BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCLXXXII. AUGUST, 1847. VOL. LXII.

CONTENTS.

GROTE'S HISTORY OF GREECE.[1]

The appearance of a new history of Greece, of the pretensions, and the just pretensions, of this of Mr Grote, is an event in literature which must not pass by without some note or comment. Never were historical studies pursued with so much success, or in so philosophical a spirit, as in the present day, and that by the whole corps of European scholarship, whether German, or French, or English; and it is saying much, when we say of the work before us, that it is equal to the demands of the critical age in which it appears, and that in just estimate of historical testimony, and in true appreciation of the spirit of past times, it is as superior to its predecessors as, in these very points, the nineteenth century is in advance of all preceding centuries.

The progress made in this department of study is very perceptible in the several histories we possess of Greece. Mitford, notwithstanding his acknowledged imperfections and demerits, has had the tribute of applause paid to him, and deservedly, of having been the first to break through that icy timidity with which the moderns were wont to write the annals of ancient Greece. They seemed to be afraid of applying the knowledge which time and science had brought them, to the events and writings of a classical age and country, lest this should imply the presumption that they were wiser than the ancients. They sat down to their task like young scholars who are construing, not interpreting, their author. Little discrimination was made between the learned writings before them. If it was not, as it has been wittily observed, "all Greek, and therefore all true," at least every thing that was Greek had a mysterious air of learning which protected it from profane examination; and incongruities and futilities, absurdities of reasoning, and improbabilities of narrative, were veiled or half concealed under the charm of Grecian typography. Mitford set aside this too great reverence for the ancient literati. As he saw men, and not moving statues, in the heroes of Grecian history, so he was persuaded that the writers of that history were also men, fallible and prejudiced, like those who were living and writing about him. But Mitford overcame one set of prejudices by the force which prejudices of another kind had endowed him with. He saw how party spirit had raged in modern as well as ancient times, but he detected it with that proverbial readiness with which the thief detects the thief; he wrote himself with the energy and penetration, the want of candour and generosity, which at all times will distinguish the advocate. Moreover, the scholarship of Europe has since his time assumed so lofty a port, and taken such rapid strides, that on many subjects he has been left lagging in the rear.

The history of Greece by Dr Thirlwall is a great improvement on its predecessor. It is written with profounder learning, and a more equitable spirit; and is indeed pre-eminently distinguished by the calmness, candour, and judge-like serenity that pervades it. In a style always lucid in disquisition, and always elegant in narrative, he appears to be solely anxious to communicate the fair result, whatever it may be, to which his extensive reading has conducted him. But, unfortunately, Dr Thirlwall wrote his history in one of those transition states of mind which render impossible the accomplishment of an enduring work. He saw the futility of much that had been relied on as basis of historical belief; he was not disposed to credulity, nor at all likely to accept fable, in its own simple and gross form, for truth. But he had not taught himself to forego the vain attempt to extract history out of fable; he could not relinquish that habit of "learned conjecture," so dear to the scholar, so fatal to the historian. In the earlier portion of his work, he constructs his narrative under the singular disadvantage of one who sees perpetually the weakness of his own superstructure, yet continues to build on; and thus, with much show of scaffolding, and after much putting up and pulling down, he leaves at last but little standing on the soil. He had not laid down for himself a previous rule for determining what should be admitted as historical evidence, or the rules he had prescribed for himself were of an uncertain, fluctuating character. Neither do we discover in Dr Thirlwall the faculty, existing at least in any eminent degree, of realising to himself, or vividly representing to others, the intellectual condition of a nascent people, far removed from ourselves in habits of thought, and trained under quite different institutions, religious and political. In short, we note a deficiency—(to adopt the phraseology of Bacon)—in what we may be allowed to describe, as the more philosophical qualifications of the historian.

Precisely in these lies the peculiar strength of Mr Grote. With scholarship as extensive as that of his predecessors, he has united a stricter discipline of mind, and habits of closer reasoning; and he manifests a truer perception of the nature of past modes of thinking—of the intellectual life of unlettered and Pagan ages. He has passed through that transition state in which Dr Thirlwall unfortunately found himself, and has drawn with a firm hand the boundaries between history and fable. Not only has he drawn the line, and determined the principle on which the limits of the historical world should be marked out, but he has had the fortitude to adhere to his own principles, and has not allowed himself, in pursuit of some fragment of historic truth, (many of which doubtless lie in a half-discovered state beyond the circle he has drawn,) to transgress the boundary he has wisely prescribed to himself. The history is not far enough advanced to enable us to judge whether Mr Grote will preserve himself from a political bias, the opposite of that which has been so much censured in Mitford. A sufficient portion however, is published, to authorise us in saying that it is not in point of narrative that the present author will obtain any advantage over his predecessors. It is in disquisition that he rejoices, and succeeds; it is the argumentative matter which excites and sustains him. His style seems to languish when the effort of ratiocination gives place to the task of the narrator. We fancy we see him resume the pen with listlessness, when nothing remains for the historian but to tell his story.

Neither can we congratulate Mr Grote on possessing the art of arrangement or compression, on the knowing when to abbreviate, or how to omit. His subject has in itself this unavoidable disadvantage, that the history of Greece lies scattered and broken up amongst many independent cities and communities: this disadvantage our author's voluminous and discursive manner does nothing to remedy, does much to aggravate. One would almost suspect that Mr Grote had entertained the idea that it belonged to the history of Greece to give us an account of all that the Greeks knew of history. It seems sufficient that a subject has been mentioned by Herodotus to entitle it to a place in his pages. This fulness of matter, it may be said, will enrich the work. Very true. But what if, in this process of enriching, the work be made unreadable? What if the treasures be so piled up and heaped together that to get at them may be little less difficult than to extract the precious metals originally from the mine? If the work advance on the plan hitherto pursued, it will be found that, "A History of Greece" is far too restricted a title, and that it should rather have been called a history of the ancient world during the times when the Greeks rose and flourished;—so well disposed does the author appear to wander over to Phœnicia and Assyria, to Babylon and Egypt. Mr Alison might as well have entitled his great historical work simply a history of the French Revolution. It is true, there is no reason to be given why Mr Grote should not do for ancient Europe during the period of the development of the Greeks, what Mr Alison has done for modern Europe during the great drama enacted by the people of France. Unhappily, however, Mr Grote does not possess those descriptive powers which, in the work of Mr Alison, render the parts which are most episodical, invariably the most interesting; so that, however important and eventful the main stream of his narrative may be, a reader of Alison always delights to find the author starting afresh from some remote era, on some distant soil, and call willingly quit even Paris and her Revolution, to revisit with him the rustic republics of Switzerland, or to build up Holland again from the sea, or to call to life the people of Poland, and fill the plains again with their strange military diet of a hundred thousand mounted senators.

There is much of the philosopher, little of the artist, in Mr. Grote; nor are the charms of style those which he has sedulously cultivated, or by which he is anxious to obtain attention. He writes in a manly, straightforward manner, and expresses his meaning with sufficient force and perspicuity: but there is no sustained elegance of diction; there is often all apparent disdain of it. At least we meet occasionally with quite conversational expressions, introduced—not, be it remarked, with that dexterous ease and felicitous taste which render them so effective in compositions of the highest order—but bluntly, carelessly, as if they were verily the first that came to hand, and the author did not think it worth his while to look for others. It should be mentioned, however, that this inequality of style is partly the effect of a desire to keep as close as possible in his narrative to the original Greek, so that it is the crudeness of translation we sometimes encounter. We raise no quarrel with him ourselves on this point; his language, in general, is all that is requisite; but a critic disposed to be severe on the minor delinquencies of style, might justify his censure by extracting many a hasty and neglected sentence, and many all uncouth expression. In fine, we accept of the present work as a valuable contribution to the history of Greece, and to the science itself of history; we accept it as a manifest improvement upon its predecessors in some of the highest and most important elements of historical composition; but we by no means accept it as the History of Greece, as the final narrative of the people of Athens and Sparta. For this it is too polemical, diffuse, incondite. On the ground which this writer and others have been obliged to contend for, which they have conquered and cleared, our posterity will one day, it is to be hoped, see a structure arise—grand, and simple, and yet ornate. For if the fitness of things be a rule for our expectation, we may safely prophesy that some future age will possess a History of Greece which will be to all other histories what the Grecian temple is to all other temples; which shall be itself a temple worthy of the memory of the most extraordinary people that have yet appeared upon the earth.

Mr Grote has done in the history of Greece what Dr Arnold did in that of Rome: he has at once excluded the early legends entirely from the class of historical records. The outcry which we sometimes hear against that scepticism which has resulted from later and more severe investigations into the nature of historical evidence, and the loss thereby sustained of many a popular tale, is—need we insist upon it?—mere childishness. It is never found that we lose any thing by truth, and certainly not here. The popular tale, legend, or myth, may be displaced entirely from the records of the past, (for what it contains, or may be supposed to contain, of fact or event;) but it remains with us in its true character of fable, as the offspring of the teeming invention and the ready faith of an unlettered generation; and, in this character, is more thoroughly understood by our present race of thinkers, and more vividly appreciated, than it ever was before. But shall we believe nothing of it?—surely something, must be true,—is the whole legend to be lost? To such exclamations we answer, that the whole legend, instead of being lost, is regained, is restored to us. While you doubt of its true nature, and strive to make it speak the language of history, you can never see the legend itself,—never clearly understand it,—never gather from it the curious knowledge it is able to reveal of our own species. If, instead of looking askance at the bold inventions of past times, with a half faith and a half denial, busied with tricks of interpretation, and teased with ever-recurring incredulity, you embrace it cordially as the genuine product of an imaginative age, redolent of the marvellous, you will, as such, gather from it a far higher and more profitable instruction than could be extracted from some supposed historic fact which it is thought to conceal, and which is received as credible on the very ground that it resembles a host of similar facts already well established.

We heartily approve and applaud the resolute abstinence with which Mr Grote has refrained from seeking for some supposed historical basis in mere legend and fable; we believe that his work, in this point of view, is calculated to have an excellent influence, not only on all future historians of Greece, but on all who shall undertake to write the early history of any people whatever. With the exception of Dr Arnold's History of Rome, we know of no work where there is the same true appreciation shown of the real value, and proper use, of legendary traditions. Certainly amongst the great scholars of Germany, whatever their undoubted merits in other respects, there is very little of this wise reticence, this philosophical forbearance; and if the two English historians, whom we have named together, be surpassed in critical knowledge by the learned men of Germany, or in brilliant narrative by the writers of France, they are superior to their contemporaries in both countries in the sound application of learning to ancient history, and their attachment to the sobriety of truth. With much less show of philosophic system, they have more of philosophy.

"The times which I have thus set apart," writes Mr Grote, in his preface, "from the region of history, are discernible only through a different atmosphere—that of epic poetry and legend. To confound together these disparate matters is, in my judgment, essentially unphilosophical. I describe the earlier times by themselves, as conceived by the faith and feeling of the first Greek, and known only through their legends,—without presuming to measure how much or how little of historical matter these legends may contain. If the reader blame me for not assisting him to determine this,—if he ask me why I do not undraw the curtain and disclose the picture,—I reply in the words of the painter Zeuxis, when the same question was addressed to him, on exhibiting his master-piece of imitative art—'The curtain is the picture.' What we now read as poetry and legend was once accredited history, and the only genuine history which the first Greeks could conceive or relish of their past time: the curtain conceals nothing behind, and cannot by any ingenuity be withdrawn. I undertake only to show it as it stands,—not to efface, still less to repaint it."

A simple uninstructed age believes its own legend; it asks no question upon the point of credibility; with such an age, to hear, is to believe. Originally, indeed, with all of us, to have a conception of any thing is tantamount to believing that it exists, or has existed: belief is no separate act of mind, but is itself included in the perception or the thought; it is experience and reflection which have to ingraft their disbelief, and teach us that every thing we think is not equally true. An ignorant people are all children, and with them there is but one rule of faith: the more vivid the impression, the stronger the belief,—the more marvellous the story, the less possibility of doubting it. And consider this—that we, owing to our scientific habits of thought, and the long record of the by-gone world which lies open to us, entertain it as a general law, that the past has, in certain essentials, resembled the present; but our unlettered people, looking out into the blank foretime, would have no such law to regulate or restrain their belief. On the contrary, their impression would naturally be, that the past was, essentially different from the present, or why was it past? Why all this change and transiency, if the same things were to be repeated? All people that have had no records have filled up the void with beings and events as unlike as possible to those they were familiar with. They had a prevailing impression that that blank space was the region of the wonderful; and the day-dreamer, the imaginative man, who was, naturally enough, proclaimed to be inspired, since none could tell how his knowledge came, was generally at hand to fill up the blank space with appropriate picture.

An age of awakening criticism begins to find the legend doubtful—cannot entirely believe, cannot entirely dismiss the old familiar story,—begins to interpret it as allegory, or to separate the probable incidents from the improbable, receiving the first, rejecting the second. A new rule of faith has been introduced; not what is most captivating and strange, but what best harmonises with the common occurrences of life, is to be the most readily believed. The exuberant legend is therefore pruned down and mutilated, or it is represented as the fantastic shadow of some quite natural circumstance,—strange shadow for such substance!—and in this state it is admitted to a certain credence. But who sees not that this is no separation of history from fable, but merely a reduction of the fable into something we can pronounce to be probable? But the probability of this residue is no sufficient ground for our belief; no one, surely, supposes that imagination deals in nothing but impossibilities. The utmost effort, the wildest flight of fancy, could not always keep clear of probability; and it would be strange indeed if the romantic fiction could claim our faith at every point where, by chance, it had touched the earth. One might as well sift, in the same manner, a fiction of the Arabian Nights; and, setting aside the supernatural, admit whatever is natural to be true. The wonderful properties of Aladdin's lamp shall be given up; but that Aladdin had an old lamp, and that his wife sold it when he was out of the way, this shall remain admissible.

A third age, however, arrives, still more critical, more justly and profoundly analytic. It recognises that, by the process just described, a dead residuum of little value and doubtful reality is the utmost that can be obtained, While the real value of the subject of this untutored chemistry has been lost in the experiment. It returns to the legend—contemplates it in its entire, and genuine form. It sees that the legend is the true history of the minds that created and believed it—a very important history—but of little or nothing else. Seen in this light, there is, indeed, no comparison between the value of the poetic fable as a contribution to the history of mankind, and the value of the prosaic and ordinary fact which a half critical age (if sure of its guess) would extract from it. Think for a moment of all the marvels of the Argonautic expedition; that vessel, itself sentient and intelligent, having its prophet as well as pilot on board, darting through rocks which move and join together, like huge pincers, to crush the passing ship; think of the wondrous Medea who conducted the homeward voyage, and reflect upon the sort of people who created and credited all these marvels. Then turn to the semi-critical version of Strabo, where the whole expedition resolves itself into an invasion of some unknown king, of some unknown country, whose wealth stands typified in the golden fleece. Such writers as Strabo commit a two-fold error. They corrupt history, and they destroy the legend. They write an unauthorised narrative, and explain the nature and genius of the fable in a manner equally unauthorised.

Or take an instance still more familiar. The legend tells us that Romulus—as was thought befitting the founder of Rome—died in no ordinary manner, but was translated to the skies. He had called the people together on the field of Mars, "when," in the simple language which Dr Arnold has appropriated to these legendary stories—"when all on a sudden there arose a dreadful storm, and all was dark as night; and the rain, and the thunder, and the lightning, were so terrible that all the people fled from the field, and ran to their homes. At last the storm was over, and they came back to the field of Mars, but Romulus was nowhere to be found, for Mars, his father, had carried him up to heaven in his chariot." Dionysius the Greek found, in this mysterious disappearance, a proof of the assassination of Romulus by certain of his nobles, who stabbed him and conveyed him away in the thunder-storm. And our own Hooke thought himself equally sagacious, in his day, when he adopted this interpretation. But what is it that we have here? Not history certainly; and as little an intelligent view of the fable.

What Hooke did, in his day, occasionally, and in an empirical manner, some German literati have attempted in a quite systematic, a priori fashion. They first determine that the myth or legend has been composed by a certain play of the imagination—as the representing the history of a people, or a tribe, under the personal adventures of an imaginary being; and then they hope to unravel this work of the fancy, and get back again the raw material of plain truth. If they are partially correct in describing this to have been one course the imagination pursued—which is all that can be admitted—still the attempt is utterly hopeless to recover, in its first shape, what has been confessedly disguised and distorted. The naturalists of Laputa were justified in supposing that the light of the sun had much to do with the growth of gerkins, but it does not follow that they would succeed in their project of "extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers."

For the briefest illustration we can call to mind of this philosophical ingenuity, we will refer the reader to Michelet's preface to his History of Rome. We see the absurdity none the worse for it being presented through the transparent medium of the French writer. He thus explains the discovery of the learned Germans whom he follows:—"Ce qu'il y a de plus original, c'est d'avoir prouvé que ces fictions historiques étaient une necéssité de notre nature. L'humanité d'abord matérielle et grossière, ne pouvait dans les langues encore toutes concrètes, exprimer la pensée abstraite, qu'en la réalisant, en lui donnant un corps, une personalité humaine, un nom propre. Le même besoin do simplification, si naturel à la faiblesse, fit aussi désigner une collection d'individus par un nom d'homme. Cet homme mythique, ce fils de la pensée populaire, exprima à la fois le peuple et l'idée du peuple. Romulus c'était la force, et le peuple de la force; Juda, l'élection divine et le peuple élu."

Having thus expounded the theory of the construction of a myth, he afterwards tries his hand upon the resolution of one into its constituent elements. The fourth chapter of his introduction commences thus:—"Circé, dit Hésiode, (Theog. v. 1111, 1115) eut d'Ulysse deux fils, Latinos et Agrios (le barbare,) qui au fond des saintes îles gouvenèrent la race célèbre des Tyrséniens. J'enterprèterais volontiers ce passage de la manière suivante: Des Pelasges, navigateurs et magiciens, (c'est-à-dire, industrieux) sortirent les deux grandes sociétés Italiennes—les Osci, (dont les Latins sont une tribu,) et les Tusci ou Etrusques. Circé, fille du soleil, a tous les caractères d'une Telchine Pélasgique. Le poete nous la montre près d'un grand feu, rarement utile dans un pays chaud, si ce n'est pour un but industriel; elle file la toile, ou prépare de puissants breuvages."

The theory and the application, it will be seen, are worthy of each other. All comment would be superfluous. We have preferred to retain the original language for this, amongst other reasons, that we should have found it difficult to represent in honest English the exact degree of affirmation to which the Frenchman pledges himself by his "j'enterpreterais volontiers." It is something less than conviction, and something more than guess;—it certainly should be, or it ought to have no place in history.

It is not by mangling the legend, or by predicating of it fantastic modes of construction, that the few grains of sober fact concealed about it are to be secured; but by studying honestly the laws of imagination under which all fabulous narratives are constructed. However wildly the fancy may range in the main events of a fable, there will be always a certain portion of the details gathered from real life; and the manners and morals of an age may be depicted in fictions, the substance of which is altogether supernatural. The heroes fight like gods, but they dine and dress like ordinary mortals. Achilles drags the body of Hector three times round the walls of Troy, both armies looking on the while. Such sight the earth never beheld. But the ear of the warrior and the harness of his steeds resembled such as had been seen or heard of. The poet invents a centaur, but not the bow and arrow he puts into his hands. His hero scales the sky, but carries with him the sandal on his foot which was made in the village below.

"Three-fourths of the two volumes now presented to the public," continues Mr Grote in his preface, "are destined to elucidate this age of historical faith as distinguished from the later age of historical reason: to exhibit its basis in the human mind—an omnipresent religious and personal interpretation of nature; to illustrate it by comparison with the like mental habit in early modern Europe; to show its immense abundance and variety of narrative matter, with little care for consistency between one story and another; lastly, to set forth the causes which overgrew, and partially supplanted the old epical sentiment, and introduced, in the room of literal faith, a variety of compromises and interpretations." This is the just application of the legends of Greece, forming, as they do, the very best description of the people whose exploits and career the author is about to narrate. This is a truer commencement of the history than that which appears at first sight more strictly historical—namely, an investigation into the obscure tribes which inhabited the same country prior to that people who are known to us as Greeks—an investigation that is to be carried on by strained interpretations of these very legends. We congratulate both author and reader on this escape from the fruitless entanglement of the Pelasgian controversy. Mr Grote seems to have taken due warning from the difficulties and embarrassments in which his predecessor has here involved himself. Dr Thirlwall is a judicious, a succinct, and lucid writer, and yet a more tedious, confused, and utterly unsatisfactory piece of history no man can read than the account he gives us, in his opening volume, of the Pelasgians. The subject is clearly hopeless. From the first sentence to the last of that account, a painful confusion attends upon the reader—not the fault, we are ready to believe, of the historian, unless it be a fault to attempt a statement of facts where the materials for such a statement do not exist. "The people"—Dr Thirlwall thus commences—"whom we call Greeks—the Hellenes—were not, at least under this name, the first inhabitants of Greece. Many names have been recorded of races that preceded them there, which they in later times considered barbarous, or foreign in language and manners to themselves." Here the very first sentence proclaims a doubt how far the change was one of race or only of name, and this doubt pursues us throughout the whole inquiry. It is never solved by the author, but is sometimes forgotten by him; for he occasionally proceeds with the discussion as if he had left no such doubt behind him undetermined. At one time he states distinctly, "we find that though in early times Thessaly, and the north of Greece in general, was the scene of frequent migrations and revolutions so that its ancient inhabitants may here and there have been completely displaced by new tribes, Attica appears never to have undergone such a change; and Peloponnesus lost no considerable part of its original population till long after the whole had become Hellenic." (P. 54.) Herodotus had said that certain Pelasgians living in his time spoke a language different from the Greeks. Dr Thirlwall puts the passage of Herodotus upon the rack to extract from it a confession that the difference was not greater than between one dialect of Greek from another. Yet, as the narrative proceeds—if narrative it can be called—we have the Pelasgians and the Greeks represented as essentially distinct people; and we hear of the difficulty of determining "the precise point of civilisation to which the Pelasgians had advanced, before the Greeks overtook and outstripped them." The whole treatise, notwithstanding the air of decision now and then assumed, is but an amplification of the doubt implied in the very first sentence of it.

The legends which fill up the dark space with eponymous heroes, as they have been called—heroes who take the name of a tribe in order to bestow it back upon the tribe; for it was the Greek mode of thinking at these early periods to presume that every tribe, or gens, had a common progenitor from whom it took its title and origin,—these legends are at one time treated with the due suspicion which should attend upon them; yet, at another, if a fortunate congruity, some lucky "dovetailing," can be observed amongst them, they are raised into the rank of historical evidence. The mode of interpretation which we have described as characterising the first and undisciplined age of critical inquiry, is not laid aside. Such personages as Danaus and Æolus are still referred to on emergency; and Dr Thirlwall still speaks of the Centaurs as "a fabulous race, which, however, may be supposed to represent the earlier and ruder inhabitants of the land." If we must call in the Centaurs to our assistance, we may safely conclude with Mr Grote that the ancient Pelasgians are "not knowable."

"Whoever," writes our author, when the course of his narrative brings him to speak of the anti-Hellenic tribes—"Whoever has examined the many conflicting systems respecting the Pelasgi—from the literal belief of Clavier, Larcher, and Raoul Rochette, (which appears to me at least the most consistent way of proceeding,) to the interpretative and half-incredulous processes applied by abler men—such as Niebuhr, or O. Müller, or Dr Thirlwall—will not be displeased with my resolution to decline so insoluble a problem. No attested facts are now present to us—none were present to Herodotus and Thucydides even in their age, on which to build trustworthy affirmations respecting the anti-Hellenic Pelasgians; and where such is the case we may without impropriety apply the remark of Herodotus respecting one of the theories which he had heard for explaining the inundation of the Nile by a supposed connexion with the ocean—that the man who carries up his story into the invisible world, passes out of the range of criticism."[2] And he adds the following pithy note:—"Niebuhr puts together all the mythical and genealogical traces, many of them in the highest degree vague and equivocal, of the existence of Pelasgi in various localities; and then, summing up their cumulative effect, asserts, 'not as an hypothesis, but with full historical conviction, that there was a time when the Pelasgians, perhaps the most extended people in all Europe, were spread from the Po and the Arno to the Rhyndakus,' (near Cyzicus,) with only an interruption in Thrace. What is perhaps the most remarkable of all, is the contrast between his feeling of disgust, despair, and aversion to the subject when he begins the inquiry:—'the name Pelasgi,' he says, 'is odious to the historian, who hates the spurious philology out of which the pretences to knowledge on the subject of such extinct people arise;' and the full confidence and satisfaction with which he concludes it."

Amongst these legends which Mr Grote thus relates for the simple purpose of showing what filled the minds of the Greek people when we first become historically acquainted with them, is one conspicuous above all others, and to which most men still cling tenaciously, finding it impossible to resign all of it to the region of fable—we mean "the divine tale of Troy." Many who relinquish without effort the Argonautic expedition, and as an historical problem are glad to be rid of it,—who resign all attempt to extract a prosaic truth out of the exploits of Theseus or the labours of Hercules, and who smile at mention of the race of Amazons—a race so well accredited in ancient times that neither the sceptical Arrian nor Julius Cæsar himself ventured to doubt of their existence—would yet shrink from surrendering the tale of Troy, with all its military details, and all its hosts, and all its kings and chieftains, entirely to the domain of fiction. What! No part of it true?—no Agamemnon?—no Ulysses?—no Troy taken?—no battles on that plain where the traveller still traces the position of the hostile forces? "Those old kings," they might exclaim in the language of Milton, when writing in his history of that fabulous line of English monarchs which sprang from Brute the Trojan—in his time still lingering in men's faith, now suffered to sleep unvexed by the keenest historical research,—"Those old and inborn kings, never any to have been real persons, or done in their lives at least some part of what so long hath been remembered—it cannot be thought, without too strict incredulity."[3]

Nevertheless the whole narrative, were it not for the familiarity we early acquire with the persons and exploits of this famous legend, would be seen at once to have all the characteristics of poetic fiction. And it is curious to trace, with our author, how, after having long stood its ground as veritable history amongst the people of Greece, it sustained attack after attack, first from ancient then from modern criticism, and has been gradually denuded of all its glorious circumstance, till now, even for those who are most willing to believe, there remains the driest, scantiest residue imaginable of what may be pronounced to be probable fact. Herodotus, with all his veneration for Homer, could not assent to attribute the Trojan war to the cause popularly assigned: he seems to have been of the opinion of our Payne Knight, that the Greeks and Trojans could not have been so mad as to incur so dire calamities "for one little woman." We confess that, for ourselves, this is not the part of the story which would have first staggered us. The immediate cause may be very trifling that brings two angry rivals into conflict, and, the war once commenced, they fight on for victory; the first object of the strife is forgotten in the strife itself, and each opponent thinks only how to destroy his enemy. Herodotus, however, had heard another account from the priests of Egypt, which made him still more disposed to dispute the popular tradition. According to this account, Helen was in fact detained in Egypt during the whole term of the siege. Paris, it seems, in sailing from Sparta, had been driven thither by a storm; and the king of Egypt, hearing of the wrong he had committed towards Menelaus, had sent him out of the country, and detained Helen till her lawful husband should appear to claim her. The misfortune was, that when the Greeks before Troy demanded Helen, and were told that she neither was, nor had been in the town, they would not believe the story, but continued to thunder at the gates. "For if Helen had really been in Troy," says Herodotus, "she would certainly have been given up, even if she had been mistress of Priam himself instead of Paris: the Trojan king, with all his family and all his subjects, would never knowingly have incurred utter and irretrievable destruction for the purpose of retaining her; their misfortune was, that while they did not possess, and therefore could not restore her, they yet found it impossible to convince the Greeks that such was the fact."

Pausanias, a reasoning man, starts at the Trojan horse: he converts it into a battering-ram, as he cannot believe the Trojans to have been deceived by so childish a trick.

Thucydides, a man who knew something of campaigning, is astonished at the length of the siege; and perhaps his patriotism was put a little to the blush at the idea that the assembled forces of Greece should be occupied ten years before a town of very inconsiderable magnitude; for no town of Ilium, we may remark in passing, ever existed that could present a worthy object of attack to so great a power, or was at all commensurate with the vast enterprise said to have been directed against it. He concluded, therefore, without hesitation, "that the Greeks were less numerous than the poets have represented, and that being, moreover, very poor, they were unable to procure adequate and constant provisions: hence they were compelled to disperse their army, and to employ a part of it in cultivating the Chersonese, and a part in marauding expeditions over the neighbourhood. Could the whole army have been employed against Troy at once, the siege would have been much more speedily and easily concluded." As Mr Grote justly observes, the critical historian might, with equal authority, have proceeded by a shorter method, and at once abridged the length of the siege.

"Though literally believed," he continues, speaking of the Trojan war, "though reverentially cherished, and numbered among the gigantic phenomena of the past, by the Grecian public, it is in the eyes of modern inquiry essentially a legend, and nothing more. If we are asked if it be not a legend embodying portions of historical matter, and raised upon a basis of truth,—whether there may not really have occurred at the foot of the hill of Ilium a war purely human and political, without gods, without heroes, without Helen, without Amazons, without Ethiopians under the beautiful son of Eos, without the wooden horse, without the characteristic and expressive features of the old epical war—like the mutilated trunk of Deïphobus in the under-world—if we are asked whether there was not really some such historical Trojan war as this, our answer must be, that as the possibility of it cannot be denied, so neither can the reality of it be affirmed. We possess nothing but the ancient epic itself, without any independent evidence: had it been an age of records, indeed, the Homeric epic, in its exquisite and unsuspecting simplicity, would probably never have come into existence. Whoever, therefore, ventures to dissect Homer, Arctinus, and Lesches, and to pick out certain portions as matters of fact, while he sets aside the rest as fiction, must do so in full reliance on his own powers of historical divination, without any means either of proving or verifying his conclusions."[4]

Take Helen from Troy, and Achilles son of Thetis from the camp, and say there was a siege—this is a result which few, perhaps, would care to contend about. It is the only result for which Dr Thirlwall contends, who on this subject approximates as nearly as possible to the opinion of Mr Grote. That there was a siege, however, Dr Thirlwall maintains with considerable pertinacity; but it happens, curiously enough, that his argument precisely supplies the last link that was wanting to complete the sceptical view of the subject. Most persons, we apprehend, are disposed to adhere to the belief that some famous siege must have taken place, or why should the poet's imagination take this direction?—why should he cluster his heroes and his exploits round the walls of Troy? Now, the effect of Dr Thirlwall's line of argument is to show how the poet's imagination was likely to take this direction, and yet there have been no siege of Troy, none at least by Agamemnon and his allies, none at the epoch which Homer assigns to it.

"We conceive it necessary," says Dr Thirlwall, "to admit the reality of the Trojan war as a general fact; but beyond this we scarcely venture to proceed a single step."[5] He finds it impossible to adopt the poetical story of its origin, partly from its inherent improbability, and partly "because we are convinced that Helen is a merely mythological person. It would be sufficient," he says, "to raise a strong suspicion of her fabulous nature to observe that she is classed by Herodotus with Io, and Europa, and Medea—all of them persons who, on distinct grounds, must clearly be referred to the domain of mythology. This suspicion is confirmed by all the particulars of her legend; by her birth, (the daughter of Jupiter, according to Homer;) by her relation to the divine Twins, whose worship seems to have been one of the most ancient forms of religion in Peloponnesus, and especially in Laconia; and by the divine honours paid to her in Laconia and elsewhere."

Compelled to reject the cause of the war assigned by Homer, and finding Helen a merely mythological person, "we are driven," he continues, "to conjecture to discover the true cause; yet not so as to be wholly without traces to direct us." He then refers to the legend which, numbering Hercules among the Argonauts, supposes him, on the voyage, to have rendered a service to the Trojan king Laomedon, who afterwards defrauded him of his stipulated recompense. Whereupon Hercules, coming with some seven ships, is said to have taken and sacked Troy; an event which is alluded to and recognised by Homer. "And thus we see," adds the author, "Troy already provoking the enmity or tempting the cupidity of the Greeks, in the generation before the celebrated war; and it may be easily conceived that if its power and opulence revived after this blow, it might again excite the same feelings."

Very easily conceived, but not rendered a jot more easy by aid of this legend of Hercules. The story of him of the Twelve Labours, who had been cheated of the divine mares for which he had bargained, and had mere earthly mares given to him, and who therefore, in revenge, had sacked the town of Troy, is, in the first place, so interpreted as to show "that the opulence of that city had in former times tempted the cupidity of the Greeks;" and then this interpretation is made a ground for supposing that a similar motive had led to the expedition of Agamemnon and his chiefs. As well, surely, have said at once of the second war, what is said of the first, that it was an ordinary case of plunder and violence. It is hard to understand how the earlier legend can assist in giving an historical character to the later.

But the elder legend may assist in explaining how a siege of Troy became the great subject of the Homeric poems; and thus, whatever there was of actual siege may be carried altogether into that remote anterior epoch which is shadowed forth, if you will, under the exploits of Hercules. For with that charming candour by which he often contrives to neutralise the errors of his conjectural method of writing history, Dr Thirlwall himself adds:—"This expedition of Hercules may indeed suggest a doubt whether it was not an earlier and simpler form of the same tradition, which grew at length into the argument of the Iliad; for there is a striking resemblance between the two wars, not only in the events, but in the principal actors. As the prominent figures in the second siege are Agamemnon and Achilles, who represent the royal house of Mycenæ, and that of the Æacids; so in the first the Argive Hercules is accompanied by the Æacid Telamon; and even the quarrel and reconciliation of the allied chiefs are features common to both traditions."[6]

The disquisition on the legend of Troy naturally leads the historian, and will naturally suggest to our own readers, the mooted question of the authorship of the Homeric poems. Some of them be happy to learn that the opinion of Mr Grote is not of so sceptical a nature as they may have been prepared to expect. The Wolfian hypothesis he by no means adopts—namely, that before the time of Pisistratus, there was no such thing in existence as an extended and entire epic, but that the two great epics we now possess were then constructed by stringing together a number of detached poems, the separate chants of the old Greek bards or rhapsodists. Mr Grote sees in the Odyssey all the marks of unity of design, and of what he rather quaintly calls "single-headed authorship." With regard to the Iliad, he admits that there is not the same stringent evidence of an original plan according to which the whole poem has been written, and he detects here the signs of interpolation and addition. According to his view, there is in the poem, as we possess it, an original whole, which he calls the Achilleis, to which additions have been made from other sources, converting the Achilleis into an Iliad. But our readers would prefer to have the words themselves of the author; and the following passage will present them with a very intelligent view of this famous controversy:—

"That the Iliad is not so essentially one piece as the Odyssey, every man agrees. It includes a much greater multiplicity of events, and what is yet more important, a greater multiplicity of prominent personages: the very indefinite title which it bears, as contrasted with the speciality of the name Odyssey, marks the difference at once. The parts stand out more conspicuously from the whole, and admit more readily of being felt and appreciated in detached recitation. We may also add, that it is of more unequal execution than the Odyssey--often rising to a far higher pitch of grandeur, but also occasionally tamer: the story does not move on continually; incidents occur without plausible motive, nor can we shut our eyes to evidences of incoherence and contradiction.

"To a certain extent, the Iliad is open to all these remarks, though Wolf and W. Müller, and above all, Lachmann, exaggerate the case in degree. And from hence has been deduced the hypothesis which treats the part in their original state as separate integers, independent of, and unconnected with each other, and forced into unity only by the afterthought of a subsequent age; or sometimes not even themselves as integers, but as aggregates grouped together out of fragments still smaller—short epics formed by the coalescence of still shorter songs. Now there is some plausibility in these reasonings, so long as the discrepancies are looked upon as the whole of the case. But in point of fact they are not the whole of the case; for it is not less true that there are large portions of the Iliad, which present positive and undeniable evidences of coherence, as antecedent and consequent, though we are occasionally perplexed by inconsistencies of detail. To deal with these latter, is a portion of the duties of a critic; but he is not to treat the Iliad as if inconsistency prevailed every where throughout its parts; for coherence of parts—symmetrical antecedence and consequence—is discernible throughout the larger half of the poem.

"Now the Wolfian theory explains the gaps and contradictions throughout the narrative, but it explains nothing else. If (as Lachmann thinks) the Iliad originally consisted of sixteen songs or little substantive epics, not only composed by different authors, but by each without any view to conjunction with the rest—we have then no right to expect any intrinsic continuity between them; and all that continuity which we now find must be of extraneous origin. Where are we to look for the origin? Lachmann follows Wolf in ascribing the whole constructive process to Peisistratus and his associates, at the period when the creative epical faculty is admitted to have died out. But upon this supposition, Peisistratus (or his associate) must have done much more than omit, transpose, and interpolate, here and there; he must have gone far to re-write the whole poem. A great poet might have re-cast pre-existing separate songs into one comprehensive whole, but no mere arrangers or compilers would be competent to do so; and we are thus left without any means of accounting for that degree of continuity and consistency which runs through so large a portion of the Iliad, though not through the whole. The idea that the poem as we read it grew out of atoms, not originally designed for the places which they now occupy, involves us in new and inextricable difficulties when we seek to elucidate either the mode of coalescence or the degree of existing unity.

"Admitting, then, premeditated adaptation of parts to a certain extent as essential to the Iliad, we may yet inquire whether it was produced all at once or gradually enlarged—whether by one author or by several; and, if the parts be of different age, which is the primitive kernel, and which are the additions?

"Welcker, Lange, and Nitzeh, treat the Homeric poems as representing a second step in advance in the progress of popular poetry: First comes the age of short narrative songs; next, when these have become numerous, there arise constructive minds who re-cast and blend together many of them into a larger aggregate, conceived upon some scheme of their own. The age of the epos is followed by that of the epopee: short spontaneous effusions prepare the way, and furnish materials for the architectonic genius of the poet. It is farther presumed by the above-mentioned authors that the pre-Homeric epic included a great abundance of such smaller songs—a fact which admits of no proof, but which seems countenanced by some passages in Homer, and is in itself no way improbable. But the transition from such songs, assuming them to be ever so numerous, to a combined and continuous poem, forms an epoch in the intellectual history of a nation, implying mental qualities of a higher order than those upon which the songs themselves depend. Nor is it at all to be imagined that the materials pass unaltered from their first state of combination: they must of necessity be re-cast, and undergo an adapting process, in which the genius of the organising poet consists; and we cannot hope, by simply knowing them as they exist in the second stage, ever to divine how they stood in the first. Such, in my judgment, is the right conception of the Homeric epoch—an organising poetical mind, still preserving that freshness of observation and vivacity of details which constitutes the charm of the ballad.

"Nothing is gained by studying the Iliad as a congeries of fragments once independent of each other: no portion of the poem can be shown to have ever been so, and the supposition introduces difficulties greater than those which it removes. But it is not necessary to affirm that the whole poem, as we now read it, belonged to the original and preconceived plan. In this respect the Iliad produces upon my mind an impression totally different from the Odyssey. In the latter poem the characters and incidents are fewer; the whole plot appears of one projection, from the beginning down to the death of the suitors: none of the parts look as if they had been composed separately, and inserted by way of addition into a pre-existing smaller poem. But the Iliad, on the contrary, presents the appearance of a house built upon a plan comparatively narrow, and subsequently enlarged by successive additions. The first book, together with the eighth, and the books from the eleventh to the twenty-second inclusive, seem to form the primary organisation of the poem, then properly an Achilleïs: the twenty-third and twenty-fourth books are additions at the tail of this primitive poem, which still leave it nothing more than an enlarged Achilleïs: but the books from the second to the seventh inclusive, together with the tenth, are of a wider and more comprehensive character, and convert the poem from an Achilleïs into an Iliad. The primitive frontispiece, inscribed with the anger of Achilles and its direct consequences, yet remains, after it has ceased to be co-extensive with the poems. The parts added, however, are not necessarily inferior in merit to the original poem: so far is this from being the case, that amongst them are comprehended some of the noblest efforts of the Grecian epic."—(Vol. ii. p. 230.)

To many persons the undisputed fact that the Homeric poems were composed to be recited, not read, has appeared a convincing proof that they could not have originally assumed the form in which they are known to us. For setting aside the difficulty of preserving by the aid only of memory, and the still greater difficulty of composing a long poem without help of the manuscript, to keep secure the part already completed, what motive, it has been said, could induce the poet to undertake so great and so superfluous a labour? Why indite a poem so much longer than could be recited on any one occasion, and which, as a whole, could never be appreciated? But we would suggest that it is not necessary to suppose that the poet commenced his labours with the project in view of writing a long epic, in order to believe that we possess these two great poems very nearly in the original form in which they were composed. If it were the task of the poet or poets to supply a number of songs on the adventures of a popular hero, or the achievements of some famous war, such number of songs must assume a certain consecutive order, the one will necessarily grow out of the other. Let any one reflect for a moment how the work of composition proceeds, and he will perceive that it would be impossible for a poet to take any one such subject as the siege of Troy, or the return of Ulysses, as the theme for a number of separate poems, and not find that he was writing, with more or less continuity, one long entire poem. This continuity would be improved and especially attended to, when a certain order came to be preserved (as we know it was) in the recitation of the several poems. We have no difficulty, therefore, in believing that, in the time of Pisistratus, the editors of Homer might have had very little to do to give them that degree of completeness and unity which they at present display. A number of consecutive songs upon the same subject would naturally grow into an epic.

No decisive argument, we submit, can be drawn from the absence or limited application of the art of writing at the era assigned for the composition of these poems. There is nothing left for us but to examine the poems themselves, to determine what degree of unity of plan or of authorship may be attributed to them. Unfortunately the critical perception of scholars, equally eminent, leads to such different results, that the controversy appears to be hopeless. Where one sees with the utmost distinctness the difference of workmanship, another sees with equal clearness the traces of the same genius and manner. And in controversies of this nature, there is unhappily a most perverse combination of the strongest conviction with an utter impotence to force that conviction upon another. Between these two, a man is generally driven into a passion; and thus we often find a bitter, acrid mood infused into literary discussions, which, lying as they do apart from the selfish and conflicting interests of men, would seem to be the theatre for no such display. The controversy rages still in Germany, and, it seems, with considerable heat. Lachmann, after dissecting a certain portion of the Iliad into four songs, "in the highest degree different in their spirit," tells us that whoever thinks the difference of spirit inconsiderable—whoever does not feel it at once when pointed out—whoever can believe that the parts as they stand now belong to one artistically constructed epos, "will do well not to trouble himself any more either with my criticisms, or with epic poetry, because he is too weak to understand any thing about it—("weil er zu schwach ist etwas darin zu verstehen.") On the contrary, Ulrici, after having shown (or tried to show) that the composition of Homer satisfies perfectly, in the main, all the exigencies of an artistic epic, adds, that this will make itself at once evident to all those who have any sense of artistical symmetry, but that to those to whom that sense is wanting, no conclusive demonstration call be given. He warns the latter, however, they are not to deny the existence of that which their short-sighted vision cannot distinguish, for every thing cannot be made clear to children, which the mature man sees through at a glance! Mr Grote, from whom we quote these instances, adds that he has the misfortune to dissent both from Lachmann and Ulrici; for to him it appears a mistake to put (as Ulrici and others have done) the Iliad and the Odyssey on the same footing. The sort of compromise which Mr Grote offers seems very fair; but, for our part, we beg to reserve the point; we will not commit ourselves on so delicate a subject, by a hasty assent. But we promise to read our Homer again with an especial regard to these boundaries he has pointed out between the Achilleïs and the Iliad.

Who Homer himself may have been, and if the blind bard ever existed, is a question, of course, very different from the degree of unity to be traced in the two great poems which have descended to us under his name. On this subject Mr Grote gives us an hypothesis which, as far as we are aware, is new and original. It has not, however, won our conviction—and we had intended to offer some objections against it. But we have already dwelt so long on this legendary period, that unless we break from it at once, we shall have no space left to give any idea whatever of the manner in which Mr Grote treats the more historical periods of his history. We must be allowed, therefore, to make a bold and abrupt transition; and, as every one in a history of Greece turns his eye first toward Athens, we shall, at one single bound, light upon the city of Minerva as she appeared in the age of Solon and Pisistratus.

A fidelity to the spirit of the epoch upon which he is engaged, as well as to the text of his authorities, we have already remarked, is a distinguishing merit of Mr Grote. Of this, his chapters upon the age of Solon might be cited as an illustration. We are persuaded that a reader of many a history of Greece, unless himself observant, and on the watch to detect, as he passes, the signs of the times, might proceed from the age of Pisistratus to that of Pericles, and not be made aware how very great the advancement, during that period, of the intellectual condition of the people of Athens. He has been in Athens all the time, but how very different have the Athenians become! And unless he were under the guidance of some more powerful thinker than ordinarily wields the pen of history, he might be little aware of the change. Mr Grote points it out with great distinctness.

At the first of these epochs, it is but a barbarous people, with qualities which bode something better—that bear the name of Athenians. Amongst the laws of Solon, is one which forbids "the sale of daughters or sisters into slavery by fathers or brothers!" A law is enacted against the exportation of all produce of the soil of Attica except olive oil, and to enforce this commercial or non-commercial regulation, "the archon was bound, on pain of forfeiting a hundred drachms, to pronounce solemn curses against every offender!" The superstitious or religious feelings, if we must honour them by the latter name, are rude and violent in the extreme—give rise to frenzy amongst the people,—the women especially,—and call for or admit of human sacrifice. Both the artifices by which Pisistratus on two several occasions succeeded in obtaining the tyranny, indicate a people in the very first stages of civilisation. But what shall be said of the second or grosser of these artifices?—his entrance into Athens in a chariot with a tall damsel by his side, personating Minerva, visibly under the protection of the goddess.

It is worth observing, that the same class of historians who are given to extract with an unauthorised boldness a prosaic fact from a poetic legend, are also the slowest and most reluctant in understanding the more startling facts which meet them on historic ground, in their simple and full significance. They are bold before the fable, they are timid before the fact. Nor is this surprising. In both cases they are on the search for incidents analogous to those which the ordinary course of life or of history has made familiar to their imagination. They see these with an exuberant faith where they do not exist, and will see nothing but these when something of a far different nature is actually put before them. Mr Grote, who refused to tread at all on the insecure ground of the legend, meets this narrative of the second entry of Pisistratus into Athens upon the level ground of history, and sees it in its simple form, and sees the people in it. Dr Thirlwall, on the contrary, who would read the history of a people's wars and emigrations in the fabulous exploits of fabulous persons, is staggered at the story—converts it all into a holiday pageant! It was some show or procession, and all the world knew as well as Pisistratus that it was the damsel Phyê, and not Minerva, who stood in the chariot.

"This story would indeed be singular," writes Dr Thirlwall, "if we consider the expedient in the light of a stratagem, on which the confederates relied for overcoming the resistance which they might otherwise have expected from their adversaries. But it seems quite as possible that the pageant was only designed to add extraordinary solemnity to the entrance of Pisistratus, and to suggest the reflection that it was by the special favour of Heaven he had been so unexpectedly restored."—(Vol. ii. p. 67.)

If this story stood alone in spirit and character, and there were no other contemporary events to occasion us the same kind of surprise, some such interpretation might not be unreasonable. But other facts which the historian himself relates with their unabated and literal significance, testify equally to the gross apprehension of the Athenian people at this epoch. What shall we say, of the visit of Epimenides to purify the city? The guilt, it seems, of sacrilege had, some time past, been incurred by Megacles and his associates, who had put to death certain of their enemies within the precincts of the temple of Minerva, whither they had fled for refuge. Megacles might have starved them there, but was scrupulous to bring this defilement upon the temple. He therefore promised to spare their lives if they would quit the sanctuary. Upon this they came forth, holding however, as an additional safeguard, a rope in their hands which was fastened to the statue of Minerva. Better not have trusted to the rope, for it broke. Megacles, seeing this, pronounced aloud that the goddess had evidently withdrawn her protection, and ordered them to be put to death. For this sacrilege—not for the promise-breaking or bloodshed—a curse hung over the city. Superstitious terrors haunted the inhabitants; the scarcity, the sickness, every evil that afflicted them, was attributed to this cause; and the women especially, gave themselves up to frantic demonstrations of fear and piety.

There was a man of Crete, born of a nymph, fed by the nymphs, if indeed he was fed at all, for no one saw him eat. In his youth, this marvellous Cretan had been sent by his father to bring home some stray sheep, and turning aside into a cave for shelter from the noontide heat, had fallen asleep. He slept on for fifty years. Either supernatural knowledge comes in sleep, or Epimenides invented this fable to stop all inquiries as to where, or how, he had passed the early period of his life. He attained the age of one hundred and fifty-four—some say three hundred years.

This remarkable person, supposed to know by what means the anger of the gods might be propitiated, was called to Athens. What means he devised for this purpose may easily be conjectured. After the performance of certain religious ceremonies, the foundation of a new temple, and the sacrifice of a human victim, the Athenians were restored to their usual tranquillity.

"The religious mission of Epimenides to Athens," observes Mr Grote, "and its efficacious as well as healing influence on the public mind, deserve notice as characteristics of the age in which they occurred. If we transport ourselves two centuries forward to the Peloponnesian war, when rational influences and positive habits of thought had acquired a durable hold upon the superior minds, and when practical discussion on political and judicial matters were familiar to every Athenian citizen, no such uncontrollable religious misery could well have subdued the entire public; and if it had, no living man could have drawn to himself such universal veneration as to be capable of effecting a cure. Plato, admitting the real healing influence of rites and ceremonies, fully believed in Epimenides as an inspired prophet during the past, but towards those who preferred claims to supernatural power in his own day, he was not so easy of faith: he, as well as Euripides and Theophrastus, treated with indifference, and even with contempt, the Orpheotelestæ of the later times, who advertised themselves as possessing the same patent knowledge of ceremonial rites, and the same means of guiding the will of the gods, as Epimenides had wielded before them.... Had Epimenides himself come to Athens in those days, his visit would probably have been as much inoperative to all public purposes as a repetition of the stratagem of Phyê, clothed and equipped as the goddess Athena, which had succeeded so completely in the days of Peisistratus—a stratagem which even Herodotus treats as incredibly absurd, although a century before his time both the city of Athens and the Demas of Attica had obeyed, as a divine mandate, the orders of this magnificent and stately woman to restore Peisistratus."—(Vol. iii. p. 116.)

There is nothing to which we are more averse than the converting ancient history into a field for the discussion of modern party politics. We are fully persuaded that the most thorough English Conservative may admire the Athenian republic; so far at least admire as to admit that it is impossible to conceive how, under any other form of government, the peculiar glories of Athens could have shone forth. And, indeed, an Athenian democracy differs so entirely from any political institution which the world sees at present, or will ever see again, that to carry the strife of our politics back into those times, in other than a quite general manner, is as futile as it is tasteless and vexatious. After this avowal, we shall not be thought disposed to enter into any needless cavil, upon this topic, with Mr Grote; we shall not, certainly, be upon the watch to detect the too liberal politician in the historian of Greece. An interest in the working of popular institutions is a qualification the more for his task; and the historian himself must have felt that it was no mean advantage he had acquired by having taken his seat in our house of parliament, and mingled personally in the affairs of a popular government. What the future volumes of the history may disclose, we will not venture to prognosticate; but, hitherto, we have met with nothing which deserves the opprobrium of being attributed to party spirit. There is a certain tone in some of his political observations which, as may be supposed, we should not altogether adopt; but many of them are excellent and instructive. Nothing could be better than the following remarks on the necessity of a "constitutional morality." He is speaking of the reforms of Cleisthenes.

"It was necessary to create in the multitude, and through them to force upon the leading ambitious men, that rare and difficult sentiment which we may term a constitutional morality,—a paramount reverence for the forms of the constitution, enforcing obedience to the authorities acting under and within those forms, yet combined with the habit of open speech, of action, subject only to definite legal control, and unrestrained censure of those very authorities as to all their public acts,—combined, too, with the perfect confidence in the bosom of every citizen, amidst the bitterness of party contest, that the forms of the constitution will not be less sacred in the eyes of his opponents than in his own. This co-existence of freedom and self-imposed restraint—of obedience to authority with unmeasured censure of the persons exercising it—may be found in the aristocracy of England, (since about 1688,) as well as in the democracy of the American United States; and, because we are familiar with it, we are apt to suppose it a natural sentiment; though there seem to be few sentiments more difficult to establish and diffuse among a community, judging by the experience of history. We may see how imperfectly it exists, at this day, in the Swiss cantons; and the many violences of the French Revolution illustrate, amongst various other lessons, the fatal effects arising from its absence, even among a people high in the scale of intelligence. Yet the diffusion of such constitutional morality, not merely among the majority of any community, but throughout the whole, is the indispensable condition of a government at once free and peaceable; since even any powerful and obstinate minority may render the working of free institutions impracticable, without being strong enough to conquer ascendency for themselves."—Vol. iv. p. 205.

Then follow, close on the extract we have just made, some observations upon the famous law of Ostracism, which are well deserving of attention, and which we would willingly quote did our space allow of it. Perhaps it would be difficult, in following out the several applications of this law, to show that it had exactly the beneficial operation which—arguing on the theory of the institution,—is here assigned to it. But, at the very lowest, this much may be said of the law of Ostracism, that it gives to the stronger of two factions a means of deciding the contest without appeal to force, before the contest rose to its maximum of bitterness, and without necessity or excuse for those wholesale banishments which afflicted the republics of Italy. If such an institution had existed in the Florentine republic, we should not have heard of those cruel banishments that Guelph and Ghibelline, Bianchi and Neri, inflicted upon each other; such banishments as that, for instance, in which its great poet Dante was involved.

Of one remarkable event, characterising the working of the Athenian government, we do not assent to the view presented to us by Mr Grote. His last published volume brings down the affairs of Greece to the battle of Marathon and the death of Miltiades. In the sentence passed on the hero of Marathon, the operation of a popular government has been often disadvantageously traced; the Athenians have been accused of fickleness and ingratitude. Mr Grote repels the charge. With some observations upon this defence, which forms the conclusion of the fourth and last of the published volumes, we shall bring our own notice to a close.

Ingratitude, we readily admit, is not the proper word to be used on such an occasion. A citizen serves the state, and is honoured; if he commits a crime against the state he is not, on this account, to go unpunished. His previous services invest him with no privilege to break the laws, or act criminally. What man, capable of doing, a patriotic action, would wish for such a privilege, or dream of laying claim to it?

Not gratitude or ingratitude—but justice or injustice—is the issue to be tried between Miltiades and the Athenian assembly. And although Mr Grote is supported, in some measure, by Dr Thirlwall in the judgment he gives on this transaction, we prefer to side here with the opinion expressed by the earlier historian, Mr Mitford: we view the sentence passed on Miltiades not as the triumph of law or justice, but of mere party-spirit, the triumph of a faction gained through the unreasonable anger of the people.

Though the extract is rather long, we must, in justice, give the narrative of Mr Grote in his own language.

"His reputation (that of Miltiades) had been great before the battle (of Marathon), and after it the admiration and confidence of his countrymen knew no bounds; it appears indeed to have reached such a pitch, that his head was turned, and he lost both his patriotism and his prudence. He proposed to his countrymen to incur the cost of equipping an armament of seventy ships, with an adequate armed force, and to place it altogether at his discretion; giving them no intimation whither he intended to go, but merely assuring them that if they would follow him, he would conduct them to a land where gold was abundant, and thus enrich them. Such a promise, from the lips of the recent victor of Marathon, was sufficient, and the armament was granted; no man except Miltiades knowing what was its destination. He sailed immediately to the island of Paros, laid siege to the town, and sent in a herald to require from the inhabitants a contribution of one hundred talents, on pain of entire destruction. His pretence for this attack was, that the Parians had furnished a trireme to Datis for the Persian fleet at Marathon; but his real motive (so Herodotus assures us) was vindictive animosity against a Parian citizen named Lysagoras, who had exasperated the Persian general Hydarnes against him. The Parians amused him at first with evasions, until they had procured a little delay to repair the defective portions of their wall, after which they set him at defiance; and Miltiades in vain prosecuted hostilities against them for the space of twenty-six days: he ravaged the island, but his attacks made no impression on the town. Beginning to despair of success in his military operations, he entered into some negotiation (such at least was the tale of the Parians themselves,) with a Parian woman named Timô, priestess or attendant in the temple of Demeter (Ceres) near the town-gates; this woman, promising to reveal to him a secret which would place Paros in his power, induced him to visit by night a temple to which no male person was admissible. He leaped the exterior fence and approached the sanctuary; but on coming near was seized with a panic terror and ran away, almost out of his senses; on leaping the same fence to get back, he strained or bruised his thigh badly, and became utterly disabled. In this melancholy state he was placed on ship-board; the siege being raised, and the whole armament returning to Athens."

"Vehement was the indignation both of the armament and the remaining Athenians against Miltiades on his return; and Zanthippus, father of the great Perikles, became the spokesman of this feeling. He impeached Miltiades before the popular judicature as having been guilty of deceiving the people, and so having deserved the penalty of death. The accused himself, disabled by his injured thigh, which even began to show symptoms of gangrene, was unable to stand or to say a word in his own defence; he lay on his couch before the assembled judges, while his friends made the best case they could in his behalf. Defence, it appears, there was none; all they could do was to appeal to his previous services; they reminded the people largely and emphatically of the inestimable exploit of Marathon, coming in addition to his previous conquest of Lemnos. The assembled dikasts or jurors showed their sense of these powerful appeals, by rejecting the proposition of his accuser to condemn him to death; but they imposed on him the penalty of fifty talents 'for his iniquity.'" (Vol. iv. p. 488.)

He died shortly after from his wound.

On this narrative we must make one or two observations. The turn of expression which the writer has selected for conveying the meaning of the original Greek text of his authority, might lead us to imply that when the Athenians placed a force of seventy ships at the command of Miltiades they did not know on what kind of expedition he was about to employ them. "He would conduct them to a land where gold was abundant, and thus enrich them." Surely no one had an idea that it was a voyage of discovery, in search after some El Dorado that Miltiades was about to undertake. Every one in Athens knew that the fleet was to be directed against some of their neighbours: although, for very manifest reasons,—the advantage of taking their victim by surprise, and of leaving their general unfettered, to act according to circumstances,—the objects of attack were not revealed, and on this a perfect secrecy was allowed to be maintained. It should be also added to this account, that Zanthippes, father of Pericles, who made himself spokesman for the angry feeling of the Athenians, was also, as Dr Thirwall tells us, "the son of Ariphron, the chief of the rival house of the Alcmaonids," who were little pleased with the sudden rise of Miltiades.

From the same authority we may also learn, that "Paros was at this time one of the most flourishing amongst the Cyclades." Miltiades directed the expedition against Paros from personal motives, from vindictive animosity against a Parian citizen; but Paros was rich, and could therefore pay a ransom—the very object of the expedition; and the pretext under which alone Athens could extort a ransom or a tribute from its neighbours, that they had assisted the Persians, or failed in bringing aid to the common cause against them, applied to Paros; it had furnished, or was accused of having furnished, a trireme to Datis. Whatever baseness Miltiades betrayed in using a public force for his own private revenge, there is nothing to make it appear that the selection of Paros for the object of his attack was not in perfect consistency with the real public purpose of the enterprise.

What crime in all this had Miltiades committed against the Athenians? The injustice of the expedition they shared; for it would be childishness to suppose that they sent their general out with seventy ships, and had no idea that he would attack any one. The personal motives which led him to direct it against Paros, however mean and unworthy of him, are not shown to have been at variance with the professed objects of the expedition. Nor can any one doubt for a moment that if he had succeeded in extorting from the Parians, and others, a large sum of money, the Athenians would have welcomed him back with applause, as loud as the censure they bestowed on their defeated generals, who, instead of plunder, brought them back only the disgrace of having tried to plunder. There were those at hand ready to take advantage of the public irritation; they accused him, and obtained his condemnation. We are not claiming for Miltiades the praise of virtue; nor should we make any pathetic appeal in his behalf. He was not free from a moral delinquency; but, so far as the Athenians were concerned, his substantial offence was failure in his enterprise.

That his friends urged no other defence but that of his previous services, is no proof that other grounds for acquittal were not present to their minds. They were pleading before angry and irresponsible judges, whom it, was their object to soothe and propitiate. Would the strain of inculpatory observations that we have been making, have answered their purpose? To tell an angry man that he is angry, because he is disappointed, is not the way to abate his passion. That Miltiades had disappointed them was certain; undoubtedly the best method of defence was to remind them of the great services that he had formerly rendered them. It was not the demands of judicial reason his advocates had to satisfy: they were pleading before judges whose feelings of the moment were to be the law of the moment.

"Thus closed the life of the conqueror of Marathon. The last act of it," continues Mr Grote, "produces an impression so mournful, and even shocking—his descent from the pinnacle of glory, to defeat, mean tampering with a temple-servant, mortal bodily hurt, undefended ignominy, and death under a sentence of heavy fine, is so abrupt and unprepared—that readers, ancient and modern, have not been satisfied without finding some one to blame for it: we must except Herodotus, our original authority, who recounts the transaction without dropping a single hint of blame against any one. To speak ill of the people, as Machiavel has long ago observed, is a strain in which every one at all times, even under a democratical government indulges with impunity and without provoking any opponent to reply; and in this case the hard fate of Miltiades has been imputed to the vices of the Athenians and their democracy—it has been cited in proof partly of their fickleness, partly of their ingratitude. But however such blame may serve to lighten the mental sadness arising from a series of painful facts, it will not be found justified if we apply to those facts a reasonable criticism."

He thus vindicates the Athenians from the charge of fickleness, on the ground that it was not they, but Miltiades who had changed. The fugitive from Paros, and the victor of Marathon, were two very different persons. As any remarkable instance of fickleness we should certainly not be disposed to cite the case. The charge of ingratitude, we have admitted, is, presuming that he was guilty, entirely displaced. But when Mr Grote in his final summary says, "The fate of Miltiades thus, so far from illustrating either the fickleness or the ingratitude of his countrymen, attests their just appreciation of deserts," we must indeed demur. No, no: this was not the triumph of justice over the finer sensibilities of our nature, as Mr Grote would seem to imply. On the fairest review we can give to the whole of the circumstances, we find on the sentence passed upon Miltiades a gross instance of that old notorious injustice which pronounces an enterprise meritorious or criminal according to its success. The enterprise was altogether a disgraceful affair. But the Athenians must be supposed cognisant of the nature of the expedition for which they fitted out their seventy ships:—against them, we repeat, the only substantial offence committed was his failure; nor can we doubt that his welcome back to Athens would have been quite different had there been a different issue to the adventure. Justice there was none; unless it be justice for three freebooters to pass sentence upon the fourth.

Before concluding, we ought, perhaps, to take, some notice of the reform in our orthography of Greek words which Mr Grote is desirous of introducing, in order to assimilate the English to the Greek pronunciation. The principal of these is the substitution of k for c. Our own k, he justly observes, precisely coincides with the Greek k, while a c may be either k or s. He writes Perikles, Alkibiades. To this approximation of the English pronunciation to the Greek we can see nothing to object. A reader of Greek finds it a mere annoyance, and sort of barbarism, to be obliged to pronounce the same name one way while reading Greek, and another when speaking or reading English; and to the English reader it must be immaterial which pronunciation he finally adopts. Meanwhile, it must be allowed that the first changing of an old familiar name is a disagreeable operation. We must leave the popular and the learned taste to arrange it how they can together. Mr Grote has wisely left some names—as Thucydides—in the old English form; in matters of this kind nothing is gained by too rigid a consistency. It is not improbable that his orthography will be adopted, in the first place, by the more learned writers, and will from their pages find its way into popular use. Mr Grote also, in speaking of the Greek deities, calls them by their Greek names, and not by the Latin equivalents—As Zeus for Jupiter—Athene for Minerva.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] A History of Greece.By George Grote, Esq.

[2] Vol. ii. p. 346.

[3] Grote: vol. i, p. 641, where the quotation is very effectively introduced.

[4] Vol. i. p. 434.

[5] Dr Thirlwall's Hist. vol. i. p. 152.

[6] Thirlwall, vol. i. p. 154. On the subject of the Trojan war we quote the following passage from the same historian, as an instance of the extremely slender thread which a conjectural writer will think it worth his while to weave in amongst his arguments for the support of some dubious fact. "One inevitable result," he says, "of such an event as the Trojan war, must have been to diffuse amongst the Greeks a more general knowledge of the isles and coasts of the Ægean, and to leave a lively recollection of the beauty and fertility of the region in which their battles had been fought. This would direct the attention of future emigrants in search of new homes toward the same quarter; and the fact that the tide of migration really set in this direction first, when the state of Greece became unsettled, may not unreasonably be thought to confirm the reality of the Trojan war." (P. 250.) Little need, one would think, of a Trojan war to direct the tide of emigration to the opposite coasts of Asia Minor.

BEN NEVIS AND BEN MUICH DHUI.

It was on a bright, hot day of July, which threw the first gleam of sunshine across a long tract of soaking, foggy, dreary, hopeless weather, that we ascended Ben Nevis. The act was unpremeditated. The wet and fog of weeks had entered into our soul; and we had resolved, in the spirit of indignant resignation, that we would not attempt the hill. Accordingly we were stalking lazily along General Wade's road: we had left Fort William, and thought there might be a probability of reaching Fort Augustus to dinner,—when we were not ungratefully surprised to see the clouds tucking themselves up the side of the mountain in a peculiar manner, which gives the experienced wanderer of the hills the firm assurance of a glorious day. Soon afterwards, the great mountain became visible from summit to base, and its round head and broad shoulders stood dark against the bright blue sky. A sagacious-looking old Highlander, who was passing, protested that the hill had never looked so hopeful during the whole summer: the temptation was irresistible, so we turned our steps towards the right, and commenced the ascent.

It is one among the prevailing fallacies of the times, that to mount a Highland hill is a very difficult operation, and that one should hire a guide on the occasion. We lately witnessed a very distressing instance of the alarming prevalence of this notion, in a young Chancery barrister, fresh from Brick Court Temple, who asked us in a very solemn tone of voice, if we could recommend him to "a steady guide to the top of Arthur Seat." When matters have come to such a crisis, it is time to speak out; and we are able, on the ground of long experience, to say, that if the proper day be chosen, and the right method adopted, the ascent of our grandest mountains is one of the simplest operations in all pedestrianism. True, if people take it in the way in which pigs run up all manner of streets, and go straight forward, looking neither to the right nor to the left, they will run their heads against nature's stone walls, which are at least as formidable as man's. But let any one study the disposal of the ground, calculating the gradients and summit levels as if he were a railway-engineer for the time being—let him observe where the moss lies deep, and precipices rise too steep to be scrambled over; and he will be very obtuse indeed, if he is not able to chalk out for himself precisely the best way to the top. It is a good general rule to keep by the side of a stream. That if you do so when you are at the top of a hill, you will somehow or other find your way to the bottom, is, we are convinced, a proposition as sound as Newton's theory of gravitation. But in the ascent, the stream is often far better than a human guide. It has no interest to lead you to the top of some episodical hill and down again, and to make you scramble over an occasional dangerous pass, to show you how impossible it is that you could have found the way yourself, and how fortunate you are in having secured the services of an intelligent and intrepid guide. On the contrary, as long as you keep by the side of the stream you are always gaining ground and making your way towards the higher levels, while you avoid bogs: for the edge of a stream is generally the dryest part of a mountain.

Choosing the broadest and deepest scaur that is scratched down the abrupt side of the lower range of the mountain, we find it, as we anticipated, the channel of a clear dancing stream, which amuses us with its babble for several hundred feet of the ascent. Some time ere we had reached the base of the hill we had lost sight of the summit, and there was before us only the broad steep bank, with its surface of alternate stone and heather, and a few birch-trees peeping timidly forth from crevices in the rock. After a considerable period of good hard climbing, accompanied by nothing worthy of note either in the variations of the scenery or in the incidents encountered, we are at the top of this rampart; and behold! on the other side of a slight depression, in which sleeps a small inky lake, the bold summit of the mountain rises clear and abrupt and close, as one might see the dome of a cathedral from the parapet on the roof. Here we linger to take a last look of the objects at the foot of the hill, for ere we resume the ascent we shall lose sight of them. Already Fort William looks like a collection of rabbit-houses. The steam-boat on the lake is like a boy's Christmas toy. The waters have assumed that hard burnished metallic appearance which they convey to the eye raised far above them in a hot summer day. The far-stretching moss, with one or two ghastly white stones standing erect out of its blackness like druidical remains, carries the eye along its surface to the dusky and mysterious ruins of Inverlochy Castle, which has so sadly puzzled antiquaries to divine how its princely round towers and broad barbican could have been erected in that wild and remote region, where they stand patiently in their ruined grandeur, waiting till our friend Billings shall, with his incomparable pencil, make each tower and arch and moulding as familiar to the public eye as if the old ruin stood in Fleet Street.

Off we start with the lake to the left, taking care to keep the level we have gained. A short interval of walking in a horizontal direction, and again we must begin to climb. On this side the porphyry dome is round and comparatively smooth—scarcely so abrupt as the outer range of hill which we have just ascended. But wending north-eastwardly when near the summit, we came suddenly to a spot where a huge fragment of the dome had, as it were, been broken off, leaving a ghastly rent—how deep it were difficult for the eye to fix, but the usual authorities tell us that the precipices here are 1500 feet high. When we reached their edge, we found that the clouds, which had been completely lifted up from the smoother parts of the mountain, still lingered as if they had difficulty in getting clear of the ragged edges of the cavernous opening, and moving about restlessly like evil spirits, hither and thither, afforded but partial glimpses of the deep vale below. Though Ben Nevis was at this time rather deficient in his snowy honours, considerable patches lay in the unsunned crevices of the precipice. It was a fine thing to occupy one's-self in tilting over huge boulders, and to see them gradually approach the edge of the gulf, and then leap thundering into the mist.

Turning our eyes from the terrible fascinations of the precipice to the apex of the hill now in full view, a strange sight there met our eyes—a sight so strange that we venture to say the reader no more anticipates it than we did, at the moment when we looked from the yawning precipice to what we expected to be a solitary mountain-top. "Pooh!" the reader will say, "it was an eagle looking at the sun, or a red-deer snuffing with his expanded nostrils the tainted air." We shake our heads. "Well, then, it was a waterspout—or, perhaps, a beautiful rainbow—or something electric, or a phenomenon of some sort." Utterly wrong. It was neither more nor less, reader, than a crowd of soldiers, occupying nearly the whole table-land of the summit! Yes, there they were, British troops, with their red coats, dark gray trousers, and fatigue caps, as distinctly as we ever saw them in Marshall's panoramas! We were reminded of the fine description which Scott gives of the Highland girl who was gazing indolently along the solitary glen of Gortuleg on the day of the battle of Culloden, when it became suddenly peopled by the Jacobite fugitives. "Impressed with the belief that they were fairies—who, according to Highland tradition, are visible to men only from one twinkle of the eyelid to another—she strove to refrain from the vibration, which she believed would occasion the strange and magnificent apparition to become invisible." But whether the eye winked or not, there they were—substantial able-bodied fellows; what could it mean? Had Colonel Mitchell discovered a new system for protecting the country by fortifying the tops of mountains which an enemy never comes near? Could it be some awkward squad sent to be drilled on this remote spot that it might escape the observation of the sarcastic public? Such were the theories as suddenly rejected as they were suggested. It was vain to speculate. No solution we could devise made the slightest approach to probability; and our only prospect of speedy relief was in pushing rapidly forward. A very short sentence from the good-humoured looking young fellow who received our first breathless and perplexed inquiry, solved the mystery,—"did you never hear of the Ordnance Survey?" Yes, indeed, we had heard of it; but our impression of it was as of something like a mathematical line, with neither breadth nor thickness; but here it was in substantial operation. The party were occupied in erecting a sort of dwelling for themselves—half tent, half hut. Though in fatigue dresses, and far from being very trim, it was easy to see that they were not common soldiers. They belong, we believe, to the educated corps of sappers and miners; and a short conversation with them showed that the reputation of intelligence and civility long enjoyed by that distinguished body has not been unjustly earned. Though not blind to the magnificence of the panorama of mountain, lake, and distant far-stretching forest-land that lay beneath our feet as we conversed, they did not conceal their consciousness that the prospect of passing some months on such a spot was not particularly cheering to round-cheeked comfortable Englishmen, accustomed at Sandhurst and Addiscombe to comforts even superior to those of the Saut Market. The air was unexceptionably pure and abundant—yet the Bedford level might have been preferable as a permanent residence. Many were the reflections that occurred to us of the feelings of a set of men thus cut off from the earth, down on which they looked, like so many Jacks on a huge bean-stalk. What a place to encounter the first burst of the November storm in, beneath the frail covering of a tent! How did their friends address letters to them? Would a cover addressed "Mr Abel Thompson of the Royal engineers, Top of Ben Nevis," be a document to which the post-office would pay any more regard than to a letter addressed to one of the fixed stars? Could they ask a friend to step up to dinner, or exchange courtesies with the garrison of Fort William, into whose windows they might peep with their telescopes?

In the course of conversation with our new friends, we alighted on a subject in which we have long taken an interest. They had already conducted some operations on Ben Muich Dhui, and they were now commencing such surveys on Ben Nevis, as would enable them finally to decide which of these mountains has the honour of being the highest land in the United Kingdom. Competition has of late run very close between them; and the last accounts had shown Ben Muich Dhui only some twenty feet or so a-head. We freely confess that we back Ben Muich Dhui in this contest. It is true that Ben Nevis is in all respects a highly meritorious hill. We must do justice to his manly civility and good humour. We have found many a crabbed little crag more difficult of access; and, for his height, we scarcely know another mountain, of which it is so easy to reach the top. He stands majestic and alone, his own spurs more nearly rivalling him than any of the neighbouring hills. Rising straight from the sea, his whole height and magnificent proportions are before us at once, and the view from the summit has an unrivalled expanse. Still there are stronger charms about the great centre of the Cairngorm range. Surrounded by his peers, he stands apart from the every-day world in mysterious grandeur. The depth and remoteness of the solitude, the huge mural precipices, the deep chasms between the rocks, the waterfalls of unknown height, the hoary remains of the primeval forest, the fields of snow, and the deep black lakes at the foot of the precipices, are full of such associations of awe, and grandeur, and mystery, as no other scenery in Britain is capable of arousing. The recollections of these things inclined us still to favour Ben Muich Dhui; and before separating from these hermits of her Majesty's ordnance, we earnestly requested, if they had any influence in the matter, that they would "find" for our favourite, to which we shall now introduce our readers.

Our public are certainly not amenable to the charge of neglecting what is worth seeing, because it is distant and inaccessible. On the top of the Righi, where people go to behold the sun rise over the Alps, we have seen the English congregated in crowds on the wooden bench erected for that purpose, making it look like a race-course stand, and carrying on a bang-up sort of conversation—

Right against the eastern gate
Where the great sun begins his state,—

as if it were a starting-post, and they were laying bets on the events of the day. The Schwartzwald, the Saxon Schweitz, nay, even the wild Norrska Fiellen, swarm with British tourists; and we are credibly informed that loud cries of "boots" and "waiter," with expostulations against the quality of the bottled porter and the airing of the beds, may be heard not far from Mount Sinai. Yet, in the centre of our own island there is a group of scenery, as unlike the rest of the country as if we had travelled to another hemisphere to see it—as grand and beautiful as the objects which our tourists cross half the globe to behold—which is scarcely known to those who profess to say that they have visited every thing that is worth seeing in their own country. The answer to this will probably be, that railway travelling has brought the extremities of Europe together—that Switzerland is but four days from London—that it is as easy to get to Chamouni as to Braemar—and that the scenery of the Alps must be finer than any thing to be seen in Scotland. Even this broad proposition may be questioned. It was with no small pride that one night, after a hard walk from Martigny to Chamouni, we heard a distinguished Englishman, who has been able to compare with each other the finest things both physical and mental which the world has produced, and whose friendly face greeted us as we emerged from the dark valley into a brilliantly lighted hotel—stand up for old Scotland, and question if there were any thing, even in the gorgeous vale of Chamouni itself, to excel our purple mountains and narrow glens. But if we should be disposed to give the preference to the Alps, on that principle of politeness, which actuated an Aberdeen fisherman, who had found his way under the dome of St Paul's, to exclaim—"Weel, that jist maks a perfect feel o' the Kirk o' Fitty"—we think there is something inexpressibly interesting in beholding, in the middle of this busy island of steam-engines and railways, of printing machines and spinning jennies, one wide district where nature is still as supremely lord of all—where man feels as much separated from all traces of the workmanship of his fellows, as in the forests of Missouri, or the upper gorges of the Himalayas. But it is not true that the Cairngorm range of mountains is a distant place to tourists. It is in the very centre of their haunts. They swarm in the valleys of the Spey and the Tay, at Laggan, Blair Athol, and Braemar, and want but enterprise or originality enough to direct their steps out of the beaten paths which have formed, since Scottish touring became fashionable forty years ago, the regular circles in which these creatures revolve. They care not in general to imbibe the glories and the delights of scenery, but confine themselves to the established Lions, which it is good for a man to be able in society to say that he has seen. "Well, I can say I have seen it," says your routine tourist—whereby, if he knew the meaning of his own words, he would be aware that he conveyed to mankind a testimony to his folly in having made any effort to look at that which has produced no impression whatever on his mind, and in looking at which he would not be aware that he saw any thing remarkable, unless the guide-book and the waiter at the inn had certified that it was an object of interest. It is true, that to see our friends the Cairngorm hills, one must walk, and that somewhat stiffly—but this is seldom an obstacle in any place where pedestrianism is not unfashionable. In the Oberland of Switzerland, we have seen green-spectacled, fat, plethoric, gentlemen, fresh from 'Change, wearing blouses and broad straw hats, carrying haversacks on their shoulders, and tall alpenstocks in their hands to facilitate the leaping of the chasms in the glaciers—looking all the time as if the whole were some disagreeable dream, from which they hoped to awaken in their easy-chair in the back office in Crane Alley. No! when personages of this kind adopt the pilgrim's staff, we may be sure that there is a good fund of pedestrianism still unexhausted, could the means of stimulating it be found. But it is high time that we should point out the way to our favourite land of precipices, cataracts, and snow.

We shall suppose the traveller to be at Braemar, which he may have reached by the Deeside road from Aberdeen, or in the direction of Spital of Glenshee through the pass of the Vhrich-vhruich, (have the goodness, reader, to pronounce that aloud,) or from the basin of the Tay by the ancient Highland road through Glen Tilt, and the Ault-Shiloch-Vran. Even the scenery round Braemar is in every way worthy of respect. The hills are fine, there are noble forests of pine and birch, and some good foaming waterfalls; while over all preside in majesty the precipices and snow of Lochin-ye-gair. Still it is farther into the wilderness, at the place where the three counties of Aberdeen, Inverness, and Banff meet, that the traveller must look for the higher class of scenery of which we are sending him in search. As Braemar, however, contains the latest inn that will greet him in his journey, he must remember here to victual himself for the voyage; and, partial as we are to pedestrianism, we think he may as well take a vehicle or a Highland poney as far on his route as either of them can go: it will not long encumber him. The linn of Dee, where the river rushes furiously between two narrow rocks, is generally the most remote object visited by the tourist on Dee-side. There is little apparent inducement to farther progress. He sees before him, about a mile farther on, the last human habitation—a shepherd's cabin, without an inch of cultivated land about it; and he is told that all beyond that is barrenness and desolation, until he reach the valley of the Spey. The pine-trees at the same time decrease in number, the hills become less craggy and abrupt, and the country in general assumes a bleak, bare, windy, bog-and-moor appearance, that is apt to make, one uncomfortable.

Of the various methods of approaching Ben Muich Dhui, the most striking, in our opinion, is one with which we never found any other person so well acquainted as to exchange opinions with us about it. We did once, it is true, coax a friend to attempt that route; he had come so far with us as the edge of the Dee, but disliked crossing it. In the superabundance of our zeal, we offered to carry him over on our shoulders; but when we came to the middle of the stream, it so happened that a foot tripped against a stone, and our friend was very neatly tilted over our head into the water, without our receiving any considerable damage, in our own proper person. He thereafter looked upon us, according to an old Scottish proverb, as "not to ride the water with;" and perhaps he was right. So we proceeded on our journey alone. Our method was to cross right over the line of hills which here bound the edge of the river. Though not precipitous, this bank is very high—certainly not less than a thousand feet. When you reach the top, if the day be clear, the whole Cairngorm range is before you on the other side of the valley, from summit to base, as you may see Mont Blanc from the Col de Balm, or the Jungfrau from the Wengern Alp. From this bird's-eye view, you at once understand that peculiar structure of the group, which makes the valleys so much deeper and narrower, and the precipices so much more frightful, than those of any other of the Scottish mountains. Here there are five summits springing from one root, and all more than four thousand feet above the level of the sea. The circumference of the whole group is as that of one mountain. We can imagine it to have been a huge, wide, rounded hill, Ben Muich Dhui being the highest part, and the whole as smooth and gentle as some of the Ural range, where you might have a fixed engine, and "an incline," without levelling or embanking. But at some time or other the whole mass had got a jerk; and so it is split from top to bottom, and shivered, and shaken, and disturbed into all shapes and positions, showing here and there such chasms as the splitting in two of mountains some three thousand feet or so in direct height must necessarily create. Having to his satisfaction contemplated the group from this elevation, the traveller may descend into Glen Lui Beg, as we shall presently describe it.

Returning to the Dee,—about a mile below the Linn, the stream of the Lui forces a passage through the steep banks and joins the river. We enter the glen from which this stream flows by a narrow rocky pass, through which the trees of the Mar forest struggle upwards. As we proceed, the trees gradually become more scarce, the rocky barrier is left behind us, and we are in a long grassy glen shut out from the world. This is Glen Lui. A better introduction to the savage scenery beyond, for the sake of contrast, there could not be. Every thing here is peace and softness. Banks lofty, but round and smooth, intervene to hide the summits of the mountains. The stream is not stagnant, but it flows on with a gentle current, sometimes through sedge or between grassy banks; elsewhere edged by a beach of the finest yellow sand. The water is beautifully transparent, and even where it is deepest you may count the shining pebbles below. A few weeping birches here and there hang their graceful disconsolate ringlets almost into the stream; the grass is as smooth as a shaven lawn, and much softer; and where a few stones protrude through it, they are covered with a cushion of many-coloured mosses. But with all its softness and beauty, the extreme loneliness of the scene fills the mind with a sense of awe. It surely must have been in such a spot that Wordsworth stood, or of such a scene that he dreamed, when he gave that picture of perfect rest which he professed to apply to a far different spot, Glen Almon—a rough, rocky glen, with a turbulent brook running through it, where there never was or can be silence:

"A convent—even a hermit's cell
Would break the silence of this dell—
It is not quiet—is not ease,
But something deeper far than these.
The separation that is here
Is of the grave, and of austere
And happy feelings of the dead."

Nor in Glen Lui can one feel inclined to join in the charge of mysticism which has been raised against this last simile. Its echoes in the heart at once associate themselves with a few strange, mysterious, round mounds, of the smoothest turf, and of the most regular, oval, or circular construction, which rise here and there from the flat floor of the valley. It needs no archæological inquiry to tell us what they are: we feel that they cover and have covered—who call tell how many hundred years?—the remains of some ancient people, with whom history cannot make us acquainted, and who have not even the benefit of tradition; for how can there be traditions in places where no human beings dwell?

"A noble race, but they are gone!
With their old forests wide and deep;
And we have fed our flocks upon
Hills where their generations sleep.
Their fountains slake our thirst at noon,
Upon their fields our harvest waves;
Our shepherds woo beneath their moon—
Ah, let us spare at least their graves!"

"Stop!" says a voice, "the quotation is utterly inappropriate—how can there be flocks where not even a single sheep feeds—how can shepherds woo beneath the moon where there are no damsels to woo?" Granted; but the lines are pretty—they were the most appropriate that we could find, and they blend in with one's feelings on this spot; for, if it be a strange and melancholy sight in the Far West, beyond the Atlantic, to alight upon the graves of a tribe of Indians whose history has become extinct, is it not more strange still to look, in the centre of this busy island, which has lived in history eighteen hundred years, on these vestiges of an old extinct race, not turned up by the plough, or found in digging the foundation of a cotton mill, but remaining there beneath the open sky, as they were left of old, no successors of the aboriginal race coming to touch them? Standing in Glen Lui, and remembering how fast we are peopling Australia and the Oregon, one's mind becomes confused about the laws of emigration and colonisation. Yet how soon may all this be changed. Perhaps the glen may turn out to be a good trunk level—the granite of Ben Muich Dhui peculiarly well adapted for tunnelling, and the traffic something of an unknown and indescribable extent: and some day soon the silence may be awakened with the fierce whistle of the train, and the bell may ring, and passengers may be ordered to be ready to take their places, and first, second, and third class tickets may be stamped with the rapidity of button-making—who knows? Nobody should prophesy in this age what may not be done. We once met a woful instance of a character for great sagacity utterly lost at one blow, in consequence of such a prediction. The man had engaged to eat the first locomotive that ever came to Manchester by steam from Liverpool. On the day when this marvel was accomplished, he received a polite note enclosing a piece of leather cut from the machinery, with an intimation that when he had digested that, the rest of the engine would be at his service. But the reader is getting tired of Glen Lui, and insists on being led into more exciting scenery.

After being for a few miles such as we have tried to describe it, the glen becomes narrower, and the scenery rougher. Granite masses crop out here and there. The pretty dejected weeping birches become mixed with stern, stiff, surly pines, which look as if they could "do any thing but weep," and not unnaturally suggest the notion that their harsh conduct may be the cause of the tears of their gentler companions. At last a mountain thrusts a spur into the glen, and divides it into two: we are here at the foot of Cairngorm of Derrie, or the lesser Cairngorm. The valley opening to the left is Glen Lui Beg, or Glen Luithe Little—containing the shortest and best path to the top of Ben Muich Dhui. The other to the right is Glen Derrie—one of the passes towards Loch A'an or Avon, and the basin of the Spey. Both these glens are alike in character. The precipitous sides of the great mountains between which they run, frown over them and fill them with gloom. The two streams of which the united waters lead so peaceful a wedded life in calm Glen Lui, are thundering torrents, chafing among rocks, and now and then starting unexpectedly at our feet down into deep black pools, making cataracts which, in the regular touring districts, would be visited by thousands. But the marked feature of these glens is the ancient forest. Somewhere we believe in Glen Derrie there are the remains of a saw-mill, showing that an attempt had been at one time made to apply the forest to civilised purposes; but it was a vain attempt, and neither the Baltic timber duties, nor the demand for railway sleepers, has brought the axe to the root of the tree beneath the shadow of Ben Muich Dhui. There are noble trees in the neighbouring forest of Braemar, but it is not in a state of nature. The flat stump occurs here and there, showing that commerce has made her selection, and destroyed the ancient unity of the forest. In Glen Derrie, the tree lives to its destined old age, and whether falling from decay, or swept to the ground by the tempest, lies and rots, stopping perhaps the course of some small stream, and by solution in the intercepted waters forming a petty peat-bog, which, after a succession of generations, becomes hardened and encrusted with lichens. Near such a mass of vegetable corruption and reorganisation, lies the new-fallen tree with its twigs still full of sap. Around them stand the hoary fathers of the forest, whose fate will come next. They bear the scars and contortions of many a hard-fought battle with the storms that often sweep the narrow glen. Some are bent double, with their heads nearly touching the earth; and among other fantastic forms it is not unusual to see the trunk of some aged warrior twisted round and round, its outer surface resembling the strands of a rope. A due proportion of the forest is still in its manly prime—tall, stout, straight trees, lifting their huge branches on high, and bearing aloft the solemn canopy of dark green that distinguishes "the scarcely waving pine." We are tempted to have recourse to poetry again—we promise it shall be the last time on this occasion: there are, however, some lines by Campbell "on leaving a scene in Bavaria," which describe such a region of grandeur, loneliness, and desolation, with a vigour and melody that have been seldom equalled. They were first published not many years before his death, and it seemed as if the ancient harp had been re-strung to more than its old compass and power—but, alas! when we spoke of these verses to himself, we found that, like all of his that were fitted for immortality, they had been the fruit of his younger and better days, and that a diffidence of their merit had retarded their publication. Let the reader commit these two stanzas to memory, and repeat them as he nears the base of Ben Muich Dhui.

"Yes! I have loved thy wild abode,
Unknown, unploughed, untrodden shore;
Where scarce the woodman finds a road,
And scarce the fisher plies an oar;
For man's neglect I love thee more;
That art nor avarice intrude,—
To tame thy torrents' thunder-shock,
Or prune thy vintage of the rock,
Magnificently rude.
Unheeded spreads thy blossomed bud
Its milky bosom to the bee;
Unheeded falls along the flood
Thy desolate and aged tree.
Forsaken scene! how like to thee
The fate of unbefriended worth!
Like thine, her fruit unhonoured falls—
Like thee, in solitude she calls
A thousand treasures forth."

It is after proceeding through Glen Lui Beg, perhaps about three or four miles from the opening of the glen, that we begin to mount Ben Muich Dhui. At first we clamber over the roots and fallen trunks of trees; but by degrees we leave the forest girdle behind, and precipices and snow, with a scant growth of heather, become our sole companions. Keeping the track where the slope of the hill is gentlest, we pass on the right Loch Etichan, lying like a drop of ink at the base of a huge dark mural precipice—yet it is not so small when seen near at hand. This little tarn, with its back-ground of dark rocks interspersed with patches of snow, might strongly remind the Alpine traveller of the lake near the Hospice of the Grimsel. The two scenes are alike hard and leafless and frozen-like—but the Alpine pass is one of the highways of Europe, and thus one seldom crosses it without encountering a pilgrim here and there. But few are the travellers that pass the edge of Loch Etichan, and if the adventurous tourist desires company, he had better try to find an eagle—not even the red-deer, we should suppose, when driven to his utmost need, seeks such a shelter, and as for foxes and wild-cats they know too well the value of comfortable quarters in snug glens, to expose themselves to catch cold in so Greenland-like a region.

The climber will know that he is at the top of Ben Muich Dhui, when he has to scramble no longer over scaurs or ledges of rock, but walking on a gentle ascent of turf, finds a cairn at its highest part. When he stands on this cairn, he is entitled to consider himself the most elevated personage in the United Kingdom. Around it is spread something like a table-land, and one can go round the edges of the table, and look down on the floor, where the Dee, the Avon, the Lui, and many other streams, are seen like silver threads, while their forest banks resemble beds of mignionette or young boxwood. There are at several points prodigious precipices, from which one may contemplate the scene below; but we recommend caution to the adventurer, as ugly blasts sometimes sweep along the top.

When a mountain is the chief of a district, we generally see from the top a wide expanse of country. Other mountains are seen, but wide valleys intervene, and thus they are carried to a graceful distance. Probably, more summits are seen from Ben Nevis, than from any other height in Scotland, but none of them press so closely on the monarch as even to tread upon his spurs. The whole view is distant and panoramic. It is quite otherwise with Ben Muich Dhui. Separated from it only by narrow valleys, which some might call mere clefts, are Cairn Toul, Brae Riach, Cairn Gorm, Ben Avon, and Ben-y-Bourd—all, we believe, ascending more than four thousand feet above the level of the sea—along with several other mountains which very closely approach that fine round number. The vicinity of some of these summits to Ben Muich Dhui has something frightful in it. Standing on the western shoulder of the hill, you imagine that you might throw a stone to the top of Brae Riach—we have been so much deceived by distance as to have seriously made the attempt, we shall not venture to say how many years ago. Yet, between these two summits rolls the river Dee; and Brae Riach presents right opposite to the hill on which we stand, a mural precipice, said to be two thousand feet high—an estimate which no one who looks on it will be inclined to doubt. Brae Riach, indeed, is unlike any thing else in Scotland. It is not properly a hill, but a long wall of precipice, extending several miles along the valley of the Dee. Even in the sunniest weather it is black as midnight, but in a few inequalities on its smooth surface, the snow lies perpetually. Seldom is the cleft between the two great summits free of clouds, which flit hither and thither, adding somewhat to the mysterious awfulness of the gulf, and seeming in their motions to cause certain deep but faint murmurs, which are in reality the mingled sounds of the many torrents which course through the glens, far, far below.

Having had a satisfactory gaze at Brae Riach,—looking across the street, as it were, to the interesting and mysterious house on the opposite side,—the traveller may probably be reflecting on the best method of descending. There is little hope, we may as well inform him, of his return to Braemar to-night, unless he be a person of more than ordinary pedestrian acquirements. For such a consummation, he may have prepared himself according to his own peculiar ideas. If he be a tea-totaller, he will have brought with him a large bottle of lemonade and some oranges—we wish him much satisfaction in the consumption of them, and hope they will keep his outer and inner man warm after the dews of eve have descended. Perhaps his most prudent course (we consider ourselves bound to give discreet advice, for perhaps we may have led some heedless person into a scrape) will be to get down to Loch Avon, and sleep under the Stone of Shelter. Proceeding along the table-land of the hill, in a direction opposite to that by which he has ascended, the traveller comes to a slight depression. If he descend, and then ascend the bank towards the north-east, he will find himself on the top of a precipice the foot of which is washed by the Loch. But this is a dangerous windy spot: the ledge projects far out, and there is so little shelter near it, that, from beneath, it has the appearance of overhanging the waters. It is not an essential part of the route we are about to suggest, and we would rather decline the responsibility of recommending it to the attention of any one who is not a practised cragsman. In the depression we have just mentioned will be found, unless the elements have lately changed their arrangements and operations, the largest of those fields of snow which, even in the heat of summer, dispute with the heath and turf the pre-eminence on the upper ranges of Ben Muich Dhui. If we were desirous of using high-sounding expressions, we would call this field a glacier, but it must be at once admitted that it does not possess the qualities that have lately made these frigid regions a matter of ardent scientific inquiry. There are no icebergs or fissures; and the mysterious principle of motion which keeps these congealed oceans in a state of perpetual restlessness is unknown in the smooth snow-fields of Ben Muich Dhui. But there are some features common to both. The snow-field, like the glacier, is hardened by pressure into a consistence resembling that of ice. A curious thing it is to topple a huge stone down from a neighbouring precipice on one of these snow-fields, and see how it hits the snow without sinking in it, and bounds along, leaving no scratch on the hardened surface. A stream issues from the field we are now alluding to, formed like the glacier streams from the ceaseless melting of the snow. It passes forth beneath a diminutive arch, such as the source of the Rhine might appear through a diminishing glass; and looking through this arch to the interior of the hardened snow, we see exemplified the sole pleasing peculiarity of the glacier—the deep blue tint that it assumes in the interior of the fissures, and on the tops of the arches whence the waters issue. This field of snow, which we believe has never been known to perspire so much in the hottest season as to evaporate altogether, constitutes the main source of the Avon. The little stream, cold and leafless though it be, is not without its beauties. Rarely have we seen such brilliant mosses as those which cluster round its source: their extreme freshness may probably be accounted for by remembering that every summer day deducts so much from the extent of the snow-field, and that the turf in its immediate neighbourhood has just been uncovered, and, relieved from prison, is enjoying the first fresh burst of spring in July or August. For our own part we think this region of fresh moss is quite worthy of comparison with the far-famed Jardin of the Talèfre, which we find described in Murray's hand-book as "an oasis in the desert, an island in the ice—a rock which is covered with a beautiful herbage, and enamelled in August with flowers. This is the Jardin of this palace of nature, and nothing can exceed the beauty of such a spot, amidst the overwhelming sublimity of the surrounding objects, the Aiguilles of Charmoz, Bletière, and the Géant," &c. "Herbage," "flowers"!! Why, the jardin is merely a rock protruding out of the glacier, and covered with lichens; but, after all, was it reasonable to expect a better flower-show ten thousand feet above the level of the sea, and some nine thousand or so above all horticultural societies and prize exhibitions?

As we follow the course of the little stream, it becomes gradually enlarged by contributions from subsidiary snow streams; and winds along for some distance not inconsiderable in the volume of its waters, passing through a beautiful channel of fine sand, probably formed of the detritus of the granite rocks, swept along by the floods, caused by the melting of the snow in spring. The water is exquisitely clear—a feature which at once deprives it of all right to be considered glacier-born; for filth is the peculiarity of the streams claiming this high origin, and none can have seen without regretting it, the Rhone, after having washed itself clean in the Lake Leman, and come forth a sapphire blue, becoming afterwards as dirty as ever, because it happens to fall in company with an old companion, the Arve, which, having never seen good society, or had an opportunity of making itself respectable, by the mere force of its native character, brings its reformed brother back to his original mire, and accompanies him in that plight through the respectable city of Lyons, till both plunge together into the great ocean, where all the rivers of the earth, be they blue or yellow, clear or boggy, classical or obscure, become alike indistinguishable.

Perhaps our traveller is becoming tired of this small pleasant stream running along a mere declivity of the table-land of Ben Muich Dhui. But he will not be long distressed by its peaceful monotony. Presently, as he comes in sight of the valley below, and Loch Avon lying in a small pool at the base of the dizzy height, the stream leaps at once from the edge of the hill, and disappears for a time, reappearing again far down in a narrow thread, as white as the snow from which it has issued. Down the wide channel, which the stream occupies in its moments of fulness and pride—moments when it is all too terrible to be approached by mortal footsteps—the traveller must find his way; and, if he understand his business, he may, by judiciously adapting to his purpose the many ledges and fractures caused by the furious bursts of the flooded stream, and by a judicious system of zig-zagging, convert the channel, so far as he is himself concerned, into a sort of rough staircase, some two thousand feet or so in length. The torrent itself takes a more direct course; and he who has descended by the ravine may well look up with wonder at what has the appearance of a continuous cataract, which, falling a large mass of waters at his feet, seems as if it diminished and disappeared in the heavens. The Staubbach, or Fall of Dust, in Lauter Brunen, is beyond question a fine object. The water is thrown sheer off the edge of a perpendicular rock, and reaches the ground in a massive shower nine hundred feet high. But with all respect for this wonder of the world, we are scarcely disposed to admit that it is a grander fall than this rumbling, irregular, unmeasured cataract which tumbles through the cleft between Ben Muich Dhui and Ben Avon. We should not omit, by the way, for the benefit of those who are better acquainted with Scottish than with Con tinental scenery, to notice the resemblance of this torrent to the Gray Mare's Tail in Moffat-dale. In the character both of the stream itself and in the immediate scenery there are many points of resemblance, every thing connected with the Avon being of course on the larger scale.

Our wanderer has perhaps indulged himself in the belief that he has been traversing these solitudes quite alone—how will he feel if he shall discover that he has been accompanied in every step and motion by a shadowy figure of huge proportions and savage mien, flourishing in his band a great pine-tree, in ghastly parallel with all the motions of the traveller's staff? Such are the spirits of the air haunting this howling wilderness, where the pale sheeted phantom of the burial vault or the deserted cloister would lose all his terrors and feel himself utterly insignificant. Sometimes the phantom's head is large and his body small, then he receives the name of Fahin. James Hogg has asserted, not only poetically, but in sober prose, that, he was acquainted with a man who

"Beheld the fahin glide o'er the fell."

For ourselves, are bound to confess that we never had the honour of meeting with this megacephalous gentleman, nor did we ever encounter any one who professed to have seen him, otherwise we would certainly have reported the case to the Phrenological Society. But we no more doubt his existence than that of the spectre of the Brocken. Sometimes the shadowy spectre of Ben Muich Dhui is a gigantic exaggeration of the ordinary human form seen stalking in a line with the traveller's route, striding from mountain-top to mountain-top as he steps from stone to stone, and imitating on an enlarged scale all his gestures. The spectre has an excellent excuse for all this unpolite mimicry—in fact, he cannot help it, as the reader may infer from the following account, of one of his appearances on a reduced scale. The description is given by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, who, along with Mr Grant of Ballindalloch, had ascended Ben Muich Dhui:—"On descending from the top, at about half-past three, p.m., an interesting optical appearance presented itself to our view. We had turned towards the east, and the sun shone on our backs, when we saw a very bright rainbow described on the mist before us. The bow, of beautifully distinct prismatic colours, formed about two-thirds of a circle, the extremities of which appeared to rest on the lower portion of the mountain. In the centre of this incomplete circle, there was described a luminous disc, surrounded by the prismatic colours displayed in concentric rings. On the disc itself, each of the party (three in number) as they stood at about fifty yards apart, saw his own figure most distinctly delineated, although those of the other two were invisible to him. The representation appeared of the natural size, and the outline of the whole person of the spectator was most correctly portrayed. To prove that the shadow seen by each individual was that of himself, we resorted to various gestures, such as waving our hats, flapping our plaids, &c., all which motions were exactly followed by the airy figure. We then collected together, and stood as close to one another as possible, when each could see three shadows in the disc; his own, as distinctly as before, while those of his two companions were but faintly discernible."[7]

We are now at the upper extremity of Loch Avon, or, as it is pronounced, Loch A'an, and beside the far-famed Stone of Shelter. We had a standing feud with James Hogg about the extent of Loch Avon, ever since the day of that celebrated encampment on Dee-side. Let us see. Thirty years have now rolled by since that unmatched gathering of choice spirits—nay, seventeen have passed and gone since we made regretful allusion, when commemorating the Moray floods, to the history and fortunes of those who were then assembled. Five years later, the Shepherd was himself gathered to the dust; but he stuck to his principles to the last, and in a discussion of the subject not many months before his death, after he had just remarked that he had "a blessed constitution," he reiterated his old statement, that Loch Avon exceeded twenty miles in length. His views on this subject were indeed a sort of gauge of the Shepherd's spirits. In his sombre moments he appeared to doubt if he were quite correct in insisting that the length was twenty miles; when he was in high spirits he would not abate one inch of the thirty. Now, when one man maintains that a lake is thirty miles long, and another that it is but a tenth part of that length, it is not always taken for granted that the moderate man is in the right; but on the contrary, paradoxical people are apt to abet his opponent, and it was provoking that we could never find any better authority against the Shepherd than his own very suspicious way of recording his experience at Loch Avon in a note to the Queen's Wake: "I spent a summer day in visiting it. The hills were clear of mist, yet the heavens were extremely dark—the effect upon the scene exceeded all description. My mind during the whole day experienced the same sort of sensation as if I had been in a dream." But if our departed friend has left any disciples, we are now able to adduce against them the highest parochial authority. We are told in the new Statistical Account that—"Loch Avon lies in the southern extremity of the parish, in the bosom of the Grampian mountain. It is estimated at three miles long and a mile broad. The scenery around it is particularly wild and magnificent. The towering sides of Ben-y-Bourd, Ben Muich Dhui, and Ben Bainac, rise all around it, and their rugged bases skirt its edges, except at the narrow outlet of the Avon at its eastern extremity. Its water is quite luminous, and of great depth, especially along its northern side. It abounds in trout of a black colour and slender shape, differing much in appearance from the trout found in the limpid stream of the Avon which issues from it. At the west end of the lake is the famous Clach Dhian or Shelter Stone. This stone is an immense block of granite, which seems to have fallen from a projecting rock above it, rising to the height of several hundred feet, and forming the broad shoulder of Ben Muich Dhui. The stone rests on two other blocks imbedded in a mass of rubbish, and thus forms a cave sufficient to contain twelve or fifteen men. Here the visitor to the scenery of Loch Avon takes up his abode for the night, and makes himself as comfortable as he can where 'the Queen of the Storm sits,' and at a distance of fifteen or twenty miles from all human abode."[8]

At the eastern end of the lake, we stop to take a glance at the whole scene. Right before us stands the broad top and the mural precipices of Ben Avon, severing us from the north-western world. On the right, the scarcely less craggy sides of Ben-y-Bourd and Ben Bainac wall up the waters of the lake. The other side is conspicuous by a sharp peak of Ben Muich Dhui—the same which we already mentioned as seeming to hang (and it certainly does so seem from this point) over the edge of the water. We never saw the sun shining on Loch Avon; we suspect its waters, so beautifully transparent in themselves, are seldom visited by even a midsummer gleam. Hence arises a prevailing and striking feature of the scene—the abundant snows that fill the hollows in the banks, and sometimes, even in midsummer, cover the slopes of the mountains.

We incline to the belief that tourists in general would consider Loch Avon the finest feature of the whole group of scenery which we have undertaken to describe. For our own part we must admit that we prefer the source of the Dee, to which the reader shall be presently introduced, as more peculiar and original. Loch Avon is like a fragment of the Alps imported and set down in Scotland. Our recollections of it invariably become intertwined and confused with the features of the scenery of the upper passes. The resemblance was particularly marked on the first of August 1836: it was a late season, and every portion of the mountains that did not consist of perpendicular rock appeared to be covered with snow. The peak of Ben Muich Dhui shot forth from the snow as like the Aiguilles of Mont Blanc, as one needle is like another. That was on the whole an adventurous day with us. We had set off from Braemar very early in the morning, taking a vehicle as far as it would penetrate through Glen Lui. The day was scarcely promising, but we had so long been baffled by the weather that we felt inclined at last to put it at defiance, or at least treat it with no respect. In Glen Lui every thing was calm and solemn. As we passed through Glen Derrie, the rain began to fall, and the wind roared among the old trees. The higher we ascended, the more fierce and relentless became the blast; and when we came within sight of Loch Avon, the interstices in the tempest-driven clouds only showed us a dreary, winter, Greenland-like chaos of snow and rocks and torrents. It taxed our full philosophy, both of the existence of the ego and the non-ego, to preserve the belief that we were still in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and that it was the first of August. Our indefinite projects had gradually been contracting themselves within a narrow compass. To reach the Stone of Shelter was now our utmost object of ambition, but it was clear that that was impracticable—so we looked about for some place of refuge, and with little difficulty discovered a stone about the size of a parish church lying like a pebble at the foot of a mountain, with a projecting ledge on the lee side, sufficiently large to protect our party. Some dry furze happened, by a singular accident, to lie heaped in a corner of this natural shed. With a little judicious management it was ignited, and burned so well as to overcome the wetness of a mass of thick heather roots, which we added to it. We were in the possession of some raw venison;—do not open your eyes so, reader; it was most unromantically and honestly come by, being duly entered in the bill at worthy Mrs Clarke's inn, at Braemar. Having brought certain conjuring utensils with us, we proceeded to cook our food and make ourselves comfortable. Water was easily obtained in the neighbourhood, and being in possession of the other essential elements of conviviality, we resolved that, as the weather was determined to make it winter outside, we should have the joys of winter within; the shrieks of the blast were drowned in our convivial shouts—

"The storm without might rair and rustle,
Tam didna mind the storm a whistle."

Another adventure we remember in the same place, but that was long, long ago; in fact, it was when in boyhood we had first entered into that awful wilderness. We had reached the top of Ben Muich Dhui early in the day. Our little wallet of provisions we had left on a tuft of heather where we had lain down to rest, and we could not afterwards find the spot. Somewhat tired, and faint with hunger, we descended the rocks by the side of the cataract, believing that Loch Avon, seemingly so small from the summit of the mountain, was the little Tarn of Etichan, which had been passed in the ascent from Dee-side. It was alarming to find the lake extending its bulk as we approached, and to see the glens looking so different from any of those we were acquainted with on Dee-side; but to have returned up the mountain would have been insanity, and by pursuing the track of a stream, one is sure in the end—at least in this country—to reach inhabited land; so we followed the waters of the Avon, so deep and transparent, that many miles down, where they join the Spey, their deceptious character is embodied in the proverb—

"The water o' A'an, it rins sae clear,
'Twould beguile a man o' a hunder year."

A few miles below the exit of the stream from the loch, as the extreme dimness of the valley showed that sunset was approaching, we met a drover who had gone up into the wilderness in search of stray black cattle. He could speak little English, but was able to give us the startling intelligence that by what was merely a slight divergence at first, we had gone down towards the strath of the Spey instead of that of the Dee; and that we were some thirty miles from the home we had expected to reach that evening. Our new friend took us under his charge, and conducted us to a bothy, made of the bent roots of the pine-tree, found in the neighbouring mosses, and covered with turf. It was so low, that we could not stand upright in it, and a traveller might have walked over it without observing that it was an edifice made with human hands. The sole article of furniture, of which it could boast was a trough, in which our new friend hospitably presented us with a supper of oatmeal and water—our first nourishment for the day. The supply was liberal, whatever might be thought of the quality of the repast. The floor of the bothy was strewed with heather, somewhat coarse and stumpy, on which we lay down and slept. Conscious of a confused noise and a sort of jostling, it was with some surprise that we perceived that no less than ten men had crowded themselves into that little hut and had lighted a fire. It was like a realisation of some of Cooper's romantic incidents, where, after a silent desert has been described, it somehow or other becomes suddenly full of people and fertile in adventure. Our new companions were not of the most agreeable cast: they were rough and surly, hiding, we thought, a desire to avoid communication under the pretence of inability to speak any thing but Gaelic; while, in the midst of their Celtic communications with each other, they swore profusely in the Scottish vernacular. What their pursuits were, or what occasion they had to be in that wild region, was to us a complete mystery, opened up slightly by reflecting on the two great lawless pursuits, smuggling and poaching; of the fruit of neither of which, however, did we see any symptom. Our position was not for many reasons, great and small, to be envied: however, it was the best policy to make one of themselves for the time being, so far as their somewhat repulsive manners would permit. It was not, however, with much regret, that, after having been packed for some hours with them on the hard stumps of heather, we left them in full snore at sunrise on a clear morning, and ascended the hill dividing the waters that run into the Spey from those which feed the Dee. The dews lay heavy on the moss and heather, and, as we neared the top of the ridge, glittered brightly in the new-risen sun; while here and there the mists, forming themselves into round balls, gradually rolled up the sides of the hills, and, mounting like balloons, disappeared in the blue sky. As we passed down through the broken forest-land on the other side, we could see, on the top of the gentler elevations, the slender-branched horns of the red-deer between us and the sky. Even on our near approach the beautiful animals showed no signs of panic,—perhaps they knew our innocence; and they gazed idly as we passed, only tossing their heads in the air, and scampering off disdainfully when we approached offensively close. We reached the Dee by following the stream of the Quoich, which, like the Lui, passes through the remains of an ancient forest. It derives its convivial name from a peculiar cataract often visited by tourists from Braemar. Here the stone is hollowed by the action of the water into circular cavities like those of the Caldron Linn; and in one of these the guides will have the audacity to tell you that a bacchanalian party once made grog by tossing in a few ankers of brandy, and that they consumed the whole on the premises.

We must now tell our pilgrim how he is to find his way by the more direct route from Loch Avon to Braemar, and we may at the same time afford a hint to the reader who desires to proceed towards the lake without crossing Ben Muich Dhui. Near where the stream of the Avon issues, it is necessary to turn to the right, and to keep rather ascending than descending. In a few miles the brow of the hill shuts us out from the wintry wild, and in a hollow are seen two small lakes called the Dhu Lochan, with nothing about them to attract notice but their dreariness and their blackness. The course of a burn which feeds them marks the way to the water-shier between the Spey and the Dee, whence a slight descent leads down to Glen Derrie, the position of which has been already described.

We now propose another excursion—our last on the present occasion—to the sources of the Dee. We place our wanderer again at the Linn of Dee. As he proceeds up the stream, the banks become flatter, and the valleys wider and less interesting, until after some miles—we really cannot say how many—the river turns somewhat northwards, and the banks become more close and rocky. At this spot there is a fine waterfall, which, in the midst of a desert, has contrived to surround itself with a not unbecoming clump of trees. The waters are divided into two; the Geusachan burn joining the stream from the west. At last the conical peak of Cairn Toul appears over-topping all the surrounding heights; and then, a rent intervening, we approach and soon walk under the great mural precipice of Brae Riach, which we have already surveyed to so much advantage from the top of Ben Muich Dhui. We are here in the spot which to us, of all this group of scenery, appears to be the most remarkable, as being so unlike any other part of Scotland, or any place we have seen elsewhere. The narrowness of the glen and the height of its walled sides are felt in the constrained attitude in which we look up on either side to the top, as if we were surveying some object of interest in a tenth story window of our own High Street. This same narrowness imparts a sensation as if one could not breathe freely. If we compare this defile to another of the grandest mountain passes in Scotland—to Glencoe, we find a marked difference between them. The scene of the great tragedy, grand and impressive as it is, has no such narrow walled defiles. The mountains are high, but they are of the sugar-loaf shape—abrupt, but never one mass of precipice from top to bottom. Cairn Toul resembles these hills, though it is considerably more precipitous: but Brae Riach is as unlike them as a tower is distinct from a dome. In this narrow glen we could tell of sunsets and sunrises, not accompanied by such disagreeable associations as those we have recorded in Glen Avon. Picture the very hottest day of a hot year. The journey in the wide burning glen up from the Linn of Dee has been accomplished only with the aid of sundry plunges in the deep, cold pools, which the stream has filled with water fresh from the inner chambers of the mountains. The moment we enter the narrow part of the glen, though the sun is still pretty far up in the heavens, we are in twilight gloom. We have no notice of his leaving the earth, save the gradual darkening of all things around us. Then the moon is up, but we have no further consciousness of his presence, save that the sharp peak of Cairn Toul shows its outline more clearly even than by daylight; and a lovely roof of light-blue, faintly studded with stars, contrasts with the dark sides of our rocky chamber. In such a time, when one has mounted so far above the level of the waters that they only make a distant murmur—when there is not a breath of wind stirring any thing—it is strange with how many mysterious voices the mountain yet speaks. Sometimes there is a monotonous and continuous rumble as if some huge stone, many miles off, were loosened from its position, and tumbling from rock to rock. Then comes a loud distinct report as if a rock had been split; and faint echoes of strange wailings touch the ear, as if this solemn desert were frequented at night by animals as little known to the inhabitants of our island as the uncouth wilds in which they live. But let not the wanderer indulge in thoughts of this description beyond the bounds of a pleasant imaginativeness. Let him take it for granted, that neither cayman nor rattlesnake will disturb his rest; and having pitched on a dry spot, let him pluck a large quantity of heather, making up a portion of it in bundles, and setting them on end closely packed together with the flower uppermost, while he reserves the rest to heap over himself. It is such a bed as a prince has seldom the good fortune to take his rest on; and if the wanderer have a good conscience, and the night be fine, he will sleep far more soundly than if he were packed on the floor of a bothy, with ten Highlanders who every now and then are giving their shoulders nervous jerks against the heather stumps, or scratching the very skin off their wrists. When he awakens, he finds himself nearer to the top of Ben Muich Dhui than he had probably supposed, and the ascent is straight and simple. He may be there to see the sun rise, a sight which has its own peculiar glories, though most people prefer seeing the event from some solitary hill, which, like Ben Nevis, Shehallion, or the Righi, stands alone, and looks round on a distant panorama of mountains.

To return to the Dee.—The river divides again, one stream coming tumbling down through the cleft between Cairn Toul and Brae Riach, called the Garchary Burn. The other, less precipitously inclined, comes from between Brae Riach and Ben Mulch Dhul, and is called the Larig. Like the Nile and the Niger, the Dee is a river of a disputed source. As we shall presently find, the right of the Garchary to that distinction is strongly maintained by pretty high authority; but we are ourselves inclined to adopt the Larig, not only because it appeared to us to contain a greater volume of water, but because it is more in the line of the glen, and, though rough enough, is not so desperately flighty as the Garchary, and does not join it in those great leaps which, however surprising and worthy of admiration they may be in themselves, are not quite consistent with the calm dignity of a river destined to pass close to two universities. Following then the Larig over rocks and rough stones, among which it chafes and foams, we reach a sort of barrier of stones laid together by the hand of nature with the regularity of an artificial breakwater. As we pass over this barrier, a hollow rumbling is heard beneath; for the stream, at least at ordinary times, finds its way in many rills deep down among the stones. When we reach the top of the bank we are on the edge of a circular basin, abrupt and deep, but full of water so exquisitely clear that the pebbly bottom is every where visible. Here the various springs, passing by their own peculiar conduit-pipes from the centre of the mountain, meet together, and east up their waters into the round basin—one can see the surface disturbed by the force of their gushing. Soon after passing these "wells of Dee," we are at the head of the pass of Cairngorm, and join the waters which run to the Spey. A path leads through the woods of Rothiemurchus to Aviemore, on which the nearest house is, or used to be, that of a widow named Mackenzie, who in that wide solitude extends her hospitality to the wayfarer. Blessings on her! may her stoup never be dry, or her aumry empty. It is needless to tell the traveller, that by this route he may approach the scenery of the Cairngorm hills from Laggan, Rannoch, and other places near Spey side.

The claims of the Garchary to the leadership are supported by that respectable topographer Dr Skene Keith—probably on account of his own adventurous ascent of that turbulent stream, which we shall give in his own words, merely premising that we suspect he was mistaken in his discovery that the well he saw is called "Well Dee."

"At two o'clock p.m. we set out to climb the mountain, still keeping in sight of the river. In a few minutes we came to the foot of a cataract, whose height we found to be one thousand feet, and which contained about a fourth part of the water of which the Garchary was now composed. In about half an hour after, we perceived that the cataract came from a lake in the ridge of the mountain of Cairn Toul, and that the summit of the mountain was another thousand feet above the loch, which is called Loch na Youn, or the Blue Lake. A short time after we saw the Dee (here called the Garchary from this rocky bed, which signifies in Gaelic the rugged quarry) tumbling in great majesty over the mountain down another cataract; or as we afterwards found it, a chain of natural cascades, above thirteen hundred feet high. It was in flood at this time from the melting of the snow, and the late rains; and what was most remarkable, an arch of snow covered the narrow glen from which it tumbled over the rocks. We approached so near to the cataract as to know that there was no other lake or stream; and then we had to climb among huge rocks, varying from one to ten tons, and to catch hold of the stones or fragments that projected, while we ascended in an angle of seventy or eighty degrees. A little before four o'clock we got to the top of the mountain, which I knew to be Brae Riach, or the speckled mountain. Here we found the highest well, which we afterwards learned was called Well Dee, and other five copious fountains, which make a considerable stream before they fall over the precipice. We sat down completely exhausted, at four o'clock P.M. and drank of the highest well, which we found to be four thousand and sixty feet above the level of the sea; and whose fountain was only thirty-five degrees of heat on the 17th of July, or three degrees above the freezing point. We mixed some good whisky with this water, and recruited our strength [9]

We must not bid farewell to this mountain desert without asking attention to a peculiar feature in the hills connected with a disastrous history. In many places the declivities are seamed with trenches some forty or fifty feet deep, appearing as if they were made by a gigantic plough-share which, instead of sand, casts up huge masses of rock on either side, in parallel mounds, like the morains of a glacier. There are many of these furrows on the side of Ben Muich Dhui, nearest to the Dee. Though we had long noticed them, it was not until we happened to be in that district, immediately after the great floods of 1829, that we were forcibly told of the peculiar cause of this appearance. The old furrows were as they had been before—the stones, gray, weather-beaten, and covered with lichen, while heather and wildflowers grew in the interstices. But among them were new scaurs, still like fresh wounds, with the stones showing the sharpness of late fracture, and no herbage covering the blood-red colour of the sand. It was clear from the venerable appearance of the older scaurs, that only at long intervals do the elements produce this formidable effect—at least many years had passed since the last instance before 1829 had occurred. The theory of the phenomenon appeared to be pretty simple. Each spring is a sort of stone cistern, which, through its peculiar duct, sends forth to one part of the surface of the earth the water it receives from another. If, through inordinately heavy falls of rain, there be a great volume of water pressing on the entrance tubes, the expansive force of the water in the cistern increases in that accumulating ratio which is practically exemplified in the hydraulic press, and the whole mass of water bursts forth from the side of the mountain, as if it were a staved barrel, rending rocks, and scattering their shattered fragments around like dust. Hence we may presume arose these fierce pulsations which made the rivers descend wave on wave. What a sight, to have been remembered and thought on ever after, would it have been, had one been present in this workshop of the storm while the work was going on!

Now, reader, before we have done, let us confess that there are many elements that we like to meet with in such things, wherein this little contribution to the knowledge of British local scenery is deficient. Fain would we have given it a more hospitable tone, telling of the excellent cookery at this inn, and the good wines at the next, and the general civility experienced at the third; but we cast ourselves, O generous reader! on your mercy. How could we describe the comforts and luxuries of inns, in a place where there is not a single house—a place which, like the Irish milestone, is "fifteen miles from inny where"?

As to the frequented methods of approach towards the border of the wilderness which we have taken under our especial patronage, we profess not to discuss them, leaving the public in the very competent hands of the Messrs Anderson, whose "Guide to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland" is, in relation to the inhabited districts, and the usual tourists' routes, all-sufficient for its purpose.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] Edinburgh New Philosophic Journal, 1831, p. 165.

[8] New Statistical Account of Scotland—Banffshire, p. 298.

[9] Dr Skene Keith's Surrey of Aberdeenshire, p. 644.

LETTERS ON THE TRUTHS CONTAINED IN POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS.

LETTER VII—OBJECTS TO BE GAINED THROUGH THE ARTIFICIAL INDUCTION OF TRANCE.

DEAR ARCHY,—I am tempted to write you a letter more than I had originally intended,—a supplementary and final one.

The powers which we have seen employed to shake the nerves and unsettle the mind in the service of superstition,—can they be turned to no useful purpose?

To answer this question, I will give you a brief account of the two most vigorous attempts which have been made to turn the elements we have been considering to a profitable end. I have in my thoughts the invention of ether-inhalation and the induction of trance in mesmerism. The witch narcotised her pupils in order to produce in them delusive visions; the surgeon stupifies his patient to prevent the pain of an operation being felt. The fanatic preacher excites convulsions and trance in his auditory to persuade them that they are visited by the Holy Spirit; Mesmer produced the same effects as a means of curing disease.

Let us first look into the simpler problem of ether-inhalation.

It occurred to Mr Jackson, a chemist in the United States, that it might be possible, and unattended with risk, so to stupify a patient with the vapour of sulphuric ether that he might undergo a surgical operation without suffering. He communicated the idea to Mr Morton, a dentist, who carried it into execution with the happiest results. The patient became unconscious,—a tooth was extracted;—no sign of pain escaped at the time;—there was no recollection of suffering afterwards. Led by the report of this success, in the course of the autumn of 1846, Messrs Bigelow, Warren, and Heywood ventured to employ the same means in surgical operations of a more serious description. The results obtained on these occasions were not less satisfactory than the first had been. Since then, in England, France, and Germany, this interesting experiment has been repeated in numberless cases, and its general success may be considered to be established.

The effects produced by the inhalation of the vapour of sulphuric ether, present a superficial resemblance to those produced by exposure to carbonic acid; but they are more closely analogous to the effects of inhaling nitrous oxide; and they may be compared and contrasted with those of opium and alcoholic liquors. But the patient is neither in the state of asphyxia, nor is he narcotised, nor drunk. The effects produced are peculiar, and deserve a name of their own.

To give you a distinct idea of the ordinary phenomena of etherisation, I will cite three or four instances from a report on this subject by Dr Heyfelder, Knight, professor of medicine, and director of the surgical clinic at Erlangen.

Dr Heyfelder himself, a strong and healthy man, after inhaling the vapour of ether for a minute, experienced an agreeable warmth in his whole person; after the second minute, he felt a disposition to cough, and diminution of ordinary sensibility. Then an impression supervened that some great change was about to take place within him. At the expiration of the third minute, he lost sensibility and consciousness. In this state he remained two minutes. The pulse was unaffected. Upon coming to himself, he felt a general sense of exhaustion, with weakness of the back and knees. For the remainder of the day he walked unsteadily, and his mind was confused.

A. T., aged thirty-six, a tall strong servant-maid, after inhaling for seventeen minutes, became unconscious, and appeared not to feel a trifling wound with a surgical needle. In a minute consciousness returned. She laughed immoderately, spoke of an agreeable feeling of warmth, and said she had had pleasant dreams. The pulse was slower, the breathing deeper, during the inhalation. The same person upon inhaling, on another occasion, with a better apparatus, became insensible after two minutes. The eyes appeared red and suffused; a carious tooth was then extracted, which caused her to moan slightly. On returning to herself she complained of giddiness, but said she had experienced none but agreeable feelings. She had no idea that the tooth had been extracted.

K. A., aged twenty-nine, upon beginning the inhalation, showed signs of excitement, but in nine minutes lay relaxed like a corpse. A tooth was extracted. Two minutes afterwards she awoke, moaning and disturbed. She stated that she had not felt the extraction of the tooth, but she had heard it.

C. S., aged twenty-two, a strong and healthy young man, a student of surgery, on commencing the inhalation, coughed, and there was a flow of saliva and of tears. In three and a half minutes the skin appeared insensible to pain. Consciousness remained perfect and undisturbed. The skin was warm; the eyes were open; the hearing as usual; the speech, however, was difficult. This state continued eighteen minutes, during which, at his request, two teeth with large fangs were extracted. He held himself perfectly still. He said, afterwards, that he felt the application of the instrument, but was sensible of no pain, during the extraction of the teeth.

W. S., aged nineteen, a strong and healthy young man, a law-student, after inhaling the ether-vapour a minute, began to move his arms about, struck his knees, stamped with his feet, laughed. In three minutes the laughter and excitement had increased. The eyes rolled, he sprang up, talked volubly; the pulse was strong and frequent. In seven minutes he breathed deeply, the eyelids closed, the pulse sank. In eight minutes he began to snore, but heard when called to. In nine minutes the eyes were suffused; the optic axes were directed upwards and outwards. At the end of twelve minutes a tooth was extracted, when he uttered an exclamation and laughed. On his return to himself, he said that he had felt the laceration, or tear, but had experienced no pain. He thought he had been at a carousal.

If I add to these sketches that the patient sometimes becomes pale, sometimes flushed,—that the pupils of the eyes are generally dilated and fixed, sometimes natural and fixed, sometimes contracted,—that violent excitement sometimes manifests itself attended with the persistence or even exaltation of the ordinary sensibility,—that sometimes hysteric fits are brought on; sometimes a state resembling common intoxication,—you will have had the means of forming a sufficiently exact and comprehensive idea of the features of etherisation.

Then, if we exclude the cases in which excitement, instead of collapse, is induced, and, in general, cases complicated with disorder of the head or chest, it appears that the inhalation of ether is not attended with questionable or injurious consequences; and that it places the patient in a condition in which the performance of a surgical operation may be prudently contemplated. If the operation require any length of time,—from thirty to forty minutes, for instance,—the state of insensibility may be safely maintained, by causing the inhalation to be resumed as often as its effects begin to wear off. In minor cases of surgery, in which union of the wound by adhesion is necessary to the success of the operation—in harelip, for instance—an exacter comparison is, perhaps, requisite than has yet been made of the relative results obtained on etherised and non-etherised patients. In graver cases, some of which always end fatally, symptoms, again, may occasionally supervene, or continue from the time of the operation, which are directly attributable to the etherisation. But, in all probability, the entire proportion of recoveries in etherised cases will be found to be increased, through the injurious effects being averted which are produced by fear and suffering. There is every reason to expect that a saving of human life will be thus realised,—an advantage over and above the deliverance from pain and terror.

So the invention of etherisation deserves to be rated as a signal benefit to humanity. Nor is it to be lost sight of, that the invention is quite in its infancy; and that any sound objections which may, at present, be raised against it, are not unlikely to be obviated through the modifications and improvements of which it is no doubt susceptible. The amount of success already obtained, may further be deemed sufficient to make us secure that the object of extinguishing the sufferings of surgery will never again be lost sight of by the medical profession and the public. One item, partial indeed, but a tolerably severe one, in the catalogue of the physical ills to which flesh is heir, is thus so far in a fair way of being got rid of.

The method of Mesmer was an attempt to cure bodily disease by making a forcible impression on the nerves. And no doubt can be entertained that many of his patients were the better for the violent succussion of the system which his developed practice put them through.

But mesmerism contained two things,—a bold empirical practice and a mystical theory. Mesmer strove, by the latter, to explain the effects which his practice produced. An odd fate his method and his theory will have had. His method was considered, by many of his contemporaries, as of solid importance; his theory was for the most part ridiculed as that of a half-crazed enthusiast and impostor. Now, no reasonable person can regard his practice in any other light than as a rough and hazardous experiment. But his theory, in the mean time, is ceasing to be absurd; for it admits of being represented as a very respectable anticipation of Von Reichenbach's recent discoveries.

Mesmer, a native of Switzerland, was born in 1734. He became a student at Vienna, where his turn for the mystical led him to the studies of alchemy and astrology. In the year 1766, he published a treatise on the influence of the planets upon the human frame. It contains the idea that a force extends throughout space through which the stars can affect the body. In attempting to identify this force, Mesmer first supposed it to be electricity. Afterwards, about the year 1773, he adopted the belief that it must be ordinary magnetism. So at Vienna, from 1773 to 1775, he employed the practice of stroking diseased parts of the body with magnets. But, in 1776, making a tour in Bavaria and Switzerland, he fell in with the notorious Father Gassner, who had at that time undertaken the cure of the blind prince-bishop of Ratisbon by exorcism. Then Mesmer observed that, without employing magnets, Gassner obtained very much the same kind of effects upon the human body which he had produced with their aid. The fact was not lost upon him. He threw away his magnets, and henceforth operated with the hand alone. In 1777, his reputation a little damaged by a failure in the case of the musician Paradies, Mesmer left Vienna, and the following year betook himself to Paris. The great success which he obtained there drew upon him the indignation and jealousy of the faculty, who did not scruple to brand him with the stigma of charlatanism. They averred that he threw difficulties in the way of a satisfactory examination of his method; but perhaps he had reason to suspect want of fairness in the proposed inquiry. He refused, from the government, an offer of twenty thousand francs to divulge his method; but he was ready to explain it, it is true, under a pledge of secresy, to individuals for one hundred louis. But his practice itself gave most support to the allegations against him. His patients were received and treated with an air of mystery and studied effect. The apartment, hung on every side with mirrors, was dimly lighted. A profound silence was observed, broken only by strains of music, which occasionally floated through the rooms. The patients were arranged around a large vessel, which contained a heterogeneous mixture of chemical ingredients. With this and with each other, they were placed in relation, by holding cords or jointed rods; and among them moved slowly and mysteriously Mesmer himself, affecting one by a touch, another by a look, a third by continued stroking with the hand, a fourth by pointing at him with a rod.

What followed is easily conceivable from the scenes referred to in my last letter, which are witnessed at religious revivals. One person became hysterical, then another; one was seized with catalepsy, then others; some with convulsions; some with palpitations of the heart, perspirations, and other bodily disturbances. These effects, however various and different, went all by the name of "salutary crises." The method was supposed to produce, in the sick person, exactly the kind of action propitious to his recovery. And it may easily be imagined that many patients found themselves better after a course of this rude empiricism; and that the impression made by these events, passing daily in Paris, must have been very considerable. To the ignorant the scene was full of wonderment.

To ourselves, regarding it from our present vantage-ground, it contains absolutely nothing of the marvellous. We discern the means which were in operation, and which are theoretically sufficient to produce the result. Those means consisted in,—first, high-wrought expectation and excited fancy, enough alone to set some of the most excitable into fits;—secondly, the contagious power of nervous disorder to cause the like disorder in others, a power augmenting with the number of persons infected;—thirdly, the physical influence upon the body of the Od force discovered by Von Reichenbach, which is produced in abundance by chemical decomposition, which can be communicated to, and conveyed by inanimate conductors, and which finally emanates with great vivacity from the subtle chemistry of the living human frame itself. The reality of this third cause you must allow me to take for granted without farther explanation. Von Reichenbach's papers, the credit of which is guaranteed by their publication in Liebig and Wöhler's Annals of Chemistry, have been now some time translated into English, and are in the hands of most English readers.

It is remarkable that Jussieu, the most competent judge in the commission which, in 1784 condemned mesmerism as a scientific imposition, was so much struck with the effects he witnessed, that he recommended the subject, nevertheless, to the farther investigation of medical men. His objections were to the theory. He laid it down, in the separate report which he made, that the only physical cause in operation was animal heat; curiously overlooking the point, that common heat was not capable of doing the same things, and that, therefore, the effects must be owing to the agency of that something else which animal heat contained in addition to common heat.

It is unnecessary to follow Mesmer through his minor performances. The relief sometimes obtained by stroking diseased parts with the hand had before been proclaimed by Dr Greatorex, whose pretensions had no less an advocate than the Honourable Robert Boyle. The extraordinary tales of Mesmer's immediate and instantaneous personal power over individuals are probably part exaggeration, part the real result of his confidence and practice in the use of the means he wielded. Mesmer died in 1815.

Among his pupils, when at the zenith of his fame, was the Marquis de Puységur. Returning from serving at the siege of Gibraltar, this young officer found mesmerism the mode at Paris, and appears to have become, for no other reason, one of the initiated. At the end of the course of instruction, he professed himself to be no wiser than when he began; and he ridiculed the credulity and the faith of his brothers, who were stanch adherents of the new doctrine. However he did not forget his lesson; and on going, the same spring, to his estate at Basancy, near Soissons, he took occasion to mesmerise the daughter of his agent, and another young person, for the toothach, who declared themselves, in a few minutes, cured. This questionable success was sufficient to lead M. de Puységur, a few days after, to try his hand on a young peasant of the name of Victor, who was suffering with a severe fluxion upon the chest. What was M. de Puységur's surprise when, at the end of a few minutes, Victor went off into a kind of tranquil sleep, without crisis or convulsion, and in that sleep began to gesticulate, and talk, and enter into his private affairs. Then he became sad; and M. de Puységur tried mentally to inspire him with cheerful thoughts; he hummed a lively tune to himself, inaudibly, and immediately Victor began to sing the air. Victor remained asleep for an hour, and awoke composed, with his symptoms mitigated.

The case of Victor revolutionised the art of mesmerism. The large part of his life in which M. Puységur had nothing to do but to follow this vein of inquiry, was occupied in practising and advocating a gentle manipulation to induce sleep, in preference to the more violent crises. I have no plea for telling you how M. de Puységur served in the first French revolutionary armies; how he quitted the service in disgust; how narrowly he escaped the guillotine; how he lived in retirement afterwards, benevolently endeavouring to do good to his sick neighbours by mesmerism; how he survived the Restoration; and how, finally, he died of a cold caught by serving again in the encampment at Rheims to assist as an old militaire at the sacre of Charles X.

For he had, to use the phrase of the moment, fulfilled his mission the day that he put Victor to sleep. He had made a vast stride in advance of his teacher. Not but that Mesmer must frequently have produced the same effect, but he had passed it over unheeded, as one only of the numerous forms of salutary crisis; nor that M. de Puységur himself estimated, or that the knowledge had then been brought together which would have enabled him to estimate, the value, or the real nature and meaning, of the step which he had made. To himself he appeared to be largely extending the domain of mesmerism, of which he had, in truth, discovered and gone beyond the limits.

The state which he had so promptly and fortunately induced in Victor, was neither more nor less than common trance—the commonest form, perhaps, of the great family of nervous disorders, to which ordinary sleep-walking belongs, and of which I have already sketched the divisions and relations in the fifth letter of this series. All that remains, combining originality and value, of Mesmer's art, is, that it furnishes the surest method of inducing this particular condition of the system. Employed with collateral means calculated to shake the nerves and excite the imagination, mesmerism causes the same variety of convulsive and violent seizures which extremes of fanatical frenzy excite; when it is employed in a gentle form and manner, with accessaries that only soothe and tranquillise, the most plain and unpretending form of trance quietly steps upon the scene.

Perhaps you will wonder that I seem to attach so much importance to the power which mesmerism offers us, of producing at pleasure mere ordinary trance; and, unluckily, it is easy to overrate that importance; because, for any plan we are yet in possession of, the induction of trance, through mesmerism, is, in truth, a very uncertain and capricious affair. It is but a limited number of persons who can be affected by mesmerism; and the good to be obtained from the process is proportionately limited.

The first object to which artificial induction of trance may be turned, is the cure or alleviation of certain forms of disease.

It has been mentioned that in many so-called cataleptic cases, a condition of violent spasm is constantly present, except when the patient falls into an alternative state of trance. The spontaneous supervention of trance relieves the spasm.

I mentioned, too, in the fifth letter of this series, the case of Henry Engelbrecht, who, after a life of asceticism, and a week of nearly total abstinence, fell into a death-trance. On waking from it, he felt refreshed and stronger.

These results are quite intelligible. In trance, the nervous system is put out of gear. The strain of its functions is suspended. Now, perhaps for the first time since birth, the nervous system, a part or the whole, experiences entire repose. The effect of this must be as soothing to it, as is to a diseased joint the disposing it in a relaxed position on a pillow. In this state of profound rest, it is natural that the nervous system should recruit its forces; that if previously weak and irritable, it should emerge from the trance stronger and more composed; that the induction of trance many days repeated, and maintained daily an hour or more, should finally enable the nerves to recover any extent of mere loss of tone, with its dependent morbid excitability, and to shake off various forms of disorder dependent upon that cause. So might it be expected, that epilepsy, that hysteric and cataleptic fits, that nervous palsy, that tic-doloreux, when caused by no structural impairment of organ, should get weak under the use of this means—other means, of course, not being thereby excluded, which peculiar features of individual cases render advisable. And experience justifies this reasonable anticipation. And it is found practically that, for purely nervous disorders, the artificial induction of trance is, generally speaking, the most efficient remedy. Nay, in cases of a more serious complexion, where organic disease exists, some unnecessary suffering and superfluous nervous irritability may be thus allayed and discarded. Even more may be said in favour of the availability of this practice. There are few diseases of any kind, and of other parts, in which the nervous system does not, primarily or secondarily, become implicated. And so far does disease in general contain an element which often may be reached and modified with salutary effect, through the means I am now advocating. When the prejudices of medical men against the artificial induction of trance have subsided, and its sanative agency has been fairly tried, and diligently studied, there is no doubt it will take a high rank among the resources of medicine.

In surgery, artificial trance is capable of playing a not less important part than in medicine.

For, as it has been already mentioned, an ordinary feature of trance is the entire suspension of common feeling. As long as the trance is maintained, the patient is impassive to all common impressions on the touch; the smartest electric shock, a feather introduced into the nose, burning, or cutting with a knife, excite no sensation. So that surgical operations may be performed without suffering during trance just as in the stupor produced by the ether inhalation. Then, as trance soothes the nerves, the patient, over and above the extinction of pain, is in a fitter state than otherwise for the infliction of physical violence. Likewise the trance may be induced not only at the time of the operation, but with equal safety on all the subsequent occasions when the wound has to be disturbed and dressed,—so that, in addition, all the after suffering attendant upon great operations may be thus avoided. The drawback against the method, is the uncertainty there exists of being able to induce trance artificially in any given case. But the trial is always worth making; and the number who can, with a little patience, be put thus as it were to sleep, is undoubtedly greater than is imagined.

The most celebrated case in which an operation has been performed upon a patient in the state of artificial trance, is that of Madame Plantin. She was sixty-four years of age, and laboured under scirrhus of the breast. She was prepared for the operation by M. Chapélain, who on several successive days threw her into trance by the ordinary mesmeric manipulations. She was then like an ordinary sleep-walker, and would converse with indifference about the contemplated operation, the idea of which, when she was in her natural state, filled her with terror. The operation of removing the diseased breast was performed at Paris on the 12th of April 1829, by M. Jules Cloquet: it lasted from ten to twelve minutes. During the whole of this time, the patient in her trance conversed calmly with M. Cloquet, and exhibited not the slightest sign of suffering. Her expression of countenance did not change, nor were the voice, the breathing, or the pulse, at all affected. After the wound was dressed, the patient was awakened from the trance, when, on learning that the operation was over, and seeing her children round her, Madame Plantin was affected with considerable emotion: whereupon M. Chapélain, to compose her, put her back into the state of trance.

I copy the above particulars from Dr Foissac's "Rapports et Discussions de l'Academie Royale de Medicine sur le Magnetisme Animal."—Paris, 1833. "My friend, Dr Warren of Boston, informed me that, being at Paris, he had asked M. Jules Cloquet if the story were true. M. Cloquet answered, "Perfectly." "Then why," said Dr Warren, "have you not repeated the practice?" M. Cloquet replied, "that he had not dared: that the pre judice against mesmerism was so strong at Paris, that he probably would have lost his reputation and his income by so doing."

Here, then, we discover two purposes of partial, indeed, but signal utility, compassable by the induction of trance, at the very outset of our inquiry into its utility. It will appear by-and-by that this resource promises to afford yet farther assistance to the physician. In the mean time, let us look at a relation of the subject which may appear more interesting to the general reader.

It has been mentioned that, in ordinary trance, the relations of consciousness to the nervous system are altered; that the laws of sensation and perception are suspended, or temporarily changed; that the mind appears to gain new powers. For a long time we had to trust to the chance turning up of cases of spontaneous trance, in the experience of physicians of observation, for any light we could hope would be thrown on those extraordinary phenomena. Now we possess around us, on every side, adequate opportunities for completely elucidating these events, if we please to employ them. The philosopher, when his speculations suggest a new question to be put, can summon the attendance of a trance, as easily as the Jupiter of the Iliad summoned a dream. Or, looking out for two or three cases to which the induction of trance may be beneficial, the physician may have in his house subjects for perpetual reference and daily experiment.

A gentleman with whom I have long been well acquainted, for many years Chairman of the Quarter Sessions in a northern county, of which the last year he was High Sheriff, has, like M. de Puységur, amused some of his leisure hours, and benevolently done not a little good, by taking the trouble of mesmerising invalids, whom he has thus restored to health. In constant correspondence with, and occasionally having the pleasure of seeing this gentleman, I have learned from him the common course in which the new powers of the mind which belong to trance are developed under its artificial induction. The sketch which I propose to give of this subject will be taken on his descriptions, which, I should observe, tally in all essential points with what I meet with in French and German authors. The little that I have myself seen of the matter, I will mention preliminarily; the most astounding things, it appears to me safer to shelter under the authority of Petetin, who, towards the close of the last century, in ignorance of mesmerism, described these phenomena as they came before him spontaneously in catalepsy.

The method of inducing trance that is found to be most successful, is to sit immediately fronting, and close to the patient, holding his hands or thumbs, or pointing the extended hands towards his forehead, and slowly moving them in passes down his face, shoulders, and arms. It is now clear that the force brought into operation on this occasion, is the Od force of Von Reichenbach. So the patients sometimes speak of seeing the luminous aura proceeding from the finger-points of the operator, which Von Reichenbach's performers described. There are many who are utterly insensible to this agency. Others are sensible of it in slight, and in various ways. A small proportion, three in ten perhaps, are susceptible to the extent of being thrown into trance.

In some, a common fit of hysterics is produced. In others, slight headach, and a sense of weight on the eyebrows, and difficulty of raising the eyelids supervene.

In one young woman, whom I saw mesmerized for the first time by Dupotel, nothing resulted but a sense of pricking and tingling wherever he pointed with his hand; and her arm on one or two occasions jumped in the most natural and conclusive manner, when, her eyes being covered, he directed his outstretched finger to it.

A gentleman, about thirty years of age, when the mesmerizer held his outstretched hands pointed to his head, experienced no disposition to sleep; but in two or three minutes, he began to shake his head and twist his features about; at last, his head was jerked from side to side, and forwards and backwards, with a violence that looked alarming. But he said, when it was over, that the motion had not been unpleasant; that he had moved in a sort voluntarily; although he could not refrain from it. If the hands of the operator were pointed to his arm instead of his head, the same violent jerks came in it, and gradually extended to the whole body. I asked him to try to resist the influence, by holding his arm out in strong muscular tension. This had the effect of retarding the attack of the jerks, but, when it came on, it was more violent than usual.

A servant of mine, aged about twenty-five, was mesmerized by Lafontaine, for a full half hour, and, no effect appearing to be produced, I told him he might rise from the chair, and leave us. On getting up, he looked uneasy and said his arms wore numb. They were perfectly paralysed from the elbows downwards, and numb to the shoulders. This was the more satisfactory, that neither the man himself, nor Lafontaine, nor the four or five spectators, expected this result. The operator triumphantly drew a pin and stuck-it into the man's hand, which bled but had no feeling. Then heedlessly, to show it gave pain, Lafontaine stuck the pin into the man's thigh, whose flashing eye, and half suppressed growl, denoted that the aggression would certainly have been returned by another, had the arm which should have done it not been really powerless. However, M. Lafontaine made peace with the man, by restoring him the use and feeling of his arms. This was done by dusting them, as it were, by quick transverse motions of his extended hands. In five minutes nothing remained of the palsy but a slight stiffness, which gradually wore off in the course of the evening.

Genuine and ordinary trance, I have seen produced by the same manipulations in from three minutes, to half an hour. The patient's eyelids have dropped, he has appeared on the point of sleeping, but he has not sunk back upon his chair; then he has continued to sit upright, and seemingly perfectly insensible to the loudest sound or the acutest and most startling impressions on the sense of touch. The pulse is commonly a little increased in frequency; the breathing is sometimes heavier than usual.

Occasionally, as in Victor's case, the patient quickly and spontaneously emerges from the state of trance-sleep into trance half-waking; a rapidity of development which I am persuaded occurs much more frequently among the French than with the English or Germans. English patients, especially, for the most part require a long course of education, many sittings, to have the same powers drawn out. And these are by far the most interesting cases. I will describe from Mr Williamson's account, the course he has usually followed in developing his patient's powers, and the order in which they have manifested themselves.

On the first day, perhaps, nothing can be elicited. But after some minutes the stupor seems as it were less embarrassing to the patient, who appears less heavily slumbrous, and breathes lighter again; or it may be the reverse, particularly if the patient is epileptic; after a little, the breathing may be deeper, the state one of less composure. Pointing with the hands to the pit of the stomach, laying the hands upon the shoulders, and slowly moving them on the arms down to the hands, the whole with the utmost quietude and composure on the part of the operator, will dispel the oppression.

And the interest of the first sitting is confined to the process of awakening the patient, which is one of the most marvellous phenomena of the whole. The operator lays his two thumbs on the space between the eyebrows, and as it were vigorously smooths or irons his eyebrows, rubbing them from within, outwards seven or eight times. Upon this, the patient probably raises his head and his eyebrows, and draws a deeper breath as if he would yawn; he is half awake, and blowing upon the eyelids, or the repetition of the previous operation, or dusting the forehead by smart transverse wavings of the hand, or blowing upon it, causes the patient's countenance to become animated; the eyelids open, he looks about him, recognises you, and begins to speak. If any feeling of heaviness remains, any weight or pain of the forehead, another repetition of the same manipulations sets all right. And yet this patient would not have been awakened, if a gun had been fired at his ear, or his arm had been cut off.

At the next sitting, or the next to that, the living statue begins to wake in its tranced life. The operator holds one hand over the opposite hand of his patient, and makes as if he would draw the patient's hand upwards, raising his own with short successive jerks, yet not too abrupt. Then the patient's hand begins to follow his; and often having ascended some inches, stops in the air cataleptic. This fixed state is always relieved by transverse brushings with the hand, or by breathing in addition, on the rigid limb. And it is most curious to see the whole bodily frame, over which spasmodic rigidness may have crept, thus thawed joint by joint. Then the first effect shown commonly is this motion, the patient's hand following the operator's. At the same sitting, he begins to hear, and there is intelligence in his countenance, when the operator pronounces his name: perhaps his lips move, and he begins to answer pertinently as in ordinary sleep-walking. But he hears the operator alone best, and him even in a whisper. Your voice, if you shout, he does not hear: unless you take the operator's hand, and then he hears you too. In general, however, now the proximity of others seems in some way to be sensible to him; and he appears uneasy when they crowd close upon him. It seems that the force of the relation between the operator and his patient naturally goes on increasing, as the powers of the sleep-walker are developed; but that this is not necessarily the case, and depends upon its being encouraged by much commerce between them, and the exclusion of others from joining in this trance-communion.

And now the patient—beginning to wake in trance, hearing and answering the questions of the operator, moving each limb, or rising even, as the operator's hand is raised to draw him into obedient following—enters into a new relation with his mesmeriser. He adopts sympathetically every voluntary movement of the other. When the latter rises from his chair, he rises; when he sits down, he sits down; if he bows, he bows; if he make a grimace, he makes the same. Yet his eyes are closed. He certainly does not see. His mind has interpenetrated to a small extent the nervous system of the operator; and is in relation with his voluntary nerves and the anterior half of his cranio-spinal chord. (These are the organs by which the impulse to voluntary motion is conveyed and originated.) Farther into the other's being, he has not yet got. So he does not what the other thinks of, or wishes him to do; but only what the other either does, or goes through the mental part of doing. So Victor sang the air, which M. de Puységur only mentally hummed.

The next strange phenomenon marks that the mind of the untranced patient has interpenetrated the nervous system of the other a step farther, and is in relation besides with the posterior half of the cranio-spinal chord and its nerves. For now the entranced person, who has no feeling, or taste, or smell of his own, feels, tastes, and smells every thing that is made to tell on the senses of the operator. If mustard or sugar be put in his own mouth, he seems not to know that they are there; if mustard is placed on the tongue of the operator, the entranced person expresses great disgust, and tries as if to spit it out. The same with bodily pain. If you pluck a hair from the operator's head, the other complains of the pain you give him.

To state in the closest way what has happened—the phenomena of sympathetic motion and sympathetic sensation, thus displayed, are exactly such as might be expected to follow, if the mind or conscious principle of the entranced person were brought into relation with the cranio-spinal chord of the operator and its nerves, and with no farther portion of his nervous system. Later, it will be seen the interpenetration can extend farther.

But before this happens, a new phenomenon manifests itself, not of a sympathetic character. The operator contrives to wake the entranced person to the knowledge that he possesses new faculties. He develops in him new organs of sensation, or rather helps to hasten his recognition of their possession.

It is to be observed, however, that many and many who can be thrown into trance will not progress so far as to the present step. Others make a tantalising half advance towards reaching it thus; and then stop. They are asked, "Do you see any thing?" After some days at length, they answer, "Yes"—"What?" "A light." "Where is the light?" Then they intimate its place to be either before them, or at the crown of the head, or behind one ear, or quite behind the head. And they describe the colour of the light, which is commonly yellow. And each day it occupies the same direction, and is seen equally when the room is light or dark. Their eyes in the mean time are closed. And here, with many, the phenomenon stops.

But, with others, it goes thus strangely farther. In this light they begin to discern objects, or they see whatever is presented to them in the direction in which the light lies, whether before the forehead or at the crown of the head, or wherever it may be. Sometimes the range of this new sense is very limited, and the object to be seen must be held near to the new organ. Sometimes it must touch it; generally, however, the sense commands what the eye would, if it were placed there.

One tries first to escape the improbability of an extempore organ of sense being thus established, by supposing that the mind of the entranced person has only penetrated a little deeper than before into yours, and perceives what you see. But I had the following experiment made, which excludes this solution of the phenomenon. The party standing behind the entranced person, whose use it was to see with the back of her head, held behind him a pack of cards, and then, drawing one of them, presented it, without seeing it himself, to her new organ of vision. She named the card justly each time the experiment was repeated.

The degree of light suiting this new vision varies in different cases: sometimes bright daylight is best; generally they prefer a moderate light. Some distinguish objects and colours in a light so obscure that the standers-by cannot distinguish the same with their eyes.

The above phenomena have been, over and over again, verified by the gentleman whom I before referred to, Mr J. W. Williamson of Whickham; and not only have I received the accounts of them from himself, but from two other gentlemen, who repeatedly witnessed their manifestation in patients at Mr Williamson's residence.

A parallel transposition of the sense of hearing I will exemplify from the details of a case of catalepsy, or spontaneous trance, as they are given by the observer, Dr Petetin, an eminent civil and military physician of Lyons, where he was president of the Medical Society. The work in which they are given is entitled, "Memoire sur la Catalepsie. 1787."

M. Petetin attended a young married lady in a sort of fit. She lay seemingly unconscious; when he raised her arm, it remained in the air where he placed it. Being put to bed, she commenced singing. To stop her, the doctor placed her limbs each in a different position. This embarrassed her considerably, but she went on singing. She seemed perfectly insensible. Pinching the skin, shouting in her ear, nothing aroused attention. Then it happened that, in arranging her, the doctor's foot slipped; and, as he recovered himself, half leaning over her, he said, "how provoking we can't make her leave off singing!" "Ah, doctor," she cried, "don't be angry! I won't sing any more," and she stopped. But shortly she began again; and in vain did the doctor implore her, by the loudest entreaties, addressed to her ear, to keep her promise and desist. It then occurred to him to place himself in the same position as when she heard him before. He raised the bed-clothes, bent his head towards her stomach, and said, in a loud voice, "Do you, then, mean to sing forever?" "Oh, what pain you have given me!" she exclaimed—"I implore you speak lower;" at the same time she passed her hand over the pit of her stomach. "In what way, then, do you hear?" said Dr Petetin. "Like any one else," was the answer. "But I am speaking to your stomach." "Is it possible!" she said. He then tried again whether she could hear with her ears, speaking even through a tube to aggravate his voice;—she heard nothing. On his asking her, at the pit of her stomach, if she had not heard him, —"No," said she, "I am indeed unfortunate."

A cognate phenomenon to the above is the conversion of the patient's new sense of vision in a direction inwards. He looks into himself, and sees his own inside as it were illuminated or transfigured.

A few days after the scone just described, Dr Petetin's patient had another attack of catalepsy. She still heard at the pit of her stomach, but the manner of hearing was modified. In the mean time her countenance expressed astonishment. Dr Petetin inquired the cause. "It is not difficult," she answered, "to explain to you why I look astonished. I am singing, doctor, to divert my attention from a sight which appals me. I see my inside, and the strange forms of the organs, surrounded with a network of light. My countenance must express what I feel,—astonishment and fear. A physician who should have my complaint for a quarter of an hour would think himself fortunate, as nature would reveal all her secrets to him. If he was devoted to his profession, he would not, as I do, desire to be quickly well." "Do you see your heart?" asked Dr Petetin. "Yes, there it is; it beats at twice; the two sides in agreement; when the upper part contracts, the lower part swells, and immediately after that contracts. The blood rushes out all luminous, and issues by two great vessels which are but a little apart."

There are many cases like the above on record, perfectly attested. There is no escaping from the facts. We have no resource but to believe them. Things if possible still more marvellous remain behind. The more advanced patient penetrates the sensoria of those around her, and knows their thoughts and all the folds of their characters. She is able, farther, to perceive objects, directly, at considerable—indefinite distances. She can foresee coming events in her own health. Finally, she can feel and discern by a kind of intuition, what is the matter with another person either brought into her presence, or who is, in certain other ways, identified by her. As the evidence of the possession of these faculties by entranced persons is complete, and admits of no question, an important use, I repeat, of the artificial induction of trance is, that it will multiply occasions of sifting this extraordinary field of psychological inquiry.

In the mean time I will not trespass upon your patience farther, nor weary you with farther instances, beyond giving the sequel of the case of catalepsy of which I have above mentioned some particulars. You will see in it a shadowing out of most of the other powers, which I have said are occasionally manifested by persons in trance, which sometimes attain an extraordinary vigour and compass, and which are maintained, or are maintainable, for several years, being manifested for that time, though not without caprice and occasional entire failures, on the patient reverting to the entranced condition. One of the most interesting features in what follows is, that it is evident M. Petetin was entirely unacquainted with mesmerism; and, at the same time, that he had all but discovered and developed the art of mesmeric manipulation himself.

The following morning, (to give the latter part of the case of catalepsy,) the access of the fit took place, according to custom, at eight o'clock in the morning. Petetin arrived later than usual; he announced himself by speaking to the fingers of the patient, (by which he was heard.) "You are a very lazy person this morning, doctor," said she. "It is true, madam; but if you knew the reason, you would not reproach me." "Ah," said she, "I perceive, you have had a headach for the last four hours; it will not leave you till six in the evening. You are right to take nothing; no human means can prevent its running its course." "Can you tell me on which side is the pain?" said Petetin. "On the right side; it occupies the temple, the eye, the teeth: I warn you that it will invade the left eye, and that you will suffer considerably between three and four o'clock; at six you will be free from pain." The prediction came out literally true. "If you wish me to believe you, you must tell me what I hold in my hand?" "I see through your hand an antique medal."

Petetin inquired of his patient at what hour her own fit would cease: "at eleven." "And the evening accession, when will it come on?" "At seven o'clock." "In that case it will be later than usual." "It is true; the periods of its recurrence are going to change to so and so." During this conversation, the patient's countenance expressed annoyance. She then said to M. Petetin, "My uncle has just entered; he is conversing with my husband, behind the screen; his visit will fatigue me, beg him to go away." The uncle, leaving, took with him by mistake her husband's cloak, which she perceived, and sent her sister-in-law to reclaim it.

In the evening, there were assembled, in the lady's apartment, a good number of her relations and friends. Petetin had, intentionally, placed a letter within his waistcoat, on his heart. He begged permission, on arriving, to wear his cloak. Scarcely had the lady, the access having come on, fallen into catalepsy, when she said, "And how long, doctor, has it come into fashion to wear letters next the heart?" Petetin pretended to deny the fact; she insisted on her correctness; and, raising her hands, designated the size, and indicated exactly the place of the letter. Petetin drew forth the letter, and held it, closed, to the fingers of the patient. "If I were not a discreet person," she said, "I should tell the contents; but to show you that I know them, they form exactly two lines and a half of writing;" which, on opening the letter, was shown to be the fact.

A friend of the family, who was present, took out his purse and put it in Dr Petetin's bosom, and folded his cloak over his chest. As soon as Petetin approached his patient, she told him that he had the purse, and named its exact contents. She then gave an inventory of the contents of the pockets of all present; adding some pointed remark when the opportunity offered. She said to her sister-in-law that the most interesting thing in her possession was a letter;—much to her surprise, for she had received the letter the same evening and had mentioned it to no one.

The patient, in the mean time, lost strength daily, and could take no food. The means employed failed of giving her relief, and it never occurred to M. Petetin to inquire of her how he should treat her. At length, with some vague idea that she suffered from too great electric tension of the brain, he tried, fantastically enough, the effect of making deep inspirations, standing close in front of the patient. No effect followed from this absurd proceeding. Then he placed one hand on the forehead, the other on the pit of the stomach of the patient, and continued his inspirations. The patient now opened her eyes; her features lost their fixed look; she rallied rapidly from the fit, which lasted but a few minutes instead of the usual period of two hours more. In eight days, under a pursuance of this treatment, she entirely recovered from her fits, and with them ceased her extraordinary powers. But, during these eight days, her powers manifested a still greater extension; she foretold what was going to happen to her; she discussed, with astonishing subtlety, questions of mental philosophy and physiology; she caught what those around her meant to say, before they expressed their wishes, and either did what they desired, or begged that they would not ask her to do what was beyond her strength.

In conclusion, let me animadvert upon the injustice with which, to its own loss, society has treated mesmerism. The use of mesmerism in nervous disorders, its use towards preventing suffering in surgical operations, have been denied and scoffed at in the teeth of positive evidence. The supposition of physical influence existing that can emanate from one human being and affect the nerves of another, was steadily combated as a gratuitous fiction, till Von Reichenbach's discoveries demonstrated its soundness. And, finally, the marvels of clairvoyance were considered an absolute proof of the visionary character of animal magnetism, because the world was ignorant that they occur independently of that influence, which only happens to be one of the modes of inducing the condition of trance in which they spontaneously manifest themselves. Adieu, dear Archy.

Yours, &c.

Mac Davus.

HISTORY OF THE CAPTIVITY OF NAPOLEON AT ST HELENA.[10]

Whatever may be the pursuits of our posterity, whether the mind of nations will turn on philosophy or politics, whether on a descent to the centre of the earth, or on the model of a general Utopia—whether on a telegraphic correspondence with the new planet, by a galvanised wire two thousand eight hundred and fifty millions of miles long, or on a Chartist government—we have not the slightest reason to doubt, that our generation will be regarded as having lived in the most brilliant time of the by-gone world.

The years from 1789 to 1815 unquestionably include the most stirring period since the great primal convulsion, that barbarian deluge, which changed the face of Europe in the fifth century. But the vengeance which called the Vandal from his forest to crush the Roman empire, and after hewing down the Colossus which, for seven hundred years, had bestrode the world, moulded kingdoms out of its fragments, was of a totally different order from that which ruled over our great day of Change. In that original revolution, man, as the individual, was scarcely more than the sufferer. It was a vast outburst of force, as uncircumscribed as uncontrollable, and as unconnected with motives merely human, as an inroad of the ocean. It was a vast expanse of human existence, rushing surge on surge over the barriers of fair and fertile empire. It was hunger, and love of seizure, and hot thirst of blood, embodied in a mass of mankind rushing down upon luxury and profligacy, and governmental incapacity embodied in other masses of mankind. An invasion from the African wilderness with all its lions and leopards in full roar, could scarcely have less been urged by motives of human nature.

But the great revolution which in our time shook Europe, and is still spreading its shock to the confines of the world, was human in the most remarkable degree. It was the work of impulses fierce and wild, yet peculiarly belonging to man. It was a succession of lights and shadows of human character, contrasted in the most powerful degree, as they passed before the eye of Europe—the ambition of man, the rage of man, the voluptuousness, the ferocity, the gallantry, and the fortitude of man, in all the varieties of human character. It was man in the robes of tragedy, comedy, and pantomime, but it was every where man. Every great event on which the revolution was suspended for the time, originated with some remarkable individual, and took its shape even from some peculiarity in that individual.

Thus, the period of mob-massacre began with the sudden ascendency of Marat—a hideous assassin, who regarded the knife as the only instrument of governing, and proclaimed as his first principle of political regeneration, that "half a million of heads must fall."

The second stage, the Reign of Terror, began with Robespierre, a village lawyer; in whose mingled cruelty and craft originated the bloody mockeries of that "Revolutionary Tribunal," which, under the semblance of trial, sent all the accused to the guillotine, and in all the formalities of justice committed wholesale murder.

The third stage was the reign of the Directory—the work of the voluptuous Barras—and reflecting his profligacy in all the dissoluteness of a government of plunder and confiscation, closing in national debauchery and decay.

The final stage was War—under the guidance of a man whose whole character displayed the most prominent features of soldiership. From that moment, the republic bore the sole impress of war. France had placed at her head the most impetuous, subtle, ferocious, and all-grasping, of the monarchs of mankind. She instantly took the shape which, like the magicians of old commanding their familiar spirits, the great magician of our age commanded her to assume. Peace—the rights of man—the mutual ties of nations—the freedom of the serf and the slave—the subversion of all the abuses of the ancient thrones—all the old nominal principles of revolutionary patriotism, were instantly thrown aside, like the rude weapons of a peasant insurrection, the pike and the ox-goad, for the polished and powerful weapons of royal armouries. In all the conquests of France the serf and the slave were left in their chains; the continental kingdoms, bleeding by the sword until they lay in utter exhaustion, were suffered to retain all their abuses; the thrones, stripped of all their gold and jewels, were yet suffered to stand. Every pretext of moral and physical redress was contemptuously abandoned, and France herself exhibited the most singular of all transformations.—The republic naked, frantic, and covered with her own gore, was suddenly seen robed in the most superb investitures of monarchy; assuming the most formal etiquette of empire, and covered with royal titles. This was the most extraordinary change in the recollections of history, and for the next hundred, or for the next thousand years, it will excite wonder. But the whole period will be to posterity what Virgil describes the Italian plains to have been to the peasant of his day, a scene of gigantic recollections; as, turning up with the ploughshare the site of ancient battles, he finds the remnants of a race of bolder frame and more trenchant weapons—the weightier sword and the mightier arm.

What the next age may develop in the arts of life, or the knowledge of nature, must remain in that limbo of vanity, to which Ariosto consigned embryo politicians, and Milton consigned departed friars—the world of the moon. But it will scarcely supply instances of more memorable individual faculties, or of more powerful effects produced by those faculties. The efforts of Conspiracy and Conquest in France, the efforts of Conservatism and Constitution in England, produced a race of men whom nothing but the crisis could have produced, and who will find no rivals in the magnitude of their capacities, the value of their services, in their loftiness of principle, and their influence on their age; until some similar summons shall be uttered to the latent powers of mankind, from some similar crisis of good and evil. The eloquence of Burke, Pitt, Fox, and a crowd of their followers, in the senate of England, and the almost fiendish vividness of the republican oratory, have remained without equals, and almost without imitators—the brilliancy of French soldiership, in a war which swept Europe with the swiftness and the devastation of a flight of locusts—the British campaigns of the Peninsula, those most consummate displays of fortitude and decision, of the science which baffles an enemy, and of the bravery which crushes him—will be lessons to the soldier in every period to come.

But the foremost figure of the great history-piece of revolution, was the man, of whose latter hours we are now contemplating. Napoleon may not have been the ablest statesman, or the most scientific soldier, or the most resistless conqueror, or the most magnificent monarch of mankind—but what man of his day so closely combined all those characters, and was so distinguished in them all? It is idle to call him the child of chance—it is false to call his power the creation of opportunity—it is trifling with the common understanding of man, to doubt his genius. He was one of those few men, who are formed to guide great changes in the affairs of nations. The celebrity of his early career, and the support given to him by the disturbances of France, are nothing in the consideration of the philosopher; or perhaps they but separate him more widely from the course of things, and assimilate him more essentially with those resistless influences of nature, which, rising from we know not what, and operating we know not how, execute the penalties of Heaven:—those moral pestilences which, like the physical, springing from some spot of obscurity, and conveyed by the contact of the obscure, suddenly expand into universal contagion, and lay waste the mind of nations.

In the earlier volumes of the Journal of Count Montholon, the assistance of Las Cases was used to collect the imperial dicta. But on the baron's being sent away from St Helena—an object which he appears to have sought with all the eagerness of one determined to make his escape, yet equally resolved on turning that escape into a subject of complaint—the duty of recording Napoleon's opinions devolved on Montholon. In the year 1818, Napoleon's health began visibly to break. His communications with O'Meara, the surgeon appointed by the English government, became more frequent; and as Napoleon was never closely connected with any individual without an attempt to make him a partisan, the governor's suspicions were excited by this frequency of intercourse. We by no means desire to stain the memory of O'Meara (he is since dead) with any dishonourable suspicion. But Sir Hudson Lowe cannot be blamed for watching such a captive with all imaginable vigilance. The recollection of the facility which too much dependance on his honour gave to Napoleon's escape from Elba, justly sharpened the caution of the governor. The fear of another European conflagration made the safeguard of the Ex-Emperor an object of essential policy, not merely to England, but to Europe; and the probability of similar convulsions rendered his detention at St Helena as high a duty as ever was intrusted to a British officer.

We are not now about to discuss the charges made against Sir Hudson Lowe; but it is observable, that they are made solely on the authority of Napoleon, and of individuals dismissed for taking too strong an interest in that extraordinary man. Those complaints may be easily interpreted in the instance of the prisoner, as the results of such a spirit having been vexed by the circumstances of his tremendous fall; and also, in the instance of those who were dismissed, as a species of excuse for the transactions which produced their dismissal. But there can be no doubt that those complaints had not less the direct object of keeping the name of the Ex-Emperor before the eyes of Europe; that they were meant as stimulants to partisanship in France; and that, while they gratified the incurable bile of the fallen dynasty against England, they were also directed to produce the effect of reminding the French soldiery that Napoleon was still in existence.

Yet there was a pettiness in all his remonstrances, wholly inconsistent with greatness of mind. He thus talks of Sir Hudson Lowe:—

"I never look on him without being reminded of the assassin of Edward II. in the Castle of Berkeley, heating the bar of iron which was to be the instrument of his crime. Nature revolts against him. In my eyes she seems to have marked him, like Cain, with a seal of reprobation."

Napoleon's knowledge of history was here shown to be pretty much on a par with his knowledge of scripture. The doubts regarding the death of Edward II. had evidently not come to his knowledge; and, so far as Cain was concerned, the sign was not one of reprobation, but of protection—it was a mark that "no man should slay him."

But all those complaints were utterly unworthy of a man who had played so memorable a part in the affairs of Europe. He who had filled the French throne had seen enough of this world's glory; and he who had fallen from it had been plunged into a depth of disaster, which ought to have made him regardless ever after of what man could do to him. A man of his rank ought to have disdained both the good and ill which he could receive from the governor of his prison. But he wanted the magnanimity that bears misfortune well: when he could no longer play the master of kingdoms, he was content to quarrel about valets; and having lost the world, to make a little occupation for himself in complaining of the want of etiquette in his dungeon. But the spirit of the intriguer survived every other spirit within him, and it is by no means certain that the return of O'Meara and Gourgaud to Europe was not a part of that intrigue in which Napoleon played the Italian to the last hour of his life. It is true that the general returned under a certificate of ill health, and it is also perfectly possible that the surgeon was unconscious of the intrigue. But there can be no doubt of the design; and that design was, to excite a very considerable interest in Europe, on behalf of the prisoner of St Helena. Gourgaud, immediately after his arrival, wrote a long letter to Marie Louise, which was palpably intended more for the Emperors of Russia and Austria than for the feelings of the Ex-Empress, of whose interest in the matter the world has had no knowledge whatever.

In this letter it was declared, that Napoleon was dying in the most frightful and prolonged agony. "Yes, Madame," said this epistle, "he whom Divine and human laws unite to you by the most sacred ties—he whom you have beheld an object of homage to almost all the sovereigns of Europe, and over whose fate I saw you shed so many tears when he left you, is perishing by a most cruel death—a captive on a rock in the midst of the ocean, at a distance of two thousand leagues from those whom he holds most dear."

The letter then proceeds to point out the object of the appeal. "These sufferings may continue for a long time. There is still time to save him: the moment seems very favourable. The Sovereigns are about to assemble at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle—passions seem calmed—Napoleon is now far from being formidable. In these circumstances let your Majesty deign to reflect what an effect a great step on your part would produce—that, for instance, of going to this Congress, and there soliciting a termination to the Emperor's sufferings, of supplicating your august father to unite his efforts with yours, in order to have Napoleon confided to his charge, if policy did not permit him to be restored to liberty; and how great would be your Majesty's own happiness: It would be said, the sovereigns of Europe, after having vanquished the great Napoleon, abandoned him to his most cruel enemies, they conducted him towards his grave by the most prolonged and barbarous torments, the continuation of his agony urged him even to demand more active executioners; he seemed forgotten, and without hope of aid; but Marie Louise remained to him, and he was restored to life."

Whether this letter ever reached its address is not clear; but if it did, it produced no discoverable effect.

But the absence of those confidants increased the troubles of the unlucky Montholon in a formidable degree, and Napoleon's habit of dictating his thoughts and recollections, (which he frequently continued for hours together, and sometimes into the middle of the night,) pressed heavily on the Count and Bertrand; the latter being excluded after six in the evening, when the sentinels were posted for the night, as he resided with his family, and thus devolving the task of the night on Montholon. Those dictations were sometimes on high questions of state, and on theories of war; sometimes on matters of the day, as in the following instance.

The death of the Princess Charlotte, which threw the mind of England into such distress, had just been made known at St Helena. Napoleon spoke of it as reminding him of the perilous child-birth of Marie Louise. "Had it not been for me," said he, "she would have lost her life, like this poor Princess Charlotte. What a misfortune! young and beautiful, destined to the throne of a great nation, and to die for want of proper care on the part of her nearest relations! Where was her husband? where was her mother? why were they not beside her, as I was beside Marie Louise? She, too, would have died, had I left her to the care of the professional people. She owes her life to my being with her during the whole time of danger; for I shall never forget the moment when the accoucheur Dubois came to me pale with fright, and hardly able to articulate, and informed me that a choice must be made between the life of the mother and that of the child. The peril was imminent; there was not a moment to be lost in decision. 'Save the mother,' said I—'it is her right. Proceed just as you would do in the case of a citizen's wife of the Rue St Denis.' It is a remarkable fact, that this answer produced an electric effect on Dubois. He recovered his sang froid, and calmly explained to me the causes of the danger. In a quarter of an hour afterwards, the King of Rome was born; but at first the infant was believed to be dead, he had suffered so much on coming into the world, and it was with much difficulty that the physicians recalled him to life."

It will probably be recollected as a similar instance of the advantage of care and decision, that Queen Caroline was rescued from the same hazard. Her accouchment was preceded by great suffering, and her strength seemed totally exhausted. The attendants were in a state of extreme alarm, when Lord Thurlow said, in his usual rough way, "Don't think of princesses here: treat her like the washerwoman, and give her a glass of brandy." The advice was followed, and the Princess speedily recovered.

Connected with the history of this short-lived son, is an anecdote, which Napoleon related as an instance of his own love of justice. When the palace was about to be built for the King of Rome at Passy, it was necessary to purchase some buildings which already stood on the ground. One of these was a hut belonging to a cooper, which the architects valued at a thousand francs. But the cooper, resolving to make the most of his tenure, now demanded ten times the sum. Napoleon ordered the money to be given to him; but when the contract was brought to him to sign, the fellow said, that "as an Emperor disturbed him," he ought to pay for turning him out, and must give him thirty thousand francs. "The good man is a little exacting," said Napoleon, "still there is some sense in his argument. Give him the thirty thousand, and let me hear no more about it." But the cooper, thinking that he had a fine opportunity, now said that he could not take less than forty thousand. The architect did not know what to say; he dared not again mention the matter to the Emperor, and yet it was absolutely necessary to have the house. Napoleon learned what was passing, and was angry, but allowed the offer of the forty thousand. Again the dealer retracted, and demanded fifty thousand. "He is a despicable creature," said the Emperor. "I will have none of his paltry hut: it shall remain where it is, as a testimony of my respect for the law."

The works were still going on at the time of the exile, in 1814; and, the cooper, finding himself in the midst of rubbish and building materials, groaned over the consequences of his folly, or rather of his extortion, for he had thus, deservedly, lost the opportunity of making his fortune.

The death of Cipriani, the maître d'hôtel, occurred about this time, and was startling from its suddenness. He was serving Napoleon's dinner, when he was attacked by such violent pains, that he was unable to reach his chamber without assistance. He rolled on the ground, uttering piercing cries. Four-and-twenty hours afterwards his coffin was carried to the cemetery of Plantation House! Cipriani had been employed in the secret police, and had distinguished himself by some difficult missions in the affairs of Naples and Northern Italy. It was only after the banishment to Elba that he had formed a part of the household. It was to Cipriani that the taking of Capri was owing. In 1806, Sir Hudson Lowe commanded at Capri, as lieutenant-colonel of a legion, composed of Corsican and Neapolitan deserters. The position of Capri in the Bay of Naples was of some importance for carrying on communications with those hostile to the French interest in Italy. Salicetti, prime minister of Naples, was vainly pondering on the capture of Capri; when it occurred to him to employ Cipriani, to put it into his power by surprise or treachery. Among the Corsicans under Sir H. Lowe's command, was one Suzanelli, a profligate, who had reduced himself by his debaucheries to acting as a spy. Cipriani soon ascertained that they had been fellow-students at college.

The whole story is curious, as an instance of the dexterity of Italian treachery, and of the difficulty which an honest man must always find in dealing with that people. Cipriani instantly found out Suzanelli, who was then in Naples, and said, "I know all, but we are fellow-countrymen—we have eaten the same soup: I do not desire to make you lose your head: choose between the scaffold, and making your fortune from your own country.—You are the spy of the English: help me to expel them from Capri, and your fortune is made. Refuse, and you are my prisoner, and will be shot within twenty-four hours." "I take your offer," was the answer. "What do you want with me?" Cipriani proposed to give him double what he received from the English, on condition of handing over all the letters which he received for Naples, and delivering the answers as if he had received them from the writers. Suzanelli thenceforth communicated all news relative to the movements of old Queen Caroline, and the British in the Mediterranean. Sir Hudson Lowe's confidence in Suzanelli was so much increased by the apparently important communications which the Neapolitan police had purposely made to him, that he rewarded him profusely, and at length accepted his offer of furnishing recruits to the Corsican legion at Capri. When the garrison was corrupted through the medium of those recruits, and an expedition was prepared at Naples, Suzanelli, in order to hoodwink the governor of Capri, whose vigilance might be awakened by the preparations, sent him a detailed report of the strength and object of the expedition, but telling him that it was meant to attack the Isle of Ponza. The expedition, under General La Marque, sailed at night, and the French effected their landing by surprise. The Royal Maltese regiment contained a great number of Suzanelli's recruits. They laid down their arms, and surrendered the forts in their charge. The commandant succeeded with difficulty in shutting himself up in the citadel with the royal Corsican regiment. It was inaccessible by assault, but the French dragged some heavy guns to a commanding height, and after a cannonade the garrison capitulated.

This story is not exactly true; for the capitulation was not the result of the cannonade; but water and provisions had totally failed. The attempt made by an English frigate to succour the island had been frustrated by a violent gale, and there was no resource but to give up the island. Yet, if our memory is exact, there was no capitulation; for the garrison escaped without laying down their arms.

It is proverbial, that great events frequently depend upon very little causes. All the world now blames the precipitancy of Napoleon in leaving Elba while the Congress was assembled. If he had waited until it was dissolved, he would have gained all the time which must have been lost by the Allies in reuniting their councils. The princes and diplomatists would have been scattered; the armies would have marched homewards; months would probably have elapsed before they could again have been brought into the field; and during that period, there would have been full opportunity for all the arts of intrigue and insinuation, which Napoleon so well knew how to use. Or, if he had delayed his return for a twelvemonth longer, he would have only found the obstacles so much the more diminished. In short, to him, the gain of time was every thing.

His own narrative on the subject now was, that he had been misled; that he was fully sensible of the advantages of delay, but that accident had betrayed him. He had established a secret correspondence with Vienna, through which he received weekly accounts of all that had passed in Congress, and was prepared to act accordingly. One of his agents, De Chaboulon, arrived at Elba, at the same period with the Chevalier D'Istria, (whom the King of Naples had sent with the despatch received from his ambassador at Vienna,) announcing the closing of the Congress, and the departure of the Emperor Alexander. On this intelligence Napoleon determined immediately to set sail for France, without waiting for the return of Cipriani, whom he had sent on a special mission. Had he waited for that return, the Emperor Alexander would have been on his way to Russia. But the result of his precipitancy was, that by rushing into France, while the emperors and diplomatists were still in combination, they were enabled to level the blow at him immediately. Instead of negotiations, he was pursued with a hue and cry; and instead of being treated as a prince, he was proclaimed an outlaw. Cipriani arrived in Elba on the 27th of February, but Napoleon had sailed on the evening of the 26th. So delicate was the interval between total ruin and what might have been final security; for Cipriani brought news of the Congress, and despatches from Vienna, which would have proved the importance of delaying the departure of the expedition.

But it must now be acknowledged that, if there ever was a human being under the influence of infatuation, that being was Napoleon, in the latter stages of his career. For ten years the favourite of fortune, the long arrear had begun to be paid in the year 1812. His expedition to Moscow was less a blunder than a frenzy. There was, perhaps, not one man in a thousand in Europe but foresaw the almost inevitable ruin of his army. We can recollect the rejoicing with which this perilous advance was viewed in England, and the universal prediction that the Russian deserts would be the grave of his army, if not of his empire. Poland had been conquered in a march and a month. The residence of Napoleon at Warsaw for the winter would have raised a Polish army for him, and would have given him a year for the march to Moscow. But he was infatuated: there is no other solution of the problem. He rushed on, captured the capital, and was ruined. Even with Moscow in ashes round him, he still persisted in the folly of supposing that he could persuade into peace an empire which had just given so tremendous an evidence of its fidelity and its fortitude. He was infatuated. He was detained amid the embers until it was impossible to remain longer, and equally impossible to escape the horrors of a Russian winter in a march of six hundred miles. His hour was come. Of an army which numbered four hundred thousand men on crossing the Niemen, probably not one thousand ever returned; for the broken troops which actually came back had been reinforcements which reached the Grand Army from time to time. He reached Paris with the stamp of fallen sovereignty on his brow: the remainder of his career was a struggle against his sentence. Waterloo was merely the scaffold: he was under irretrievable condemnation long before.

In his captivity, Napoleon was liberal in his donatives. On the departure of Balcombe, in whose house he had remained for some time on his arrival in the island, he gave him a bill for seventy-two thousand francs, with the grant of a pension of twelve thousand,—saying to him "I hear that your resignation of your employment is caused by the quarrels drawn upon you through the hospitality which you showed me: I should not wish you to regret ever having known me."

A quarrel relative to the bulletins of Napoleon's health, produced an order from the governor for the arrest of O'Meara. There was a vast quantity of peevishness exercised on the subject, and Napoleon attempted to raise this trifling affair into a general quarrel of the commissioners. But on his declaring that he would no longer receive the visits of O'Meara while under arrest, the governor revoked the order, and O'Meara continued his attendance until instructions were received from Lord Bathurst, to remove him from his situation in the household of the Emperor, and send him to England. This gave another opportunity for complaint. "I have lived too long," said Buonaparte; "your ministers are very bold. When the Pope was my prisoner, I would have cut off my arm rather than have signed an order for laying hands on his physician."

Before leaving the island, O'Meara drew up a statement of his patient's health, in which he seems to have regarded the liver as the chief seat of his disease. A copy of this paper reached home, when Cardinal Fesch and the mother of Napoleon had it examined by her own physician and four medical professors of the university. They also pronounced the disease to consist of an obstruction of the liver. So much for the certainty of medicine. The whole report is now known to have been a blunder. Napoleon ultimately died of a fearful disease, which probably has no connexion with the liver at all. His disease was cancer in the stomach.

The result of those quarrels, however, was to give a less circumscribed promenade to Napoleon. On the decline of his health being distinctly stated to Sir Hudson Lowe, he enlarged the circle of his exercise, and Napoleon resumed his walks and works. From this period, too, he resumed those dictations which, in the form of notes, contained his personal opinions, or rather those apologies for his acts, which he now became peculiarly anxious to leave behind him to posterity.

Whatever may be the historic value of those notes, it is impossible to read them without the interest belonging to transactions which shook Europe, and without remembering that they were the language of a man by far the most remarkable of his time, if not the most remarkable for the result of his acts, since the fall of the Roman empire. In speaking of the return from Elba—"I took," said he, "that resolution as soon as it was proved to me that the Bourbons considered themselves as the continuance of the Third Dynasty, and denied the legal existence of the Republic, and the Empire, which were thenceforth to be regarded only as usurping governments. The consequences of this system were flagrant. It became the business of the bishops to reclaim their sees; the property of the clergy, and the emigrants must be restored. All the services rendered in the army of Condé and in La Vendée, all the acts of treachery committed in opening the gates of France to the armies which brought back the king, merited reward. All those rendered under the standard of the Republic and the Empire were acts of felony." He then gave his special view of the overthrow of the French monarchy.

"The Revolution of 1789 was a general attack of the masses upon the privileged classes. The nobles had occupied, either directly or indirectly, all the posts of justice, high and low. They were exempt from the charges of the state, and yet enjoyed all the advantages accruing from them, by the exclusive possession of all honourable and lucrative employments. The principal aim of the Revolution was to abolish those privileges." He then declared the advantages of the Revolution. "It had established the right of every citizen, according to his merit, to attain to every employment; it had broken down the arbitrary divisions of the provinces, and out of many little nations formed a great one. It made the civil and criminal laws the same every where—the regulations and taxes the same every where. The half of the country changed its proprietors."

This statement is true, and yet the mask is easily taken off the Revolution. The whole question is, whether the means by which it was purchased were not wholly unnecessary. It cost seven years of the most cruel and comprehensive wickedness that the world ever saw; and, when at last its violence overflowed the frontiers, it cost nearly a quarter of a century of slaughter, of ruthless plunder and savage devastation, concluding with the capture of the French capital itself, twice within two years, and the restoration of the royal family by the bayonets of the conquerors.

Yet every beneficial change which was produced by the Revolution, at this enormous waste of national strength and human happiness, had been offered by the French throne before a drop of blood was shed; and was disdained by the leaders of the populace, in their palpable preference for the havoc of their species.

In the beginning of November, 1818, Sir Hudson Lowe communicated to Count Montholon a despatch from Lord Bathurst announcing the departure from Italy of two priests, a physician, a maître d'hôtel and cook, sent by Cardinal Fesch, for the service of Longwood. This news was received by the household with joy, in consequence of Napoleon's declining health. Towards the end of November he became worse; and Dr Stock, the surgeon of one of the ships on the station, was sent for, and attended him for a while. Liver complaint was Napoleon's disease in the opinion of the doctor; the true disease having escaped them all. The paroxysm passed off, and for six weeks his constitution seemed to be getting the better of his disease.

The complaints of the governor's conduct appear to have been kept up with the same restless assiduity. If we are to judge from a conversation with Montholon, those complaints were of the most vexatious order. "It is very hard," said Sir Hudson, "that I who take so much care to avoid doing what is disagreeable, should be constantly made the victim of calumnies; that I should be presented as an object of ridicule to the eyes of the European powers; that the commissioners of the great powers should say to me themselves, that Count Bertrand had declared to them that I was a fool; that I could not be sure that the Emperor was at Longwood; that I had been forty days without seeing him; and that he might be dead without my knowing any thing of it." He further said that the newspapers, and particularly the Edinburgh Review, were full of articles which represented him as an assassin. But in the mean time, it was necessary that the orderly officer should see Napoleon every day, and that this might be done in any way he pleased. All that was necessary was, that he should be seen.

Yet this demand of seeing him, which was thus expressed in moderate terms, and obviously essential to his safe keeping, was answered in the lofty style of a melodrama. "Count Bertrand and myself have both informed you, sir, that you should never violate the Emperor's privacy without forcing his doors, and shedding blood."

A great deal of the pretended irritation of Napoleon and his household, arose from the governor's omission of the word Emperor in his notes; and on this subject a cavil had existed even in England. Yet what could be more childish than such a cavil, either in England or in St Helena? It is a well-known diplomatic rule, that no title which a new power may give to itself can be acknowledged, except as a matter of distinct negotiation; and those Frenchmen must have known that the governor had no right to acknowledge a title, which had never been acknowledged by the British Cabinet.

At length the quarrel rose to bullying. The governor having insisted on his point, that Napoleon should be seen by the orderly officer; this was fiercely refused; and at length Bertrand made use of offensive language, filling up the offence by a challenge to the governor. The most surprising matter in the whole business is, that Sir Hudson did not instantly send the blusterer to the black-hole. It was obvious that the idea of fighting with men under his charge was preposterous. But he still, and we think injudiciously, as a matter of the code of honour, wrote, that if Count Bertrand had not patience to wait another opportunity, as he could not fight his prisoner, he might satisfy his rage by fighting Lieutenant-Colonel Lyster, the bearer of his reply, who was perfectly ready to draw his sword. Of this opportunity, however, the Count had the wisdom to avoid taking advantage.

The whole question now turned on the admission of the orderly officer, to have personal evidence that Napoleon was still in the island—a matter of obvious necessity, for Europe at that time teemed with the projects of Revolutionary Frenchmen for setting him free. His escape would have ruined the governor; but even if it had been a matter of personal indifference to him, his sense of the public evils which might be produced by the return of this most dangerous of all incendiaries would doubtless have made his detention one of the first duties.

However, finding at last that the state of Napoleon's health might afford a sufficient guarantee against immediate escape, and evidently with the purpose of softening the irritation between them as much as possible, it was finally, though "temporarily," agreed to take Montholon's word for his being at Longwood. On the 21st of September, the priests and Dr Antomarchi arrived. Napoleon, always active and inventive, now attempted to interest the Emperor of Russia in his liberation. It must be owned, that this was rather a bold attempt for the man who had invaded Russia, ravaged its provinces, massacred its troops, and finished by leaving Moscow in flames. But he dexterously limited himself to explaining the seizure of the Duchy of Oldenburg, which was the commencement of the rapacious and absurd attempt to exclude English merchandise from the Continent. Oldenburg was one of the chief entrances by which those manufactures made their way into Germany. Its invasion, and the countless robberies which followed, had been among the first insolences of Napoleon, and the cause of the first irritations of Alexander, as his sister was married to the reigning prince. Napoleon lays the entire blame on Davoust, whom he charges with both the conception and the execution. But if he had disapproved of the act, why had he not annulled it? "I was on the point of doing so," said Napoleon, "when I received a menacing note from Russia; but," said he, "from the moment when the honour of France was implicated, I could no longer disapprove of the marshal's proceedings." He glides over the invasion of Russia with the same unhesitating facility. "I made war," said he, "against Russia, in spite of myself. I knew better than the libellers who reproached me with it, that Spain was a devouring cancer which I ought to cure before engaging myself in a terrible struggle, the first blow of which would be struck at a distance of five hundred leagues from my frontiers. Poland and its resources were but poetry, in the first months of the year 1812." He then adroitly flatters the Russian nation. "I was not so mad as to think that I could conquer Russia without immense efforts. I knew the bravery of the Russian army. The war of 1807 had proved it to me." He then hints at the subject of his conversations at Erfurth, and discloses some of those curious projects, by which France and Russia were to divide the world. He says that Alexander offered to exchange his Polish provinces for Constantinople. Under this arrangement Syria and Egypt would have supplied to France the loss of her colonies. He then admits that he had desired to marry the Grand-duchess; and, finally asserting that the dynasty of the Bourbons was forced upon the people, he declares himself willing to accept of Russian intervention to save himself from the "martyrdom of that rock."

It is evident that the conduct of the governor was constantly guided by a wish to consult the convenience of his prisoner; but the most important point of all was to guard against his escape. Gradually the relaxations as to the limits of his movements became more satisfactory even to the household themselves; and for some time in the latter period of 1819 Napoleon was suffered to ride to considerable distances in the island, without the attendance of all English officer. He now took long rides—among others, one to the house of Sir William Doveton, on the other side of the island. In the evenings he dictated narratives relative to some of the more prominent points of his history, for the purpose of their being sent to Europe, where he was determined, at least, never to let the interest of his name die, and where, though he was practically forgotten, this clever but utterly selfish individual deceived himself into the belief that thousands and tens of thousands were ready to sacrifice every thing for his restoration. On one of these evenings he gave his own version of the revolt of Marshal Ney.

It will be remembered that Ney, when the command of the troops was given to him by Louis XVIII. made a dashing speech to the King, declaring that "he would bring back the monster in an iron cage." But it happened that he had no sooner seen the monster, than he walked over to him with his whole army. This was an offence not to be forgiven; and the result was, that on the restoration of the King, Ney was tried by a court-martial, and shot.

Of course, there could be but one opinion of this unfortunate officer's conduct; but it is curious to observe the romantic colour which Napoleon's dexterous fancy contrived to throw over the whole scene.

"Marshal Ney," said he, "was perfectly loyal, when he received his last orders from the King. But his fiery soul could not fail to be deeply impressed by the intoxicating enthusiasm of the population of the provinces, which was daily depriving him of some of his best troops, for the national colours were hoisted on all sides." Notwithstanding this, Ney, when the Emperor was ready at Lyons, resisted his recollections, until he received the following letter from the Emperor. "Then he yielded, and again placed himself under the banner of the empire."

The letter was the following pithy performance:—"Cousin, my major-general sends you the order of march. I do not doubt that the moment you heard of my arrival at Lyons, you again raised the tricolored standards among your troops. Execute the orders of Bertrand, and come and join me at Chalons. I will receive you as I did the morning after the battle of Moscow." It must be acknowledged that the man who could have been seduced by this letter must have been a simpleton: it has all the arrogance of a master, and even if he had been perfectly free, it was evident that obedience would have made him a slave. But he had given a solemn pledge to the King; he had been given the command of the army on the strength of that pledge; and in carrying it over to the enemy of the King, he compromised the honour and hazarded the life of every man among them. The act was unpardonable, and he soon found it to be fatally so.

Napoleon makes no reference to the pledge, to the point of honour or the point of duty, but pronounces his death a judicial assassination. Still, he is evidently not quite clear on the subject; for he says, that even if he had been guilty, his services to his country ought to have arrested the hand of justice.

Napoleon sometimes told interesting tales of his early career. One of those, if true, shows how near the world was to the loss of an Emperor. After the siege of Toulon, which his panegyrists regard as the first step to his good fortune, he returned to Paris, apparently in the worst possible mood for adventure. He was at this period suffering from illness. His mother, too, had just communicated to him the discomforts of her position.—She had been just obliged to fly from Corsica, where the people were in a state of insurrection, and she was then at Marseilles, without any means of subsistence. Napoleon had nothing remaining, but an assignat of one hundred sous, his pay being in arrear. "In this state of dejection I went out," said he, "as if urged to suicide by an animal instinct, and walked along the quays, feeling my weakness, but unable to conquer it. In a few more moments I should have thrown myself into the water, when I ran against an individual dressed like a simple mechanic, and who, recognising me, threw himself on my neck, and cried, 'Is it you, Napoleon? what joy to see you again!' It was Demasis, a former comrade of mine in the artillery regiment. He had emigrated, and had returned to France in disguise, to see his aged mother. He was about to go, when, stopping, he said, 'What is the matter? You do not listen to me. You do not seem glad to see me. What misfortune threatens you? You look to me, like a madman about to kill himself.'"

This direct appeal awoke Napoleon's feelings, and he told him every thing. "Is that all?" said he; opening his coarse waistcoat, and detaching a belt, he added, "here are thirty thousand francs in gold, take them and save your mother." "I cannot," said Napoleon, "to this day, explain to myself my motives for so doing, but I seized the gold as if by a convulsive movement, and ran like a madman to send it to my mother. It was not until it was out of my hands, that I thought of what I had done. I hastened back to the spot where I had left Demasis, but he was no longer there. For several days I went out in the morning, returning not until evening, searching every place where I hoped to find him."

The end of the romance is as eccentric as the beginning. For fifteen years Napoleon saw no more of his creditor. At the end of that time he discovered him, and asked "why he had not applied to the Emperor." The answer was, that he had no necessity for the money, but was afraid of being compelled to quit his retirement, where he lived happily practising horticulture.

Napoleon now paid his debt, as it maybe presumed, magnificently; made him accept three hundred thousand francs as a reimbursement from the Emperor for the thirty thousand lent to the subaltern of artillery; and besides, made him director-general of the gardens of the crown, with a salary of thirty thousand francs. He also gave a government place to his brother.

Napoleon, who seems always to have had some floating ideas of fatalism in his mind, remarked that two of his comrades, Demasis and Philipeau, had peculiar influence on his destiny. Philipeau had emigrated, and was the engineer employed by Sir Sydney Smith to construct the defences of Acre. We have seen that Demasis stopped him at the moment when he was about to drown himself. "Philipeau," said he, "stopped me before St Jean d'Acre: but for him, I should have been master of this key of the East. I should have marched upon Constantinople, and rebuilt the throne of the East."

This idea of sitting on the throne of the Turk, seems never to have left Napoleon's mind. He was always talking of it, or dreaming of it. But it may fairly be doubted, whether he could ever have found his way out of Syria himself. With his fleet destroyed by Nelson, and his march along the coast—perhaps the only practicable road—harassed by the English cruisers; with the whole Turkish army ready to meet him in the defiles of Mount Taurus; with Asia Minor still to be passed; and with the English, Russian, and Turkish fleets and forces ready to meet him at Constantinople, his death or capture would seem to be the certain consequence of his fantastic expedition. The strongest imaginable probability is, that instead of wearing the diadem of France, his head would have figured on the spikes of the seraglio.

Suicide is so often the unhappy resource of men indifferent to all religion, that we can scarcely be surprised at its having been contemplated more than once by a man of fierce passions, exposed to the reverses of a life like Napoleon's. Of the dreadful audacity of a crime, which directly wars with the Divine will, which cuts off all possibility of repentance, and which thus sends the criminal before his Judge with all his sins upon his head, there can be no conceivable doubt. The only palliative can be, growing insanity. But in the instance which is now stated by the intended self-murderer, there is no attempt at palliation of any kind.

"There was another period of my life," said Napoleon, "when I attempted suicide; but you are certainly acquainted with this fact." "No, sire," was Montholon's reply.

"In that case, write what I shall tell you: for it is well that the mysteries of Fontainbleau should one day be known."

We condense into a few sentences this singular narrative, which begins with an interview demanded by his marshals on the 4th of April 1815, when he was preparing to move at the head of his army to attack the Allies. The language of the marshals was emphatic.

"The army is weary, discouraged, disorganised; desertion is at work among the ranks. To re-enter Paris cannot be thought of: in attempting to do so we should uselessly shed blood."

Their proposal was, his resignation in favour of his son.

Caulaincourt had already brought him the Emperor Alexander's opinion on the subject. The envoy had thus reported the imperial conversation:—"I carry on no diplomacy with you, but I cannot tell you every thing. Understand this, and lose not a moment in rendering an account to the Emperor Napoleon of our conversation, and of the situation of his affairs here; and return again as quickly, bringing his abdication in favour of his son. As to his personal fate, I give you my word of honour that he will be properly treated. But lose not an hour, or all is lost for him, and I shall no longer have power to do any thing either for him or his dynasty."

Napoleon proceeds. "I hesitated not to make the sacrifice demanded of my patriotism. I sat down at a little table, and wrote my Act of Abdication in favour of my son." But on that day Marmont with his army had surrendered. The Allies instantly rejected all negotiation, after this decisive blow in their favour. The Act of Resignation had not reached them, and they determined on restoring the old monarchy at once. On this the desertion was universal; and every man at Fontainbleau was evidently thinking only of being the first to make his bargain with the Bourbons. Napoleon, as a last experiment, proposed to try the effect of war in Italy.

But all shook their heads, and were silent. He at length signed the unequivocal Abdication for himself, and his family.

"From the time of my retreat from Russia," said he, "I had constantly carried round my neck, in a little silken bag, a portion of a poisonous powder which Ivan had prepared by my orders, when I was in fear of being carried off by the Cossacks. My life no longer belonged to my country; the events of the last few days had again rendered me master of it. Why should I endure so much suffering? and who knows, that my death may not place the crown on the head of my son? France was saved."—

"I hesitated no longer, but, leaping from my bed, mixed the poison in a little water, and drank it, with a sort of happiness.

"But time had taken away its strength; fearful pains drew forth some groans from me; they were heard, and medical assistance arrived. It was not Heaven's will that I should die so soon—St Helena was in my Destiny."

It may easily be supposed that projects were formed for carrying the prisoner from St Helena. One of those is thus detailed. The captain of a vessel returning from India, had arranged to bring a boat to a certain point of the coast without running the risk of being stopped. This person demanded a million of francs, not, as he said, for himself, but for the individual whose concurrence was necessary. The million was not to be payable until the vessel had reached America. This renders it probable that the captain was a Yankee. At all events, it shows how necessary was the vigilance of the governor, and how little connected with tyranny were his precautions against evasion. Another project was to be carried out, by submarine vessels, and on this experiment five or six thousand Louis were expended in Europe. But Napoleon finished his inquiry into these matters by refusing to have any thing to do with them. It is probable that he expected his release on easier terms than those of breaking his neck, as Montholon observes, "in descending the precipices of St Helena," or being starved, shot, or drowned on his passage across the Atlantic. But as his object was constantly to throw obloquy on the Bourbons, he placed his fears to the account of their treachery.

"I should not," said he, "be six months in America without being assassinated by the Count d'Artois's creatures. Remember the isle of Elba. Did he not send the Chouan Brulard there to organise my assassination? And besides, we should always obey our destiny. Every thing is written in Heaven. It is my martyrdom which will restore the crown of France to my dynasty. I see in America nothing but assassination or oblivion. I prefer St Helena."

In the beginning of 1821, Napoleon began to grow lethargic. He had generally spent the day in pacing up and down his apartment, and dictating conversations and political recollections. But he now sat for hours listlessly and perfectly silent on the sofa. It required the strongest persuasion to induce him to take the air either on foot or en calêche.

Napoleon to the last was fond of burlesquing the hypocrisy or romance of the Revolution. The 18th of Brumaire, which made him First Consul, and had given him two colleagues, gave him the opportunity of developing the patriotism of the Republic. Shortly after that period, Sieyes, supping with the heads of the Republican party, said to them, at the same time throwing his cap violently on the ground, "There is no longer a Republic. I have for the last eight days been conferring with a man who knows every thing. He needs neither counsel nor aid; policy, laws, and the art of government are all as familiar to him as the command of an army. I repeat to you, there is no longer a Republic."

Sieyes was well known to be what the French call an idealogue. He was a theorist on governments, which he invented in any convenient number. For the Consulate he had his theory ready. The First Consul was to be like an epicurean divinity, enjoying himself and taking care for no one. But this tranquillity of position, and nonentity of power, by no means suited the taste of Napoleon. "'Your Grand Elector," said he (the title which seems to have been intended for his head of his new constitution,) "would be nothing but an idle king. The time for do-nothing kings is gone by—six millions of francs and the Tuilleries, to play the stage-king in, put his signature to other peoples work, and do nothing of himself, is a dream. Your Grand Elector would be nothing but a pig to fatten, or a master, the more absolute because he would have no responsibility.' It was on quitting me after this conversation," said Napoleon, "that Sieyes said to Roger Ducos, 'My dear Colleague, we have not a President, we have a master. You and I have no more to do, but to make our fortunes before making our paquets.'" This was at least plain speaking, and it discloses the secret of ninety-nine out of every hundred of the Republicans.

An amusing anecdote of the memorable Abbé is then told. He was Almoner to one of the Princesses of France. One day, while he was reading mass, the Princess, from some accidental circumstance, retired, and her ladies followed her. Sieyes, who was busy reading his missal, did not at first perceive her departure; but when he saw himself abandoned by all the great people, and had no auditory left but the domestics, he closed the book, and left the altar, crying, "I do not say mass for the rabble!" This certainly was not very democratic, and yet Sieyes was soon afterwards the most rampant of all possible democrats.

The history of his patriotism, however, alike accounted for his former contempt and his subsequent fraternisation. Previously to the Revolution he was poor, neglected, and angry; but, as he was known to be a man of ability, his name was mentioned to De Brienne, who, though an archbishop, was Prime Minister. He was desired to attend at his next levee; he attended, and was overlooked. He complained to his friend, who repeated the complaint to the archbishop, who desired him to appear at his levee; but was so much occupied with higher people, that the clever but luckless Abbé was again overlooked. He made a third experiment, on the promise that he should obtain audience; but he found the Archbishop enveloped in a circle of epaulets, grands cordons, and mitres. To penetrate this circle was impossible, and the Abbé, now furious at what he regarded as a mockery, rushed to his chamber, seized a pen, and wrote his powerful and memorable pamphlet entitled, "What is the third Estate?" a fierce, but most forcible appeal to the vanity of the lower orders, pronouncing them the nation. This was a torch thrown into a powder magazine—all was explosion; the church, the noblesse, and the monarchy were suddenly extinguished, and France saw this man of long views and powerful passions, suddenly raised from hunger and obscurity, to the highest rank and the richest sinecurism of the republic.

Antomarchi was not fortunate in his attendance on Napoleon. Of course he felt, like every other foreigner, the ennui of the island, and he grew impatient to return to Europe. At last he applied for permission, which Napoleon gave him in the shape of a discharge, with the following sting at the end. "During the fifteen months which we have spent in this country, you have given his Majesty no confidence in your moral character. You can be of no use to him in his illness, and your residing here for several months longer would have no object, and be of no use." However, a reconciliation was effected, and the doctor was suffered to remain. But all the household now began to be intolerably tired. Three of the household, including the Abbé, requested their congé.

There is in the spirit of the foreigner a kind of gross levity, an affectation of frivolity with respect to women, and a continual habit of vulgar vanity, which seems to run through all ranks and ages of the continental world. What can be more offensively trifling, than the conduct which Napoleon narrates of himself, when Emperor, at Warsaw.

A Madame Waleska seems to have been the general belle of the city. On the night when Napoleon first saw this woman, at a ball, General Bertrand and Louis de Perigord appeared as her public admirers. "They both," said he, "kept hovering emulously round her." But Napoleon, Emperor, husband, and mature as he was, chose to play the gallant on this evening also. Finding the two Frenchmen in the way of his attentions, he played the Emperor with effect on the spot. He gave an order to Berthier, then head of his staff, instantly to send off M. Perigord "to obtain news of the 6th corps," which was on the Passarge. Thus one inconvenience was got rid of, but Bertrand was still present, and during supper his attentions were so marked that, as he leaned over Madame's chair, his aiguilettes danced on her shoulders. "Upon this," said Napoleon, "my impatience was roused to such a pitch that I touched him on the arm and drew him to the recess of a window, where I gave him orders 'to set out for the head-quarters of Prince Jerome,' and without losing an hour to bring me a report of the siege of Breslau." Such it is to come in the way of Emperors. "The poor fellow was scarcely gone," adds Napoleon, "when I repented of my angry impulse; and I should certainly have recalled him, had I not remembered at the same minute that his presence with Jerome would be useful to me." And this was the conduct of a man then in the highest position of life, whose example must have been a model to the multitude, and in whom even frivolity would be a crime.

Napoleon had long lived in a state of nervous fear, which must have made even his high position comfortless to him. He had been for years in dread of poison. "I have escaped poisoning," said he, "ten times, if I have once." In St Helena he never eat or drank any thing which had not been tasted first by one of the household! Montholon, during the night, constantly tasted the drink prepared for him. On this subject, Napoleon told the following anecdote.

"He was one day leaving the dinner-table with the Empress Josephine, and two or three other persons, when, as he was about to put his hand in his pocket for his snuff-box, he perceived it lying on the mantel-piece, in the saloon which he was entering. He was about to open it and take a pinch, when his good star caused him to seat himself. He then felt that his snuff-box was in one of his pockets. This excited inquiry, and on sending the two boxes to be chemically tested, the snuff on the mantel-piece was discovered to be poisoned." After this, it is somewhat absurd in M. Montholon to give his hero credit for sang froid, and say of him, that no one could take fewer precautions against such dangers than the Emperor. His whole life seems to have been precautionary; still, he sententiously talked the nonsense of fatalism.

"Our last hour is written above," was his frequent remark. He had some absurdities on the subject of medicine, which would have very effectually assisted the fulfilment of this prediction. He had all idea that he should cure himself of his immediate disease, and perhaps of every other, by swallowing orange-flower water, and soup à la reine.

The governor, during this period, constantly offered the services of an English physician; and Dr Arnott was at last summoned, who pronounced the disease to be very serious, and to be connected with great inflammation in the region of the stomach. It was now, for the first time, ascertained that his disease was ulceration of the stomach. There is an occasional tribute to the humane conduct of the governor at this time. On April eleventh, there is this memorandum:—

"Sir Hudson Lowe has left us in perfect tranquillity, since Dr Arnott has been admitted, though he comes every day to the apartments of the orderly officer, for the purpose of conferring with the physician."

Napoleon, now conscious of the dangerous nature of his disease, made his will. He had conceived that he was worth in various property about two hundred millions of francs, which he left by will, but of which we believe the greater part was impounded by the French government, as being public property.

He now held a long conversation on the prospects of his son, whom he regarded as not altogether beyond the hope of ascending the throne of France. He predicted the fall of the reigning family. "The Bourbons," said he, "will not maintain their position after my death." With an exactness equally odd, but equally true, he predicted the rise of another branch of the dynasty: "My son will arrive, after a time of troubles; he has but one party to fear, that of the Duke of Orleans. That party has been germinating for a long time. France is the country where the chiefs of parties have the least interest. To rest for support on them, is to build their hopes on sand."

There is a brilliant shrewdness now and then, in his contempt of the showy exhibitors in public life. "The great orators," said he, "who rule the assemblies by the brilliancy of their eloquence, are in general men of the most mediocre talents. They should not be opposed in their own way, for they have always more noisy words at command than you. In my council there were men possessed of much more eloquence than I was, but I always defeated them by this simple argument,—Two and two make four.

"My son will be obliged to allow the liberty of the press. This is a necessity in the present day. My son ought to be a man of new ideas, and of the cause which have made triumphant every where.

"Let my son often read and reflect on history: that is the only true philosophy. Let him read and meditate on the wars of the great Captains. That is the only means of rightly learning the science of war."

In April, the signs of debility grew still more marked. On the 26th, at four in the morning, after a calm night, he had what Montholon regards as a dream, but what Napoleon evidently regarded as a vision. He said with extraordinary emotion, "I have just seen my good Josephine, but she would not embrace me; she disappeared at the moment when I was about to take her in my arms; she was seated there; it seemed to me that I had seen her yesterday evening; she is not changed—still the same, full of devotion to me; she told me that we were about to see each other again, never more to part. She assured me of that. Did you see her?"

Montholon attributed this scene to feverish excitement, gave him his potion, and he fell asleep; but on awaking he again spoke of the Empress Josephine.

It is difficult in speaking of dreams and actual visions, to know the distinction. That the mind may be so perfectly acted upon during the waking hours as to retain the impressions during sleep, is the experience of every day. And yet we know so little of the means by which truths may be communicated to the human spirit while the senses are closed, that it would be unphilosophical to pronounce even upon those fugitive thoughts as unreal. That Napoleon must have often reflected on his selfish and cruel desertion of Josephine, it is perfectly natural to conceive. That he may have bitterly regretted it, is equally natural, for, from that day, his good fortune deserted him. And he might also have discovered that he had committed a great crime, with no other fruit than that of making a useless alliance, encumbering himself with an ungenial companion, and leaving an orphan child dependant on strangers, and continually tantalised by the recollections of a fallen throne. Those feelings, in the solitude of his chamber, and the general dejection of his captivity, must have so often clouded his declining hours, that no miracle was required to embody them in such a vision as that described. And yet, so many visitations of this kind have undoubtedly occurred, that it would be rash to pronounce that this sight of the woman who had so long been the partner of his brilliant days might not have been given, to impress its moral on the few melancholy hours which now lay between him and the grave.

It is painful, after a scene which implies some softness of heart, to find him unrepentant of one of the most repulsive, because the most gratuitous crime of his career. In the course of the day, Bertrand, in translating an English journal, inadvertently began to read an article containing a violent attack on the conduct of Caulaincourt and Savary in the seizure of the Duc d'Enghien. Napoleon, interrupting him, suddenly cried, "This is shameful." He then sent for his will, and interlined the following words:—"I caused the Duc d'Enghien to be arrested and tried, because that step was essential to the interest, honour, and safety of the French people, when the Count d'Artois was maintaining, by his own confession, sixteen assassins in Paris. Under similar circumstances I should act in the same way." Having written these few lines he gave back the will. From this period he was engaged in writing codicils and appointing executors. He gave to Marchand a diamond necklace, valued at 200,000 francs. He wound up those transactions by an extraordinary letter,—no less than the form of an announcement of his own death. It was in these words:—

"Monsieur le Gouverneur, the Emperor Napoleon breathed his last on the —— after a long and painful illness. I have the honour to communicate this intelligence to you.

"The Emperor had ordered me to communicate, if such be your desire, his last wishes. I beg you to inform me, what are the arrangements, prescribed by your government for the transportation of his remains to France, as well as those relating to the persons of his suite. I have the honour to be, &c., Count Montholon."