, very likely,) and when he came to ask me for assistance, which was at least a hundred times a-year, he invariably threatened to blow out his brains in my room; having left, he said, a letter to a newspaper for which he wrote, publishing to Europe the avarice of the royal family, and the baseness of those about them, beginning, of course, with myself. When I refused to yield to his threats, Mr. B. changed his mind, and consented to live, but with the sole object of injuring me in every possible way; and, according to promise, this worthy man of letters wrote against me in his newspaper, and sent anonymous letters to the Tuileries.”

Exiled Polish princes, Italian patriots, veterans of all possible armies and services, moustached to the eyes, their coats covered with crosses, their breasts, as they affirmed, with scars; aid-de-camps of half the kings and generals in the world; wounded and fever-stricken soldiers from Algeria;—these were a few of the false titles to charity impudently advanced by the mob of rogues and impostors, who daily crowded M. Appert’s anti-chamber, giving it the aspect of a guard-room or of the depôt of some house of correction, and displaying in their tales of wo astonishing address and ingenuity. And in spite of the immense army of gendarmes and police-spies, who are supposed to envelop France in the vast net of their vigilance—and who certainly succeed in rendering it as unlike a land of liberty as a free country well can be—in spite of the complicated passport system, having for one of its chief objects the check of crime and fraud, we find that these jail-birds “had always passports and certificates, and were often provided with letters of recommendation from persons of rank and wealth, who found it easier to sign their name than to draw their purse-strings. I possess more than fifteen hundred letters and notes, large and small, from peers of France, generals, ex-ministers, and others, recommending petitioners; and sometimes, when I met these complaisant patrons, they knew not even the name of those they had thus supported. The visits of these illustrious persons often lost me a great deal of time; and what astonished me beyond measure was, that the possession of a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand francs a-year did not prevent these rich misers from tormenting me. They would lose two or three hours rather than pay down a penny. The son-in-law of one of the richest proprietors in France once wrote me a most humble and suppliant letter, begging me to obtain from the Queen a grant of thirty francs to one of his domestics, who, through old age, was compelled to leave his service.” And many an enemy did M. Appert make by noncompliance with the requests of the wealthy skin-flints, who sought to do a charitable act at another’s expense. The Queen and the Princess Adelaide often received petitions from ladies of the court, who expatiated on the interesting and deserving character of those they recommended. Nevertheless, M. Appert was always desired to inquire into the real merits of the case, and frequently found that it was not one deserving of succour. Then the queen or princess would say, when next they were importuned on the subject, “My dear countess, M. Appert has been to see your protégée, has made due inquiry, and finds that we have many upon our list in far greater need of assistance. I am sorry, therefore, to be unable to comply with your wishes.” Here, of course, was an enemy for poor M. Appert, who certainly needs the approbation of his own conscience as reward for having gratuitously held so thankless an office. His functions were no light ones, and took up nearly his whole time. His position relatively to the royal family compelled him to receive a vast number of persons of all ranks and classes, some of them of no very respectable description, but who were useful in procuring him information. Once or twice a month the Phrenological Society held its sittings at his house. During one of these meetings two heads were brought into the room in a basket, and placed with great care upon the table. “I thought they were in wax; the eyes were open, the faces placid. Upon approaching, I recognised the features of the assassins, Lacenaire and Avril, whom I had seen in their dungeons. ‘Do you find them like, M. Appert?’ said the man who had brought them. I replied in the affirmative. ‘No wonder,’ said he, ‘they are not more than four hours off their shoulders.’ They were the actual heads of the two murderers.” Not satisfied with having the heads, our philanthropical phrenologist had the headsman. We have already referred to the less scientific but more convivial meetings held at M. Appert’s house, in the shape of dinners, given each Saturday, and at which the guests were all, in some way or other, men of mark. Sometimes the notorious Vidocq, and Samson, the executioner of Paris—son of the man who decapitated Louis the Sixteenth, Marie Antoinette, and many other illustrious victims—took their places at M. Appert’s table. When this occurred, all his friends were anxious for an invitation. The only two who declined meeting the thief-taker and the headsman, were the archbishop of Malines, and M. Arnault, of the French Academy, brother-in-law of Regnaut de St. Jean d’Angely, who was so influential a person in the time of Napoleon. There were others, however, whom M. Arnault disliked to meet. He had a great prejudice against writers of the romantic school, and especially against Dumas, whom he called a washed-out negro. If M. Appert wanted an abrupt refusal, he merely had to say to him, “Dine with me on Saturday next. I shall have Balzac and Alexander Dumas.” Caustic in manner, but good and amiable, M. Arnault cherished the memory of Napoleon with a fidelity that did him honour. In the court of his house grew a willow, sprung from a slip of that at St. Helena. After 1830, misfortune overtook him, and M. Appert tried to interest the king and Madame Adelaide in his behalf. He was successful, and a librarian’s place was promised to his friend. But the promise was all that M. Arnault ever obtained. The ill-will or obstinacy of the minister, who had the power of nomination, is assigned by M. Appert as the cause of the disappointment, which he hesitates to attribute to lukewarmness on the part of his royal patrons. Louis Philippe is the last man, according to our notion of him, to suffer himself to be thwarted by a minister, whether in great or small things. Kings, whose position exposes them to so much solicitation, should be especially cautious in promising, strictly on their guard against the odious vice, too common in the world, of lightly pledging and easily breaking their word. They, above all men, should ever bear in mind that a broken promise is but a lie inverted.

We return to M. Appert’s dinners. To meet Samson and Vidocq, he had invited the late Lord Durham, Dr. Bowring, De Jouy the academician, Admiral Laplace, and several others. The executioner sat on his right, the policeman on his left, and both occasionally favoured him with a confidential a parte. Samson was grave and serious, rather out of his element amongst the grand seigneurs, as he called them; Vidocq, on the contrary, was gay, lively, and quite at his ease.

“‘Do you know,’ said he, with a laugh, to the headsman, ‘I have often sent you customers when I was chief of the brigade of safety?’

“‘I know you have, M. Vidocq,’ replied Samson. Then, in a low voice to me, ‘Any where but in your house, sir, I should hardly like to dine in company with that joker. He’s a queer one.’ Almost at the same moment, Vidocq whispered, ‘He’s a worthy man, that Monsieur Samson; but all the same, it seems odd to me to sit at the same table with him.’” Very good, the spy; not bad, the hangman. In the conversation that followed, Lord Durham and the accomplished Hermite de la Chaussée d’Antin took a share, and Samson gave some curious details concerning his terrible profession. He was on the scaffold when Louis XVI. was executed. “We all loved the king in our family,” said he, “and when my father was obliged, according to orders, to take up the head by the hair and show it to the people, the sight of that royal countenance, which preserved all its noble and gentle expression, so affected him that he nearly swooned away. Luckily I was there, and being tall, I masked him from the crowd, so that his tears and emotion, which in those days might have sufficed to bring us to the guillotine in our turn, passed unobserved.” Presently Vidocq ventured a joke, concerning the headsman’s office, which greatly offended him of the axe, who muttered his displeasure in M. Appert’s ear. “That man is as coarse as barley bread,” was his remark: “it is easy to see he is not used to good society; he does not behave himself as I do!” Poor Samson, who receives about five hundred a year for the performance of his melancholy duties, was, in reality, very well behaved. His appearance was so respectable, his black coat, gold chain, and frilled shirt, so irreproachable, that on his first visit to M. Appert, that gentleman’s secretary took him for some village mayor on his way to a wedding, or about to head a deputation to the king. Upon Lord Durham’s expressing a wish to see the guillotine, he obligingly offered to show it to him. M. Appert gives an account of the visit. “On the following Saturday, Lord Durham, accompanied by his nephew, heir, I believe, to his title and vast fortune, came in his carriage to fetch me. He had told so many English of our intended visit, that we were followed by a string of vehicles, like the procession to a funeral. On our way, Lord Durham asked me if it were not possible to buy a sheep to try the guillotine upon. On my telling him that to do so would give just grounds for severe criticisms, he did not press his wish. On reaching the Rue du Marais, I went alone into Samson’s house. He was in a full dress suit of black, waiting to receive us. He conducted our party, at least fifty in number, to the banks of the Canal St. Martin, where, in a coachmaker’s shed, the guillotine was kept. Here there was a fine opportunity for the display of a genuine English characteristic. Every body wished to touch every thing; to handle the hatchet and baskets, and get upon the plank which supports the body when the head is fitted into the fatal frame. Samson had had the guillotine repainted and put together, and bundles of straw served to show its terrible power.”

At another dinner, to which Samson and Vidocq were invited, Balzac and Dumas were present, and the talk was most amusing. For romance writers, the conversation of such men must possess especial interest and value. Of Vidocq, M. Appert speaks very highly, with respect both to his head and heart. He began life as a soldier under Dumouriez, and was sent to prison for forging a passport. Endowed with great intelligence and physical strength, and with a restless activity of mind and body, he made his escape, and opened a negotiation for a free pardon, on which condition he promised to render great services to the police. His offer was accepted and he kept his word. M. Appert considers his skill as a police agent unsurpassable. It is perhaps in gratitude for that gentleman’s good opinion that Vidocq has bequeathed him his head, should he die first, for the purpose of phrenological investigations. We find two or three interesting traits and anecdotes of the thief-catcher. A report once got abroad that he had an only daughter to marry, and as he was supposed to be rich, he immediately received a host of offers for her hand, many of them from young men of excellent family, but in needy circumstances. Vidocq, who had no children, was vastly amused at this sudden eagerness for the honour of his alliance. Samson has two pretty daughters, who are well brought up and even accomplished, and who will probably marry the sons of the executioners of large towns. Hangmen, like kings, can only wed in their own sphere. “Samson, who was grateful for the politeness shown him by Lord Durham, thought it might please that nobleman to possess the clothes worn by remarkable criminals, and offered to send them to me. Thus I had for some time in my possession the coats worn at their execution by Fieschi, Lacenaire, and Alibaud. It was one of Samson’s assistants who brought them, and each time I gave him fifteen francs as compensation, the clothes being his perquisites.” M. Appert relates many other curious particulars concerning French executioners, and gives a remarkable letter from Samson himself, relating to the guillotine, to the punishment of branding, and to the old tax called navage, which was formerly levied, to the profit of the headsman, on all grain and fruits entering Paris. This tax gave rise to many disputes and discussions between the country people and the men appointed to collect it, who received from the peasants the title of valets de bourreau. From that time dates the French proverb, “Insolent as a hangman’s lacquey.”

Of the four sons of Louis Philippe, M. Appert speaks in terms of very high praise. Doubtless they are well-informed and accomplished princes, although, as yet, none of them have given indications of striking talents or high qualities; possibly because they have lacked opportunities for their display. Not one of them enjoys the prestige and popularity of the late Duke of Orleans. The Prince de Joinville, by his handsome person, and frank, off-hand manners, also by his antipathy, real or supposed, to the English, and by his occasional indulgence in a bit of harmless clap-trap and rhodomontade, has acquired the favour and good opinion of certain classes of the French people, who behold in him the man destined, at some future day, to humble the maritime power of England, and to take the British fleet into Brest or Cherbourg, as Gulliver towed the hostile men-of-war into the port of Liliput. We trust it will be long before he has an opportunity of displaying his prowess, or of disappointing the expectations of his admirers. The Duke of Nemours, against whom nothing can be alleged, who has distinguished himself in Algeria, and who is represented, by those who best know him, as a man of sense and moderate views, zealous for the welfare of his country, has been far less successful than his nautical brother, in captivating the sympathies of the bulk of the nation. This can only be attributed to his manners, which are reserved, and thought to indicate pride; but this seeming haughtiness is said to disappear upon nearer acquaintance. Of the two younger brothers, the characters have yet to be developed. It has been affirmed that the natural abilities of the Duke of Aumale are superior to those of either of his seniors. As far as can be judged by the scanty opportunities they have hitherto had of displaying them, the military talents of the French princes are respectable. Their personal courage is undoubted. But for the opposition of the king and of their anxious mother, they would, according to M. Appert, be continually in Africa, heading and serving as examples to the troops. Bravery, however, whose absence is accounted a crime in the private soldier, can hardly be made a merit of in men whose royal blood raises them, when scarcely beyond boyhood, to the highest ranks in the service. And the best wish that can be formed on behalf of the princes of France, of their country, and of Europe, is that their military experience may ever be limited, as, with some slight exceptions, it has hitherto been, to the superintendence of field-days, and the harmless manœuvres of Mediterranean squadrons.

MILDRED;
A Tale.
Chap. IV.

A few days afterwards the Bloomfields also and Miss Willoughby left Brussels for Paris.

It is far from our purpose to follow them step by step upon their route. The little love-affair we have undertaken to relate, leads us a dance upon the Continent; but we have no disposition to play the tourist one moment more than is necessary; and as no incidents connected with our story occurred in Paris, we shall not loiter long even in that gayest and most seductive of capitals. He who knows Paris—and who does not?—and at all understands what sort of traveller Mildred was, will easily conceive the delight she felt in visiting the public monuments, ancient and modern; in observing its populace, so diversified and mobile in their expression, so sombre and so gay; in traversing the different quarters of a city which still retains in parts whatever is most picturesque in the structures of the middle ages, whilst it certainly displays whatever is most tasteful in modern architecture, and which, in fact, in every sense of the word, is the most complete summary of human life that exists upon the face of the earth.

What modern city can boast a point of view comparable to that which bursts upon the stranger as he enters the Place de la Concorde! What beautiful architecture to his right and to his left!—the Palais Bourbon, the distant Madeleine, the Chamber of Deputies—whilst before him runs the long avenue of the Champs Elysées, terminated by its triumphal arch. No crowding in of buildings. No darkening of the air. Here is open space and open sky, trees and fountains, and a river flowing through the scene. There is room to quarrel, no doubt, with some of its details. Those two beautiful fountains in the centre are beautiful only at a certain respectful distance; you must not approach those discoloured nymphs who are each squeezing water out of the body of the fish she holds in her arms. Nor can we ever reconcile ourselves to that Egyptian obelisk which stands between them; in itself admirable enough, but as much out of place as a sarcophagus in a drawing-room. But these and other criticisms of the like kind, are to be made, if worth while, on after reflection and a leisure examination; the first view which the scene, as a whole, presents to the eye, is like enchantment. So at least Mildred thought, when, the morning after their arrival, (while the breakfast was waiting for her uncle, who was compensating himself for the fatigues of the journey,) she coaxed her aunt to put her arm in hers, and just turn round the corner—she knew from the map where she was—and take one look at it whilst the sun was shining so brightly above them.

Nor are there many cities, however boastful of their antiquities, which present more picturesque views than meet the eye as, leaving the garden of the Tuileries, you proceed up the river; and the round towers, with their conical roofs, of the Palais de Justice, rise on the opposite banks, and you catch glimpses of Notre Dame. In London, the houses have crowded down to the edge of the water, and are standing up to their ankles in it, so that the inhabitants may walk about its streets all their lives, and never know that a river is flowing through their city. From the centre of one of its bridges they may indeed assure themselves of the fact, and confirm, by their own observations, what they had learned in the geographical studies of their youth, that London is built on the river Thames; but, even from this position, it is more wood than water they will see. The shipping, and the boats of all kinds, blot out the river, and so crush and overcharge it that it is matter of wonder how it continues to exist and move under such a burden. It is otherwise in Paris. There one walks along the quay, and sees the river flowing through the city.

In spite of its revolutions, of its innovations, of its impatient progress, there is much still in Paris to carry back the thoughts of a visitor to antiquated times. If the Madeleine is a Grecian temple, if he finds that religious ceremonies are performed there with an elegance and propriety which propitiate the taste of the profane, if they fail to satisfy the fervour of the devout—a short walk will bring him to the venerable church of St. Germain, hard by the Louvre, where he will encounter as much solemnity and antiquity as he can desire; an antiquity, however, that is still alive, that is still worshipping as it used to worship. He will see at the further extremity of the church a dark, arched recess, imitative of a cavern or sepulchre, at the end of which lies the Christ, pale and bleeding, visible only by the light of tapers; and, if he goes to matins there, he will probably find himself surrounded by a crowd of kneeling devotees, kneeling on the stone pavement before this mediæval exhibition. Two distant ages seem to be brought together and made contemporaries.

But we will not be tempted to loiter on our way even at Paris; we take post horses and proceed with our party to Lyons.

A long ride, what an exceptional state it is!—what a chapter apart—what a parenthesis in life! The days we pass rolling along the road are always dropped out of the almanack; we have lost them, not in the sublime sense of the Roman emperor, but fairly out of the calendar; we cannot make up the tale of days and weeks. We start—especially if it is in a foreign country that we are travelling—with how much exhilaration! Every thing is new, and this charm of novelty lends an interest to the most trivial things we encounter. Not one of the least amusements of travel is this passing, in easy and rapid review, the wayside novelties which the road, the village, and the street that we scamper through, present to us. The changing costume of the peasant—the whimsical, traditionary head-dress of the women, which, whimsical as it is, retains its geographical boundaries with a constancy rarely found in any flora of the botanist—the oddly constructed vehicles, carts fashioned upon all conceivable plans, and drawn by horses, or mules, or oxen harnessed and decorated in what seems quite a masquerading attire—these, and a thousand other things, in their nature the most common and familiar, claim for once the power to surprise us. All the common-place of daily life comes before us, “Trick’d in this momentary wonderment.”
Here in the south of France, for instance, a cart-horse approaches you with a collar surmounted by a large upright horn, and furnished, moreover, with two long curving antennæ branching from either side, which, with the gay trappings that he wears, give to an old friend the appearance of some monstrous specimen of entomology; you might expect him to unfold a pair of enormous wings, and take flight as you advance, and not pass you quietly by, as he soon will, nodding his head in his old familiar style, and jingling his bells. While the mind is fresh, there is nothing which does not excite some transitory pleasure. But when the journey is felt to be growing long—very long—what a singular apathy steals over us! We struggle against this encroaching torpor—we are ashamed of it—we rouse the mind to thought, we wake the eye to observation—all in vain. Those incessant wheels of the carriage roll round and round, and we are rolling on as mechanically as they. The watch, which we refrain from consulting too often, lest the interest of its announcements should be abated, is our only friend; we look at it with a secret hope that it may have travelled farther than we venture to prognosticate; we proclaim that it is just two o’clock, and in reality expect that it is three, and try to cheat ourselves into an agreeable surprise. We look, and the hands point precisely at half-past one!

“What a business-like looking thing,” said Mildred, as she roused herself from this unwelcome torpor, “seems the earth when it is divided into square fields, and cut into even furrows by the plough!—so palpably a mere manufactory for grain. Oh, when shall I see it rise, and live in the mountain?”

“My dear Mildred,” said her aunt, gently jogging her, “do you know that you are talking in your sleep?”

“I have been asleep, my dear aunt, or something very like it, I know; but I thought just then I was quite awake,” was Mildred’s quiet reply.

When the party reached Lyons, there was some little discussion as to the route they should take into Italy. Mildred had hoped to cross the Alps, and this had been their original intention; but the easy transit down the river, by the steam-boat, to Avignon, was a temptation which, presenting itself after the fatigues of his long journey from Paris, was irresistible to Mr. Bloomfield. He determined, therefore, to proceed into Italy by way of Marseilles, promising his niece that she should cross the Alps, and pass through Switzerland on their return home.

Accordingly, they embarked in the steamer. Here Mr. Bloomfield was more at his ease. One circumstance, however, occasioned him a little alarm. He was watching, with some curiosity, the movements of two men who were sounding the river, with long poles, on either side of the vessel. The reason of this manœuvre never distinctly occurred to him, till he heard the bottom of the boat grating on the bed of the river. “No danger!” cried the man at the helm, who caught Mr. Bloomfield’s eye, as he looked round with some trepidation. “No danger!” muttered Mr. Bloomfield. “No danger, perhaps, of being drowned; but the risk of being stuck here fast in the midst of this river for four-and-twenty hours, is danger enough.” After this, he watched the motions of these men with their long poles with less curiosity, indeed, but redoubled interest.

It was in vain, however, that he endeavoured to communicate his alarm to Mildred, who contented herself with hoping, that if the boat really meant to stop, it would take up a good position, and where the view was finest. With her the day passed delightfully. The views on the Rhone, though not equal to those of the Rhine, form no bad introduction to the higher order of scenery; and she marked this day in her calendar as the first of a series which she hoped would be very long, of days spent in that highest and purest excitement which the sublimities of nature procure for us. On the Rhine, the hills rise from the banks of the river, and enclose it, giving to the winding stream, at some of its most celebrated points of view, the appearance of a lake. It is otherwise on the Rhone. The heights are ruder, grander, but more distant; they appertain less to the river; they present bold and open views, but lack that charm of tenderness which hangs over the German stream. In some parts, a high barren rock rises precipitately from the banks, and, the surface having been worn away in great recesses, our party was struck with the fantastic resemblance these occasionally bore to a series of vast architectural ruins. A beautiful sunset, in which the old broken bridge, with its little watch-tower, displayed itself to great advantage, welcomed them to Avignon.

Again, from Avignon to Marseilles, their route lay through a very picturesque country. One peculiarity struck Mildred: they were not so much hills which rose before and around her, as lofty rocks which had been built up upon the plain—abrupt, precipitous, isolated—such as seem more properly to belong to the bottom of the sea than to the otherwise level surface over which they were passing. As their most expeditious conveyance, and in order to run no risk of the loss of the packet, our travellers performed this stage in the diligence, and Mildred was not a little amused by the opportunity this afforded of observing her fellow-passengers. It is singular how much accustomed we are to regard all Frenchmen as under one type; forgetting that every nation contains all varieties of character within itself, however much certain qualities may predominate. Amongst her travelling companions was an artist, not conceited, and neither a coxcomb nor an abominable sloven, but natural in his manners, and, as the little incident we shall have occasion to mention will prove, somewhat energetic in his movements. In the corner opposite to him sat a rather elderly gentleman, travelling probably in some mercantile capacity, of an almost infantine simplicity of mind, and the most peaceable temperament in the world; but who combined with these pacific qualities the most unceasing watchfulness after his own little interests, his own comfort and convenience. The manner in which he cherished himself was quite amusing; and admirable was the ingenuity and perseverance he displayed in this object; for whilst quietly resolved to have his own way in every thing, he was equally resolved to enter into collision with no one. He was averse to much air, and many were the manœuvres that he played off upon the artist opposite, and on the controller of the other window, that he might get them both arranged according to the idea which he had formed of perfect comfort. Then, in the disposition of his legs, whilst he seemed desirous only of accommodating his young friend opposite, he so managed matters as to have his own limbs very comfortably extended, while those of his “young friend” were cramped up no one could say where. It greatly facilitated these latter manœuvres, that our elderly gentleman wore large wooden shoes, painted black. No one could tread on his toes.

Sedulous as he was to protect himself against all the inconveniencies of the road, he seemed to have no desire to monopolize the knowledge he possessed requisite to this end, but, on the contrary, was quite willing to communicate the results of his travelling experience. He particularly enlarged on the essential services rendered to him by these very wooden shoes—how well they protected him from the wet—how well from external pressure! He was most instructive also and exact upon the sort of garments one should travel in—not too good, for travel spoils them—not too much worn, or too slight, for in that case they will succumb under the novel hardships imposed upon them. Pointing to his own coat, he showed how well it illustrated his principles, and bade the company observe of what a stout and somewhat coarse material it was fabricated. Warming upon his subject, he proceeded to give them an inventory of all the articles of dress he carried with him in his portmanteau—how many coats, shirts, pantaloons, &c. &c. All this he gave out in a manner the most urbane and precise, filling up his pauses with a short dry cough, which had nothing to do with any pulmonary affection, but was merely an oratorical artifice—a modest plan of his own for drawing the attention of his hearers.

Unfortunately he had not long succeeded in arranging matters to his perfect satisfaction, when a little accident robbed him of the fruit of all his labours. The artist, in his energetic manner of speaking, and forgetting that he had been induced by the soft persuasions of his neighbour to put up the window (an act which he had been led into almost unconsciously) thrust his elbow through the glass. Great was the consternation of our elderly traveller, and yet it was in the gentlest tone imaginable that he suggested to the artist the propriety, the absolute necessity, that he should get the window mended at the next place where they would stop to change horses. Mended the window accordingly was. When the new glass was in, and paid for, and they had started again upon their journey, then the friendly old gentleman placed all his sympathies at the command of the young artist. He was of opinion that he had been greatly overcharged for the window—that he had paid twice as much as he ought. Nay, he doubted whether he ought to have paid any thing at all—whether he could be said to have broken the window—for, as he now began to remember, he thought it was cracked before.

Mildred could hardly refrain from a hearty laugh at what she found to be as amusing as a comedy.

First the town of Aix, then that of Marseilles, received our travellers. Of Aix, Mildred carried away one impression only. As they entered into the town with all the rattling vehemence which distinguishes the diligence on such occasions, there stood before her an enormous crucifix, a colossal, representation of the Passion; and underneath it a company of showmen, buffoons of some description, had established their stage, and were beating their drums, as French showmen can alone beat them, and calling the crowd together with all manner of noise and gesticulation. Strange juxtaposition! thought Mildred—the crucifix and the mountebank! But not the fault of the mountebank.

What execrable taste is this which the Catholic clergy display! That which is fit only for the sanctuary—if fit at all for the eye of man, or for solitary and desolate spots—is thrust into streets and market-places, there to meet with a perpetual desecration. That which harmonizes with one mood only, the most sad and solemn of the human mind, is dragged out into the public square, where every part of life, all its comedy and all its farce, is necessarily transacted. If the most revolting contrasts occur—no, it is not the fault of the profane mountebank.

Marseilles, with all its dirt and fragrance, left almost as little impression upon her mind. The only remembrance that outlived the day was that of the peculiar dignity which seemed to have been conferred upon the market-women of the town. At other places, especially at Brussels, our party had been not a little amused by inspecting the countenances of the old women who sat, thick as their own apples, round the Grand Place, or on both sides of the street. What formidable physiognomies! What preternatural length of nose! What terrific projection of chin! But these sat upon the pavement, or on an upturned wicker basket; a stool or a low chair that had suffered amputation in the legs, was the utmost they aspired to. Here the market-women have not only possessed themselves of huge arm-chairs, but these arm-chairs are elevated upon the broad wooden tables that are covered with the cabbages, and carrots, and turnips, over which they thus magisterially preside. Here they have the curule chair. Manifestly they are the Ædiles Cereales of the town. Our travellers did not, however, see them in their glory; they saw only down the centre of the street the row of elevated chairs, which, if originally of ivory, had certainly lost much of their brightness and polish since the time when the Roman Senate had presented them. The Court was not sitting as they passed.

The following day saw them in the steam-boat bound for Genoa. In a few hours they would be coasting the shores of Italy!

We cannot resist the opportunity which here occurs of showing, by an example, how justly our Mildred may be said to have been a solitary traveller, though in almost constant companionship. She was alone in spirit, and her thoughts were unparticipated. The steam-boat had been advertised to leave Marseilles at four o’clock in the afternoon. The clock had struck six, and it was still stationary in the harbour,—a delay by no means unusual with steam-boats in that part of the world. Mildred stood on the deck, by the side of the vessel, watching the movements of the various craft in the harbour. To her the delays which so often vex the traveller rarely gave rise to any impatience. She always found something to occupy her mind; and the passing to and fro of men in their usual avocations was sufficient to awaken her reflection. At a little distance from the steamer was a vessel undergoing some repairs; for which purpose it was ballasted down, and made to float nearly on one side. Against the exposed side of the vessel, astride upon a plank, suspended by a rope, swung a bare-legged mortal most raggedly attired, daubing its seams with some most disgusting-looking compound. The man swinging in this ignominious fashion, and immersed in the filth of his operation, attracted the notice of Mildred. What an application, thought she, to make of a man! This fellow-creature of mine, they use him for this! and perhaps for such as this only! They use his legs and arms—which are sufficiently developed—but where is the rest of him?—where is the man? He has the same humanity as the noblest of us: what a waste of the stuff, if it is worth any thing!

This last expression Mildred, almost unconsciously, uttered aloud,—“What a waste of the stuff, if it is worth any thing!”

“My dear,” said Miss Bloomfield, who sat beside her, “it is nothing but the commonest pitch or tar. How can you bear to look at it?”

“Dearest aunt,” said Mildred, “I was not thinking of the pitch, but the man.”

“What can you be talking of, my child?” said her aunt, in utter amazement.

But there was one behind them who appeared to have understood what Mildred was talking of, and who now, by some observation, made his presence known to them. As she turned, she caught the eye of—Alfred Winston.

They met this time as old acquaintances; and that glance of intellectual freemasonry which was interchanged between them, tended not a little to increase their feeling of intimacy.

“And you too are going into Italy?” she said. “But how is it that you select this route?”

“I made an excursion,” he replied, “last summer into Switzerland and the north of Italy, which accounts for my turning the Alps on this occasion.”

The vessel now weighed anchor. Departure—and a beautiful sunset—made the view delightful. But daylight soon deserted them. Mr. Bloomfield came to take the ladies down to the cabin, where a meal, which might be called either dinner or supper, was preparing. Mildred would rather have remained on deck; but as he had expressed his intention of doing so, she thought it better to descend with the rest.

Amongst the company in the cabin she immediately recognised one of her fellow-travellers of the previous day. There was the elderly gentleman with his black wooden shoes, and his short dry cough, gently but strenuously chiding the garçon for his delay. In these vessels the passage-money includes provisions, so that, eat or not, you pay; and our experienced traveller, having taken due precaution, as he soon afterwards informed all the company, not to dine, was very excusably somewhat impatient. Mildred was amused to find him supporting his character throughout with perfect consistency. Although every one but himself was suffering from heat, he—anxious only for the public good, and especially for the comfort of the ladies—maintained a strict watch upon both door and, window, and would have kept both, if possible, hermetically closed. And as the waiters handed round the soup, or any thing that was, fluid, he, with a mild solemnity of manner, warned them not to arroser his coat, not to sprinkle that excellent garment which was doubtless destined, under so considerate a master, to see many years of service.

Chapter V.

The next morning Mildred had risen with the dawn, leaving her aunt and the rest of the passengers locked in their slumbers. What a delightful sensation awaited her as she rose from the close cabin of the steamer, and, ascending upon deck, met the breeze, the sunrise, the dancing waters of the Mediterranean, and hailed at her side the mountain coast of Italy! It was the first time in her life she had seen the blue hill crested with the snowy summits of the more distant and lofty mountain,—a combination which the art of the painter is daily attempting to imitate, but the etherial effect of which it never can at all approach. What an enchantment is the first view of the greater beauties of nature! The first lake—the first mountain—the first time we behold the eternal snow, white as the summer cloud, but which passes not away—is an era in our existence,—a first love without its disappointment. The inhabitant of a mountainous country, though he may boast his greater intimacy with nature, though he may have linked all the feelings of home with her grandeur and sublimity, can never know what the dweller in the plain and the city has felt, who, with matured taste, with imagination cultivated by literature, stands, in all the vigour of his mind, for the first time before the mountain! It was but a distant view of the Alps that Mildred now obtained; but that snowy ridge against the blue sky—that moved not, that was not cloud—exercised an indescribable fascination over her.

Winston was also soon upon deck; but, observing how well she was employed, he was careful not to disturb her. He well knew how essential was solitude to the highest gratification which either art or nature afford. It is but a secondary or declining excitement that we feel when we are restless to communicate it to another. The heart is but half full of its object, that, to complete its pleasure, craves for sympathy.

It was not till they were within sight of Genoa that he ventured to approach the side of the vessel where she was sitting.

“Now,” said he, with a smile, “it is permissible to talk. We approach the shore too near for picturesque effect; and the town of Genoa, seen here from the bay, whatever tourists may assert, is neither more nor less than what a sea-port town may be expected to be.”

“Yes,” said Mildred; “I was just observing to myself that a hilly coast, delightful to him who is on it, and delightful to the distant spectator, is at a certain mid-way station seen to great disadvantage. It has lost the cerulean hue—that colour laid in the air—that visible poetry which it had appropriated to itself; it has lost this enchantment of distance, and it is still too remote for the natural beauty of its several objects to be perceived. These are dwarfed and flattened. The trees are bushes, mere tufts of green; the precipices and cliffs are patches of gravel darker or lighter. For the charm of imagination it is too near; for the effect of its own realities, too remote. And yet—and yet—see what a life is thrown over the scene by the shadow of that passing cloud, moving rapidly over the little fields, and houses, and the olive groves! How it brightens all, by the contrast it forms with the stream of light which follows as rapidly behind it! I retract—I retract—Nature has a pencil which never is at fault; which has always some touch in reserve to kindle every scene into beauty.”

“But the town——”

“Oh, I surrender the town. Certainly, if this is the view which tourists admire, they shall never have the moulding of my anticipations. The sail by the coast has been delightful; but it is precisely here, in presence of this congregation of ordinary buildings, that the pleasure deserts us.”

“People,” said Winston, “have described Genoa the Proud as if its palaces stood by the sea. They have combined, I suspect, in one view all that the exterior and the interior of the town had presented to them. They have taken the little privilege of turning the city inside out; just as if one should make up a picture of the approach to London by the river Thames, by lining its banks with sections cut out of Regent’s Park. But here we are at anchor, and shall soon be able to penetrate into this city of palaces.”

They landed, and Alfred Winston assisted the ladies to disembark, but showed no symptoms of any intention to attach himself to their party. He did not even select the same hotel. But as all travellers are seeing the same sights, visiting the same churches, the same palaces, the same points of view, it was not possible for them to be long without meeting. And these casual encounters seemed to afford to both parties an equal pleasure.

We have seen that there was a strain of thought in Mildred’s mind, which found neither sympathy nor apprehension with her companions. Mr. Bloomfield was, indeed, more intelligent than his sister; but his half-perceptions, coupled unfortunately with no distrust whatever of himself, made him the more tedious companion of the two; for he would either inflict upon her some misplaced flippancy, or some wearisome common-place; which last he doubted not was extremely edifying to his niece. Good man! he little suspected that the great difference between himself and his niece consisted in this, that he was indeed incapable of receiving any edification from her; whilst she, in her own silent way, would often extract from the chaff he dealt in, some truth for herself. Her responsive “Yes,” was, often yielded in assent to a meaning other and higher than he was aware he had expressed. To her, therefore, the intellectual sympathy which she found in their fellow-traveller was peculiarly grateful; it was as novel as it was agreeable.

If she had refused to be pleased with the applauded view of the bay of Genoa, she was unfeignedly interested in the interior of the town. Nor, perhaps, is there any town in Italy, with the exception of Venice, which makes a more striking impression upon the traveller. He walks through a street of palaces, the painted fronts of many of which remind him of the scenes of the theatre—so that he can hardly believe himself to be in a real town; he sees the orange-tree upon the terrace above him, and its veritable golden fruit hangs over his head—is hanging in the open air: he feels he is now really in Italy! he sees the light arcade running by the side of the palace, with its decorated arch, its statues, its vases; and as he passes along the street, the open portico partly reveals the branching staircase, and the inner court, with its deserted galleries, and its now so solitary fountain. And as he walks on—in striking contrast—narrow, very narrow streets, at his right or at his left, descend upon him, dark and precipitous as a mountain gorge, bringing down the clattering mule, laden ingeniously enough with whatever is elsewhere stowed into a cart, or the antique sedan, the only vehicle in which a living man could navigate those straits. Then the multitude of priests and friars, black and brown—the white muslin veil thrown over the heads of the women, or the gaudy scarf of printed cotton substituted by the poorer sort (Miss Bloomfield exclaimed, and very naturally, that they had got their bed furniture about their ears)—all this, and much more, which it is not exactly our purpose to describe, give to the town an air of complete originality. The very decay, in some parts, of its antique state and grandeur, adds to its interest. One looks into the deserted porch, deserted of all but that sleepy shoe-black, who has installed himself in its shade with the necessary implements of his calling; and one sees the fountain still bubbling up, still playing there before its only companion, that stained and mutilated statue, who looks on with how pensive, how altered, how deploring an aspect!

The young priests, with their broad hats and well draped vests of spotless black cloth, Mildred thought the best dressed men she had any where seen. The finished dandy looks contemptible by the side of these. She could not pass the same compliment on the brown friar, corded and sandeled, with his low brow and his bare shaven crown. In vain does he proclaim that his poverty is voluntary, and most meritorious: he has a sad, plebeian aspect; and even his saintly brother in black manifestly looks down upon him, as they meet upon the pavement, as belonging to the democracy of their sacred order. Voluntary poverty! the faith in the existence of such a thing is rarer even than the thing itself; it is worn out; and in this age a mendicant friar can be nothing more than a legalised beggar, earning his subsistence (as the Church, we suppose, would explain it) by the useful office of stimulating the charity of men; there being in the natural constitution of society so few occasions for the practice of benevolence.

Our fellow-travellers had met in the church of the Annunciation, one of the most gorgeous structures which the Catholic religion has erected for its worship. It would be almost impossible for gilding, and painting, and all the decorative arts, to produce any thing more splendid than the interior of this temple. Neither Versailles nor Rome has any thing to compete with the sumptuous effect which is here produced by these means. By drawing a red silk curtain across the upper windows, there is thrown over the gilding so rich a hue, that the roof and pillars glow as if with molten gold. High up, within the dome, there stand, in pairs, one at each side of every window, gilded statues; and these, in the red light thrown upon them, look as if invested with flame. They reminded Mildred of some description she had read in Southey’s Curse of Kehama.

Winston was disposed to quarrel with the building as being too gorgeous; but Mildred, who resigned herself more readily to genuine and natural impulses of pleasure, and who at all times expressed the unaffected dictates of her taste, would not acquiesce in any censure of the kind.

“No,” she maintained, “if the artist aim at being gorgeous, he must stop at no half measures. There is a higher aim, no doubt, where form and proportion ought more strictly to predominate over colour, and all the splendour of marble and of gilding. But if he is resolved to dazzle us—if to be sumptuous is his very object, let him throw timidity to the winds; let him build—as he has done here—in gold; let him paint—as on this ceiling—in such glowing colours as even this roof of flame cannot overpower. Look up the dome; see how these clouds are rolling down upon us!”

“But,” said Winston, still disposed to be critical, “there is something else in that dome which seems disposed to fall; and which, from its nature, ought to manifest no such tendency. Do you remark those small Corinthian pillars placed round the upper part of the dome—how they lean inward? A pillar is the last thing which ought to look as if it needed support; yet these evidently, unless fastened to the wall, would, by their own gravity, fall down upon us. This is surely contrary to the simplest rules of taste, yet it is not the first time I have observed in Italy this species of ornament.”

“I acquiesce in your criticism,” said Mildred, with a smile; “now point me out something to admire.”

They sat down quietly on one of the benches, placed there for the service of the faithful, to survey at leisure this sumptuous edifice, and let its impression sink into their memory. But this pleasure was not a little interrupted by the devotees in their neighbourhood—dirty, ragged, squalid men and women, mumbling and spitting—spitting and mumbling. They were unreasonable enough to feel that the devotion of these people was quite an intrusive circumstance. For such worshippers!—such a temple!—thought Mildred. They were jabbering their prayers, like idiocy, behind her. “Let us move away,” she whispered. “After all,” said Winston, as they retired, “it is for their idiocy, and not our admiration, that the temple is built.”

On leaving this building they directed their steps towards the suburbs of the town, and entered a church which, in its modest appearance, formed a strong contrast with the one they had just visited. A level space before it, planted with trees, gave it the air of an English parish church. Neither the interior nor the exterior presented any architectural display. Whilst Mr. and Miss Bloomfield were walking up to the altar, and taking, as in duty bound, a survey of the whole building, Mildred and her companion lingered near the entrance, attracted by some monumental tablets set up against the walls. The bas-reliefs on one, or two of these were remarkable for their beauty, their elegance and tenderness, and the inscriptions accorded with them, and seemed full of feeling.

“I am glad,” she said, “we happened to enter here. I was beginning to be a little out of humour with my catholic brethren; but these tablets bring me back to a charitable and kindly mood.”

Winston joined her in reading some of the inscriptions.

“It is really,” said he, “the first time I can remember to have been affected by monumental inscriptions, or to have read them with any pleasure or patience. In an English churchyard, the tombstone either preaches at you—and that with such an offensive dogmatism as none but a dead man would venture to assume—or it presents a fulsome collection of laudatory phrases, shovelled upon the dead with as much thought and consideration as were the dirt and clay upon his coffin. If verse is added, it seems to have been supplied, with the stone, by the stone-mason; the countrymen of Milton—and not alone the poor and ignorant—select, to be engraved on the enduring marble, some pitiable doggerel that ought never to have been heard beyond the nursery, so that few persons stop to read the epitaphs in our churchyards, unless in a spirit of mockery, and with the hope of extracting a jest from them.”

“For which reason, amongst others,” said Mildred, “I generally avoid them. I would respect the dead,—and the living in their affliction. But what a natural, humane, tender, and faithful spirit are some of these written in! And this beautiful figure of a young girl ascending to the skies, embracing the cross in her arms,—what a sweet piety it breathes! How well it bears out the inscription underneath, the conceit in which might otherwise have at least failed to please,—

è fatta in cielo quale parve in terra
—un angelo.

“And here—how full of tenderness—how full of faith—seem these simple words!—

Quì dorme in pace
la gentile e virtuosa giovine Maria, &c.
Voleva all’ amplesso di Dio.

“And this,—

O Ginevra,
Unico nostro tesoro!
Arridi a noi dal cielo
cara angioletta,
e ne prega da Dio
novella prole che ti somigli,
a rendere meno acerbo,
il dolore della tua partita.

“Earth and Heaven—how they mingle here!”

“Is it poetry or religion that we are reading?” said Winston. “It seems to me as if these people had suddenly turned their poetry into faith.”

“Or have some of us been turning our faith into poetry? I believe,” added Mildred, “that, in every mind, not utterly destitute of imagination, the boundaries of the two are not very rigidly defined. There is always something of faith in our poetry, and something of poetry in our faith.”

They were now joined by Mr. and Miss Bloomfield, who had made their tour of the church; and the whole party retraced their steps towards their hotel. Winston felt that he had not once indulged Mr. Bloomfield in an opportunity of venting his lamentations over the evils of travel, and the discomforts of foreign parts; he therefore asked that gentleman how he had found himself accommodated at the hotel at which he had descended.

“Ay,” said Mr. Bloomfield, delighted to have a topic on which he could feelingly expatiate, “Descended!—’tis the Frenchman’s phrase. I know that I have ascended to my hotel, and to no trivial elevation. Why, the hotel itself does not begin till where another house might end, and where it ends might be a problem for astronomers to calculate. The ladies got deposited somewhere beneath the clouds; but for myself I am really at a frightful altitude. I was conducted up a dark stone-staircase with an iron-bannister; after some time my guide branched off laterally through by-passages, with unglazed openings, having the most cheerless look-out imaginable, and across damp landing-places contiguous to sinks, and what seemed wash-houses, and where you heard the perpetual dripping of water. All this lay in the road to my bed-room; but the bed-room was not reached yet. I had again to mount—to mount—till I was almost giddy. When at length I attained the apartment destined for me—the only one, I was assured, vacant in the hotel—and was left up there alone in it, I felt so removed from all human fellowship, all succour or sympathy from the inhabitants of the earth below, that I do declare, if I had not been a little initiated on the journey—if I had come direct from my English home at Wimborne—and if, moreover, I was not here in character of protector to two ladies, and therefore bound to carry a bold face in all extremities—I do declare that I should have thrown myself down in utter despair upon the floor, and there lay till the undertaker should come and take me down again!—it seemed the only mode of descent that was at all practicable.”

“Certainly it would be the easiest and the safest,” said Winston, humouring his vein of exaggeration. “And yet it is hardly upon the floor that you would have thrown yourself—which being probably of painted tiles, would have given you a cruel reception. You would rather have chosen Captain Shandy’s attitude, when he was overwhelmed with grief, and flung yourself face foremost upon the bed.”

“Very true. And as to that same bed, whether owing to the fatigue of my toilsome ascent, or to some good properties of its own, I must confess I never slept on any thing more agreeable. Yet, on examination, I found it stuffed with the dried leaves of the Indian corn. Strange substitute for a feather bed! It is inconceivable how comfortable I found it. And to be the dried leaves of Indian corn—a sort of straw, in short. And the next morning when I woke, and saw by daylight the light and elegant drapery of my bed, and looked up at the gaily painted ceiling—I suppose in this country the pigeon-houses have their ceilings painted—I could hardly believe that I was in an attic—raised even to the fifth power of an attic.”

When Alfred Winston mounted to his attic that night—as Mr. Bloomfield persisted in calling every elevated dormitory—he ought, if fatigue was sufficient to ensure it, to have slept soundly too. But he did not. He did not sleep at all. And the result of this sleepless night was a resolution, which does not seem strictly consequent thereon,—a resolution to rise with the dawn, and leave Genoa immediately.

The fact was, that this Mildred Willoughby was exercising over him, not, as is often said, a fascination “for which he could not account,” but one for which he could account too well. She realized all that he had ever pictured to himself of feminine charms,—his ideal of woman,—grace, beauty, tenderness, and a mind highly cultivated. But he had not come to Italy to fall in love. Besides, what had he, in Italy or elsewhere, to do with love? It was a thing out of his calculation at all times and places, and just now more than ever. How could he see Italy—see any thing—with this Mildred by the side of him? He would escape from this dangerous party. It was their intention, he had heard, to proceed to Pisa; he would start at once to Florence, and visit Pisa on his return. By this means he should get the start of them, and he would keep it.

By eight o’clock that morning he was travelling on the road to Florence.

The Bloomfields were a little surprised at not encountering their agreeable companion again; and at length concluded that he had taken his departure. Rather abruptly, to be sure, yet what claim had either on the other to any of the ceremonies of social intercourse? They were mere travellers, whom hazard had thrown together.

“After all,” said Mr. Bloomfield; “we have never been introduced.”

“Very true,” said Miss Bloomfield, “that never struck me.”

Mildred was silent.

Chapter VI.

Winston so far succeeded in his design, that by hastening from Genoa, and leaving Pisa unvisited, he was enabled to view the galleries of Florence without being disturbed by any other beauty than that which looked on him from the walls, or lived in the creations of the sculptor. From Florence he had proceeded to Rome, and had surveyed its antiquities and the marvels of art it contained, still undistracted by the too fascinating Mildred.

But although he had secured his solitude from interruption by a person likely to interest him too keenly, he was not equally resolute, or equally successful, in keeping himself aloof from certain fellow-travellers with whom he had scarce one thought or one taste in common. Our readers may remember a young lady whom we attempted to describe, figuring not very advantageously at the ball-room at Brussels. This damsel belonged to a mamma who, in her own way, was a still greater oddity, and who, indeed, ought to be made responsible for the grotesque appearance of her daughter on that occasion. She insisted upon it that, as all the world knew they were travellers, just looking in, as it were, as they were passing through the town, they might very well go to the ball in their travelling dresses; and as she was one of those who held rigidly to the prudent maxim that “any thing was good enough to travel in,” these dresses were not likely, be the occasion what it might, to be remarkable for their freshness.

Mrs. Jackson was the widow of a citizen of London who had lately died, leaving her and her daughter a very ample fortune. Now, although Mr. Jackson had, ever since his marriage, been adding hundred to hundred by the sale of wax and tallow candles in the city, yet had he continued to inhabit the same little house at Islington into which he had first packed himself with dear Mrs. Jackson immediately after the honeymoon; nor had he, in any one way, made an effort to enjoy his increasing income. An effort it would have been. What more did Mr. Jackson want? What more could he have enjoyed? The morning took him to his warehouse in the city, and the afternoon brought him back with an excellent appetite for an excellent dinner, and quite sufficiently fatigued to enjoy that comfortable digestive nap, in which Mrs. Jackson also joined him; and from which he woke up only the better prepared for the hearty slumbers of the night. His wealth, had he been obliged to spend it, would have added to his discomfort, instead of diffusing over him, as it did, a perpetual pleasant glow of self-importance. A larger and finer house, with the toil of receiving company in it, would have distressed him beyond measure. It was bad enough to be compelled, occasionally, to take his spouse to the theatre, or to a Christmas party: such enterprises were looked forward to with uneasy apprehension; and the gratification of having got over them was the only one they afforded him. His ledger—his newspaper—his dinner and a fireside, quiet but not solitary, this was the summary of his happiness. His little wine-glass, as Boswell would have expressed it, was quite full; you would only have made a mess of it, and spoilt all, by attempting to pour in a whole tumbler-full of happiness.

One daughter only had blessed the nuptials of Mr. and Mrs. Jackson. She was still at boarding-school when her father died. But, after this event, her fond mamma could no longer bear the separation; and home she came, bringing with her that accurate and complete stock of human knowledge and female accomplishments which is usually derived from such establishments, namely, infinite scraps of every thing and every thing in scraps, with the beginning of all languages, of all arts, and all sciences. There was in her portfolio a map of China, faithfully delineated, and a group of roses not quite so faithful. She had strummed one sonata till she played it with all the certainty of animal instinct, and she had acquired the capability of saying, “How d’ye do?” in at least three several languages beside the English.

But the loss of “Jackson” even the society of the accomplished Louisa could not compensate. The widow was very dull. Her comfortable house at Islington ceased to bring comfort to her; and she was tormented by a most unusual restlessness. Her daughter, who had heard from her favourite companion at the boarding-school, of the charms of foreign travel,—of the romantic adventures, and the handsome counts and barons that are sure to be encountered on the road, took advantage of this restlessness to persuade her mamma to take a tour on the Continent. After much discussion, much hesitation, infinite talking, and reading of guide-books, and exploring of maps—they started.

Absurd!—impossible!—exclaims the intelligent reader—that good Mrs. Jackson should commit herself and her daughter to all the casualties of travel without a male companion. And for what purpose? What pleasure could rocks and mountains, or statues and pictures, give to her, that would be worth the trouble of getting to them? Very absurd and quite impossible! we ourselves should, perhaps, have exclaimed, had we been inventing incidents, and not recording a mere sober matter of fact. But so it was. And, indeed, let any one call to mind the strange groups he has encountered—scrambling about the Continent, the Lord knows why or wherefore—and whatever difficulty he may have in explaining Mrs. Jackson’s motives, he will have none in believing her conduct, were it twice as absurd. Of pleasure, indeed, she had little, and very much tribulation. To be sure she felt quite at home upon the steam-boat on the Rhine;—“it did so remind her” of a trip she once took to Greenwich with the dear departed. And then it was very amusing and instructive to both herself and her daughter to find out all the places as they passed on that “Panorama of the Rhine” which lay extended on their laps before them. Being on the spot, they could study the map with singular advantage. But it was not always they had a map of the country to look at, nor even anyone to tell them the names of the places. The idea of seeing a place and not knowing its name!—this always put Mrs. Jackson in a perfect fever: as well, she would say, shake hands with the Lord Mayor, and not know it was the Lord Mayor! And then what she suffered who can tell, from the strange outlandish viands put before, and alas! too often put within her? and that daily affliction—imposed on her with such unnecessary cruelty—of eating her meat without vegetables, or her vegetables without meat?

Still on she went—bustling, elbowing, sighing, scolding, complaining—but nevertheless travelling on. Being at Rome, in the same hotel with Winston, and finding that he had answered one or two of her questions very civilly and satisfactorily, both she and her daughter had frequently applied to him in their difficulties. And these difficulties generally resulted from a lack of knowledge so easily supplied, that it would have been mere churlishness to withhold the necessary information.

These difficulties, however, seemed to increase rather than diminish with their sojourn at Rome; and well they might. Louisa Jackson found them the most convenient things imaginable. She had been all the way on the look-out for adventures, counts, and barons, and had hitherto met with nothing of the sort. But Alfred Winston was as handsome as any count need be—why not fall in love with him? A gentleman she was convinced he was; of wealth she had sufficient, and to do her justice, had quite generosity enough to be indifferent as to his possessions; and for the rest, she would let her eye, let her heart, choose for her. The brave Louisa! And her eye and her heart—which mean here pretty much the same thing—had made no bad selection. As she had mentally resolved to bestow herself, and all her “stocks, funds, and securities,” upon our hero, and as she had wit enough to see that her only hold upon him at present, was through his compassion for their embarrassments, she was determined to keep an ample supply of them on hand.

They came sometimes without being called for, and without the least collusion on her part. It was from no principle of economy, but from a curiosity which could not be gratified so well in any other manner, that Mrs. Jackson and her daughter occasionally ventured to thread their way on foot through the streets of Rome. On one of these expeditions they found themselves in the neighbourhood of the Pantheon. Opposite this building there is a sort of ambulatory market, outrivalling all other markets, at least in the commodity of noise—a commodity in which the populace of Rome generally abound. On approaching it you think some desperate affray is going on; but the men are only parading and vaunting their disgusting fish, or most uninviting vegetables. The merits of these they proclaim with a perfect storm of vociferation. Mrs. Jackson, who had heard of revolutions on the Continent, did not doubt for a moment but that one of these frightful things was taking place before her. She and her daughter hurried back with precipitation, haunted by all the terrors of the guillotine and the lamp-post. Louisa remembered a certain beautiful princess she had read of, who had been compelled to drink a cup of blood to save her father. What if they should treat her as they did the beautiful princess, and offer her such another cup, and force her to drink it, as the only means of saving her mother? Her heroism did not desert her. She resolved she would drink half. But as they were hurrying away full of these imaginary dangers, they rushed upon one of a more real though less imposing description. It is no joke in the narrow streets of Rome, to meet with a string of carts drawn by huge oxen, wallowing along under their uneasy yokes. Just such a string of carts encountered them as they turned one of the many narrow streets that conduct to the Pantheon. The enormous brutes went poking their spreading horns this way and that, in a manner very quiet perhaps in the animals apprehensions, but very alarming to those of Mrs. Jackson; huge horns, that were large enough, she thought, to spit an alderman, and still have, room for her at the top. The two ladies, seeing the first of these carts approach, had drawn-up close against the wall, and placed themselves on a little heap of rubbish to be more completely out of the way. To their dismay the line of these vehicles seemed to be endless—there was no escape—in that position they had to stand, while each brute as he passed turned his horns round to them, not with any ferocious intention, but as if he had a great curiosity to feel them, and examine their texture—an attention which would have been highly indecorous, to say the least of it.

What could Winston do, who encountered them in this predicament, but offer his escort? He calmed their various terrors—both of mad bulls and of revolutions—reconducted them to the Pantheon, and secured an exceedingly happy day for one at least of the party.

Winston had now been some time in Rome, and with an inconsistency so natural that it hardly merits the name of inconsistency, he found himself looking about in the galleries and churches for Mr. Bloomfield and his party, and with a curiosity which did not bespeak a very violent determination to avoid them. He began to think that they had lingered a long while at Florence. He had forgot the danger—he remembered the charm.

One morning—having stolen out early and alone from his hotel—as he was engaged in viewing, for perhaps the last time, the sculpture of the Vatican, he observed standing before the statue of the Amazon, a female figure, as beautiful as it, and in an attitude which had been unconsciously moulded into some resemblance of the pensive, queen-like posture which the artist has given to the marble. It was Mildred. He hesitated—he approached. She, on her part, met him with the utmost frankness. His half-uttered apologies were immediately dropped. He hardly knew whether to be pleased or mortified, as she made him feel that the peculiar footing on which they stood tasked him to no apologies, no ceremonial, that he was free to go—and withal very welcome to return.

“You are before the Amazon,” said he: “it is the statue of all others which has most fascinated me. I cannot understand why it should bear the name it does. I suppose the learned in these matters have their reasons: I have never inquired, nor feel disposed to inquire into them; but I am sure the character of the statue is not Amazonian. That attitude—the right arm raised to draw aside her veil, the left hand at its elbow, steadying it—that beautiful countenance, so full of sadness and of dignity—no, these cannot belong to an Amazon.”

“To a woman,” said Mildred, “it is allowed to be indifferent on certain points of learning; and, in such cases as this, I certainly take advantage to the full of the privilege of my sex. I care not what they call the statue. It may have been called an Amazon by Greek and Roman—it may have been so named by the artist himself when he sent it home to his patron: I look at it as a creation standing between me and the mind of the artist; and sure I am that, bear what name it may, the sculptor has embodied here all that his soul had felt of the sweetness, and power, and dignity of woman. It is a grander creation than any goddess I have seen; it has more of thought——”

“And, as a consequence, more of sadness, of unhappiness. How the mystery of life seems to hang upon that pensive brow! I used to share an impression, which I believe is very general, that the deep sorrow which comes of thought, the reflective melancholy which results from pondering on the bitter problem of life, was peculiar to the moderns. This statue, and others which I have lately seen, have convinced me that the sculptor of antiquity has occasionally felt and expressed whatever could be extracted from the mingled poetry of a Byron or a Goethe.”

“It seems that the necessity of representing the gods in the clear light of happiness and knowledge, in some measure deprived the Greek artist of one great source of sublimity. But it is evident,” continued Mildred, “that the mysterious, with its attendant sorrow, was known also to him. How could it be otherwise? Oh, what a beautiful creation is this we stand before! And what an art it is which permits us to stand thus before a being of this high order, and note all its noble passions! From the real life we should turn our eyes away, or drop them, abashed, upon the ground. Here is more than life; and we may look on it by the hour, and mark its graceful sorrow, its queen-like beauty, and this over-mastered grief which we may wonder at, but dare not pity.”

They passed on to other statues. They paused before the Menander, sitting in his chair. “The attitude,” said she, “is so noble, that the simple chair becomes a throne. But still how plainly it is intellectual power that sits enthroned there! The posture is imperial; and yet how evident, that it is the empire of thought only that he governs in!”

“And this little statue of Esculapius,” she added, “kept me a long while before it. The healing sage—how faithfully is he represented! What a sad benevolence! acquainted with pain—compelled to inflict even in order to restore.”

They passed through the Hall of the Muses.

“How serene are all the Muses!” said Winston. “This is as it should be. Even Tragedy, the most moved of all, how evidently her emotion is one of thought, not of passion! Though she holds the dagger in her down-dropt hand, how plainly we see that she has not used it! She has picked it up from the floor after the fatal deed was perpetrated, and is musing on the terrible catastrophe, and the still more terrible passions that led to it.”

They passed through the Hall of the Animals; but this had comparatively little attraction for Mildred. Her companion pointed out the bronze centaur for her admiration.

“You must break a centaur in half,” said she, “before I can admire it. And, if I am to look at a satyr, pray let the goat’s legs be hid in the bushes. I cannot embrace in one conception these fragments of man and brute. Come with me to the neighbouring gallery; I wish to show you a Jupiter, seated at the further end of it, which made half a Pagan of me this morning as I stood venerating it.”

“The head of your Jupiter,” said Winston, as they approached it, “is surpassed, I think, by more than one bust of the same god that we have already seen; and I find something of stiffness or rigidity in the figure; but the impression it makes, as a whole, is very grand.”

“It will grow wonderfully on you as you look at it,” said Mildred. “How well it typifies all that a Pagan would conceive of the supreme ruler of the skies, the controller of the powers of nature, the great administrator of the world who has the Fates for his council! His power irresistible, but no pride in it, no joy, no triumph. He is without passion. In his right hand lies the thunder, but it reposes on his thigh; and his left hand rests calmly upon his tall sceptre surmounted by an eagle. In his countenance there is the tranquillity of unquestioned supremacy; but there is no repose. There is care; a constant, wakefulness. It is the governor of a nature whose elements have never known one moment’s pause.”

“I see it as you speak,” said Winston. Winston then proposed that they should go together and look at the Apollo; but Mildred excused herself.

“I have paid my devotions to the god,” she said, “this morning, when the eyes and the mind were fresh. I would not willingly displace the impression that I now carry away for one which would be made on a fatigued and jaded attention.”

“Is it not godlike?”

“Indeed it is. I was presumptuous enough to think I knew the Apollo. A cast of the head—esteemed to be a very good one—my uncle had given me. I placed it in my own room; for a long time it was the first thing that the light fell upon, or my eyes opened to, in the morning; and in my attempts at crayons I copied it, I believe, in every aspect. It seemed to me therefore that on visiting the Apollo I should recognise an old acquaintance. No such thing. The cast had given me hardly any idea of the statue itself. There was certainly no feeling of old acquaintanceship. The brow, as I stood in front of the god, quite overawed me; involuntarily I retreated for an instant; you will smile, but I had to muster my courage before I could gaze steadily at it.”

“I am not surprised; the divinity there is in no gentle mood. How majestic! and yet how lightly it touches the earth! It is buoyant with godhead.”

“What strikes me,” continued Mildred, “as the great triumph of the artist, is this very anger of the god. It is an anger, which, like the arrow he has shot from his bow, spends itself entirely upon his victim; there is no recoil, as in human passion, upon the mind of him who feels it. There is no jar there. The lightning strikes down—it tarries not a moment in the sky above.”

We are giving, we are afraid, in these reports of Mildred’s conversation, an erroneous impression of the speaker. We collect together what often was uttered with some pauses between, and, owing to a partiality to our heroine, we are more anxious to report her sentiments than those of her companion. She is thus made to speak in a somewhat elaborate style, very different from her real manner, and represented as rather the greater talker of the two; whereas she was more disposed to listen than to speak, and spoke always with the greatest simplicity—with enthusiasm, it is true, but never with effort, or display of diction.

The delight which Winston experienced, (having already surveyed them for and by himself,) in retracing his steps through the marvels of Rome with such a companion, is indescribable. The pictures in the Borghese, and other palaces, broke upon him with a second novelty, and often with a deeper sentiment. But was there no danger in wandering through galleries with one by his side to whose living beauty the beauty on the canvass served only to draw renewed attention and heightened admiration? If he fled at Genoa, why does he tarry at Rome? There are some dangers, alas! that are seen the less the greater they become. He was standing with her before that exquisite picture in the Borghese palace representing the Three Ages; a youth is reclining in the centre, and a nymph is playing to him upon two flutes. He had seen it before, but he seemed now to understand it for the first time. “How plainly,” he murmured to himself, “is youth the all of life! How plainly is love the all of youth!”

As he was now somewhat familiar with Rome, he could be serviceable to the Bloomfield party in the capacity of cicerone. They were pleased with his services, and he found every day some incontrovertible reason why he should bestow them. The embarrassments of Louisa Jackson and her mamma were quite forgotten; nor could their difficulties excite a moment’s compassion or attention. In vain did Louisa sigh; no inquiry was made into the cause of her distress. In vain did she even, with plaintive voice, ask whether, “being a Protestant, she could take the veil, and be a nun?” the question was unheeded, and its deep significance unperceived.

EUGENE, MARLBOROUGH, FREDERICK, NAPOLEON, AND WELLINGTON.

Five generals, by the common consent of men, stand forth pre-eminent in modern times for the magnitude of the achievements they have effected, and the splendour of the talents they have displayed—Eugene, Marlborough, Frederick, Napoleon, and Wellington. It is hard to say which appears the greatest, whether we regard the services they have rendered to their respective countries, or the durable impress their deeds have left on human affairs. All had difficulties the most serious to contend with, obstacles apparently insurmountable to overcome, and all proved in the end victorious over them. All have immortalized their names by exploits far exceeding those recorded of other men. All have left their effects durably imprinted in the subsequent fate of nations. The relative position of the European states, the preservation of public rights, the maintenance of the balance of power, the salvation of the weak from the grasp of the strong, has been mainly owing to their exertions. To their biography is attached not merely the fortune of the countries to which they belonged, but the general destinies of Europe, and through it of the human race.

To give a faithful picture, in a few pages, of such men, may seem a hopeless, and to their merits an invidious task. A brief summary of the chief actions of those of them to ordinary readers least known, is, however, indispensable to lay a foundation for their comparison with those whose deeds are as household words. It is not impossible to convey to those who are familiar with their exploits, a pleasing resumè of their leading features, and salient points of difference; to those who are not, to give some idea of the pleasure which their study is calculated to afford. Generals, like poets or painters, have certain leading characteristics which may be traced through all their achievements; a peculiar impress has been communicated by nature to their minds, which appears, not less than on the painter’s canvass or in the poet’s lines, in all their actions. As much as grandeur of conception distinguishes Homer, tenderness of feeling Virgil, and sublimity of thought Milton, does impetuous daring characterize Eugene, consummate generalship Marlborough, indomitable firmness Frederick, lofty genius Napoleon, unerring wisdom Wellington. Greatness in the military, as in every other art, is to be attained only by strong natural talents, perseveringly directed to one object, undistracted by other pursuits, undivided by inferior ambition. The men who have risen to the highest eminence in war, have done so by the exercise of faculties as great, and the force of genius as transcendent, as that which formed a Homer, a Bacon, or a Newton. Success doubtless commands the admiration of the multitude; military glory captivates the unthinking throng; but to those who know the military art, and can appreciate real merit, the chief ground for admiration of its great masters, is a sense of the difficulties, to most unknown, which they have overcome.

Prince Eugene, though belonging to the same age, often acting in the same army, and sometimes commanding alternately with Marlborough, was a general of an essentially different character. A descendant of the House of Savoy, born at Paris, in 1663, and originally destined for the church, he early evinced a repugnance for theological studies, and, instead of his breviary, was devouring in secret Plutarch’s lives of ancient heroes. His figure was slender, and his constitution at first weak; but these disadvantages, which caused Louis XIV. to refuse him a regiment, from an opinion that he was not equal to its duties, were soon overcome by the ardour of his mind. Immediately setting out for Vienna, he entered the imperial service; but he was still pursued by the enmity of Louvois, who procured from Louis a decree which pronounced sentence of banishment on all Frenchmen in the armies of foreign powers who should fail to return to their country. “I will re-enter France in spite of him,” said Eugene; and he was more than once as good as his word. His genius for war was not methodical or scientific like that of Turenne or Marlborough, nor essentially chivalrous like that of the Black Prince or the Great Condé. It was more akin to the terrible sweep of the Tartar chiefs; it savoured more of oriental daring. He was as prodigal of the blood of his soldiers as Napoleon; but, unlike him, he never failed to expose his own with equal readiness in the fight. He did not reserve his attack in person for the close of the affray, like the French Emperor, but was generally to be seen in the fire from the very outset. It was with difficulty he could be restrained from heading the first assault of grenadiers, or leading on the first charge of horse. His first distinguished command was in Italy, in 1691, and his abilities soon gave his kinsman, the Duke of Savoy, an ascendant there over the French. But it was at the great battle of Zenta, on the Teife, where he surprised and totally defeated Cara-Mustapha, at the head of 120,000 Turks, that his wonderful genius for war first shone forth in its full lustre. He there killed 20,000 of the enemy, drove 10,000 into the river, took their whole artillery and standards, and entirely dispersed their mighty array.

Like Nelson at Copenhagen, Eugene had gained this glorious victory by acting in opposition to his orders, which were positively to avoid a general engagement. This circumstance, joined to the envy excited by his unparalleled triumph, raised a storm at Court against the illustrious general, and led to his being deprived of his command, and even threatened with a court-martial. The public voice, however, at Vienna, loudly condemned such base ingratitude towards so great a benefactor to the imperial dominions: the want of his directing eye was speedily felt in the campaign with the Turks, and the Emperor was obliged to restore him to his command, which he, however, only agreed to accept on being given carte blanche for the conduct of the war. The peace of Carlowetz, in 1699, between the Imperialists and the Ottomans, soon after restored him to a pacific life, and the study of history, in which, above any other, he delighted. But on the breaking out of the war of the Succession, in 1701, he was restored to his military duties, and during two campaigns measured his strength, always with success, in the plains of Lombardy, with the scientific abilities of Marshal Catinat, and the learned experience of Marshal Villeroi, the latter of whom he made prisoner during a nocturnal attack on Cremona, in 1703. In 1704, he was transferred to the north of the Alps to unite with Marlborough in making head against the great army of Marshal Tallard, which was advancing, in so threatening a manner, through Bavaria; and he shared with the illustrious Englishman the glories of Blenheim, which at once delivered Germany, and hurled the French armies with disgrace behind the Rhine. Then commenced that steady friendship, and sincere and mutual regard, between these illustrious men, which continued unbroken till the time of their death, and is not the least honourable trait in the character of each. But the want of his protecting arm was long felt in Italy: the great abilities of the Duke de Vendôme had well-nigh counterbalanced there all the advantages of the allies in Germany; and the issue of the war in the plains of Piedmont continued doubtful till the glorious victory of Eugene, on the 7th Sept. 1706, when he stormed the French intrenchments around Turin, defended by eighty thousand men, at the head of thirty thousand only, and totally defeated Marshal Marsin and the Duke of Orleans, with such loss, that the French armies were speedily driven across the Alps.

Eugene was now received in the most flattering manner at Vienna: the lustre of his exploits had put to silence, if not to shame, the malignity of his enemies. “I have but one fault to find with you,” said the Emperor when he was first presented to him after his victory, “and that is that you expose yourself too much.” He was next placed at the head of the Imperial armies in Flanders; and shared with Marlborough in the conduct, as he did in the glories, of Oudenarde and Malplaquet. Intrusted with the command of the corps which besieged Lille, he was penetrated with the utmost admiration for Marshal Boufflers, and evinced the native generosity of his disposition, by the readiness with which he granted the most favourable terms to the illustrious besieged chief, who had with equal skill and valour conducted the defence. When the articles of capitulation proposed by Boufflers were placed before him, he said at once, without looking at them, “I will subscribe them at once: knowing well you would propose nothing unworthy of you and me.” The delicacy of his subsequent attentions to his noble prisoner evinced the sincerity of his admiration. When Marlborough’s influence at the English Court was sensibly declining, in 1711, he repaired to London, and exerted all his talents and address to bring the English council back to the common cause, and restore his great rival to his former ascendency with Queen Anne. When it was all in vain, and the English armies withdrew from the coalition, Eugene did all that skill and genius could achieve to make up for the great deficiency arising from the withdrawal of Marlborough and his gallant followers; and when it had become apparent that he was over-matched by the French armies, he was the first to counsel his Imperial master to conclude peace, which was done at Rastadt on the 6th March, 1714.

Great as had been the services then performed by Eugene for the Imperialists, they were outdone by those which he subsequently rendered in the wars with the Turks. In truth it was he who first effectually broke their power, and for ever delivered Europe from the sabres of the Osmanlis, by which it had been incessantly threatened for three hundred years. Intrusted with the command of the Austrian army in Hungary, sixty thousand strong, he gained at Peterwardin, in 1716, a complete victory over an hundred and fifty thousand Turks. This glorious success led him to resume the offensive, and in the following year he laid siege, with forty thousand men, to Belgrade, the great frontier fortress of Turkey, in presence of the whole strength of the Ottoman empire. The obstinate resistance of the Turks, as famous then, as they have ever since been, in the defence of fortified places, joined to the dysenteries and fevers usual on the marshy banks of the Danube in the autumnal months, soon reduced his effective force to twenty-five thousand men, while that of the enemy, by prodigious efforts, had been swelled to an hundred and fifty thousand around the besiegers’ lines, besides thirty thousand within the walls. Every thing presaged that Eugene was about to undergo the fate of Marshal Marsin twelve years before at Turin, and even his most experienced officers deemed a capitulation the only way of extricating them from their perilous situation. Eugene himself was attacked and seriously weakened by the prevailing dysentery: all seemed lost in the Austrian camp. It was in these circumstances, with this weakened and dispirited force, that he achieved one of the most glorious victories ever gained by the Cross over the Crescent. With admirable skill he collected his little army together, divided it into columns of attack, and though scarcely able to sit on horseback himself, led them to the assault of the Turkish intrenchments. The result was equal to the success of Cæsar over the Gauls at the blockade of Alesia, seventeen centuries before. The innumerable host of the Turks was totally defeated—all their artillery and baggage taken, and their troops entirely dispersed. Belgrade, immediately after, opened its gates, and has since remained, with some mutations of fortune, the great frontier bulwark of Europe against the Turks. The successes which he gained in the following campaign of 1718 were so decisive, that they entirely broke the Ottoman power; and he was preparing to march to Constantinople, when the treaty of Passarowitz put a period to his conquests, and gave a breathing time to the exhausted Ottoman empire.[3]

From this brief sketch of his exploits, it may readily be understood what was the character of Eugene as a general. He had none of the methodical prudence of Turenne, Marlborough, or Villars. His genius was entirely different: it was more akin to that of Napoleon, when he was reduced to counterbalance inferiority of numbers by superiority of skill. The immortal campaigns of 1796, in Italy, and of 1814, in Champagne, bear a strong resemblance to those of Eugene. Like the French Emperor, his strokes were rapid and forcible; his coup-d’œil was at once quick and just; his activity indefatigable; his courage undaunted; his resources equal to any undertaking. He did not lay much stress on previous arrangements, and seldom attempted the extensive combinations which enabled Marlborough to command success; but dashed fearlessly on, trusting to his own resources to extricate him out of any difficulty—to his genius, in any circumstances, to command victory. Yet was this daring disposition not without peril. His audacity often bordered on rashness, his rapidity on haste; and he repeatedly brought his armies into situations all but desperate, and which, to a general of lesser capacity, unquestionably would have proved so. Yet in these difficulties no one could exceed him in the energy and vigour with which he extricated himself from the toils: and many of his greatest victories, particularly those of Turin and Belgrade, were gained under circumstances where even the boldest officers in his army had given him over for lost. He was prodigal of the blood of his soldiers, and, like Napoleon, indifferent to the sacrifices at which he purchased his successes; but he was still more lavish of his own, and never failed to share the hardships and dangers of the meanest of his followers. He was engaged in thirteen pitched battles, in all of which he fought like a common soldier. He was in consequence repeatedly, sometimes dangerously, wounded; and it was extraordinary “that his life escaped his reiterated perils.” He raised the Austrian monarchy by his triumphs to the very highest pitch of glory, and finally broke the power of the Turks, the most persevering and not the least formidable of its enemies. But the enterprises which his genius prompted the cabinet of Vienna to undertake, were beyond the strength of the hereditary states; and for nearly a century after, it achieved nothing worthy, either of its growing resources, or the military renown which he had spread around its annals.

Frederick II., surnamed the Great, with more justice than that title has elsewhere been applied in modern times, was born at Berlin on the 24th January, 1712. His education was as much neglected as ill-directed. Destined from early youth for the military profession, he was in the first instance subjected to a discipline so rigorous, that he conceived the utmost aversion for a career in which he was ultimately to shine with such eclat, and, as his only resource, threw himself with ardour into the study of French literature, for which he retained a strong predilection through the whole of his subsequent life. Unfortunately his education was almost entirely confined to that literature. That of his own country, since so illustrious, had not started into existence. Of Italian and Spanish he was ignorant. He could not read Greek; and with Latin his acquaintance was so imperfect, as to be of no practical service to him through life. To this unfortunate contraction of his education his limited taste in literature, in subsequent life, is chiefly to be ascribed. He at first was desirous of espousing an English princess; but his father, who was most imperious in his disposition, decided otherwise, and he was compelled, in 1733, to marry the Princess Elizabeth of Brunswick. This union, like most others contracted under restraint, proved unfortunate; and it did not give Frederick the blessing of an heir to the throne. Debarred from domestic enjoyments, the young prince took refuge with more eagerness than ever in literary pursuits; the chateau of Rhinsberg, which was his favourite abode, was styled by him in his transport the “Palace of the Muses;” and the greatest general and most hardy soldier of modern times spent some years of his youth in corresponding with Maupertuis, Voltaire, and other French philosophers, and in making indifferent verses and madrigals, which gave no token of any remarkable genius. He had already prepared for the press a book entitled “Refutation of the Prince of Machiavel,” when, in 1740, the death of his father called him to the throne, its duties, its dangers, and its ambition.

The philosophers were in transports, when they beheld “one of themselves,” as they styled him, elevated to a throne: they flattered themselves that he would continue his literary pursuits, and acknowledge their influence, when surrounded by the attractions, and wielding the patronage of the crown. They soon found their mistake. Frederick continued through life his literary tastes: he corresponded with Voltaire and the philosophers through all his campaigns: he made French verses, in his tent, after tracing out the plans of the battles of Leuthen and Rosbach. But his heart was in his kingdom: his ambition was set on its aggrandizement: his passion was war, by which alone it could be achieved. Without being discarded, the philosophers and madrigals were soon forgotten. The finances and the army occupied his whole attention. The former were in admirable order, and his father had even accumulated a large treasure which remained in the exchequer. The army, admirably equipped and disciplined, already amounted to 60,000 men: he augmented it to 80,000. Nothing could exceed the vigour he displayed in every department, or the unceasing attention he paid to public affairs. Indefatigable day and night, sober and temperate in his habits, he employed even artificial means to augment the time during the day he could devote to business. Finding that he was constitutionally inclined to more sleep than he deemed consistent with the full discharge of all his regal duties, he ordered his servants to waken him at five in the morning; and if words were not effectual to rouse him from his sleep, he commanded them, on pain of dismissal, to apply linen steeped in cold water to his person. This order was punctually executed, even in the depth of winter, till nature was fairly subdued, and the king had gained the time he desired from his slumbers.

It was not long before he had an opportunity of evincing at once the vigour and unscrupulous character of his mind. The Emperor Charles VI. having died on the 20th October, 1740, the immense possessions of the house of Austria devolved to his daughter, since so famous by the name of Maria Theresa. The defenceless condition of the imperial dominions, consisting of so many different and discordant states, some of them but recently united under one head, when under the guidance of a young unmarried princess, suggested to the neighbouring powers the idea of a partition. Frederick eagerly united with France in this project. He revived some old and obsolete claims of Prussia to Silesia; but in his manifesto to the European powers, upon invading that province, he was scarcely at the pains to conceal the real motives of his aggression. “It is,” said he, “an army ready to take the field, treasures long accumulated, and perhaps the desire to acquire glory.” He was not long in winning the battle, though it was at first rather owing to the skill of his generals, and discipline of his soldiers, than his own capacity. On the 10th April, 1741, the army under his command gained a complete victory over the Austrians, at Mollwitz, in Silesia, which led to the entire reduction of that rich and important province. The king owed little to his own courage, however, on this occasion. Like Wellington, the first essay in arms of so indomitable a hero was unfortunate. He fled from the field of battle, at the first repulse of his cavalry; and he was already seven miles off, where he was resting in a mill, when he received intelligence that his troops had regained the day; and at the earnest entreaties of General afterwards Marshal Schwerin, he returned to take the command of the army. Next year, however, he evinced equal courage and capacity in the battle of Czaslau, which he gained over the Prince of Lorraine. Austria, on the brink of ruin, hastened to disarm the most formidable of her assailants; and, by a separate peace, concluded at Breslau on June 11, 1742, she ceded to Prussia nearly the whole of Silesia.

This cruel loss, however, was too plainly the result of necessity to be acquiesced in without a struggle by the Cabinet of Vienna. Maria Theresa made no secret of her determination to resume possession of the lost province on the first convenient opportunity. Austria soon united the whole of Germany in a league against Frederick, who had no ally but the King of France. Assailed by such a host of enemies, however, the young king was not discouraged, and, boldly assuming the initiative, he gained at Hohenfriedberg a complete victory over his old antagonist the Prince of Lorraine. This triumph was won entirely by the extraordinary genius displayed by the King of Prussia: “It was one of those battles,” says the military historian, Guibert, “where a great master makes every thing give way before him, and which is gained from the very beginning, because he never gives the enemy time to recover from their disorder.” The Austrians made great exertions to repair the consequences of this disaster, and with such success, that in four months Prince Charles of Lorraine again attacked him at the head of 50,000 men near Soor. Frederick had not 25,000, but with these he again defeated the Austrians with immense loss, and took up his winter quarters in Silesia. So vast were the resources, however, of the great German League, of which Austria was the head, that they were enabled to keep the field during winter, and even meditate a coup-de-main against the king, in his capital of Berlin. Informed of this design, Frederick lost not a moment in anticipating it by a sudden attack on his part on his enemies. Assembling his troops in the depth of winter with perfect secrecy, he surprised a large body of Saxons at Naumberg, made himself master of their magazines at Gorlitz, and soon after made his triumphant entry into Dresden, where he dictated a glorious peace, on 25th December, 1745, to his enemies, which secured, permanently, Silesia to Prussia. It was full time for the Imperialists to come to an accommodation. In eighteen months Frederick had defeated them in four pitched battles, besides several combats; taken 45,000 prisoners, and killed or wounded an equal number of his enemies. His own armies had not sustained losses to a fifth part of this amount, and the chasms in his ranks were more than compensated by the multitude of the prisoners who enlisted under his banners, anxious to share the fortunes of the hero who had already filled Europe with his renown.

The ambitious and decided, and, above all, indomitable character of Frederick, had already become conspicuous during these brief campaigns. His correspondence, all conducted by himself, evinced a vigour and tranchant style, at that period unknown in European diplomacy, but to which the world has since been abundantly accustomed in the proclamations of Napoleon. Already he spoke on every occasion as the hero and the conqueror—to conquer or die was his invariable maxim. On the eve of his invasion of Saxony, he wrote to the Empress of Russia, who was endeavouring to dissuade him from that design:—“I wish nothing from the King of Poland (Elector of Saxony) but to punish him in his Electorate, and make him sign an acknowledgment of repentance in his capital.” During the negotiations for peace, he wrote to the King of England, who had proposed the mediation of Great Britain:—“These are my conditions. I will perish with my army before departing from one iota of them: if the Empress does not accept them, I will rise in my demands.”

The peace of Dresden lasted ten years; and these were of inestimable importance to Frederick. He employed that precious interval in consolidating his conquests, securing the affections by protecting the interests of his subjects, and pursuing every design which could conduce to their welfare. Marshes were drained, lands broken up and cultivated, manufactures established, the finances were put in the best order, agriculture, as the great staple of the kingdom, sedulously encouraged. His capital was embellished, and the fame of his exploits attracted the greatest and most celebrated men in Europe. Voltaire, among the rest, became for years his guest; but the aspiring genius and irascible temper of the military monarch could ill accord with the vanity and insatiable thirst for praise in the French author, and they parted with mutual respect, but irretrievable alienation. Meanwhile, the strength of the monarchy was daily increasing under Frederick’s wise and provident administration. The population nearly reached 6,000,000 of souls; the cavalry mustered 30,000, all in the highest state of discipline and equipment; and the infantry, esteemed with reason the most perfect in Europe, numbered an hundred and twenty thousand bayonets. These troops had long been accustomed to act together in large bodies; the best training next to actual service in the field which an army can receive. They had need of all their skill, and discipline, and courage, for Prussia was ere long threatened by the most formidable confederacy that ever yet had been directed in modern times against a single State. Austria, Russia, France, Sweden, and Saxony, united in alliance for the purpose of partitioning the Prussian territories. They had ninety millions of men in their dominions, and could with ease bring four hundred thousand men into the field. Prussia had not six million of inhabitants, who were strained to the uttermost to array a hundred and fifty thousand combatants—and even with the aid of England and Hanover, not more than fifty thousand auxiliaries could be relied on. Prussia had neither strong fortresses like Flanders, nor mountain chains like Spain, nor a frontier stream like France. It was chiefly composed of flat plains, unprotected by great rivers, and surrounded on all sides by its enemies. The contest seemed utterly desperate; there did not seem a chance of escape for the Prussian monarchy.

Frederick began the contest by one of those strokes which demonstrated the strength of his understanding and the vigour of his determination. Instead of waiting to be attacked, he carried the war at once into the enemy’s territories, and converted the resources of the nearest of them to his own advantage. Having received authentic intelligence of the signature of a treaty for the partition of his kingdom by the great powers, on 9th May 1756, he suddenly entered the Saxon territories, made himself master of Dresden, and shut up the whole forces of Saxony in the intrenched camp at Pirna. Marshal Brown having advanced at the head of 60,000 men to relieve them, he encountered and totally defeated him at Lowositz, with the loss of 15,000 men. Deprived of all hope of succour, the Saxons in Pirna, after having made vain efforts to escape, were obliged to lay down their arms, 14,000 strong. The whole of Saxony submitted to the victor, who thenceforward, during the whole war, converted its entire resources to his own support. Beyond all question, it was this masterly and successful stroke, in the very outset, and in the teeth of his enemies, adding above a third to his warlike resources, which enabled him subsequently to maintain his ground against the desperate odds by which he was assailed. Most of the Saxons taken at Pirna, dazzled by their conqueror’s fame, entered his service: the Saxon youth hastened in crowds to enrol themselves under the banners of the hero of the North of Germany. Frederick, at the same time, effectually vindicated the step he had taken in the eyes of all Europe, by the publication of the secret treaty of partition, taken in the archives at Dresden, in spite of the efforts of the electress to conceal it. Whatever might have been the case in the former war, when he seized on Silesia, it was apparent to the world, that he now, at least, was strictly in the right, and that his invasion of Saxony was not less justifiable on the score of public morality, than important in its consequences to the great contest in which he was engaged.

The allies made the utmost efforts to regain the advantages they had lost. France, instead of the 24,000 men she was bound to furnish by the treaty of partition, put 100,000 on foot; the Diet of Ratisbon placed 60,000 troops of the empire at the disposal of Austria; but Frederick still preserved the ascendant. Breaking into Bohemia, in March 1757, he defeated the Austrians in a great battle under the walls of Prague, shut up 40,000 of their best troops in that town, and soon reduced them to such extremities, that it was evident, if not succoured, they must surrender. The cabinet of Vienna made the greatest efforts for their relief Marshal Daun, whose cautious and scientific policy were peculiarly calculated to thwart the designs, and baffle the audacity of his youthful antagonist, advanced at the head of 60,000 men to their relief. Frederick advanced to meet them with less than 20,000 combatants. He attacked the Imperialists in a strong position at Kolin, on the 18th July, and, for the first time in his life, met with a bloody defeat. His army, especially that division commanded by his brother, the prince-royal, sustained severe losses in the retreat, which became unavoidable, out of Bohemia; and the king confessed, in his private correspondence, that an honourable death alone remained to him. Disaster accumulated on every side. The English and Hanoverian army, his only allies, capitulated at Closterseven, and left the French army, 70,000 strong, at liberty to follow the Prussians; the French and troops of the empire, with the Duke of Richelieu at their head, menaced Magdeburg, where the royal family of Prussia had taken refuge; and advanced towards Dresden. The Russians, 60,000 strong, were making serious progress on the side of Poland, and had recently defeated the Prussians opposed to them. The king was put to the ban of the empire, and the army of the empire, mustering 40,000, was moving against him. Four huge armies, each stronger than his own, were advancing to crush a prince who could not collect 30,000 men round his banners. At that period he carried a sure poison always with him, determined not to fall alive into the hands of his enemies. He seriously contemplated suicide, and gave vent to the mournful, but yet heroic, sentiments with which he was inspired, in a letter to Voltaire, terminating with the lines—

Pour moi, menaçé de naufrage,
Je dois, en affrontant l’orage
Penser, vivre et mourir en roi.

Then it was that the astonishing vigour and powers of his mind shone forth with their full lustre. Collecting hastily 25,000 men out of his shattered battalions, he marched against the Prince of Soubise, who, at the head of 60,000 French and troops of the empire, was advancing against him through Thuringia, and totally defeated him, with the loss of 18,000 men, on the memorable field of Rosbach. Hardly was this triumph achieved, when he was called, with his indefatigable followers, to stem the progress of the Prince of Lorraine and Marshal Daun, who were making the most alarming progress in Silesia. Schweidnitz, its capital, had fallen: a large body of Prussians, under the Duke de Bevorn, had been defeated at Breslau. That rich and important province seemed on the point of falling again into the hands of the Austrians, when Frederick reinstated his affairs, which seemed wholly desperate, by one of those astonishing strokes which distinguish him, perhaps, above any general of modern times. In the depth of winter he attacked, at Leuthen, on the 5th December, 1757, Marshal Daun and the Prince of Lorraine,—who had 60,000 admirable troops under their orders,—and, by the skilful application of the oblique method of attack, defeated them entirely, with the loss of 30,000 men, of whom 18,000 were prisoners! It was the greatest victory that had been gained in Europe since the battle of Blenheim. Its effects were immense: the Austrians were driven headlong out of Silesia; Schweidnitz was regained; the King of Prussia, pursuing them, carried the war into Moravia, and laid siege to Olmutz; and England, awakening, at the voice of Chatham, from its unworthy slumber, refused to ratify the capitulation of Closterseven, resumed the war on the continent with more vigour than ever, and intrusted its direction to Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, who soon rivalled Turenne in the skill and science of his methodical warfare.

But it was the destiny of the King of Prussia—a destiny which displayed his great qualities in their full lustre—to be perpetually involved in difficulties, from the enormous numerical preponderance of his enemies, or the misfortunes of the lieutenants to whom his subordinate armies were intrusted. Frederick could not be personally present every where at the same time; and wherever he was absent, disaster revealed the overwhelming superiority of the force by which he was assailed. The siege of Olmutz, commenced in March 1758, proved unfortunate. The battering train, at the disposal of the king, was unequal to its reduction, and it became necessary to raise it on the approach of Daun with a formidable Austrian army. During this unsuccessful irruption into the south, the Russians had been making alarming progress in the north-east, where the feeble force opposed to them was well-nigh overwhelmed by their enormous superiority of numbers. Frederick led back the flower of his army from Olmutz, in Moravia, crossed all Silesia and Prussia, and encountered the sturdy barbarians at Zorndorf, defeating them with the loss of 17,000 men, an advantage which delivered the eastern provinces of the monarchy from this formidable invasion; dearly purchased, however, by the sacrifice of 10,000 of his own best soldiers. But, during the king’s absence, Prince Henry of Prussia, whom he had left in command of 16,000 men, to keep Marshal Daun in check, was well-nigh overwhelmed by that able commander, who was again at the head of 50,000 combatants. Frederick flew back to his support, and, having joined his brother, took post at Hohenkirchen. The position was unfavourable: the army inferior to the enemy. “If Daun does not attack us here,” said Marshal Keith, “he deserves to be hanged.” “I hope,” answered Frederick, “he will be more afraid of us than the rope.” The Austrian veteran, however, saw his advantage, and attacked the Prussians, during the night, with such skill, that he threw them into momentary confusion, took 150 pieces of cannon, and drove them from their ground, with the loss of 7000 men. Then it was that the courage and genius of the king shone forth with their full lustre. Though grievously wounded in the conflict, and after having seen his best generals fall around him, he rallied his troops at daybreak,—formed them in good order behind the village which had been surprised, and led them leisurely to a position a mile from the field of conflict, where he offered battle to the enemy, who did not venture to accept it. Having remained two days in this position to re-organize his troops, he decamped, raised the siege of Niesse, and succeeded in taking up his winter quarters at Breslau, in the very middle of the province he had wrested from the enemy.

The campaign of 1759 was still more perilous to Frederick; but, if possible, it displayed his extraordinary talents in still brighter colours. He began by observing the Austrians, under Daun and the Prince of Lorraine, in Silesia, and reserved his strength to combat the Russians, who were advancing, 80,000 strong, through East Prussia. Frederick attacked them at Cunnersdorf, with 40,000 only, in an intrenched position, guarded by 200 pieces of cannon. The first onset of the Prussians was entirely successful: they forced the front line of the Russian intrenchment, and took 72 pieces of cannon. But the situation of the king was such, pressed on all sides by superior armies, that he could not stop short with ordinary success; and, in the attempt to gain a decisive victory, he had well-nigh lost all. The heroism of his troops was shattered against the strength of the second line of the Russians; a large body of Austrians came up to their support during the battle, and, after having exhausted all the resources of courage and genius, he was driven from the field with the loss of 20,000 men and all his artillery. The Russians lost 18,000 men in this terrible battle, the most bloody which had been fought for centuries in Europe, and were in no condition to follow up their victory. Other misfortunes, however, in appearance overwhelming, succeeded each other. General Schmellau capitulated in Dresden; and General Finch, with 17,000 men, was obliged to lay down his arms in the defiles of the Bohemian mountains. All seemed lost; but the king still persevered, and the victory of Minden enabled Prince Ferdinand to detach 12,000 men to his support. The Prussians nobly stood by their heroic sovereign in the hour of trial; new levies supplied the wide chasms in his ranks. Frederick’s great skill averted all future disasters, and the campaign of 1759, the fourth of the war, concluded with the king still in possession of all his dominions in the midst of the enormous forces of his enemies.

The campaign of 1760 began in March by another disaster at Landshech, where ten thousand Prussians were cut to pieces, under one of his generals, and the important fortress of Glatz invested by the Austrians. Frederick advanced to relieve it; but soon remeasured his steps to attempt the siege of Dresden. Daun, in his turn, followed him, and obliged the Prussian monarch to raise the siege; and he resumed his march into Silesia, closely followed by three armies, each more numerous than his own, under Laudon, Daun, and Lacey, without their being able to obtain the slightest advantage over him. Laudon, the most active of them, attempted to surprise him; but Frederick was aware of his design, and received the attacking columns in so masterly a manner, that they were totally defeated, with the loss of 12,000 men. Scarcely had he achieved this victory, when he had to make head against Lacey, withstand Daun, repel an enormous body of Russians, who were advancing through East Prussia, and deliver Berlin, which had been a second time occupied by his enemies. Driven to desperate measures by such an unparalleled succession of dangers, he extricated himself from them by the terrible battle and extraordinary victory of Torgau, on November 3, 1761, in which, after a dreadful struggle, he defeated Daun, though intrenched to the teeth, with the loss of 25,000 men—an advantage dearly purchased by the loss of 18,000 of his own brave soldiers. But this victory saved the Prussian monarchy: Daun, severely wounded in the battle, retired to Vienna; the army withdrew into Bohemia; two-thirds of Saxony was regained by the Prussians; the Russians and Swedes retired; Berlin was delivered from the enemy; and the fifth campaign terminated with the unconquerable monarch still in possession of nearly his whole dominions.

The military strength of Prussia was now all but exhausted by the unparalleled and heroic efforts she had made. Frederick has left us the following picture of the state of his kingdom and army at this disastrous period:—“Our condition at that period can only be likened to that of a man riddled with balls, weakened by the loss of blood, and ready to sink under the weight of his sufferings. The noblesse was exhausted, the lower people ruined; numbers of villages burnt, many towns destroyed; an entire anarchy had overturned the whole order and police of government: in a word, desolation was universal. The army was in no better situation. Seventeen pitched battles had mowed down the flower of the officers and soldiers; the regiments were broken down and composed in part of deserters and prisoners: order had disappeared and discipline relaxed to such a degree that the old infantry was little better than a body of newly-raised militia.”[4] Necessity, not less than prudence, in these circumstances, which to any other man would have seemed desperate, prescribed a cautious defensive policy; and it is doubtful whether in it his greatness did not appear more conspicuous than in the bolder parts of his former career. The campaign of 1761 passed in skilful marches and countermarches, without his numerous enemies being able to obtain a single advantage, where the king commanded in person. He was now, literally speaking, assailed on all sides: the immense masses of the Austrians and Russians were converging to one point; and Frederick, who could not muster 40,000 men under his banners, found himself assailed by 120,000 allies, whom six campaigns had brought to perfection in the military art. It seemed impossible he could escape: yet he did so, and compelled his enemies to retire without gaining the slightest advantage over him. Taking post in an intrenched camp at Bunzelwitz, fortified with the utmost skill, defended with the utmost vigilance, he succeeded in maintaining himself and providing his troops for two months within cannon-shot of the enormous masses of the Russians and Austrians, till want of provisions obliged them to separate. “It has just come to this,” said Frederick, “who will starve first?” He made his enemies do so. Burning with shame, they were forced to retire to their respective territories, so that he was enabled to take up his winter quarters at Breslau in Silesia. But, during this astonishing struggle, disaster had accumulated in other quarters. His camp at Bunzelwitz had only been maintained by concentrating in it nearly the whole strength of the monarchy, and its more distant provinces suffered severely under the drain. Schweidnitz, the capital of Silesia, was surprised by the Austrians, with its garrison of 4000 men. Prince Henry, after the loss of Dresden, had the utmost difficulty in maintaining himself in the part of Saxony which still remained to the Prussians: in Silesia they had lost all but Glogau, Breslau, and Neiss; and, to complete his misfortune, the dismissal of Lord Chatham from office in England, had led to the stoppage of the wonted subsidy of £750,000 a-year. The resolution of the king did not sink, but his judgment almost despaired of success under such a complication of disasters. Determined not to yield, he discovered a conspiracy at his head-quarters, to seize him, and deliver him to his enemies. Dreading such a calamity more than death, he carried with him, as formerly in similar circumstances, a sure poison, intended, in the last extremity, to terminate his days.

“Nevertheless,” as he himself said, “affairs which seemed desperate, in reality were not so; and perseverance at length surmounted every peril.” Fortune often, in real life as well as in romance, favours the brave. In the case of Frederick, however, it would be unjust to say he was favoured by Fortune. On the contrary, she long proved adverse to him; and he recovered her smiles only by heroically persevering till the ordinary chance of human affairs turned in his favour. He accomplished what in serious cases is the great aim of medicine; he made the patient survive the disease. In the winter of 1761, the Empress of Russia died, and was succeeded by Peter III. That prince had long conceived the most ardent admiration for Frederick, and he manifested it in the most decisive manner on his accession to the throne, by not only withdrawing from the alliance, but uniting his forces with those of Prussia against Austria. This great event speedily changed the face of affairs. The united Prussians and Russians under Frederick, 70,000 strong, retook Schweidnitz in the face of Daun, who had only 60,000 men; and, although the sudden death of the Czar Peter in a few months deprived him of the aid of his powerful neighbours, yet Russia took no farther part in the contest. France, exhausted and defeated in every quarter of the globe by England, could render no aid to Austria, upon whom the whole weight of the contest fell. It was soon apparent that she was over-matched by the Prussian hero. Relieved from the load which had so long oppressed him, Frederick vigorously resumed the offensive. Silesia was wholly regained by the king in person: the battle of Freyberg gave his brother, Prince Henry, the ascendant in Saxony; and the cabinet of Vienna, seeing the contest hopeless, were glad to make peace at Hubertsbourg, on 15th February, 1763, on terms which left Silesia and his whole dominions to the King of Prussia.

He entered Berlin in triumph after six years’ absence, in an open chariot, with Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick seated by his side. No words can paint the enthusiasm of the spectators at the august spectacle, or the admiration with which they regarded the hero who had filled the world with his renown. It was no wonder they were proud of their sovereign. His like had never been seen in modern times. He had founded and saved a kingdom. He had conquered Europe in arms. With six millions of subjects he had vanquished powers possessing ninety millions. He had created a new era in the art of war. His people were exhausted, pillaged, ruined; their numbers had declined a tenth during the contest. But what then? They had come victorious out of a struggle unparalleled in modern times: the halo of Leuthen and Rosbach, of Zorndorf and Torgau, played round their bayonets; they were inspired with the energy which so speedily repairs any disaster. Frederick wisely and magnanimously laid aside the sword when he resumed the pacific sceptre. His subsequent reign was almost entirely pacific; all the wounds of war were speedily healed under his sage and beneficent administration. Before his death, his subjects were double, and the national wealth triple what it had been at the commencement of his reign: and Prussia now boasts of sixteen millions of inhabitants, and a population increasing faster in numbers and resources than any other state in Europe.

No laboured character, no studied eulogium, can paint Frederick like this brief and simple narrative of his exploits. It places him at once at the head of modern generals,—if Hannibal be excepted, perhaps of ancient and modern. He was not uniformly successful: on the contrary, he sustained several dreadful defeats. But that arose from the enormous superiority of force by which he was assailed, and the desperate state of his affairs, which were generally so pressing, that a respite even in one quarter could be obtained only by a victory instantly gained, under whatever circumstances, in another. What appears rashness was often in him the height of wisdom. He could protract the struggle only by strong and vigorous strokes and the lustre of instant success, and they could not be dealt out without risking receiving as many. The fact of his maintaining the struggle against such desperate odds proves the general wisdom of his policy. No man ever made more skilful use of an interior line of communication, or flew with such rapidity from one threatened part of his dominions to another. None ever, by the force of skill in tactics and sagacity in strategy, gained such astonishing successes with forces so inferior. And if some generals have committed fewer faults, none were impelled by such desperate circumstances to a hazardous course, and none had ever so much magnanimity in confessing and explaining them for the benefit of future times.

The only general in modern times who can bear a comparison with Frederick, if the difficulties of his situation are considered, is Napoleon. It is a part only of his campaigns, however, which sustains the analogy. There is no resemblance between the mighty conqueror pouring down the valley of the Danube, at the head of 180,000 men, invading Russia with 500,000, or overrunning Spain with 300,000, and Frederick the Great with 30,000 or 40,000, turning every way against quadruple the number of Austrians, French, Swedes, and Russians. Yet a part, and the most brilliant part of Napoleon’s career, bears a close resemblance to that of the Prussian hero. In Lombardy in 1796, in Saxony in 1813, and in the plains of Champaigne in 1814, he was upon the whole inferior in force to his opponents, and owed the superiority which he generally enjoyed on the point of attack to the rapidity of his movements, and the skill with which, like Frederick, he availed himself of an interior line of communication. His immortal campaign in France in 1814, in particular, where he bore up with 70,000 men against 250,000 enemies, bears the closest resemblance to those which Frederick sustained for six years against the forces of the Coalition. Rapidity of movement, skill in strategy, and the able use of an interior line of communication, were what enabled both to compensate a prodigious inferiority of force. Both were often to appearance rash, because the affairs of each were so desperate, that nothing could save them but an audacious policy. Both were indomitable in resolution, and preferred ruin and death to sitting down on a dishonoured throne. Both were from the outset of the struggle placed in circumstances apparently hopeless, and each succeeded in protracting it solely by his astonishing talent and resolution. The fate of the two was widely different: the one transmitted an honoured and aggrandized throne to his successors; the other, overthrown and discrowned, terminated his days on the rock of St. Helena. But success is not always the test of real merit: the verdict of ages is often different from the judgment of present times. Hannibal conquered, has left a greater name among men than Scipio victorious. In depth of thought, force of genius, variety of information, and splendour of success, Frederick will bear no comparison with Napoleon. But Frederick’s deeds as a general were more extraordinary than those of the French emperor, because he bore up longer against greater odds. It is the highest praise of Napoleon to say, that he did in one campaign—his last and greatest—what Frederick had done in six.

If the campaigns of Eugene and Frederick suggest a comparison with those of Napoleon, those of Marlborough challenge a parallel with those of the other great commander of our day—Wellington. Their political and military situations were in many respects alike. Both combated at the head of the forces of an alliance, composed of dissimilar nations, actuated by separate interests, inflamed by different passions. Both had the utmost difficulty in soothing their jealousies and stifling their selfishness; and both found themselves often more seriously impeded by the allied cabinets in their rear, than by the enemy’s forces in their front. Both were the generals of a nation, which, albeit covetous of military glory, and proud of warlike renown, is to the last degree impatient of previous preparation, and frets at the cost of wars, which its political position renders unavoidable, or its ambitious spirit had readily undertaken. Both were compelled to husband the blood of their soldiers, and spare the resources of their governments, from the consciousness that they had already been strained to the uttermost in the cause, and that any farther demands would render the war so unpopular as speedily to lead to its termination. The career of both occurred at a time when political passions were strongly roused in their country; when the war in which they were engaged was waged against the inclination, and, in appearance at least, against the interests of a large and powerful party at home, which sympathized from political feeling with their enemies, and were ready to decry every success and magnify every disaster of their own arms, from a secret feeling that their party elevation was identified rather with the successes of the enemy than with those of their own countrymen. The Tories were to Marlborough precisely what the Whigs were to Wellington. Both were opposed to the armies of the most powerful monarch, led by the most renowned generals of Europe, whose forces, preponderating over the adjoining states, had come to threaten the liberties of all Europe, and at length produced a general coalition to restrain the ambition from which so much detriment had already been experienced.

But while in these respects the two British heroes were placed very much in the same circumstances, in other particulars, not less material, their situations were widely different. Marlborough had never any difficulties approaching those which beset Wellington to struggle with. By great exertions, both on his own part and that of the British and Dutch governments, his force was generally equal to that with which he had to contend. It was often exactly so. War at that period, in the Low Countries at least, consisted chiefly of a single battle during a campaign, followed by the siege of two or three frontier fortresses. The number of strongholds with which the country bristled, rendered any farther or more extensive operations, in general, impossible. This state of matters at once rendered success more probable to a general of superior abilities, and made it more easy to repair disaster. No vehement passions had been roused, bringing whole nations into the field, and giving one state, where they had burnt the fiercest, a vast superiority in point of numbers over its more pacific or less excited neighbours. But in all these respects, the circumstances in which Wellington was placed, were not only not parallel—they were contrasted. From first to last, in the Peninsula, he was enormously outnumbered by the enemy. Until the campaign of 1813, when his force in the field was, for the first time, equal to that of the French, the superiority to which he was opposed was so prodigious, that the only surprising thing is, how he was not driven into the sea in the very first encounter.

While the French had never less than 200,000, sometimes as many as 260,000 effective troops at their disposal, after providing for all their garrisons and communications, the English general had never more than 30,000 effective British and 20,000 Portuguese around his standard. The French were directed by the Emperor, who, intent on the subjugation of the Peninsula, and wielding the inexhaustible powers of the conscription for the supply of his armies, cared not though he lost 100,000 men, so as he purchased success by their sacrifice in every campaign. Wellington was supported at home by a government, which, raising its soldiers by voluntary enrolment, could with difficulty supply a drain of 15,000 men a-year from their ranks, and watched by a party which decried every advantage, and magnified every disaster, in order to induce the entire withdrawal of the troops from the Peninsula. Napoleon sent into Spain a host of veterans trained in fifteen years’ combats, who had carried the French standards into every capital of Europe. Wellington led to this encounter troops admirably disciplined, indeed, but almost all unacquainted with actual war, and who had often to learn the rudiments even of the most necessary field operations in presence of the enemy. Marlborough’s troops, though heterogeneous and dissimilar, had been trained to their practical duties in the preceding wars under William III., and brought into the field a degree of experience noways inferior to that of their opponents. Whoever weighs with impartiality those different circumstances, cannot avoid arriving at the conclusion that as Wellington’s difficulties were incomparably more formidable than Marlborough’s, so his merit, in surmounting them, was proportionally greater.

Though similar in many respects, so far as the general conduct of their campaigns is concerned, from the necessity under which both laboured of husbanding the blood of their soldiers, the military qualities of England’s two chiefs were essentially different, and each possessed some points in which he was superior to the other. By nature Wellington was more daring than Marlborough, and though soon constrained, by necessity, to adopt a cautious system, he continued, throughout all his career, to incline more to a hazardous policy. The intrepid advance and fight at Assaye; the crossing of the Douro and movement on Talavera in 1809; the advance to Madrid and Burgos in 1812; the actions before Bayonne in 1813; the desperate stand made at Waterloo in 1815—place this beyond a doubt. Marlborough never hazarded so much on the success of a single enterprise: he ever aimed at compassing his objects by skill and combination, rather than risking them on the chance of arms. Wellington was a mixture of Turenne and Eugene: Marlborough was the perfection of the Turenne school alone. No man could fight more ably and gallantly than Marlborough: his talent and rapidity of eye in tactics were, at least, equal to his skill in strategy and previous combination. But he was not partial to such desperate passages at arms, and never resorted to them, but from necessity or the emergency of a happy opportunity for striking a blow. The proof of this is decisive. Marlborough, during ten campaigns, fought only five pitched battles. Wellington in seven fought fifteen, in every one of which he proved victorious.[5]

Marlborough’s consummate generalship, throughout his whole career, kept him out of disaster. It was said, with justice, that he never fought a battle which he did not gain, nor laid siege to a town which he did not take. He took above twenty fortified places of the first order, generally in presence of an enemy’s army superior to his own. Wellington’s bolder disposition, more frequently involved him in peril, and on some occasions caused serious losses to his army; but they were the price at which he purchased his transcendent successes. But Wellington’s bolder strategy gained for him advantages which the more circumspect measures of his predecessor never could have attained. Marlborough would never, with scarcely any artillery, have hazarded the attack on Burgos, nor incurred the perilous chances of the retreat from that town; but he never would have delivered the South of the Peninsula in a single campaign, by throwing himself, with 40,000 men, upon the communications, in the North, of 200,000. It is hard to say which was the greater general, if their merits in the field alone are considered; but Wellington’s successes were the more vital to his country, for they delivered it from the greater peril; and they were more honourable to himself, for they were achieved against greater odds. And his fame, in future times, will be proportionally brighter; for the final overthrow of Napoleon, and destruction of the revolutionary power, in a single battle, present an object of surpassing interest, to which there is nothing in history, perhaps, parallel, and which, to the latest generation, will fascinate the minds of men.

The examination of the comparative merits of these two illustrious generals, and the enumeration of the names of their glorious triumphs, suggests one reflection of a very peculiar kind. That England is a maritime power, that the spirit of her inhabitants is essentially nautical, and that the sea is the element on which her power has chiefly been developed, need be told to none who reflect on the magnitude of her present colonial empire, and how long she has wielded the empire of the waves. The French are the first to tell us that her strength is confined to that element; that she is, at land, only a third-rate power; and that the military career does not suit the genius of her people. How, then, has it happened that England, the nautical power, and little inured to land operations, has inflicted greater wounds upon France by military success, than any other power, and that in almost all the pitched battles which the two nations have fought, during five centuries, the English have proved victorious? That England’s military force is absorbed in the defence of a colonial empire which encircles the earth, is indeed certain, and, in every age, the impatience of taxation in her people has starved down her establishment, during peace, to so low a point, as rendered the occurrence of disaster, in the first years consequent on the breaking out of war, a matter of certainty; while the military spirit of its neighbours has kept theirs at the level which ensures early success. Yet with all these disadvantages, and with a population which, down to the close of the last war, was little more than half that of France, she has inflicted far greater land disasters on her redoubtable neighbour than all the military monarchies of Europe put together.

English armies, for 120 years, ravaged France: they have twice taken its capital; an English king was crowned at Paris; a French king rode captive through London; a French emperor died in English captivity, and his remains were surrendered by English generosity. Twice the English horse marched from Calais to the Pyrenees; the monuments of Napoleon in the French capital at this moment, owe their preservation from German revenge to an English general. All the great disasters and days of mourning for France, since the battle of Hastings,—Tenchebray, Cressy, Poitiers, Azincour, Verneuil, Blenheim, Oudenarde, Ramilies, Malplaquet, Minden, Quebec, Egypt, Talavera, Salamanca, Vittoria, Orthes, the Pyrenees, Waterloo,—were all gained by English generals, and won, for the most part, by English soldiers. Even at Fontenoy, the greatest victory over England of which France can boast since Hastings, every regiment in the French army was, on their own admission, routed by the terrible English column, and victory was snatched from its grasp solely by want of support on the part of the Dutch and Austrians. No coalition against France has ever been successful, in which England did not take a prominent part; none, in the end, failed of gaining its objects, in which she stood foremost in the fight. This fact is so apparent on the surface of history, that it is admitted by the ablest French historians, though they profess themselves unable to explain it.

Is it that there is a degree of hardihood and courage in the Anglo-Saxon race which renders them, without the benefit of previous experience in war, adequate to the conquest, on land, even of the most warlike Continental military nations? Is it that the quality of dogged resolution, determination not to be conquered, is of such value in war, that it compensates almost any degree of inferiority in the practical acquaintance with war? Is it that the North brings forth a bolder race of men than the South, and that, other things being equal, the people in a more rigorous climate will vanquish those in a more genial? Is it that the free spirit which, in every age, has distinguished the English people, has communicated a degree of vigour and resolution to their warlike operations, which has rendered them so often victorious in land fights, albeit nautical and commercial in their ideas, over their military neighbours? Or is it, that this courage in war, and this vigour in peace, and this passion for freedom at all times, arise from and are but symptoms of an ardent and aspiring disposition, imprinted by Nature on the races to whom was destined the dominion of half the globe? Experience has not yet determined to which of these causes this most extraordinary fact has been owing; but it is one upon which our military neighbours, and especially the French, would do well to ponder, now that the population of the British isles will, on the next census, be thirty millions. If England has done such things in Continental warfare, with an army which never brought fifty thousand native British sabres and bayonets into the field, what would be the result if national distress or necessities, or a change in the objects of general desire, were to send two hundred thousand?

LAYS AND LEGENDS OF THE THAMES.

Part II.

——Rushing along, leaving innumerable chimneys behind pouring out sempiternal smoke; the air filled with a perpetual clank of hammers, the crashing of enormous wheels, and jangling of colossal chains; every human being within sight being as black as a negro, and the gust from the shore giving the closest resemblance to a blast between the tropics. Our steamer played her part handsomely in this general effort to stifle the population, and threw columns of smoke, right and left, as she moved through the bends of the river, thick enough to have choked an army of coal-heavers. I am as little of a sentimentalist as any man; I have always pronounced Rousseau an impostor. I regretted that the pillory has been abolished in the days of the modern novelists of France; but I was nearly in a state of suffocation, and some allowance must be made for the wrath of asphyxia. As I looked on the fuliginous sky, and the cineritious earth, on the ember-coloured trees, and half vitrified villas, the whole calcined landscape, I involuntarily asked myself, what is the good of all this hammering, forging, and roasting alive? Is man to be made perfect in the manner of a Westphalia ham? or is it to be the crowning glory of a nation, that she is the great nail-maker to the civilized globe? Is her whole soul to be absorbed in the making of chain-cables and cotton-twist? Are all her aspirations to breathe only linsey-woolsey, Yorkshire broadcloth, and Birmingham buttons? Are the cheeks of her maids to grow pallid, for the sake of clothing the lower portion of a Hindoo mountaineer in flannel, and the forehead of an African savage in book-muslin? Or are our men, by nature the finest race in the world, to be crippled into the physiognomy and faculties of baboons, merely to make shawls for the Queen of Madagascar, or slippers for the great Mogul?

I was startled, by an universal run towards the head of the steamer. Men, women, children, lap-dogs, and all rushed forward, followed by an avalanche of bandboxes, which, heaped half chimney high, had heaved with a sudden lurch of the helm, and over-spread the deck with a chaos of caps, bonnets, and inferior appendages to the toilet. In the cloud of smoke above, around, and below, we had as nearly as possible run ashore upon the Isle of Dogs. The captain, as all the regular reports on occasions of disaster say, behaved in this extremity “with a coolness, a firmness, and a sagacity worthy of all admiration.” He had made nine hundred and ninety-nine voyages, to Margate before; it was therefore wholly impossible that he could have shot the head of his ship into the mud of the left bank of the Thames on his thousandth transit. The fact, however, seemed rather against the theory. But as I was not drowned, was not a shareholder in the vessel, and have an antipathy to courts-martial, I turned from the brawling of the present, to the bulletins of the past, and thought of Dog-land in its glory.

THE ISLE OF DOGS.

“On Linden when the sun was low.”

Ten thousand years the Isle of Dogs,
Lay sunk in mire, and hid in fogs,
Rats, cats and bats, and snakes and frogs—
The tenants of its scenery.

No pic-nic parties came from town,
To dance with nymphs, white, black, or brown,
(They stopped at Greenwich, at the Crown,
Neglecting all its greenery.)

Dut Dog-land saw another sight,
When serjeants cried, “Eyes left, eyes right,”
And jackets blue, and breeches white,
Were seen upon its tenantry.

Then tents along the shore were seen,
Then opened shop the gay Canteen,
And floated flags, inscribed,—“The Queen.”
All bustle, show, and pennantry.

There strutted laughter-loving Pat,
John Bull (in spirits rather flat,)
And Donald, restless as a rat,
Three nations in their rivalry.

There bugle rang, and rattled drum,
And sparkled in the glass the rum,
Each hero thinking of his plum,
The prize of Spanish chivalry.

At last, Blue-Peter mast-high shone,
The Isle of Dogs was left alone,
The bats and rats then claimed their own
By process sure and summary.

The bold battalions sail’d for Spain,
Soon longing to get home again,
Finding their stomachs tried in vain
To live on Spanish flummery.

A cloud of smoke, which the wrath of Æolus poured upon our vessel, as a general contribution from all the forges along shore, here broke my reverie, by nearly suffocating the ship’s company. But the river in this quarter is as capricious as the fashions of a French milliner, or the loves of a figurante. We rounded a point of land, emerged into blue stream and bright sky, and left the whole Cyclopean region behind, ruddied with jets of flame, and shrouded with vapour, like a re-rehearsal of the great fire of London.

I had scarcely time to rejoice in the consciousness that I breathed once more, when my ear was caught by the sound of a song at the fore-part of the deck. The voice was of that peculiar kind, which once belonged to the stage coachman, (a race now belonging alone to history,)—strong without clearness; full without force; deep without profundity, and, as Sydney Smith says, “a great many other things without a great many other things;” or, as Dr. Parr would tell mankind,—“the product of nights of driving and days of indulgence; of facing the wintry storm, and enjoying the genial cup, the labours of the Jehu, and the luxuries of the Sybarite,”—it was to Moore’s melody,—

——“My dream of life
From morn till night,
Was love, still, love.”

THE SONG OF THE MAIL-COACHMAN.

Oh, the days were bright
When, young and light,
I drove my team,
My four-in-hand
Along the Strand,
Of bloods the cream.
But time flies fast:
Those days are past,
The ribbons are a dream:
Now, there’s nothing half so quick in life
As steam, still, steam.

The Bristol Mail,
Is but a snail,
The York stands still,
The Liverpool
Is but a stool—
All gone down hill.
Your fire you poke,
Up springs your smoke,
On sweeps the fiery stream:
Now, there’s nothing half so quick in life
As steam, still, steam.

Along the sky
The sparkles fly,
You fly below,—
You leave behind
Time, tide, and wind,
Hail, rain, and snow.
Through mountain cores
The engine snores,
The gas lamps palely gleam:
Oh, there’s nothing half so quick in life
As steam, still, steam.

You see a hill,
You see a mill,
A bit of sky;
You see a cow,
You see a plough,
All shooting by.
The cabins prance,
The hedgerows dance,
Like gnats in Evening’s beam:
Oh, there’s nothing half so quick in life
As steam, still, steam.

You hear a sound,
You feel a bound,
You all look blue.
You’ve split a horse,
A man’s a corse.
All’s one to you.
Upon the road
You meet a load,
In vain you wildly scream.
Oh, there’s nothing half so quick in life
As steam, still, steam.

You come full front
Upon a hunt,
You hear a yell;
You dash along,
You crush the throng,
Dogs, squires, pell-mell.
You see a van;
The signal man
Is snugly in a dream.
Oh, there’s nothing half so quick in life
As steam, still, steam.

You see a flash,
You feel a crash,
From toe to chin.
You touch a bank,
You top a tank,
You all plump in.
You next engage
The three-mile stage,
And long for my old team,
Your trial’s o’er, you trust no more,
To steam, steam, steam!

The romantic disappears from the world every day. Canals and docks now vulgarize this tract of the shore, and the whole scene will yet undergo the fate of Billingsgate. But it has a story as romantic as that of Romeo and Juliet; excepting the masquerade, the moonlight, and the nightingales of Verona.

The Isle flies from me, and I must give but the outline.

The daughter of the old Baron de Bouvraye, one of the followers of William the Norman, and lord of the country for leagues along the northern shore of the Thames, was the court beauty of the time. With the Norman dignity of form, she had the Saxon beauty of countenance; for the Baron had wedded a Saxon heiress. The charms of the Lady Blanche de Bouvraye, were the theme of the whole race of troubadours; and the most popular poem of Guido de Spezzia was written on the incident of her dropping her wimple at a court ball. It was said that she had a thousand lovers; but it is certain, that suitors crowded from every part of Christendom to claim her hand—a number probably not diminished by the knowledge that she was to succeed to the immense possessions of the barony.

But, to the sorrow of some, the indignation of others, and the astonishment of all, the Lady Blanche laughed at the idea of love. William, not accustomed to have his orders disputed, commanded the beautiful heiress to fall in love with some one or other at a moment’s delay. But she laughed at the herald who bore the command, and bade him tell his master, that though armies might be commanded, and crowns conquered, Blanche de Bouvraye would be neither. William was indignant, and ordered the herald to prison for a month, and to be fed on bread and water, for the audacity of bringing back such an answer. But the lady was unchanged. The Baron remonstrated, and demanded whether she was prepared to see his line extinguished, and his lands go to strangers. She laughed and said, that as the former could not be while she lived, and the latter could take place only after she was dead, she saw no reason why she should concern herself on the subject. The abbess of the famous convent of the Celestines, near the ford of the river Rom, where the town of Romford has since grown up, was sent to argue with her. But her answer was the question, “Why had not the abbess herself married?” Her father confessor was next sent to her. But she sportively asked him, “Where were his wife and children?”—a question which, though put in all innocence, so perplexed the good father, that, not desiring to be the penitent instead of the confessor, he returned with all possible speed to his convent.

Yet the Lady Blanche’s eye often exhibited the signs of weeping, and her cheek grew pale. All was a problem, until a handsome youth, the son of a knight on the Kentish shore, was seen one night touching a theorbo under her window, and singing one of the Tuscan love songs, which the troubadours had brought into England.

This was enough for the suspicions of the Baron. The young minstrel was seized, and sent to join the Crusaders then embarking for the Holy Land; and the lady was consigned to the Baron’s castle in Normandy. As Shakspeare said four hundred years after, The course of true love never does run smooth.
It would take the pen and song of ten troubadours to tell the adventures of the lady and the youth. In the fashion of the age, they had each consulted an astrologer, and each had been told the same fortune, that they should constantly meet, but be constantly separated, and finally be happy.

In Normandy, the Baron’s castle and the lady had fallen together into the hands of the troops who had rebelled against William, when a band of the crusaders on the march, commanded by her lover, rescued her. The lady was next ordered to take up her abode in a convent in Lombardy, of which her father’s sister was the abbess. The vessel in which she embarked was driven up the Mediterranean by a storm, and wrecked on the shore where the army of the crusaders was encamped. Thus the lovers met again. By the Baron’s order, the lady returned once more to Europe; but when in sight of the Italian coast, the felucca was captured by an Algerine, and, to her astonishment, she found in the pirate’s vessel her lover, who had been wounded and taken prisoner in battle with the Saracens, and sold into slavery. Again they were separated; the lady was ransomed by her father; and the lovers seemed to have parted for ever.

But the stars were true. The lover broke his Moorish chains, and the first sight which the lady saw on her landing at Ancona, was the fugitive kneeling at her feet.

I hasten on. As the vessel in which they sailed up the Thames approached the baronial castle, they saw a black flag waving from the battlements, and heard the funeral bell toll from the abbey of the Celestines. The Baron had been laid in the vault of the abbey on that day. Their hopes were now certainty: but the lady mourned for her father; and the laws of the church forbade the marriage for a year and a day. Yet, this new separation was soothed by the constant visits of her lover, who crossed the river daily to bask in the smiles of his betrothed, who looked more beautiful than ever.

The eve of the wedding-day arrived; and fate seemed now to be disarmed of the power of dividing the faithful pair; when, as the lover was passing through a dark grove to return to the Kentish shore for the last time, he was struck by an arrow shot from a thicket, fainted, and saw no more.

The morning dawned, the vassals were in array, the bride was in her silk and velvet drapery, the bride’s maids had their flower-baskets in their hands, the joy-bells pealed, a hundred horsemen were drawn up before the castle gates,—all was pomp, joy, and impatience,—but no bridegroom came.

At length the mournful tidings were brought, that his boat had waited for him in vain on the evening before, and that his plume and mantle, dabbled with blood, had been found on the sands. All now was agony. The bank, the grove, the river, were searched by hundreds of eager eyes and hands, but all in vain. The bride cast aside her jewels, and vowed to live and die a maid. The castle was a house of mourning; the vassals returned to their homes: all was stooping of heads, wringing of hands, and gloomy lamentation.

But, as the castle bell tolled midnight, a loud barking was heard at the gate. It was opened; and the favourite wolf-hound of the bridegroom rushed in, making wild bounds, running to and fro, and dragging the guard by their mantles to go forth. They followed; and he sprung before them to the door of a hut in a swampy thicket a league from the castle.

On bursting open the door, they found a man in bed, desperately torn, and dying from his wounds. At the sight, the noble hound flew on him; but the dying man called for a confessor, and declared that he had discharged the arrow by which the murder was committed, that he had dug a grave for the dead, and that the dog had torn him in the act. The next demand was, where the body had been laid. The dying man was carried on the pikes of the guard to the spot; the grave was opened; the body was taken up; and, to the astonishment of all, it was found still with traces of life. The knight was carried to the castle, restored, wedded, and became the lord of all the broad acres lying between the Thames and the Epping hills.

He had been waylaid by one of his countless rivals, who had employed a serf to make him the mark for a cloth-yard shaft, and who, like the Irish felon of celebrated memory, “saved his life by dying in jail.” The dog was, by all the laws of chivalry, an universal favourite while living; and when dead, was buried under a marble monument in the Isle; also giving his name to the territory; which was more than was done for his master; and hence the title of the Isle of Dogs. Is it not all written in Giraldus Cambrensis?

——Enter Limehouse Reach.—The sea-breeze comes “wooingly,” as we wind by the long serpent beach; the Pool is left behind, and we see at last the surface of the river. Hitherto it has been only a magnified Fleet-ditch. The Thames, for the river of a grave people, is one of the most frolicsome streams in the world. From London Bridge to the ocean, it makes as many turns as a hard-run fox, and shoots round so many points of the shore, that vessels a few miles off seem to be like ropemakers working in parallel lines, or the dancers in a quadrille, or Mr. Green’s balloon running a race with his son’s (the old story of Dædalus and Icarus renewed in the 19th century); or those extravaganzas of the Arabian Nights, in which fairy ships are holding a regatta among meadows strewn with crysolites and emeralds, for primroses and the grass-green turf.

But what new city is this, rising on the right? What ranges of enormous penthouses, covering enormous ships on the stocks! what sentinels parading! what tiers of warehouses! what boats rushing to and fro! what life, tumult, activity, and clank of hammers again? This is Deptford.

“Deep forde,” says old Holinshed, “alsoe called the Goldene Strande, from the colour of its brighte sandes, the whiche verilie do shine like new golde under the crystalle waters of the Ravensbourne, which here floweth to old Father Thamis, even as a younge daughtere doth lovinglie fly to the embrace of her aged parente.”

But Deptford has other claims on posterity. Here it was that Peter the Great came, to learn the art of building the fleets that were to cover the Euxine and make the Crescent grow pale. At this moment I closed my eyes, and lived in the penultimate year of the 17th century. The scene had totally changed. The crowds, the ships, the tumult, all were gone; I saw an open shore, with a few wooden dwellings on the edge of the water, and a single ship in the act of building. A group of ship carpenters were standing in the foreground, gazing at the uncouth fierceness with which a tall wild figure among them was driving bolts into the keel. He wore a common workman’s coat and cap; but there was a boldness in his figure, and a force in his movement, which showed a superior order of man. His countenance was stern and repulsive, but stately; there was even a touch of insanity in the writhings of the mouth and the wildness of the eye; but it did not require the star on the cloak, which was flung on the ground beside him, nor the massive signet ring on his hand, to attest his rank. I saw there the most kingly of barbarians, and the most barbarian of kings. There I saw Peter, the lord of the desert, of the Tartar, and of the polar world.

While I was listening, in fancy, to the Song of the Steppe, which this magnificent operative was shouting, rather than singing, in the rude joy of his work, I was roused by a cry of “Deptford!—Any one for Deptford? Ease her; stop her!”

I sprang from the bench on which I had been reclining, and the world burst upon me again.

“Deptford—any one for Deptford?” cried the captain, standing on the paddle-box. None answered the call, but a whole fleet of wherries came skimming along the surge, and threw a crowd of fresh passengers, with trunks and carpet-bags numberless, on board. The traveller of taste always feels himself instinctively drawn to one object out of the thousand, and my observation was fixed on one foreign-featured female, who sat in her wherry wrapt up in an envelope of furs and possessing a pair of most lustrous eyes.

A sallow Italian, who stood near me, looking over the side of the vessel, exclaimed, “Fanni Pellmello,” and the agility with which she sprang up the steps was worthy of the name of that most celebrated daughter of “the muse who presides over dancing,” as the opera critics have told us several million times.

The sallow Italian was passed with a smile of recognition, which put him in good spirits at once. Nothing vivifies the tongue of a foreigner like the memory of the Coulisses, and he over-flowed upon me with the history of this terrestrial Terpsichore. It happened that he was in Rome at the time of that memorable levee at which Fanny, in all her captivations, paid her obeisance at the Vatican; an event which notoriously cost a whole coterie of princesses the bursting of their stay-laces, through sheer envy, and on whose gossip the haut ton of the “Eternal City” have subsisted ever since.

The Italian, in his rapture, and with the vision of the danseuse still shining before him at the poop, began to improvise the presentation. All the world is aware that Italian prose slides into rhyme of itself,—that all subjects turn to verse in the mind of the Italian, and that, when once on his Pegasus, he gallops up hill and down, snatches at every topic in his way, has no mercy on antiquity, and would introduce King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, dancing a quadrille with Prince Albert and Queen Victoria.

THE PRESENTATION.

The month was September,
The day I remember,
(’Twas the congé of Clara Novello),
I saw troops under arms,
Dragoons and gendarmes,
Saluting sweet Fanny Pellmello.

At St Peter’s last chime
A chorus sublime
(By-the-by, from Rossini’s Otello),
Was sung by Soprani,
In homage to Fanny,
The light footed Fanny Pellmello.

As she rush’d on their gaze,
The Swiss-guard in amaze,
Thought they might as well stand a Martello;
All their muskets they dropp’d,
On their knees they all popp’d,
To worship sweet Fanny Pellmello.

To describe the danseuse,
Is too much for my muse;
But if ever I fight a “duello,”
Or quarrel at mess,
It will be to possess
Such a jewel as Fanny Pellmello.

On her brow a tiara,
Like the lady’s in Lara,
Or a portrait of thine, Biandello;
With a twist and a twirl,
All diamond and pearl,
In bounded sweet Fanny Pellmello.

All the men in the cowls,
Were startled like owls,
When the sunbeam first darts in their dell, O;
As she flash’d on their eyes,
All were dumb with surprise—
All moon-struck with Fanny Pellmello.

As she waltzed through the hall,
None heard a foot fall,
All the chamberlains stood in a spell, O;
While, silent as snow,
She revolved on her toe,
A la Psyche—sweet Fanny Pellmello.

Whom she knelt to within
I can’t say, for my sin;
Those are matters on which I don’t dwell, O;
But I know that a Queen
Was nigh bursting with spleen
At the diamonds of Fanny Pellmello.

Were I King, were I Kaiser,
I’d have perish’d to please her,
Or dared against all to rebel, O;
I’d have barter’d a throne
To be bone of thy bone,
Too exquisite Fanny Pellmello.

If Paris had seen
Her pas seul on the green,
When the goddesses came to his cell, O,
Forgetting the skies,
He’d have handed the prize
To all-conquering Fanny Pellmello.

Achilles of Greece
Though famed for caprice,
Would have left Greek and Trojan in bello,
Cut country and king,
And gone off on the wing
To his island with Fanny Pellmello.

Alexander the Great,
Though not over sedate,
And a lover of more than I’ll tell, O,
Would have learn’d to despise
All his Persians’ black eyes,
And been faithful to Fanny Pellmello.

Marc Antony’s self
Would have laid on the shelf
His Egyptian so merry and mellow;
Left his five hundred doxies,
And found all their proxies
In one, charming Fanny Pellmello.

The renown’d Julius Cæsar,
With nose like a razor,
And skull smooth and bright as a shell, O,
Would his sword have laid down,
Or pilfer’d a crown,
At thy bidding, sweet Fanny Pellmello.

His nephew Augustus,
Not famous for justice,
(Unless when the gout made him bellow,)
His nose would have curl’d
At the pomps of the world,
For a cottage with Fanny Pellmello.

The Emperor Tiberius,
(A rascal nefarious,)
Though all things on earth he would sell, O,
Would have bid Rome adieu,
To the Alps flown with you,
And play’d shepherd to Fanny Pellmello.

That Bluebeard, young Nero,
(Not much of a hero,
For a knave earth has scarce seen his fellow,)
Though his wife he might smother,
Or hang up his mother,
Would have worshipp’d sweet Fanny Pellmello.

Nay, Alaric the Goth,
Though he well might be loath
His travelling baggage to swell, O,
Would have built you a carriage,—
Perhaps offer’d marriage,—
And march’d off with Fanny Pellmello.

Fat Leo the Pope,
In tiara and cope,
Who the magic of beauty knew well, O,
Would have craved your permission
For your portrait, by Titian,
As Venus—sweet Fanny Pellmello.

The Sultan Mahmood
Who the Spahis subdued,
And mow’d them like corn-fields so yellow,
Would have sold his Haram,
And made his salām
At thy footstool, sweet Fanny Pellmello.

Napoleon le Grand
Would have sued for thy hand,
Before from his high horse he fell, O;
He’d have thought Josephine
Was not fit to be seen,
By thy beauties, sweet Fanny Pellmello.

——But the Thames, like the world, is full of changes. As the steamer ran close in under the right shore, I observed a small creek, as overgrown with sedge, as silent and as lonely as if it had been hid in a corner of Hudson’s Bay. It was once called Julius Cæsar’s bath, from the tradition, that when marching at the head of the Tenth Legion, on a visit to Cleopatra, then resident in Kent! he ordered his whole brigade to wash the dust from their visages preparatory to appearing before her majesty and her maids of honour. But this was the age of romance. An unwashed age followed, and the classical name gave way to the exigencies of things. The creek was called the “Condemned Hole,” and was made the place for impounding vessels caught in the act of smuggling, which were there secured, like other malefactors, in chains. It may not unnaturally be concluded, that the spot was unpopular to the tribe of gallant fellows, who had only followed the example of Greek, Saxon, Dane, and Norman; and who saw the beloved companions of many a daring day and joyous night (for if the sailor loves his ship, the smuggler adores her) laid up under sentence of firewood. By that curious propensity, which makes the fox so often fix his burrow beside the kennel, the surrounding shore was the favourite residence of the smuggler; and many a broad-shouldered hero, with a visage bronzed by the tropic sun, and a heart that would face a lion, a fire-ship, or any thing but his wife in a rage, was seen there taking his sulky rounds, and biting his thumb (the approved style of insult in those days) at the customhouse officers, who kept their uneasy watch on board. With some the ruling passion was so strong, that they insisted on being buried as near as possible to the spot, and a little churchyard was thence established, full of epitaphs of departed gallantry and desperate adventure—a sort of Buccaneer Valhalla, with occasional sculptures and effigies of the sleepers below.

Among those the name of Jack Bradwell lived longest. The others exemplified what Horace said of the injustice of fame, they “wanted a poet” to immortalize them; but Jack took that office on himself, and gave the world an esquisse of his career, in the following rough specimen of the Deptford muse of 1632:—

EPITAPH.

Fulle thirtie yeares, I lived a smuggler bolde,
Dealing in goode Schiedam and Englishe golde.
My hande was open, and my hearte was lighte;
My owners knew my worde was honour brighte.
In the West Indies, too, for seven long yeares,
I stoutlie foughte the Dons and the Mounseers.
Commander of the tight-built sloop, the Sharke,
Late as the owle, and early as the larke,
I roamed the sea, nor cared for tide or winde,
And left the Guarda Costas all behinde.
Until betrayed by woman’s flattering tongue,
In San Domingo my three mates were hung.
I shot the Judge, forsook the Spanish Maine,
And to olde Englande boldlie sailed againe.
Was married thrice, and think it rather harde,
That I should lie alone in this churchyarde.

But the march of mind is fatal to sentiment. A few years ago all vestiges of Jack were swept away. A neighbouring tanner had taken a liking to the spot, purchased it, planted his pits in it, and carried off Jack’s monument for a chimney-piece!

——But what hills are those edging the horizon, green, soft, and sunny. I hear a burst of sonorous bells—

Over this wide-watered shore,
Swinging slow with sullen roar.

No; Milton’s bells are monastic; the solemn clang of some huge cathedral, calling the brethren to vespers, and filling the air with the melancholy pomp of the antique cloister.—These are gay, glad, tumultuous, a clang of joy. It is the Queen’s accession. Flags are flying on every ship and steeple, and I hear a distant cannonade. The guns of Woolwich are firing in honour of the day.

And what palace is looming on my right? Greenwich Hospital. A façade worthy of Greece; ranges of Corinthian columns; vast courts expanding in front; groves and green hills in the rear; and on the esplanade, a whole battalion of one-legged or one-armed heroes, formed in line, and, as we arrive, giving three cheers to the “glory” of her Majesty.

I leave the chroniclers to tell, that this noble establishment was founded by William the Dutchman, of freedom-loving and French-hating memory; that the call for public munificence was answered, as such calls always are, by England; and that at this hour it pensions nearly forty thousand as brave veterans as any in the world.

What magnitude of benevolence was ever equal to this regal and national benefaction? In what form could public gratitude have ever been more nobly displayed? Or by what means, uniting the highest charity to the most just recompense, could comfort have been more proudly administered to the declining days of the British seaman. In the long course of a hundred and fifty years, what thousands, and tens of thousands, must have been rescued, by this illustrious benevolence, from the unhappiness of neglected old age! To what multitudes of brave old hearts must it have given comfort in their distant cottages, and what high recollections must the sight of its memorials and trophies revive in the men who fought under Rodney and Howe, St. Vincent and Nelson! Those are the true evidences of national greatness. Those walls are our witnesses to posterity, that their fathers had not lived in vain. The shield of the country thrown over the sailor and the soldier, against the chances of the world in his old age, is the emblem of a grander supremacy than ever was gained by even its irresistible spear.

——But the steamer has made a dash to the opposite bank, and we glide along the skirts of a small peninsula, marked by a slender stone pillar, where the border of Essex begins.

At this spot, a couple of hundred years ago, a mayor of London had been hanged; for what reason, Elkanah Settle, the city laureate, does not aver, further than that “wise people differed much on the subject,”—some imagining that it was for bigamy; others, that it was for having, at a great banquet given to the king by the corporation of spectacle-makers, mistaken the royal purse for his own; but the chief report being, “that he was hanged for the bad dinners which he gave to the common-councilmen.” The laureate proceeds to say, that at this spot, whenever the mayor of London went down with the Companies in their visitation of the boundaries, the barges all made a solemn stop. The mayor, (he was not yet a lord,) with all the aldermen, knelt on the deck, and the chief chaplain, taking off his cap, repeated this admonition:—

Mister Mayor, Mister Mayor,
Of a sinner’s death beware.
Liveth virtue, liveth sin
Not without us, but within.
Man doth never think of ill,
While he feedeth at his will.
None doth seek his neighbour’s coin,
When he seeth the sirloin.
No man toucheth purse or life,
While he thus doth use his knife.
Savoury pie and smoking haunch
Make the hungry traitor staunch.
Claret spiced, and Malvoisie,
From ill Spirits set us free,
Better far than axe or sword
Is the City’s well filled board.
Think of him once, hanging there,
Mister Mayor, Mister Mayor,
Chorus.—Beware, Beware, Beware!

The various corporate bodies chanted the last line with unanimous devotion; the mayor and aldermen then rose from their knees, and the whole pageant moved on to Blackwall to Dine.

Who has not heard of Blackwall? more fashionable for three months in the year than Almacks itself for the same perishable period; fuller than Bond Street, and with as many charming taverns as Regent Street contains “Ruination shops,” (so called by Lady J. the most riante wit of the day,) those shops where one can purchase every thing that nobody wants, and that few can pay for. Emporiums, as they name themselves, brilliant collections of all that is dazzling and delightful, from a filigree tooth-pick, up to a service of plate for a royal visitation.

Blackwall is a little city of taverns, built by white-bait, as the islands in the South Sea are built by the coral insect. The scenery is a marsh, backed by the waters of a stagnant canal, and lined with whitewashed warehouses. It is in fact a transfer of Wapping, half-a-dozen miles down the Thames. But Blackwall disdains the picturesque; it scorns exterior charms, and devotes itself to the solid merits of the table, and to dressing white-bait with a perfection unrivalled, and unrivalable in the circumference of the terrestrial globe.

Blackwall deserves to be made immortal, and I gave it a passport to posterity, in an Ode.

ODE TO BLACKWALL.

Let me sing thy praise, Blackwall!
Paradise of court and city,
Gathering in thy banquet-hall
Lords and cockneys—dull, and witty.
Spot, where ministers of state,
Lay aside their humbug all;
Water-souchy, and white-bait,
Tempting mankind to Blackwall.

Come, ye Muses, tuneful Nine,
Whom no Civil List can bribe,
Tell me, who come here, to dine,
All the great and little tribe,
Who, as summer takes its rounds,
O’er Whitechapel, or Whitehall,
From five shillings to five pounds,
Club for dinner at Blackwall.

There the ministerial Outs,
There the ministerial Ins,
One an emblem of the pouts,
T’other emblem of the grins;
All, beneath thy roof, are gay,
Each forgetting rise or fall,
Come to spend one honest day,——
All good fellows, at Blackwall.