Title: International Weekly Miscellany - Volume 1, No. 9, August 26, 1850
Author: Various
Language: English
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INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY MISCELLANY

Of Literature, Art, and Science.

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Vol. I. NEW YORK, AUGUST 26, 1850. No. 9.

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NUMISMATIC ARCHÆOLOGY.

A magnificent work[1] upon this subject has just been completed in
Paris, where it was commenced fifteen years ago. It was begun under
the auspices of M. Paul Delaroche and M.C. Lenormand, member of the
Institute, and well known already as one of the first authorities in
the numismatic branch of archæology. Some faint idea of the greatness
of the task may be given by stating that it embraces the whole range
of art, from the regal coins of Syracuse and of the Ptolemies, down to
those of our day; that such a stupendous scheme should ever have been
carried into execution is not solely due to the admirable ease and
fidelity, with which the "Collas machine" renders the smallest and the
largest gems of the antique: but to him who first felt, appreciated,
and afterward promoted its capabilities in this labor of love, M.A.
Lachevardiere. Comparisons and contrasts, which are the life of art,
though generally confined to the mental vision, are not the least of
the recommendations of this vast work. For the first time have the
minor treasures of each country been brought together, and not the
least conspicuous portion are those from the British Museum and the
Bank of England.

[Footnote 1: Trésor de Numismatique et de Glyptique; ou, Recueil
Général de Médailles, Monnaies, Pierres Gravées, Sceaux, Bas-reliefs,
Ornements, &c. Paris, 1850.]

Whether we consider the selection of these monumental relics, the
explanatory letterpress, or the engravings which reproduce them, we
are struck by the admirable taste, science, and fidelity with which
the largest as well as the smallest gems have each and every one been
made to tally in size with the originals.

The collection of the "Trésor de Numismatique et Glyptique,"
consisting of twenty volumes in folio, and containing a thousand
engraved plates in folio, reproduces upward of 15,000 specimens, and
is divided into three classes--1st. The coins, medals, cameos, &c.
of antiquity; 2d. Those of the middle ages; lastly, those of modern
times. The details of this immense mass of artistic wealth would be
endless; but these three classes seem to be arranged according to the
latest classification of numismatists.

In the first class may be noticed--1. The regal coins of Greece,
which contains, beside the portraits of the Greek Kings, to be found
in Visconti's "Iconographie," copied from medals and engraved gems,
all the coins bearing the Greek name of either a king, a prince, or
a tyrant, and every variety of these types, whether they bear the
effigy of a prince, or only reproduce his name. To the medals of each
sovereign are joined the most authentic and celebrated engraved gems
of European cabinets. Next come the series of portraits of the Roman
emperors and their families, with all the important varieties of Roman
numismatics, amongst which will be found the most celebrated coins
of France, Vienna, Dresden, Munich, Florence, Naples, St. Petersburg,
Weimar, &c.; and, moreover, those medallions which perpetuate great
events. These two volumes contain eight-fold more matter than the
great work of Visconti.

In the second class, containing the works of the middle ages, and
showing the uninterrupted progress of the numismatic art down to
modern times, and forming alone fourteen volumes, we find the source
which the French artists and men of letters have studied with such
predilection. First in order are the Italian medals of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, chiefly by the famous Victor Pisano, a
Veronese, whom Nasari has so much lauded. The scholars and imitators
of Pisano also produced works as interesting as historical documents
as they are admirable in workmanship. Here also will be found the
French and English seals, in which the balance of skill in design and
execution is acknowledged to be in our favor.

Less barbarous, and indeed perfect works of art, in character of
costume and visage, are the medals struck in Germany during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the influence of Albert
Durer and his school was strongly felt. And finally, relics of
ornamental art of different nations and epochs.

In the third class, two parts only are devoted to contemporary art;
the medals illustrative of the French revolution of 1789; those of
the "Empire" and of the Emperor "Napoleon;" generally smacking of the
florid and corrupt taste of that period, they are nevertheless curious
as being often the sole evidence of the facts commemorated. There is,
however, a manifest improvement in the late ones, and in them may be
traced the transition from the independent ideas of the revolution
to the subsequent submission to one man: and not less striking is
the transition from a slip-shod style of art to a pedantic imitation
of the antique. The "Trésor de Numismatique et de Glyptique" is the
most scientific and important work of art which has been executed and
achieved of late years in France. Our great public libraries may be
proud of possessing so rich, so valuable, and so curious a collection,

Most lovers of art have their favorite periods and well-beloved
masters, but in this varied range of excellence it is difficult which
to select for preference and admiration. The cameos have a beauty and
_finesse_ which far surpass that of busts and statues; they evince the
skill of grouping, which, with rare exceptions, such as the Niobe and
Laocoon, is seldom aimed at in the more important pieces of sculpture.
Cameos, moreover, let us, as it were, into the secrets of indoor
life. To these considerations we may add that these gems have had an
immense influence on French modern art. The "Apotheosis of Augustus"
especially, known to antiquarians as the "Agate of Tiberius," the
largest cameo in the world, and beautifully engraved the size of the
original in this collection, may be traced in more than one of their
late compositions.

It is said that large medallions are a sign of taste either in the
medalist or the monarch he is supposed to honor; if so, Dupré and
Varin have drawn a thick vail over the effulgence of Louis XIV.
We would not, however, lose their wigs and smiles for a world of
historiettes.

But it is to be remembered that the more names are blazoned on works
of art, the more art becomes deteriorated. In this respect the present
collection shows the rapidly progressive march of this evil through
twenty-five centuries--a most instructive subject of contemplation.

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THE CSIKOS OF HUNGARY.

Of the chivalry, the gallantry, the splendor, the hospitality, the
courage, and the love of liberty of the Hungarian noble or gentleman,
no one doubts. Of his ideas of true constitutional freedom, or the
zeal with which that or Hungarian independence has been maintained
first through Turkish, and then German domination for some hundred
years past, doubts may be entertained. Neither do the Hungarian
peasantry or people reflect high credit on their "natural superiors."
Something should be deducted for the forced vivacity and straining
after effect of the littérateur; but this sketch of a large class of
peasantry from Max Schlesinger's "War in Hungary," just published
in London, must have some foundation in truth--and very like the Red
Indians or half-breeds of Spanish America the people look.

"The Csikos is a man who from his birth, somehow or other, finds
himself seated upon a foal. Instinctively the boy remains fixed upon
the animal's back, and grows up in his seat as other children do in
the cradle.

"The boy grows by degrees to a big horse-herd. To earn his livelihood,
he enters the service of some nobleman, or of the Government, who
possess in Hungary immense herds of wild horses. These herds range
over a tract of many German square miles, for the most part some level
plain, with wood, marsh, heath, and moorland; they rove about where
they please, multiply, and enjoy freedom of existence. Nevertheless,
it is a common error to imagine that these horses, like a pack of
wolves in the mountains, are left to themselves and nature, without
any care or thought of man. Wild horses, in the proper sense of the
term, are in Europe at the present day only met with in Bessarabia;
whereas the so-called wild herds in Hungary may rather be compared
to the animals ranging in our large parks, which are attended to and
watched. The deer are left to the illusion that they enjoy the most
unbounded freedom; and the deer-stalker, when in pursuit of his game,
readily gives in to the same illusion. Or, to take another simile, the
reader has only to picture to himself a well-constituted free state,
whether a republic or a monarchy is all one.

"The Csikos has the difficult task of keeping a watchful eye upon
these herds. He knows their strength, their habits, the spots they
frequent; he knows the birthday of every foal, and when the animal,
fit for training, should be taken out of the herd. He has then a hard
task upon his hands, compared with which a Grand-Ducal wild-boar hunt
is child's play; for the horse has not only to be taken alive from the
midst of the herd, but of course safe and sound in wind and limb. For
this purpose, the celebrated whip of the Csikos serves him; probably
at some future time a few splendid specimens of this instrument will
be exhibited in the Imperial Arsenal at Vienna, beside the sword of
Scanderberg and the Swiss 'morning-stars.'

"This whip has a stout handle from one and a half to two feet long,
and a cord which measures not less than from eighteen to twenty-four
feet in length. The cord is attached to a short iron chain, fixed
to the top of the handle by an iron ring. A large leaden button is
fastened to the end of the cord, and similar smaller buttons are
distributed along it at distances, according to certain rules
derived from experience, of which we are ignorant. Armed with this
weapon, which the Csikos carries in his belt, together with a short
grappling-iron or hook, he sets out on his horse-chase. Thus mounted
and equipped without saddle or stirrup, he flies like the storm-wind
over the heath, with such velocity that the grass scarcely bends
under the horse's hoof; the step of his horse is not heard, and the
whirling cloud of dust above his head alone marks his approach and
disappearance. Although familiar with the use of a bridle, he despises
such a troublesome article of luxury, and guides his horse with his
voice, hands, and feet--nay, it almost seems as if he directed it by
the mere exercise of the will, as we move our feet to the right or
left, backward or forward, without its ever coming into our head to
regulate our movements by a leather strap.

"In this manner for hours he chases the flying herd, until at length
he succeeds in approaching the animal which he is bent on catching.
He then swings his whip round in immense circles, and throws the cord
with such dexterity and precision that it twines around the neck of
his victim. The leaden button at the end, and the knots along the
cord, form a noose, which draws closer and tighter the faster the
horse hastens on.

"See how he flies along with outstretched legs, his mane whistling
in the wind, his eye darting fire, his mouth covered with foam, and
the dust whirling aloft on all sides! But the noble animal breathes
shorter, his eye grows wild and staring, his nostrils are reddened
with blood, the veins of his neck are distended like cords, his legs
refuse longer service--he sinks exhausted and powerless, a picture
of death. But at the same instant the pursuing steed likewise stands
still and fixed as if turned to stone. An instant, and the Csikos has
flung himself off his horse upon the ground, and inclining his body
backward, to keep the noose tight, he seizes the cord alternately with
the right and left hand, shorter and shorter, drawing himself by it
nearer and nearer to the panting and prostrate animal, till at last
coming up to it he flings his legs across its back. He now begins to
slacken the noose gently, allowing the creature to recover breath: but
hardly does the horse feel this relief, before he leaps up, and darts
off again in a wild course, as if still able to escape from his enemy.
But the man is already bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh; he
sits fixed upon his neck as if grown to it, and makes the horse feel
his power at will, by tightening or slackening the cord. A second time
the hunted animal sinks upon the ground; again he rises, and again
breaks down, until at length, overpowered with exhaustion, he can no
longer stir a limb....

"The foot-soldier who has discharged his musket is lost when opposed
to the Csikos. His bayonet, with which he can defend himself against
the Uhlans and Hussars, is here of no use to him; all his practiced
maneuvers and skill are unavailing against the long whip of his enemy,
which drags him to the ground, or beats him to death with his leaden
buttons; nay, even if he had still a charge in his musket, he could
sooner hit a bird on the wing than the Csikos, who, riding round and
round him in wild bounds, dashes with his steed first to one side then
to another, with the speed of lightning, so as to frustrate any aim.
The horse-soldier, armed in the usual manner, fares not much better;
and wo to him if he meets a Csikos singly! better to fall in with a
pack of ravenous wolves."

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THE PRESENT RELIGION OF PERSIA.

An account of the Expedition for the survey of the rivers Euphrates
and Tigris, carried on by order of the British Government, in the
years 1835, 1836, and 1837; preceded by geographical and historical
notices of the regions situated between the Nile and the Indus, with
fourteen maps and charts, and ninety-seven plates, besides numerous
woodcuts, has just appeared in London, in four large volumes, from the
pen of Lieutenant-Colonel Chesney, R.A., F.R.S., &c., commander of
the Expedition. It is too comprehensive a work ever to be reprinted
here, or to be much read, even in England, but it is undoubtedly very
valuable as an authority. The following paragraphs from it describe
the present state of religion in Persia:

"The title of Múlla is conferred on a candidate by some member of the
order, after the requisite examination in theology and law; and the
person is then intrusted with the education of youth, as well as
the administration of justice, and the practice of law. The Múllas
sometimes possess sufficient power not only to influence the people at
large, but even the King himself.

"Of this class of priests, those who have been successful in life are
either placed in mosques or private families, waiting for advancement;
but a greater number are nominally attached to colleges, and live
by the practice of astrology, fortune-telling, the sale of charms,
talismans, &c. They who are not possessed of the requisite ingenuity
to subsist by the credulity of others, take charge of an inferior
school, or write letters, and draw up marriage and other engagements,
for those who are unequal to the task. They mix at the same time
largely in the domestic concerns of families. But in addition to
these and other vocations, a considerable number of the lowest priests
derive a scanty support from that charity which no one denies to
the true believer. These men wander as fakirs from place to place,
carrying news, and repeating poems, tales, &c., mixed with verses from
the Koran. The heterodox religions are very numerous; nor is Irián
without her free-thinkers, as the Kamúrs and Mu'tazelís, (Mitaulis,)
who deny everything which they cannot prove by natural reason. A third
sect, the Mahadelis, or Molochadis, still maintain the Magian belief
that the stars and the planets govern all things. Another, the Ehl
el Tabkwid, (men of truth,) hold that there is no God except the four
elements, and no rational soul or life after this one. They maintain
also, that all living bodies, being mixtures of the elements, will
after death return to their first principles. They also affirm that
paradise and hell belong to this world, into which every man returns
in the form of a beast, a plant, or again as a man; and that in this
second state, he is great, powerful, and happy, or poor, despicable,
and unhappy, according to his former merits or demerits. In practice
they inculcate kindness to and respect for each other, with implicit
obedience to their chiefs, who are called Pir, (old men,) and are
furnished with all kinds of provisions for their subsistence. This
sect is found in the provinces of Irák and Fárs.

"The Táríkh Zenádikah (way of the covetous) are directly opposed to
the last on the subject of transmigration; and they believe that God
is in all places, and performs all things. They likewise maintain
that the whole visible universe is only a manifestation of the
Supreme Being; the soul itself being a portion of the Divine essence.
Therefore, they consider, that whatever appears to the eye is God, and
that all religious rites should be comprised in the contemplation of
God's goodness and greatness.

"On these various creeds the different branches of Suffeeism seem to
have been founded. One of the most extraordinary of these sects is the
Rasháníyah; the followers of which believe in the transmigration of
souls, and the manifestation of the Divinity in the persons of holy
men. They maintain likewise, that all men who do not join their
sect are to be considered as dead, and that their goods belong, in
consequence, to the true believers, as the only survivors."

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THE "OLD DUKE OF QUEENSBURY."

Mr. Burke gives in his gossiping book about the English aristocracy,
the following anecdotes of this once famous person:

"Few men occupied a more conspicuous place about the court and town
for nearly seventy years, during the reigns of the Second and Third
Georges. Like Wilmot Earl of Rochester, he pursued pleasure under
every shape, and with as much ardor at fourscore as he had done at
twenty. At the decease of his father, in 1731, he became Earl of
March; and he subsequently, in 1748, inherited his mother's earldom
of Ruglen, together with the family's estates in the counties of
Edinburgh and Linlithgow. These rich endowments of fortune, and a
handsome person, of which he was especially careful, combined to
invest the youthful Earl with no ordinary attractions, and the
ascendency they acquired he retained for a longer period than any one
of his contemporaries; from his first appearance in the fashionable
world in the year 1746, to the year he left it forever, in 1810,
at the age of eighty-five, he was always an object of comparative
notoriety. There was no interregnum in the public course of his
existence. His first distinction he achieved on the turf; his
knowledge of which, both in theory and practice, equaled that of the
most accomplished adepts of Newmarket. In all his principal matches
he rode himself, and in that branch of equitation rivaled the most
professional jockeys. Properly accoutered in his velvet cap, red
silken jacket, buckskin breeches, and long spurs, his Lordship bore
away the prize on many a well-contested field. His famous match with
the Duke of Hamilton was long remembered in sporting annals. Both
noblemen rode their own horses, and each was supported by numerous
partisans. The contest took place on the race-ground at Newmarket, and
attracted all the fashionables of the period. Lord March, thin, agile,
and admirably qualified for exertion, was the victor. Still more
celebrated was his Lordship's wager with the famous Count O'Taafe.
During a conversation at a convivial meeting on the subject of
'running against time,' it was suggested by Lord March, that it
was possible for a carriage to be drawn with a degree of celerity
previously unexampled, and believed to be impossible. Being desired to
name his maximum, he undertook, provided choice of ground were given
him and a certain period for training, to draw a carriage with four
wheels not less than nineteen miles within the space of sixty minutes.
The accomplishment of such rapidity staggered the belief of his
hearers; and a heavy wager was the consequence. Success mainly
depending on the lightness of the carriage, Wright of Long Acre, the
most ingenious coach-builder of the day, devoted the whole resources
of his skill to its construction, and produced a vehicle formed partly
of wood and partly of whale-bone, with silk harness, that came up
to the wishes of his employer. Four blood horses of approved speed
were then selected, and the course at Newmarket chosen as the ground
of contest. On the day appointed, 29th of August, 1750, noble and
ignoble gamesters journeyed from far and near to witness the wonderful
experiment; excitement reached the highest point, and bets to an
enormous amount were made. At length the jockeys mounted; the carriage
was put in motion, and rushing on with a velocity marvelous in those
times of coach traveling, but easily conceived by us railway travelers
of the nineteenth century, gained within the stipulated hour the goal
of victory."

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THE DECAY OF GREAT FAMILIES.

Not the least valuable parts of Burke's just published "Anecdotes of
the Aristocracy," are a species of essay on the fortunes of families.
The following is from a chapter on their decadence:

"It has often occurred to us that a very interesting paper might
be written on the rise and fall of English families. Truly does Dr.
Borlase remark that 'the most lasting houses have only their seasons,
more or less, of a certain constitutional strength. They have their
spring and summer sunshine glare, their wane, decline, and death.'
Take, for example, the Plantagenets, the Staffords, and the Nevills,
the three most illustrious names on the roll of England's nobility.
What race in Europe surpassed in royal position, in personal
achievement, our Henries and our Edwards? and yet we find the
great-great-grandson of Margaret Plantagenet, daughter and heiress
of George Duke of Clarence, following the craft of a cobbler at the
little town of Newport in Shropshire, in the year 1637. Beside, if
we were to investigate the fortunes of many of the inheritors of the
royal arms, it would soon be discovered that

    'The aspiring blood of Lancaster'

had sunk into the ground. The princely stream at the present time
flows through very humble veins. Among the lineal descendants of
Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, sixth son of Edward I., King
of England, entitled to quarter the Royal arms, occur Mr. Joseph
Smart, of Hales Owen, butcher, and Mr. George Wilmot, keeper of the
turnpike-gate at Cooper's Bank, near Dudley; and among the descendants
of Thomas Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester, fifth son of Edward
III., we may mention Mr. Stephen James Penny, the late sexton at St.
George's, Hanover Square.

"The story of the Gargraves is a melancholy chapter in the romance
of real life. For full two centuries, or more, scarcely a family in
Yorkshire enjoyed a higher position. Its chiefs earned distinction
in peace and war; one died in France, Master of the Ordnance to King
Henry V.; another, a soldier, too, fell with Salisbury, at the siege
of Orleans; and a third filled the Speaker's chair of the House of
Commons. What an awful contrast to this fair picture does the sequel
offer. Thomas Gargrave, the Speaker's eldest son, was hung at York,
for murder; and his half-brother, Sir Richard, endured a fate only
less miserable. The splendid estate he inherited he wasted by the most
wanton extravagance, and at length reduced himself to abject want.
'His excesses,' says Mr. Hunter, in his 'History of Doncaster,' 'are
still, at the expiration of two centuries, the subject of village
tradition; and his attachment to gaming is commemorated in an old
painting, long preserved in the neighboring mansion of Badsworth, in
which he is represented as playing at the old game of put, the right
hand against the left, for the stake of a cup of ale.

"The close of Sir Richard's story is as lamentable as its course.
An utter bankrupt in means and reputation, he is stated to have been
reduced to travel with the pack-horses to London, and was at last
found dead in an old hostelry! He had married Catherine, sister of
Lord Danvers, and by her left three daughters. Of the descendants of
his brothers few particulars can be ascertained. Not many years since,
a Mr. Gargrave, believed to be one of them, filled the mean employment
of parish-clerk of Kippax.

"A similar melancholy narrative applies to another great Yorkshire
house. Sir William Reresby, Bart., son and heir of the celebrated
author, succeeded, at the death of his father, in 1689, to the
beautiful estate of Thrybergh, in Yorkshire, where his ancestors had
been seated uninterruptedly from the time of the Conquest; and he
lived to see himself denuded of every acre of his broad lands. Le Neve
states, in his MSS. preserved in the Heralds' College, that he became
a tapster in the King's Bench Prison, and was tried and imprisoned for
cheating in 1711. He was alive in 1727, when Wootton's account of the
Baronets was published. In that work he is said to be reduced to a low
condition. At length he died in great obscurity, a melancholy instance
how low pursuits and base pleasures may sully the noblest name, and
waste an estate gathered with labor and preserved by the care of a
race of distinguished progenitors. Gaming was amongst Sir William's
follies--particularly that lowest specimen of the folly, the fights
of game-cocks. The tradition at Thrybergh is (for his name is not
quite forgotten) that the fine estate of Dennaby was staked and lost
on a single main. Sir William Reresby was not the only baronet who
disgraced his order at that period. In 1722, Sir Charles Burton was
tried at the Old Bailey for stealing a seal; pleaded poverty, but
was found guilty, and sentenced to transportation; which sentence was
afterward commuted for a milder punishment."

       *       *       *       *       *


MADRID AND THE SPANISH SENATE.

Gazpacho; or, Summer Months in Spain, is the title of a new book by W.
George Clark, published in London. Gazpacho, it seems, is the name of
a dish peculiar to Spain, but of universal use there, a sort of cold
soup, made up of familiars and handy things, as bread, pot-herbs, oil,
and water. "My Gazpacho," says the author, "has been prepared after
a similar receipt. I know not how it will please the more refined
and fastidious palates to which it will be submitted; indeed, amid
the multitude of dainties wherewith the table is loaded, it may well
remain untasted." It at least deserves a better fate than that. The
volume relates, in a pleasant, intelligent, and gossiping way, a
summer's ramble through Spain, describing with considerable force the
peculiarities of its people, and the romantic features by which it
is marked. The clever painter could not have better materials. The
party-colored costumes of the peasants, like dahlias at a Chiswick
show; the somber garments of the priests, the fine old churches, the
queer rambling houses, looking centuries old, the dull, gloomy streets
of Madrid, the life and activity of the market-place. Such are the
objects upon which the eye rests, and of which Mr. Clark was too
observant to neglect any. The following passages will give an idea of
the materials of which the Gazpacho is made up:--

MADRID.

"I left, I suppose, scarcely a street in Madrid which I did not
traverse, or a church which I did not enter. The result is hardly
worth the trouble. One street and church are exactly like another
street and church. In the latter, one always finds the same profusion
of wooden Christs, and Madonnas in real petticoats, on the walls, and
the same scanty sprinkling of worshipers, also in petticoats, on the
floor. The images outnumber the devotees here, as in all other Roman
Catholic countries (except Ireland, which is an exception to every
rule.) To a stranger, the markets are always the most interesting
haunts. A Spaniard, he or she, talks more while making the daily
bargain than in all the rest of the twenty-four hours. The fruit and
vegetable market was my especial lounge. There is such a fresh, sweet
smell of the country, and the groups throw themselves, or are thrown,
into such pretty tableaux after the Rubens and Snyders fashion. The
shambles one avoids instinctively, and fish-market there is none,
for Madrid is fifty hours' journey from the nearest sea, and the
Manzanares has every requisite for a fine trout stream, but water.

"Madrid has one peculiarity which conduces very much to the visitor's
comfort, namely, that there are very few inevitable 'sights' to be
gone through. The armory said to be the finest in the world; the
palace, ditto (which people who are addicted to upholstering may
go and see, if they don't mind breaking the tenth commandment); the
museum of natural history, where is the largest loadstone in active
operation between this and Medina; and the Academia, nearly complete
the list. Everybody should devote a morning to the last-named, were it
only for the sake of the Murillos. The famous picture of 'St. Isabel
giving alms to the sick' has been arrested at Madrid on its return
from Paris to Seville. As the Sevilians have instituted a 'process'
for its recovery, it is likely to stay there for some time longer.
'The Patrician's Dream' is quite cheering to look upon, so rich and
glowing it is. Shut your eyes to the semi-ludicrous effect of husband,
wife, and dog, in a decreasing series, like the three genders in
Lindley Murray, all asleep.

"The gardens of the queen, sunk in a deep hollow below the palace,
deserve a visit. The head-gardener, of course a Frenchman, struggles
gallantly against all kinds of difficulties of soil, climate, and lack
of water. By a series of ingenious artifices he has concocted a plot
of grass, some ten feet square, to the great astonishment of all
natives."

NARVAEZ IN THE SENATE.

"One day my kind friend Colonel S. took me to hear a debate in the
_Senado_, the Spanish Chamber of Peers, which holds its sittings in
the chapel of a suppressed convent, near the palace. By dint of paint,
gilding, and carpets, the room has been divested of its sanctified
aspect, and made to look like a handsome modern room. They have not
thought it necessary that a place in which a hundred gentlemen in
surtouts meet to discuss secular matters in this nineteenth century,
should be made to resemble a chapel of the fifteenth. Antiquity is
here represented in the person of two halberdiers, who stand to guard
the door, dressed in extravagant costume, like beefeaters in full
bloom. Rows of raised seats extend on each side of the room; in
the center, facing the beef-eaters, are the chair and desk of the
president, and on each side a little tribune, from which the clerks
read out documents from time to time. The spectators are accommodated
in niches round the walls. Each member speaks from his place, and the
voting is by ballot. First a footman hands round a tray of beans, and
then each advances, when his name is called, to a table in the center,
where he drops his bean into the box. The beans are then counted, and
the result proclaimed by the president. On the right of the chair, in
the front, is the bench assigned to the ministers; and there I had
the good luck to see Narvaez, otherwise called Duke of Valencia, and
a great many fine names besides, and, in reality, master of all the
Spains. His face wears a fixed expression of inflexible resolve, very
effective, and garnished with a fierce dyed mustache, and a somewhat
palpable wig to match. His style of dress was what, in an inferior
man, one would have called 'dandified.' An unexceptionable surtout,
opened to display a white waistcoat with sundry chains, and the
extremities terminated, respectively, in patent leather and primrose
kid. During the discussion he alternately fondled a neat riding-whip
and aired a snowy pocket-handkerchief. Those who know him give him
credit for good intentions and great courage, but do not expect
that he will ever set the Thames on fire, whatever he may do to
the Manzanares. He is a mixture, they say, of the chivalric and the
asinine: a kind of moral mule. His personal weakness is a wish to be
thought young, and hence he was naturally angry when Lord Palmerston
wanted to give him a 'wrinkle.' I saw, likewise, Mon, the Minister of
Finance, smiling complacently, like a shopkeeper on his customers;
and the venerable Castanos, Duke of Bailen, who, as he tottered in,
stooping under the weight of ninety years, was affectionately greeted
by Narvaez and others. On the whole, the debate seemed to be languid,
and to be listened to with little interest; but that is the general
fate of debates in July."

       *       *       *       *       *


THE KANASZ.

Of the Servian swineherd we have heard something of late, both in
history and romance; because this was the vocation of Kara George, the
Servian Liberator. In Hungary the swine-keeper does not seem to be so
respectable a person. Here is a sketch of him from Max Schlesinger's
new book on the Hungarian war:

"The Kanasz is a swineherd, whose occupation, everywhere unpoetical
and dirty, is doubly troublesome and dirty in Hungary. Large droves
of pigs migrate annually into the latter country from Serbia, where
they still live in a half-wild state. In Hungary they fatten in the
extensive oak-forests, and are sent to market in the large towns, even
to Vienna, and still further....

"It is a true enjoyment to live in these shady forests. The oak
attains a finer and more luxuriant growth on the Hungarian soil than
in any part of Germany. The hogs find food in profusion, and commonly
stuff themselves to such a degree that they lose all desire for roving
about: so that dog, master, and ass, lead a comparatively easy life,
and are left to the quiet enjoyment of nature. But the lot of the
Kanasz is a pitiable one when, at the close of summer, he has to
drive his swine to market. From Debreczin, nay even from the Serbian
frontier, he has to make a journey on foot more toilsome than was ever
undertaken by the most adventurous traveler, pacing slowly over the
interminable heaths in rain, storm, or under a burning sun, behind
his pigs, which drive into his face hot clouds of dust. Every now and
then a hog has stuffed itself so full as to be unable to stir from the
spot; and there it lies on the road without moving, whilst the whole
caravan is obliged to wait for half a day or longer, until the glutted
animal can get on his legs again; and when at length this feat is
accomplished, frequently his neighbor begins the same trick. There
is truly not a more toilsome business in the wide world than that of
a Kanasz.... The fokos is a hatchet, with a long handle, which the
Kanasz hurls with great dexterity. Whenever he desires to pick out
and slaughter one of his hogs, either for his own use or for sale,
the attempt would be attended with danger, in the half-savage state
of these animals, without such a weapon. The fokos here assists him;
which he flings with such force and precision, that the sharp iron
strikes exactly into the center of the frontal bone of the animal
he has marked out; the victim sinks on the earth without uttering a
sound, and the drove quietly proceeds on its way. That he can strike
down a man with equal precision at eighty to a hundred paces, is
proved by the gallows at the entrance of the forest--the three-legged
monument of his dexterity. During recent events, too, the surgeons
of the Austrian army will readily furnish the Kanasz and Csikos with
certificates of their ability and skill."

       *       *       *       *       *


THE "WILD HUSSAR" OF HUNGARY.

France, Russia, Prussia, and other countries, have introduced the
Hussars into their armies; but these soldiers are merely Russian,
French, and Prussian cavalry, dressed in the Hungarian laced jacket:
they want the spirit, the horse, and--the 'Magyar Isten.' For this
reason, the Hungarian Hussar will not acknowledge them as brethren;
and whenever he comes in contact with foreign Hussars, he lets them
feel in battle the full force of his contempt. A story is told, that
during a campaign against the French in the war with Napoleon, the
bivouacs of the Prussian and Hungarian Hussars were near to one
another. A Prussian came over to his neighbors in a familiar way with
a glass of wine, and drank it to the health of his 'brother hussar.'
But the Hungarian gently pushed the glass back, and stroked his beard,
saying, 'What brother?--no brother--I hussar--you jack-pudding.'

This expression is not to be mistaken for a brag. The Hungarian hussar
is no fanfaron like the French chasseur, but he is conscious of his
own powers, like a Grenadier of the Old Imperial Guard. The dolmany,
the csako, and the csizma, have grown to his body; they form his
holyday dress even when off duty--the national costume transferred
into the army; and as he is aware that this is not the case in other
countries, the foreign Hussar's dress is in his eyes a mere servant's
livery; and logically the man is not altogether wrong.

The Hussar, like the Magyars in general, is naturally good-tempered.
The finest man in the service, he is at the same time the most jovial
companion in the tavern, and will not sit by and empty his glass by
himself when a Bohemian or German comrade at his side has spent all
his money. There is only one biped under the sun who is in his eyes
more contemptible and hateful than any animal of marsh or forest. This
is the Banderial Hussar--that half-breed between Croat and Magyar,
that caricature of the true Hussar, who serves in the cavalry, as
the Croat in the infantry, of the Military Frontier. Never was an
Hungarian Hussar known to drink with a Banderial Hussar; never will he
sit at the same table: if he meets a snake he crushes it under foot--a
wolf he will hunt in the mountains--with a buffalo he will fight on
the open heath--with a miserable horse-stealer he will wrestle for a
halter; but as for the Banderial Hussar, he spits in his face wherever
he meets him.

It was at Hatvan, or at Tapjo-Bicske, that Hungarian and Banderial
Hussars were for the first time in this war--the first time perhaps
in the recollection of man--opposed to one another in battle. If looks
could slay, there would have been no need of a conflict, for the eyes
of the Magyars shot death and contempt at their unworthy adversaries.
The signal of attack sounded; and at the same instant, as if seized by
one common thought, the Hungarian Hussars clattered their heavy sabres
back into the scabbard, and with a fearful imprecation, such as no
German tongue could echo, charged weaponless and at full speed their
mimic caricatures whom fate had thrown in their way. The shock was so
irresistible, that the poor Croats could make no use of their sabers
against the furious onset of their unarmed foe: they were beaten down
from their saddles with the fist, and dragged off their horses by
their dolmanys; those who could save themselves fled. The Hussars
disdained to pursue them; but they complained to their Colonel at
having been opposed to 'such a rabble.'--_Schlesinger_.

       *       *       *       *       *



ORIGINAL POETRY.

       *       *       *       *       *

A HOROSCOPE.

BY ELIZABETH OAKES SMITH.

"Quorum pars magna fui."

  Oh! loveliest of the stars of Heaven,
    Thus did ye walk the crystal dome,
  When to the earth a child was given,
    Within a love-lit, northern home;
  Thus leading up the starry train,
    With aspect still benign,
  Ye move in your fair orbs again
    As on that birth long syne.

  Within her curtained room apart,
    The pale young mother faintly smiled;
  While warmly to a father's heart
    With love and prayer was pressed the child;
  And, softly to the lattice led,
    In whispers grandams show
  How those presaging stars have shed
    Around the child a glow.

  Born in the glowing summer prime,
    With planets thus conjoined in space
  As if they watched the natal time,
    And came to bless the infant face;
  Oh! there was gladness in that bower,
    And beauty in the sky;
  And Hope and Love foretold a dower
    Of brightest destiny.

  Unconscious child! that smiling lay
    Where love's fond eyes, and bright stars gleamed,
  How long and toilsome grew the way
    O'er which those brilliant orbs had beamed;
  How oft the faltering step drew back
    In terror of the path,
  When giddy steep, and wildering track
    Seemed fraught with only wrath!

  How oft recoiled the woman foot,
    With tears that shamed the path she trod.
  To find a canker at the root
    Of every hope, save that in God!
  And long, oh! long, and weary long,
    Ere she had learned to feel
  That Love, unselfish, deep, and strong,
    Repays its own wild zeal.

  Bright Hesperus! who on the eyes
    Of Milton poured thy brightest ray!
  Effulgent dweller of the skies,
    Take not from me thy light away--
  I look on thee, and I recall
    The dreams of by-gone years--
  O'er many a hope I lay the pall
    With its becoming tears;

  Yet turn to thee with thy full beam,
    And bless thee, Oh love-giving star!
  For life's sweet, sad, illusive dream
    Fruition, though in Heaven afar--
  "A silver lining" hath the cloud
    Through dark and stormiest night,
  And there are eyes to pierce the shroud
    And see the hidden light.

  Thou movest side by side with Jove,
    And, 'tis a quaint conceit, perchance--
  Thou seem'st in humid light to move
    As tears concealed thy burning glance--
  Such Virgil saw thee, when thine eyes,
    More lovely through their glow,[2]
  Won from the Thunderer of the skies
    An accent soft and low.

  And Mars is there with his red beams,
    Tumultuous, earnest, unsubdued--
  And silver-footed Dian gleams
    Faint as when she, on Latmos stood--
  God help the child! such night brought forth
    When Love to Power appeals,
  And strong-willed Mars at frozen north
    Beside Diana steals.

BROOKLYN, August, 1850.

[Footnote 2: "Lachrymis oculos effusa nitentes."]

       *       *       *       *       *

FRIENDSHIP.

  How oft the burdened heart would sink
    In fathomless despair
  But for an angel on the brink--
    In mercy standing there:
  An angel bright with heavenly light--
    And born of loftiest skies,
  Who shows her face to mortal race,
    In Friendship's holy guise.

  Upon the brink of dark despair,
    With smiling face she stands;
  And to the victim shrinking there,
    Outspreads her eager hands:
  In accents low that sweetly flow
    To his awakening ear,
  She woos him back--his deathward track.
    Toward Hope's effulgent sphere.

  Sweet Friendship! let me daily give
    Thanks to my God for thee!
  Without thy smiles t'were death to live,
    And joy to cease to be:
  Oh, bitterest drop in woe's full cup--
    To have no friend in need!
  To struggle on, with grief alone--
    Were agony indeed!

August. WILLIAM C. RICHARDS.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE BALANCE OF LIFE.

  All daring sympathy--clear-sighted love--
    Is, from its source, a ray of endless bliss;
  Self has no place in the pure world above,
    Its shadows vanish in the strife of this.

  The toil--the tumult--the sharp struggle o'er,--
    The casket breaks;--men say, "A martyr dies!"
  The death--the martyrdom--has past before:
    The soul, transfigured, finds its native skies.

  The good--the ill--we vainly strive to weigh
    With Reason's scales, hung in the mists of Time:
  Yet child-like Faith the balance doth survey,
    Held high in ether, by a hand sublime.

May, 1850. HERMA.

       *       *       *       *       *



SCIENCE.

       *       *       *       *       *

The SPANISH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES have announced the following subject
for competition: "An experimental investigation and explanation of
the theory of nitrification, the causes which most influence the
production of this phenomenon, and the means most conducive in Spain
to natural nitrification." The prize, to be awarded in May 1851, is to
be a gold medal and 6000 copper reals--about seventy pounds sterling;
and a second similar medal will be given to the second best paper. The
papers, written in Spanish or Latin, are to be sent in before the 1st
May, with, as usual, the author's name under seal.

       *       *       *       *       *

IMPROVEMENTS IN THE TELEGRAPH.--The _Presse_ gives some account of
experiments made at the house of M. de Girardin, in Paris, with a
new telegraphic dictionary, the invention of M. Gonon. Dispatches
in French, English, Portuguese, Russian, and Latin, including proper
names of men and places, and also figures, were transmitted and
translated, says this account, with a rapidity and fidelity alike
marvelous, by an officer who knew nothing of any one of the languages
used except his own. Dots, commas, accents, and breaks were all in
their places. This dictionary of M. Gonon is applicable alike to
electric and aerial telegraphy, to transmissions by night and by day,
to maritime and to military telegraphing. The same paper speaks of
the great interest excited in the European capitals by the approaching
experiment of submarine telegraphic communication between England
and France. The wires, it says, on the English side are deposited
and ready for laying down. It is probable that in a very few days the
experiment will be complete.

       *       *       *       *       *



AUTHORS AND BOOKS.

       *       *       *       *       *

NEW ORLEANS AS SEEN BY A GERMAN PRINCE is very naturally not quite
the same city as in the opinion of her own pleasure-loving citizens,
nor can the republic whose South-western metropolis is condemned with
the rigidity of a merciless judge and the jaundice of an unfriendly
traveler, hope to get clear of censure from the same super-royal pen.
It seems that his serenest highness Major-General Duke Paul William,
of Wirtemburg, is traveling in America, and that the _Ausland_, a
weekly paper, of Stuttgart, is from time to time favored with the
results of his experience on the way. From some recent portions of his
correspondence _The International_ translates the subjoined _morceau_,
which, however, despite its great exaggeration, is not altogether
devoid of truth: "It is not necessary here to mention how much
New Orleans has altered, increased, and deteriorated, for it is an
established thing that cities which grow to such gigantic proportions
gain nothing in respect to the morals of their inhabitants. Here
drunkenness and gambling, two vices of which the Americans were
ignorant in the time of the founders of their great federation,
have taken very deep root. The decrease of the inflexible spirit of
religion, and the increase of vice and luxury, gnaw the powerful tree,
and are fearful enemies, which cannot be resisted by a structure that
might resist with scorn all foreign foes, and would have played a
mighty part in the world's history had the spirit of Washington and
Franklin remained with it. The annexation of Texas, the war with
Mexico, and now the gold of California, have transformed the United
States. A people which makes conquests, loses inward power in
proportion to the aggrandizement of its volume, and the increase of
its external enemies."

       *       *       *       *       *

AN ARABIAN NEWSPAPER, with the title _Mobacher_. has lately been
commenced in Algiers, at the expense of the French Government. It
is edited in the cabinet of the Governor-General, issued weekly, and
lithographed, as less expensive than printing, which in Arabic types
would be quite costly. It contains political news from Europe and
Africa, the latest advices from Constantinople, all those laws and
decrees of the Government which in any way concern the Arabs, and
descriptions of such new discoveries and inventions as can be made
intelligible to the readers for whom it is designed. A thousand copies
are printed weekly and sent to the chiefs and headmen of all the
tribes that are under French rule or influence. At first it was not
read much, but now the vanity of the Arabs has been excited by it as a
mark of special attention from the Governor-General, so that they take
it as an honor, and a degree of curiosity has been excited to obtain
news from other parts of the world.

Within a short time, also, an additional importance has been given to
the paper by the publication in it of the amount of the tribute which
each tribe is required to pay to France. Formerly this was known only
to the chiefs who would accordingly exact from their people whatever
amount they deemed best, under the pretense that it was for the
government, while the greater part was retained by themselves. These
tribes have profited greatly by the French conquest; it is estimated
that of the eighty millions of francs which the army in Algeria costs
yearly, from twenty to twenty-five millions remain in the hands of the
Arabs. The Arab sells his corn, dates, horses, sheep, the baskets he
weaves, &c., to the European population, but never buys anything from
them in turn, except it be arms and powder. The rest of his money he
carries home and buries where no one knows but himself, so that, if
he dies suddenly, it is lost. Only the chiefs of the tribe know how to
extort anything of these hidden sums. According to the most moderate
estimates the tribes must have from two to three hundred millions
of French money. The gains which the chiefs draw from this wealth is
considerable; some of them have from a hundred to a hundred and fifty
thousand francs income. They are beginning to build large houses,
and cultivate gardens around them, a disposition which the government
favors, because it is easier to keep tribes in order that are
settled and have dwellings to lose which they cannot take with them.
The publication of the tribute in the _Mobacher_, is, under these
circumstances, of great value for the Arabs, because it enables them,
as it were, to supervise their chiefs, and to refuse to pay exorbitant
taxes laid under pretense of a high tribute. This has increased the
respect generally felt for the paper, though it has not rendered it
more a favorite with the chiefs. The power of these leaders is very
great in the various tribes, having been in most cases hereditary, at
least since the tenth century, and although not always inherited in
direct line, the tribes have never suffered it to pass into the hands
of new families. Hitherto nothing has diminished it; the war rather
gave it new strength, and it is only by means of the chiefs that the
French can keep Algiers quiet. It would be a remarkable fact if the
dissolving power of publicity through the press should be manifested
here as elsewhere, and begin the overthrow of the long standing
influence exercised by the great Arabian families.

       *       *       *       *       *

MRS. M. ST. LEON LOUD, of Philadelphia, has in the press of Ticknor,
Reed & Fields, of Boston, a collection of her poems, entitled,
"Wayside Flowers." Mrs. Loud is a writer of much grace and elegance,
and occasionally of a rich and delicate fancy. The late Mr. Poe was
accustomed to praise her works very highly, and was to have edited
this edition of them.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE LITERATURE OF SOCIALISM occupies the press in France. The subject
is warmly debated, _pro_ and _con_. In a pamphlet called _Despotisme
ou Socialisme_, M. Pompery rapidly sketches the alternative which, he
says, lies open to those who rise against despotism. There are but two
religious doctrines according to him: the one absolutist, represented
by De Maistre, and the Catholic school, which is, logically enough,
desirous of reestablishing the Inquisition; the other professed by all
the illustrious teachers of mankind, by Pythagoras, Jesus, Socrates,
Pascal, &c., which, believing in the goodness of the Creator and the
perfectibility of man, endeavors to found upon earth the reign of
justice, fraternity, and equality. A more important work on Socialism
is that of Dr. Guepin, of Nantes, _Philosophie du Socialisme_; and M.
Lecouturier announces a _Science du Socialisme_.

       *       *       *       *       *

MR. G.P.R. JAMES has taken a cottage at Jamaica, Long Island, and
is domiciliated as an American--we hope for a long time. He has made
troops of friends since his arrival here, and is likely to be as
popular in society as he has long been in literature. We are sure
we communicate a very pleasing fact when we state that it is his
intention to give in two or three of our principal cities, during the
autumn and fall, a series of lectures--probably upon the chivalric
ages, with which no one is more profoundly familiar, and of which
no one can discourse more wisely or agreeably. His abilities, his
reputation, and the almost universal acquaintance with his works,
insure for him the largest success. We are indebted to no other living
author for so much enjoyment, and by his proposed lectures he will not
only add to our obligations, but furnish an opportunity to repair
in some degree the wrong he has suffered from the imperfection and
injustice of our copyright system.

       *       *       *       *       *

"THE LIFE, CHARACTER, AND GENIUS OF EBENEZER ELLIOTT," is a volume
by January Searle, author of _Leaves from Sherwood Forest_, &c., who
knew the corn-law rhymer well, and has been enabled to give very
characteristic sketches, original descriptions, correspondence, &c.
There are in it many judiciously selected specimens of Elliott's
poems, prose productions, and lectures. Mr. Searle observes of him,
that "he was cradled into poetry by human wrong and misery; and was
emphatically the bard of poverty--singing of the poor man's loves and
sorrows, and denouncing his oppressors." Again: "He has one central
idea--terrible and awful in its aspect, although beautiful and
beneficent in spirit--before which he tries all causes, and men, and
things. It is the Eternal Idea of Right; his synonyme of God. And this
idea is perpetually present in his mind, pervades all his thoughts,
will not be shuffled nor cheated, but demands a full satisfaction from
all violators of it."

       *       *       *       *       *

THE LATE MRS. OSGOOD was in a very remarkable degree respected and
beloved by those who were admitted to her acquaintance. Without envy
or jealousy, or any of the immoralities of the intellect which most
commonly beset writers of her sex, she occasioned no enmities and was
a party to none, but was regarded, especially by the literary women
of this country, with a feeling of tenderness and devotion probably
unparalleled in the annals of literature or of society. Immediately
after her death, therefore, a desire was manifested to illustrate
the common regard for her by some suitable testimonial, and upon
consultation, it was decided to publish a splendid souvenir, to
consist of the gratuitous contributions of her friends, and with the
profits accruing from its sale to erect a monument to her memory in
the cemetery of Mount Auburn. This gift book, edited by Mrs. Osgood's
most intimate friend, Mary E. Hewitt, will be published by Mr. Putnam,
on the first of October, under the title of _The Cairn_, and it will
contain original articles by George Aubrey, Lord Bishop of Jamaica:
the Right Rev. George W. Doane, the Right Rev. Alonzo Potter, the
Hon. R.H. Walworth, the Hon. J. Leander Starr, the Rev. C.S. Henry,
D.D., G.P.R. James, Esq., N.P. Willis, Esq., W. Gilmore Simms, Esq.,
Bayard Taylor, Esq., J.H. Boker, Esq., Alfred B. Street, Esq., R.
H. Stoddard, Esq., Miss Fredrika Bremer, Mrs. Sigourney, Mrs. Oakes
Smith, Mrs. Embury, Mrs. Lewis, Mrs. Neal, Mrs. Willard, Mrs. Whitman,
Miss Lynch, Miss Hunter, Miss Cheesebro', and indeed nearly all the
writers of her sex who have attained any eminence in our literary
world. The volume will be illustrated with nine engravings on steel,
by Cheney and other eminent artists.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE REV. WALTER COLTON has just published through A.S. Barnes & Co.
"Three Years in California," a journal of experiences and observations
in the gold region, from the period when it first attracted the
attention of the Atlantic cities. Mr. Colton was some time alcade
of Monterey, and he had in every way abundant opportunity to acquire
whatever facts are deserving of preservation in history. His "Ship
and Shore," "Constantinople and Athens," "Deck and Port," and other
works, have illustrated his genial temper, shrewdness, and skill in
description and character writing; and this book will increase his
reputation for these qualities. It contains portraits of Capt. Sutter,
Col. Fremont, Mr. Gwin, Mr. Wright, Mr. Larkin, and Mr. Snyder, a map
of the valley of the Sacramento, and several other engravings, very
spirited in design and execution.

       *       *       *       *       *

MR. GEORGE STEPHENS, author of the "_Manuscripts of Erdely_," has
been struck by ill health and reduced to poverty, and an amateur play
has been prepared for his benefit at the Soho Theater. He wrote "The
Vampire," "Montezuma," and "Martinuzzi."

       *       *       *       *       *

The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, conducted by Mr. Lester,
continues with every number to increase in interest. The work is
designed to embrace folio portraits, engraved by Davignon, from
daguerreotypes by Brady, of twenty-four of the most eminent American
citizens who have lived since the time of Washington. The portraits
thus far have been admirable for truthfulness and artistic effect. It
may be said that the _only_ published pictures we have, deserving to
be called portraits, of the historian Prescott, or Mr. Calhoun, or
Colonel Fremont, are in this Gallery. The great artist, naturalist,
and man of letters, Audubon, is reflected here as he appears at the
close of the battle, receiving the reverence of nations and ages.
In the biographical department Mr. Lester has evinced very eminent
abilities for this kind of writing. He seizes the prominent events
of history and the strong points of character, and presents them
with such force and fullness, and happy combination, as to make the
letter-press as interesting and valuable as the engraved portion
of the work. We are pleased to learn that the Gallery is remarkably
successful. No publication of equal splendor and expensiveness has
ever before been so well received in this country. The cost of it
is but one dollar per number, or twenty dollars for the series of
twenty-four numbers. It is now half completed.

       *       *       *       *       *

M. Max Schlesinger, author of "The War in Hungary, in 1848-9,"--a
work which, from what we read of it in the foreign journals, is much
the most striking and attractive of all that have appeared upon its
subject in English,--is described in the _Athenæum_, as by birth
a Hungarian, by the accidents of fortune a German. For some time a
resident in Prague, and more recently settled in Berlin, he has had
excellent opportunities of seeing the men and studying the questions
connected both in the literary and political sense with the present
movement of ideas and races in Eastern Europe. His acquaintance
with the aspects of nature in his native land--his knowledge of the
peculiar character of its inhabitants, their manners, modes of thought
and habits of life--his familiarity with past history--his right
conception of the leading men in the recent struggle--are all vouched
for as "essentially accurate" by no less an authority than Count
Pulszky. It would be an injustice merely to say that M. Schlesinger
has given in an original and picturesque way a general view of the
course of events in the late war, more complete and connected than is
afforded in any account hitherto presented to the public. He has done
more: he has enabled the German and English reader to understand the
miracle of a nation of four or five millions of men rising up at the
command of a great statesman, and doing successful battle with the
elaborately organized power of a first-class European state, shaking
it to its very foundations, and contending, not without hope,
against two mighty military empires,--until the treachery from within
paralyzed its power of resistance.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dr. Mayo's new novel, "The Berber, or the Mountaineer of the Atlas,"
published by Putnam, promises to be scarcely less popular than his
"Kaloolah." The _Evening Post_ says of it: "Kaloolah was a sprightly
narrative of the wanderings of a Yankee, who seemed to combine in
his person the characteristics of Robinson Crusoe with those of Baron
Munchausen; but the Berber professes to be nothing more than a novel;
or, as the author says in his preface, his principal object has been
to tell an agreeable story in an agreeable way. In doing so, however,
an eye has been had to the illustration of Moorish manners, customs,
history, and geography; to the exemplification of Moorish life as
it actually is in Barbary in the present day, and not as it usually
appears in the vague and poetic glamour of the common Moorish romance.
It has also been an object to introduce to the acquaintance of the
reader a people who have played a most important part in the world's
history, but of whom very few educated people know anything more than
the name. As Dr. Mayo has traveled extensively over the regions he
describes, we presume that his descriptions may be taken as true. His
account of the Berbers, a tribe of ancient Asiatic origin, who inhabit
a range of the Atlas, and who live a semi-savage life like the Arabs,
is minute, and to the intelligent reader quite as interesting as the
more narrative parts of the work. It is, perhaps, the best evidence of
the merits of the book, that the whole first edition was exhausted by
orders from the country before the first number had appeared in the
city."

       *       *       *       *       *

Col. Forbes, who was in Italy during the revolution, and many years
previous, and who was himself, both in a military and civic capacity,
one of the actors in that event, the _Evening Post_ informs us, is
about to give public lectures on the subject of Italy in the various
cities and towns of the United States. Col. Forbes was intimately
connected with the revolutionary chiefs during the brief existence
of the Roman Republic, and was directly and confidently employed by
Mazzini. His knowledge of the country, its people, its politics, and
its recent history, will supply him with materials for making his
lectures highly interesting and instructive.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Gem of the Western World, edited by Mrs. Hewitt, and published by
Cornish & Co., Fulton street, is a very beautiful gift-book, and in
its literary character is deserving of a place with the most splendid
and; tasteful annuals of the season. Mrs. Hewitt's own contributions
to it embrace some of her finest compositions, and are of course among
its most brilliant contents.

       *       *       *       *       *

FRENCH PERIODICALS.--A Parisian correspondent of the London _Literary
Gazette_ observes, that if we exclude the _Revue des Deux Mondes_--a,
sort of cross between the English _Quarterly_ and the monthlies,--if
we exclude also a few dry scientific periodicals, and one or two
theatrical or musical newspapers, we shall seek in vain for any
_Quarterly_, or _Blackwood_, or _Art Union_, or _Literary Gazette_;
and that even the periodicals and journals which make the nearest
approach to the weekly, monthly, or quarterly publications of England,
are either wretched compilations, or abominably ill-written and
ill-printed. The _feuilleton_ system of the newspapers is no doubt
the principal cause of the periodical literature being in such
an extremely low condition. But though literary and scientific
periodicals be, generally speaking, vile in quality, they can at least
boast of quantity. There are, it seems, not fewer than 300 of one
kind or another published in Paris alone. Among them are 44 devoted
to medicine, chemistry, natural science, &c.; 42, trade, commerce,
railways, advertisements; 34, fashions; 30, law; 22, administration,
public works, roads, bridges, mines; 19, archæology, history,
biography, geography, numismatics; 19, public instruction and
education; 15, agriculture and horticulture; 8, bibliography and
typography; 10, army and navy; 7, literary; the rest theatrical,
musical, or of a character too hybrid to be classified.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE ILLUSTRATED DOMESTIC BIBLE, edited by the Rev. Ingram Cobbin,
seems to us decidedly the best family Bible ever offered to the trade
in this country. It is printed with remarkable correctness and beauty;
illustrated with a very large number of maps and engravings on wood;
and its notes, written with much condensation and perspicuity, are
such as are necessary for the understanding of the text. Indeed, all
that is added to the letter of the Bible is legitimate and necessary
_illustration_. It is being published in a series of twenty-five
numbers, at twenty-five cents each, by S. Hueston, publisher of _The
Knickerbocker_, Nassau-street.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE VIENNA UNIVERSITY, long one of the best in Europe, has not been
reopened since the insurrection of November, 1848, its principal
edifice having been occupied as barracks for a regiment of soldiers.
It is now proposed to restore it to its proper use, but great
difficulty is experienced in finding professors. The old ones
are scattered, some as exiles in foreign countries, on account of
democratic opinions,--some in prison for the same reason, others
employed elsewhere. Wackernagel, the eminent professor of the German
Language and Literature at Basle, Switzerland, tempted by liberal
offers, had promised to come to Vienna, and lend the aid of his
reputation and talents to the restoration of the University, but being
lately at Milan, on a wedding tour, as he and his wife were passing
through the _Piazza d'Armi_, their ears were saluted by cries of
pain, which on inquiry they found to proceed from sundry rebellious
Italians, of both sexes, who were receiving each from twenty-five to
fifty blows of the military baton, or cane, employed by the Austrians
in flogging soldiers. Madame Wackernagel at once declared that she
would never willingly inhabit a country whose laws and habits suffered
women to be so brutally punished for patriotism, and her husband could
only agree with her. He has accordingly broken off the engagement, and
the Government cannot hope to supply his place.

       *       *       *       *       *

HINCKS ON LITERARY LARCENY.--A Canadian friend sends us the following
extract from a speech by Francis Hincks, a leading member of the
Canadian Ministry, touching the International Copyright question:

    "The American publisher steals the works of British authors,
    because he is immoral enough to do it, because he is scoundrel
    enough, and the nation is scoundrel enough to permit it.
    (Ironical cheers.) Yes, because the nation is scoundrel enough
    to permit it."

Our unknown friend who sends us this wants us to give Hincks a
thorough roasting for it, and evidently expects every hair on our head
to bristle with indignation. Now we have not the least objection to
roasting the Minister aforesaid, and will do it when a fair chance
presents itself, but we don't consider this such a chance. In fact,
though we think Francis has drawn rather a strong draught from "the
well of English undefiled," yet essentially we regard his observations
above quoted as rather more than half right. It _is_ rascally to steal
a man's book, print it, sell it, read it, and refuse him any pay for
the labor of writing it; and we don't see that his being an Englishman
makes any material difference. There may be a cheaper way to get the
proceeds of another man's toil than by paying for it, but we don't
think there is any other strictly honest way.--_Tribune_.

       *       *       *       *       *

HERR SCHUMANN's opera, "Généviève," was produced at Leipsic on the
28th ultimo. "This work," says the _Gazette Musicale_, "after having
been much recommended beforehand, does not seem to have satisfied
public expectation, being concert music, without any dramatic force."
For the verdict which will finally be passed on "Généviève" every
one must be curious who has at all followed the journals of Young
Germany in the recent crusades which they nave made, not so much to
establish Schumann as a great composer, as to prove him greater than
Mendelssohn.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE GRAND LITERARY TRADE SALES are now in progress in New York: and
the catalogues of the rival houses are the largest ever printed.
Cooley & Keese at their splendid hall in Broadway present this year a
richer and more extensive series of invoices than has ever before been
sold in America.

       *       *       *       *       *



THE FINE ARTS.

       *       *       *       *       *

Bavaria is a sort of artists' paradise, both the late King Louis and
the present Maximilian being determined to leave behind them the glory
of munificent patrons of art. In this they have so far succeeded, that
Munich, which before their time was by no means among German cities
the most worthy a traveler's attention, may now dispute the palm even
with Dresden, notwithstanding the unrivaled gallery of paintings,
possessed by the latter. For students of modern art, and especially
of the German schools, Munich is incomparable, while its collection of
ancient sculptures cannot be equaled out of Italy. We now learn that
King Maximilian has conceived the plan of a grand series of pictures
to comprehend the prominent epochs and events of history. The most
eminent German and foreign artists are to be invited to assist in
carrying out this immense undertaking; so that thus the series will
not only represent the great experiences of mankind, but will, it is
hoped, contain specimens of all the great schools of modern painting.

       *       *       *       *       *

An exhibition of indisputable works by the old painters is now open
at Valenciennes, in France. It consists of pictures belonging to the
family of the Belgian general Rottiers. They are for sale, either
single or together. Among them is a St. Denis, bearing his Head, by
Rubens, said to have been painted by order of Pope Urban VIII. It was
deposited in the Convent of the _Annunciades_, at Antioch; in 1747,
Louis XV. offered 100,000 francs for it, but was refused, the convent
having no right to dispose of it. Afterward, on the suppression
of the convent, it fell into the hands of the family to which it
now belongs. The exhibition also contains a landscape by Salvator
Rosa, representing a scene in the Appenines; a Magdalen kneeling
in a Cavern, by Kneller; two Allegories, by Giulio Romano; several
portraits by Rubens and Van Dyke, besides other works of less value.

       *       *       *       *       *

Darley's "Sleepy Hollow."--The London Art Journal, for July, has the
following notice of Mr. Darley's illustrations of Irving's "Legends of
Sleepy Hollow," published by the _American Art Union_: "The charmingly
quaint original legend told with so much quiet humor by Washington
Irving, is here illustrated by a native artist in a congenial spirit,
and his scenes realized in a manner which must give its author
satisfaction, and redound to the credit of the designer. We have
before noticed the great ability exhibited by Mr. Darley for the mode
of illustration he adopts, which we may add is that rendered famous
by Retzsh. The series we are now noticing are quite as meritorious as
that designed by the same artist to Rip Van Winkle; but the subject
matter is not equally capable of such broad contrasts in drollery
as that legend presents. Nevertheless, Mr. Darley has executed his
task in the truest appreciation of his author; and his hero is the
veritable Ichabod Crane of Irving; his love-making scene with "the
peerless daughter of Van Tassel" is exquisite in its quiet humor;
so also is the merry-making in the Dutch Farmer's home. Altogether,
the series is extremely good, and does the greatest credit to the
designer. American literature thus illustrated by American artists
cannot fail to achieve honor to that country in the old world as well
as the new. We believe Mr. Darley, in his line, to be as great as any
American artist whose works have fallen under our notice."

       *       *       *       *       *

Chaucer's Monument.--The _Athenæum_ says, "One of the objections
formerly urged against taking steps to restore the perishing memorial
of the Father of English Poetry in Poet's Corner was, that it was not
really his tomb, but a monument erected to do honor to his memory a
century and a half after his death. An examination, however, of the
tomb itself, by competent authorities, has proved this objection to
be unfounded--inasmuch as there can exist no doubt, we hear, from
the difference of workmanship, material, &c., that the altar tomb is
the original tomb of Geoffrey Chaucer,--and that instead of Nicholas
Brigham having erected an entirely new monument, he only added to that
which then existed the overhanging canopy, &c. So that the sympathy of
Chaucer's admirers is now invited to the restoration of what till now
was really not known to exist--_the original tomb_ of the Poet--as
well as to the additions made to it by the affectionate remembrance of
Nicholas Brigham."

       *       *       *       *       *

Lessing's new picture.--A letter from Düsseldorf under date of
9th July, in the _Courier and Enquirer_, says that Lessing's great
painting, "The Martyrdom of Huss," Sad just been finished and had been
exhibited for the last few days at the Academy of Fine Arts, where
it was visited by thousands. When it became known that orders for its
immediate shipment had arrived from New York, the desire to obtain a
last view of this truly great work became so intense that it was found
necessary to put the Police in requisition to keep back the throng,
and the gates of the Academy had to be closed. It causes general
regret that it is to be sent out of the country. The _Cologne Gazette_
calls this picture the most sublime production of the great artist,
and expresses the conviction that a speedy fortune might be realized
by its exhibition in Europe.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mr. George Flagg has just completed a portrait of Mrs. E. Oakes Smith,
which will be ranked among the first productions of his pencil. We
know of scarce a picture as beautiful or a portrait as truthful. It is
to be engraved, we believe, by Cheney.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mlle. Rachel.--The wonderful accuracy of the death-scene in "Adrienne
Lecouvreur" has been the object of universal praise in London, not
merely from the thrilled and thralled public, but from men of art
and science. A physician, it is said, was complimenting Mademoiselle
on her amazing truth to the symptoms of mortal agony: "You must have
studied death closely," said he. "Yes, I have," was the quiet reply;
"my maid's. I went up to her--I stayed with her--she recommended her
mother to me!--I was studying my part." This is probably merely one
of those cynical stories with which the sharp people of Paris love
to environ and encircle every one who stands a dangerous chance of
becoming too popular. But smaller artists than Mademoiselle Rachel
have sometimes had recourse to curious expedients to give their
dramatic personations a show at reality. The French _prima donna_, who
not very long ago appeared in M. Clapisson's poor opera, "Jeanne la
Folle," is said to have shut herself up in the _Salpêtrière_, by way
of studying _her_ part, and to have been rewarded for her zealous
curiosity by receiving a basin of scalding soup dashed in her face by
one of the poor miserable objects of her examination.

       *       *       *       *       *

A Frankfort journal states that the colossal statue of Bavaria, by
SCHWANTHALER, which is to be placed on the hill of Seudling, surpasses
in its gigantic proportions all the works of the moderns. It will have
to be removed in pieces from the foundry where it is cast to its place
of destination,--and each piece will require sixteen horses to draw
it. The great toes are each half a metre in length. In the head two
persons could dance a polka very conveniently,--while the nose might
lodge the musician. The thickness of the robe--which forms a rich
drapery descending to the ankles--is about six inches, and its
circumference at the bottom about two hundred metres. The Crown
of Victory which the figure holds in her hands weighs one hundred
quintals (a quintal is a hundred-weight).

       *       *       *       *       *

The death of SIR ROBERT PEEL, says the _Literary Gazette_, has
awakened a busy competing spirit for the production of articles
relating to him, and especially in connection with Literature and the
Arta. In the one, Memoirs, Speeches, Recollections, Anecdotes, &c.,
have been abundantly supplied; and in the other, every printshop
window in London displays its Peels of every style and every degree,
but mostly very indifferent, absolutely bad, or utter caricature.

       *       *       *       *       *

Goupil, Vibert & Co. have published a series of portraits of eminent
Americans which is deserving of the largest approval and sale.
The head of Mr. Bryant is the best ever published of that poet; it
presents his fine features and striking phrenology with great force
and with pleasing as well as just effect. A portrait of Mr. Willis
is wonderfully truthful, in detail, and is in an eminent degree
characteristic. The admirers of that author who have not seen him will
find in it their ideal, and all his acquaintances will see in it as
distinctly the real man who sits in the congress of editors as the
representative of the polite world. The head of the artist Mount,
after Elliott, is not by any means less successful. Among the other
portraits are those of Gen. Scott, President Fillmore, Robert Fulton,
J.Q. Adams, Mr. Clay, Mr. Webster, and President Taylor. They are all
on imperial sheets, and are sold at $1 each.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Paris papers tell a story of a young actor, who finding no
engagement in that city, came to America to try his fortune. From
New Orleans he went to California, was lucky as a digger, embarked
in business and got immensely rich. He is now building in the Champs
Elysées a magnificent hotel for his mother. All actors are not so
fortunate.

       *       *       *       *       *

Expected arrivals from Nineveh.--The Great Bull, and upward of one
hundred tons of sculpture, excavated by Dr. Layard, are now on their
way to England, and may be expected in the course of September. In
addition-to the Elgin, Phigalian, Lycian, and Boodroun marbles, the
British Museum will soon be enriched with a magnificent series of
Assyrian sculptures.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mr. Burt has nearly finished the "Anne Page and Slender" of Leslie,
which is to be the annual engraving of the Art Union. It will be an
admirable picture, but we cannot but regret that the managers selected
for this purpose a work so familiar.

       *       *       *       *       *

The French Minister of the Interior has decided that marble busts of
M. Gay-Lussac and of M. Blainville shall be executed at the expense of
the government, and placed in the Institute.

       *       *       *       *       *


Mr. Powell, who is living in Paris, engaged upon his picture for the
capital, has been in ill health nearly all the summer.

       *       *       *       *       *



RECENT DEATHS.

       *       *       *       *       *

The French papers report the death, at Paris, of M. MORA, the Mexican
Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of St. James. M. Mora was
the author of a History of Mexico and its Revolutions since the
establishment of its independence, and editor-in-chief of several
journals in Mexico.

       *       *       *       *       *

MR. B. SIMMONS, an amiable and accomplished writer, whose name will
be recollected as that of a frequent contributor of lyrical poems of
a high order to _Blackwood's Magazine_, and to several of the Annuals,
died in London on the 20th of July.

       *       *       *       *       *


[FROM GRAHAM'S MAGAZINE.]

ON A PORTRAIT OF CROMWELL.

BY JAMES T. FIELD.

  "Paint me as I am," said Cromwell,
    Rough with age, and gashed with wars--
  "Show my visage as you find it--
    Less than truth my soul abhors!"

  This was he whose mustering phalanx
    Swept the foe at Marston Moor;
  This was he whose arm uplifted
    From the dust the fainting poor.

  God had made his face uncomely--
    "Paint me as I am," he said.
  So he lives upon the canvas
    Whom they chronicled as _dead_!

  Simple justice he requested
    At the artist's glowing hands,
  "Simple justice!" from his ashes
    Cries a voice that still commands.

  And, behold! the page of History,
    Centuries dark with Cromwell's name,
  Shines to-day with thrilling luster
    From the light of Cromwell's fame!

       *       *       *       *       *


[FROM THE EXAMINER.]

WORDSWORTH'S POSTHUMOUS POEM.[3]

This is a voice that speaks to us across a gulf of nearly fifty years.
A few months ago Wordsworth was taken from us at the ripe age of
fourscore, yet here we have him addressing the public, as for the
first time, with all the fervor, the unworn freshness, the hopeful
confidence of thirty. We are carried back to the period when
Coleridge, Byron, Scott, Rogers, and Moore were in their youthful
prime. We live again in the stirring days when the poets who divided
public attention and interest with the Fabian struggle in Portugal and
Spain, with the wild and terrible events of the Russian campaign, with
the uprising of the Teutonic nations and the overthrow of Napoleon,
were in a manner but commencing their cycle of songs. This is to
renew, to antedate, the youth of a majority of the living generation.
But only those whose memory still carries them so far back, can feel
within them any reflex of that eager excitement with which the news of
battles fought and won, or mailcoach copies of some new work of Scott,
or Byron, or the _Edinburgh Review_, were looked for and received in
those already old days.

[Footnote 3: The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind; an
Autobiographical Poem. By William Wordsworth. London, Moxon. [New
York, Appletons.]]

We need not remind the readers of the _Excursion_ that when Wordsworth
was enabled by the generous enthusiasm of Raisley Calvert to retire
with a slender independence to his native mountains, there to devote
himself exclusively to his art, his first step was to review and
record in verse the origin and progress of his own powers, as far
as he was acquainted with them. This was at once an exercise in
versification, and a test for the kind of poetry for which he was
by temperament fitted. The result was a determination to compose a
philosophical poem containing views of man, of nature, and of society.
This, ambitious conception has been doomed to share the fate of so
many other colossal undertakings. Of the three parts of his _Recluse_,
thus planned, only the second, (the _Excursion_, published in 1814,)
has been completed. Of the other two there exists only the first book
of the first, and the plan of the third. The _Recluse_ will remain in
fragmentary greatness, a poetical Cathedral of Cologne.

Matters standing thus, it has not been without a melancholy sense of
the uncertainty of human projects, and of the contrast between the
sanguine enterprise and its silent evaporation (so often the "history
of an individual mind"), that we have perused this _Prelude_ which no
completed strain was destined to follow. Yet in the poem itself there
is nothing to inspire depression. It is animated throughout with the
hopeful confidence in the poet's own powers, so natural to the time
of life at which it was composed; it evinces a power and soar of
imagination unsurpassed in any of his writings; and its images and
incidents have a freshness and distinctness which they not seldom
lost, when they came to be elaborated, as many of them were, in his
minor poems of a later date.

The _Prelude_, as the title-page indicates, is a poetical
autobiography, commencing with the earliest reminiscences of the
author, and continued to the time at which it was composed. We are
told that it was begun in 1799 and completed, in 1805. It consists
of fourteen books. Two are devoted to the infancy and school-time of
the poet; four to the period of his University life; two to a brief
residence in London immediately subsequent to his leaving Cambridge,
and a retrospect of the progress his mind had then made; and three
to a residence in France, chiefly in the Loire, but partly in Paris,
during the stormy period of Louis the Sixteenth's flight and capture,
and the fierce contest between the Girondins and Robespierre. Five
books are then occupied with an analysis of the internal struggle
occasioned by the contradictory influences of rural and secluded
nature in boyhood, and of society when the young man first mingles
with the world. The surcease of the strife is recorded in the
fourteenth book, entitled "Conclusion."

The poem is addressed to Coleridge; and apart from its poetical
merits, is interesting as at once a counterpart and a supplement to
that author's philosophical and beautiful criticism of the _Lyrical
Ballads_ in his _Biographia Literaria_. It completes the explanation,
there given, of the peculiar constitution of Wordsworth's mind, and of
his poetical theory. It confirms and justifies our opinion that that
theory was essentially partial and erroneous; but at the same time it
establishes the fact that Wordsworth was a true and a great poet in
despite of his theory.

The great defect of Wordsworth, in our judgment, was want of sympathy
with and knowledge of men. From his birth till his entry at college,
he lived in a region where he met with none whose minds might awaken
his sympathies, and where life was altogether uneventful. On the
other hand, that region abounded with the inert, striking, and most
impressive objects of natural scenery. The elementary grandeur
and beauty of external nature came thus to fill up his mind to
the exclusion of human interests. To such a result his individual
constitution powerfully contributed. The sensuous element was
singularly deficient in his nature. He never seems to have passed
through that erotic period out of which some poets have never emerged.
A soaring, speculative imagination, and an impetuous, resistless
self-will, were his distinguishing characteristics. From first to last
he concentrated himself within himself; brooding over his own fancies
and imaginations to the comparative disregard of the incidents and
impressions which suggested them; and was little susceptible of ideas
originating in other minds. We behold the result. He lives alone in a
world of mountains, streams, and atmospheric phenomena, dealing with
moral abstractions, and rarely encountered by even shadowy specters
of beings outwardly resembling himself. There is measureless grandeur
and power in his moral speculations. There is intense reality in
his pictures of external nature. But though his human characters are
presented with great skill of metaphysical analysis, they have rarely
life or animation. He is always the prominent, often the exclusive,
object of his own song.

Upon a mind so constituted, with its psychological peculiarities
so cherished and confirmed, the fortunes and fates of others, and
the stirring events of his time, made vivid but very transient
impressions. The conversation and writing of contemporaries trained
among books, and with the faculty of speech more fully developed than
that of thought, seemed colorless and empty to one with--whom natural
objects and grandeurs were always present in such overpowering force.
Excluded by his social position from taking an active part in the
public events of the day, and repelled by the emptiness of the then
fashionable literature, he turned to private and humble life as
possessing at least a reality. But he thus withheld himself from
the contemplation of those great mental excitements which only great
public struggles can awaken. He contracted a habit of exaggerating the
importance of every-day incidents and emotions. He accustomed himself
to see in men and in social relations only what he was predetermined
to see there, and to impute to them a value and importance derived
mainly from his own self-will. Even his natural good taste contributed
to confirm him in his error. The two prevailing schools of literature
in England, at that time, were the trashy and mouthing writers who
adopted the sounding language of Johnson and Darwin, unenlivened
by the vigorous thought of either; and the "dead-sea apes" of
that inflated, sentimental, revolutionary style which Diderot had
unconsciously originated, and Kotzebue carried beyond the verge of
caricature. The right feeling and manly thought of Wordsworth were
disgusted by these shallow word-mongers, and he flew to the other
extreme. Under the influences--repulsive and attractive--we have thus
attempted to indicate, he adopted the theory that as much of grandeur
and profound emotion was to be found in mere domestic incidents and
feelings, as on the more conspicuous stage of public life; and that
a bald and naked simplicity of language was the perfection of style.
Singularly enough, he was confirmed in these notions by the very
writer of the day whose own natural genius, more than any of his
contemporaries, impelled him to revel in great, wild, supernatural
conceptions; and to give utterance to them in gorgeous language.
Coleridge was perhaps the only contemporary from whom Wordsworth ever
took an opinion; and that he did so from him, is mainly attributable
to the fact that Coleridge did little more than reproduce to him
his own notions, sometimes rectified by a subtler logic, but always
rendered more attractive by new and dazzling illustrations.

Fortunately it is out of the power of the most perverse theory to
spoil the true poet. The poems of Wordsworth must continue to charm
and elevate mankind, in defiance of his crotchets, just as Luther,
Henri Quatre, and other living impersonations of poetry do, despite
all quaint peculiarities of the attire, the customs, or the opinions
of their respective ages, with which they were imbued. The spirit of
truth and poetry redeems, ennobles, hallows, every external form in
which it may be lodged. We may "pshaw" and "pooh" at Harry Gill and
the Idiot Boy; but the deep and tremulous tenderness of sentiment,
the strong-winged flight of fancy, the excelling and unvarying purity,
which pervade all the writings of Wordsworth, and the exquisite melody
of his lyrical poems, must ever continue to attract and purify the
mind. The very excesses into which his one-sided theory betrayed him,
acted as a useful counter-agent to the prevailing bad taste of his
time.

The Prelude may take a permanent place as one of the most perfect of
his compositions. It has much of the fearless felicity of youth; and
its imagery has the sharp and vivid outline of ideas fresh from the
brain. The subject--the development of his own great powers--raises
him above that willful dallying with trivialties which repels us in
some of his other works. And there is real vitality in the theme,
both from our anxiety to know the course of such a mind, and from
the effect of an absorbing interest in himself excluding that languor
which sometimes seized him in his efforts to impart or attribute
interest to themes possessing little or none in themselves. Its mere
narrative, though often very homely, and dealing in too many words,
is often characterized also by elevated imagination, and always by
eloquence. The bustle of London life, the prosaic uncouthness of its
exterior, the earnest heart that beats beneath it, the details even of
its commonest amusements, from Bartholomew Fair to Sadler's Wells, are
portrayed with simple force and delicate discrimination; and for the
most part skillfully contrasted with the rural life of the poet's
native home. There are some truthful and powerful sketches of French
character and life, in the early revolutionary era. But above all,
as might have been anticipated, Wordsworth's heart revels in the
elementary beauty and grandeur of his mountain theme; while his
own simple history is traced with minute fidelity, and is full of
unflagging interest.

We have already adverted to the fact that this Prelude was but
the overture to a grander song which the poet has left, in a great
measure, unsung. Reverting to this consideration an important
fact seems to force itself upon our notice. The creative power of
Wordsworth would appear to have been paralyzed after the publication
of his Excursion. All his most finished works precede that period. His
later writings generally lack the strength and freshness which we find
in those of an earlier date. Some may attribute this to his want of
the stimulus which the necessity of writing for a livelihood imparts,
and in part they may be right; but this is not the whole secret. That
his isolation from the stirring contact of competition, that his utter
disregard of contemporary events, allowed his mind, which for perfect
health's sake requires constantly-renewed impulses from without, to
subside into comparative hebetude, there can be no doubt whatever.
But the main secret of the freezing up of his fountain of poetical
inspiration, we really take to have been his change of politics.
Wordsworth's muse was essentially liberal--one may say, Jacobinical.
That he was unconscious of any sordid motive for his change, we
sincerely believe; but as certainly his conforming was the result less
of reasonable conviction than of willfulness. It was by a determined
effort of his will that he brought himself, to believe in the
Church-and-State notions which he latterly promulgated. Hence the want
of definite views, and of a living interest, which characterizes all
his writings subsequent to that change, when compared with those of
an earlier time. It was Wordsworth's wayward fate to be patronized and
puffed into notice by the champions of old abuses, by the advocates
of the pedantry of Oxford, and by the maintainers of the despotism not
even of Pitt but of Castlereagh. It is already felt, however, that the
poet whom these men were mainly instrumental in bringing into notice,
will live in men's memories by exactly those of his writings most
powerful to undermine and overthrow their dull and faded bigotries.
Despite his own efforts, Wordsworth (as has been said of Napoleon) is
the child and champion of Jacobinism. Though clothed in ecclesiastical
formulas, his religion is little more than the simple worship of
nature; his noblest moral flights are struggles to emancipate himself
from conventional usage; and the strong ground of his thoughts, as of
his style, is nature stripped of the gauds with which the pupils of
courts and circles would bedeck and be-ribbon it. Even in the ranks of
our opponents Wordsworth has been laboring in our behalf.

It is in the record of his extra-academic life that the poet soars his
freest flight, in passages where we have a very echo of the emotions
of an emancipated worshiper of nature flying back to his loved
resorts. Apart from its poetic value, the book is a graphical and
interesting portraiture of the struggles of an ingenuous and impetuous
mind to arrive at a clear insight into its own interior constitution
and external relations, and to secure the composure of self-knowledge
and of equally adjusted aspirations. As a poem it is likely to
lay fast and enduring hold on pure and aspiring intellects, and to
strengthen the claim of Wordsworth to endure with his land's language.

       *       *       *       *       *


THE MONUMENT TO SIR ROBERT PEEL.

A LETTER FROM WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR,

TO THE EDITOR OF THE 'EXAMINER.'

Now the fever hath somewhat subsided which came over the people from
the grave of Sir Robert Peel, there is room for a few observations on
his decease and on its consequences. All public writers, I believe,
have expatiated on his character, comparing him with others who,
within our times, have occupied the same position. My own opinion
has invariably been that he was the wisest of all our statesmen;
and certainly, though he found reason to change his sentiments and
his measures, he changed them honestly, well weighed, always from
conviction, and always for the better. He has been compared, and
seemingly in no spirit of hostility or derision, with a Castlereagh,
a Perceval, an Addington. a Canning. Only one of these is worthy of
notice, namely Canning, whose brilliancy made his shallowness less
visible, and whose graces, of style and elocution threw a vail over
his unsoundness and lubricity. Sir Robert Peel was no satirist or
epigrammatist: he was only a statesman in public life: only a virtuous
and friendly man in private. _Par negotiis, nee supra_. Walpole alone
possessed his talents for business. But neither Peel nor his family
was enriched from the spoils of his country; Walpole spent in building
and pictures more than double the value of his hereditary estate, and
left the quadruple to his descendants.

Dissimilar from Walpole, and from commoner and coarser men who
occupied the same office, Peel forbade that a name which he had
made illustrious should be degraded and stigmatized by any title
of nobility. For he knew that all those titles had their origin and
nomenclature from military services, and belong to military men, like
their epaulets and spurs and chargers. They sound well enough against
the sword and helmet, but strangely in law-courts and cathedrals: but,
reformer as he was, he could not reform all this; he could only keep
clear of it in his own person.

I now come to the main object of my letter.

Subscriptions are advertised for the purpose of raising monuments
to Sir Robert Peel; and a motion has been made in Parliament for
one in Westminster Abbey at the public expense, Whatever may be the
precedents, surely the house of God should contain no object but
such as may remind us of His presence and our duty to Him. Long ago I
proposed that ranges of statues and busts should commemorate the great
worthies of our country. All the lower part of our National Gallery
might be laid open for this purpose. Even the best monuments in
Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's are deformities to the edifice. Let
us not continue this disgrace. Deficient as we are in architects,
we have many good statuaries, and we might well employ them on the
statues of illustrious commanders, and the busts of illustrious
statesmen and writers. Meanwhile our cities, and especially the
commercial, would, I am convinced, act more wisely, and more
satisfactorily to the relict of the deceased, if, instead of statues,
they erected schools and almshouses, with an inscription to his
memory.

We glory in about sixty whose busts and statues may occupy what are
now the "deep solitudes and awful cells" in our national gallery. Our
literary men of eminence are happily more numerous than the political
or the warlike, or both together. There is only one class of them
which might be advantageously excluded, namely, the theological; and
my reasons are these. First, their great talents were chiefly employed
on controversy; secondly, and consequently, their images would excite
dogmatical discord. Every sect of the Anglican Church, and every
class of dissenters, complaining of undue preferences. Painture and
sculpture lived in the midst of corruption, lived throughout it, and
seemed indeed to draw vitality from it, as flowers the most delicate
from noxious air; but they collapsed at the searching breath of free
inquiry, and could not abide persecution. The torch of Philosophy
never kindled the suffocating fagot, under whose smoke Theology was
mistaken for Religion. Theology had, until now, been speculative
and quiescent: she abandoned to Philosophy these humbler qualities:
instead of allaying and dissipating, as Philosophy had always done,
she excited and she directed animosities. Oriental in her parentage,
and keeping up her wide connections in that country, she acquired
there all the artifices most necessary to the furtherance of her
designs: among the rest was ventriloquism, which she quite perfected,
making her words seem to sound from above and from below and from
every side around. Ultimately, when men had fallen on their faces at
this miracle, she assumed the supreme power. Kings were her lackeys,
and nations the dust under her palfrey's hoof. By her sentence Truth
was gagged, scourged, branded, cast down on the earth in manacles; and
Fortitude, who had stood at Truth's side, was fastened with nails and
pulleys to the stake. I would not revive by any images, in the abode
of the graceful and the gentle Arts, these sorrowful reminiscences.
The vicissitudes of the world appear to be bringing round again the
spectral Past. Let us place great men between it and ourselves: they
all are tutelar: not the warrior and the statesman only; not only the
philosopher; but also the historian who follows them step by step, and
the poet who secures us from peril and dejection by his counter-charm.
Philosophers in most places are unwelcome: but there is no better
reason why Shaftesbury and Hobbes should be excluded from our
gallery, than why Epicurus should have been from Cicero's or Zeno from
Lucullus's. Of our sovereigns, I think Alfred, Cromwell, and William
III alone are eligible; and they, because they opposed successfully
the subverters of the laws. Three viceroys of Ireland will deservedly
be placed in the same receptacle; Sir John Perrot, Lord Chesterfield,
and (in due time) the last Lord-Deputy. One Speaker, one only, of the
Parliament; he without whom no Parliament would be now existing;
he who declared to Henry IV. that until all public grievances were
removed, no subsidy should be granted. The name of this Speaker may be
found in Rapin; English historians talk about facts, forgetting men.

Admirals and generals are numerous and conspicuous. Drake, Blake,
Rodney, Jervis, Nelson, Collingwood; the subduer of Algiers beaten
down for the French to occupy: and the defender of Acre, the first who
defeated, discomfited, routed, broke, and threw into shameful flight,
Bonaparte. Our generals are Marlborough, Peterborough, Wellington, and
that successor to his fame in India, who established the empire that
was falling from us, who achieved in a few days two arduous victories,
who never failed in any enterprise, who accomplished the most
difficult with the smallest expenditure of blood, who corrected
the disorders of the military, who gave the soldier an example of
temperance, the civilian of simplicity and frugality, and whose sole
(but exceedingly great) reward, was the approbation of our greatest
man.

With these come the statesmen of the Commonwealth, the students of
Bacon, the readers of Philip Sidney, the companions of Algernon, the
precursors of Locke and Newton. Opposite to them are Chaucer, Spenser,
Shakspeare, Milton; lower in dignity, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Goldsmith,
Cowper, Scott, Burns, Shelley, Southey, Byron, Wordsworth; the author
of _Hohenlinden_ and the _Battle of the Baltic_; and the glorious
woman who equaled these, two animated works in her _Ivan_ and
_Casabianca_. Historians have but recently risen up among us: and long
be it before, by command of Parliament, the chisel grates on the brow
of a Napier, a Grote, and Macaulay!

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.

       *       *       *       *       *


[FROM THE SPECTATOR.]

JURISPRUDENCE OF THE MOGULS: THE PANDECTS OF AURUNGZEBE.[4]

THE Government of British India have not neglected to countenance
the study of the indigenous and other systems of law which they found
established on acquiring possession of the country. Warren Hastings
was the first to recognize the value of such knowledge; and to his
encouragement, if not to his incitement, we are indebted for the
compilation of Hindoo law translated by Halbed, Jones, Colebrooke,
Macnaghten, Hamilton, and a pretty numerous body of accomplished
men, of whom Mr. Baillie is the most recently enrolled laborer in
the vineyard, have carried on the good work. More comprehensive and
accurate views of Hindoo law have gradually been developed, and the
more advanced and more influential system of Mahometan jurisprudence
has also shared in the attention of European students. There is,
however, still much to be done in this field of inquiry; as a few
remarks on the nature of the present publication, and the source
whence its materials are derived, will show.

[Footnote 4: The Moohummadan Law of Sale, according to the Hunefeea
Code: from the Futawa Alumgeeree, a Digest of the whole Law, prepared
by command of the Emperor Aurungzebe Alumgeer. Selected and translated
from the original Arabic, with an Introduction and explanatory Notes,
by Neil B.E. Baillie, Author of "The Moohummadan Law of inheritance."
Published by Smith and Elder.]

The law of Mahometan jurists is for India pretty much what the Roman
law is for Scotland and the Continental nations of Europe. Savigny has
shown how, throughout all the territories formerly included within the
limits of the Roman Empire, a large amount of Roman legal doctrines
and forms of procedure continued to be operative after the Empire's
subversion. The revival of the study of the Roman law, as embodied
in the compilations of Justinian, by the doctors of the school
of Bologna, augmented and systematized these remnants of Roman
jurisprudence, and extended their application to countries which (like
great part of Germany) had never been subjected to the sway of Rome.
In like manner, throughout that part of India which was permanently
subdued and organized by the Mogul dynasty, and also those parts in
which minor Islamitic states were established, the organization of
the courts of justice, and the legal opinions of the individuals who
officiated in them, necessarily introduced a large amount of Mahometan
jurisprudence. This element of the law of India was augmented and
systematized by the writings of private jurists, and by compilations
undertaken by command of princes. As with the Roman jurisprudence in
Europe, so with Mahometan jurisprudence in India, only so much of its
doctrines and forms could at any time be considered to possess legal
force as had been reenacted by the local sovereigns, or introduced by
judges in the form of decisions. A systematic knowledge of the whole
body of Mahometan law was important to the Indian lawyer, as enabling
him more thoroughly to understand the system, and its various isolated
doctrines; but the whole body of that law was at no time binding in
India. Since the establishment of British sway, only so much of the
Mahometan law as has kept its ground in the practice of the courts,
or has been reenacted by the "regulations" or "ordinances" of the
Anglo-Indian Government, _is law_; the rest is only valuable as the
"antiquities of the law," which help to trace the origin of what
survives, and thereby throw light upon what in it is obscure or
doubtful.

Among the most valuable, if not indeed the most valuable of the
compilations from which we may obtain a knowledge of Mahometan
jurisprudence, is the "Futawa Alumgeeree," mentioned in Mr. Baillie's
title-page. Its value is not confined to the purposes of those
who would make themselves acquainted with Mahometan jurisprudence
in the peculiar form it assumed in India. It is highly esteemed
throughout Islam, and is quoted even by the doctors of Mecca as the
Futawa-i-hind, or the Indian _responsa prudentum_. It was compiled by
the orders of the Emperor Aurungzebe. It is a digest of the "Futawa"
of the most celebrated jurists of the Hanifeh (or, as Mr. Baillie
spells it, _Hunefeeah_) sect or school. Mr. Baillie informs us in
his preface, that "_futawa_ is the plural form of _futwa_, a term in
common use in Mahometan countries to signify an exposition of law by a
public officer called the _mooftee_, or a case submitted to him by the
_kazee_ or judge." The "futwa," therefore, seems to correspond not
so much with our English "decisions" or "precedents" as with the
"responsa prudentum," that fertile source of doctrines in the Roman
law. The "Futawa Alumgeeree" consequently resembles the Pandects
of Justinian in being a systematical arrangement of selections from
juridical authorities--compiled by Imperial authority; but differs
from it in this, that the selections are made exclusively from the
"responsa prudentum," and a few legal treatises, whereas Justinian's
digest combined with those excerpts from judicial decisions,
prætorian edicts, &c. With this distinction, we may regard the "Futawa
Alumgeeree" as the Pandects or Digest of Mahometan Law. As in the
Roman work of that name, to each extract is appended the name of the
original work from which it is taken; and the whole of them are so
arranged as to form a complete digest of Mahometan law.

A work of this kind is invaluable to the student who would make
himself master of Mahometan jurisprudence as a system. But great care
must be taken not to misapprehend the exact nature of the knowledge
to be obtained from it. The "Futawa Alumgeeree" is a systematic
exposition of the principles of Mahometan law; it assuredly does not
enable us to ascertain what doctrines of that law are now of legal
force in India, or even what doctrines have at any time had force
in India. It does not appear to have been Aurungzebe's intention to
promulgate it as a code, but to present it to lawyers as a complete
text-book. Even if he did by ordinance attribute to it the power of
law, such ordinance was only effectual at any time in the provinces of
the Mogul Empire; and since the disruption of that empire, it has been
superseded and modified by laws and the practice of law-courts in the
various independent states erected on its ruins.

Again the general scholar must be on his guard against the delusion
that he will find in this digest materials illustrative of the social
condition of India under the Mogul dynasty. The juridical works
excerpted in it are almost all foreign to Hindostan; the special cases
illustrative of abstract doctrines are taken from other countries,
and many of them from ages antecedent to the invasion of India by the
Moguls.

Though Persian was the court language of the Mogul dynasty, there is
scarcely any Persian element in Aurungzebe's legal compilation. The
Shiite views of jurisprudence, as of theology, prevailed in Persia;
the "Futawa Alumgeeree" is strictly Sunnite. It is not difficult to
account for this.--The Mahometan conquerors of India were mainly of
Turkish or Tartar race; they came from Turan, a region which from time
immemorial has stood in antagonistic relations to Iran or Persia. This
may account for the fact that the races of Turan which have embraced
Mahometanism have uniformly adhered to the Sunnite sect--the sect
most hostile to the Persian Shias--not only when they settled in the
countries where the Sunnite sect originated, but when they remained in
their native regions. The views of the Sunnites were first promulgated
and have prevailed most extensively in those regions of Islam which
were once part of the Roman empire, which nominally at least was
Christian; those of the Shiites, in the countries where, under the
Sassanides and Arsacidæ, the doctrines of Zoroaster predominated. The
Euphrates forms pretty nearly the line of demarkation between them.

The Caliphs dominated over both countries and over both sects. Under
their orthodox protection the Sunnite doctrines were able to strike
root in Balkh and Samarkand--the ancient Turan, and therefore hostile
to Iran and Persia. When Islam was reorganized after the anarchy which
ensued upon the overthrow of the Caliphs, Persia became the appanage
of the Sophis or Shiite dynasty; the regions to the West of the
Euphrates--the ci-devant Roman Empire--acknowledged the rule of
the Turkish dynasties, which were Sunnite. On the Oxus and further
East--the old Turan--the Sunnite sect was sufficiently strong to defy
the efforts of the Shiite sovereigns of Persia to eradicate it. The
doctors of Samarkand and Bokhara continued (and continue) as orthodox
Sunnites as those of Kufah, Mecca, and Stamboul.

Accordingly, we find the authorities excerpted in the "Futawa
Alumgeeree" consist almost exclusively of two classes; they are either
the immediate disciples of Hanifa at Kufah and Bagdad, or the jurists
of Samarkand and Bokhara. The law-cases they expounded are such as had
originated, or might have originated, in those countries--in Babylonia
or Turan. And they are for the most part taken from a state of
society, and illustrative of social relations, which prevailed in
these countries at a period long antecedent to that of Aurunzebe. To
attempt to illustrate the civil and social condition of India, under
that Emperor by their aid, would be as preposterous as to attempt to
illustrate the civil and social condition of those parts of Germany
where the Roman law still possesses authority from cases recorded in
the Pandects of Justinian.

The real use and value of the "Futawa Alumgeeree" may be briefly
explained. In every country in Europe where the Roman law is still
recognized as more or less authoritative--and indeed in every country
where the common law has borrowed more or less from the Roman--an
acquaintance with the system of Roman jurisprudence as it is embodied
in the law-books of Justinian has its value for the scientific lawyer.
In like manner a knowledge of Mahometan jurisprudence as embodied in
the "Futawa Alumgeeree" cannot fail to be instructive for the lawyers
of all the countries of Islam, and the lawyers of India, where so much
of the existing practical law has been derived from that source. To
the general scholar who wishes to master the civil history of Arabia
and Babylonia, in which the Sunnite sect, and more particularly the
Hanifite subdivision of it, originated, or to familiarize himself
with the moral theories which regulate the judgments and actions of
the modern Turks, Turcomans, Arabians, and Egyptians, the digest of
Aurungzeebee is also a valuable repertory of facts and illustrations.

For this reason we incline to be of opinion that Mr. Baillie is
mistaken in thinking that a selection from the two books of the
"Futawa Alumgeeree," which embrace the subject of "sale" can have much
utility for Indian practitioners. It does not follow, because a legal
doctrine is declared sound in this work, that it is or ever has been
practically applicable in India. As an authoritative declaration of
legal doctrines, the book is as likely to mislead as to guide aright.
On the other hand, as an exposition of the general principles of
Mahometan law, even with regard to sale, it is necessarily imperfect.
The work from which it is taken is a collection of legal opinions,
which had in their day the force of judicial decisions--of something
equivalent to the "responsa prudentum" of Roman jurisprudence. Each is
expounded on its own merits; and all the special doctrines involved
in it are laid down. Hence it comes, that much that is calculated
to throw light on the principles of the law of sale must be sought
under other heads; and that much included in the chapters ostensibly
treating of sale refers to other topics. As part of an entire digest
of the law compiled on the same principle as that of Justinian,
the two books relating to sale are sufficient; but for an isolated
treatise on "sale," they contain at once too much and too little.

Nevertheless, we welcome Mr. Baillie's publication as a valuable
addition to juridical and even to general literature. The translation,
though not by any means free from defects, is the best specimen of
a really good Mahometan law-book that has yet been published. The
defects to which we allude are twofold. In the first place, though Mr.
Baillie mentions that in the original the name of the treatise from
which it is taken is appended to every excerpt, he has not in his
translation given those references. His work is not therefore what
the original is, a Chrestomathia of the best Arabian jurists--a
succedaneum for their complete works--an illustration of Arabic legal
literature. Again, he is often loose and vacillating in the use of
the English words he has selected as corresponding to the technical
phraseology of the Arabian jurists, and sometimes infelicitous in the
selection of his English terms. It has occurred to us that he would
have succeeded better in rendering the exact meaning of his originals,
had he availed himself more of technical phrases of the Roman law
which are familiar to all European jurists. Is does not occur to
us that he would by doing so have been in danger of Romanizing the
Mahometan to an extent that might mislead. Mill, in his History of
British India, has noticed how closely the classification of the
Mahometan approaches to that of the Roman jurists. An attentive
perusal of Mr. Baillie's volume has convinced us that the analogy in
the substance is quite as strong as in the arrangements. This fact
seems susceptible of being accounted for on historical grounds.
Mahometanism is in fact a sect or heresy of Christianity. The views
and sentiments, the aggregate of which make up the body of Christian
opinion, are not all of Jewish or Christian origin. They are the moral
creed of societies whose opinions and civilization have been derived
in part from other sources. The philosophy of Greece and the law of
Rome have contributed in nearly equal proportions to the theosophy
of the Hebrews. The jurisprudence of all Christian nations is mainly
referable to Rome for its origin, and the same is the case with at
least the Sunnite Mahometans. The nations of Islam took only their
religious creed from their Prophet; the jurists of Kufah retained and
expounded the civil law which prevailed among them before his time.
That law was the law of the Greek Empire, developed in the same way as
that of the Western Empire under the judicial and legislative auspices
of Roman Prætors and Pro-Consuls, aided by Roman jurists. Theophilus,
one of the jurists employed by Justinian for his compilations,
lectured in Greek on the Institutions; and the substance of
his lectures still survives under the name of the Paraphrase of
Theophilus. The Greek edicts and novels of Justinian's successors are
mainly Roman law. Throughout the Byzantine Empire (within which Kufah
and the region where Bagdad now stands were included) Roman law was
paramount, and Roman jurists were numerous. The arrangement, the
subdivisions, and the substance of Mahometan jurisprudence, show
that it has been principally derived from this source. Some of its
doctrines are doubtless aboriginal engrafted on the law of the
Empire; and it has been modified in some respects to reconcile it to
the religious dictates of Islam, just as the law of Pagan Rome was
modified after Christianity became the religion of the Empire. But
still Mahometan jurisprudence retains undeniably the lineaments of its
parentage.

This consideration places in a strong light the importance of the
study of Mahometan law. The increasing intimacy of our relations with
independent Mahometan states makes it of the utmost consequence that
we should entertain correct views of their opinions and institutions;
and no better key to the knowledge of both can be found than in the
historical study of their law. Again, we are called upon to legislate
and supply judges for British India, a large proportion of the
inhabitants of which are Mahometans. Even the Hindoos of the former
Mogul Empire have adopted many legal forms and doctrines from
their conquerors. A minute and accurate acquaintance with Mahometan
jurisprudence is an indispensable preliminary to judicious legislation
for British India. For these reasons, it could be wished that Mr.
Baillie, or some other equally accomplished laborer in that field,
would set himself to do for the "Futawa Alumgeeree" what Heineccius
and other modern civilians have done for the law-books of
Justinian--present the European public with an elegant and exact
abstract of its contents.

       *       *       *       *       *

The following, from Southey's "Gridiron," now first published in his
Memoirs, ought to be set to music for the Beef-Steak Club:--

  "Now the perfect Steak prepare!
  Now the appointed rites begin!
  Cut it from the pinguid rump.
  Not too thick and not too thin;
  Somewhat to the thick inclining,
  Yet the thick and thin between,
  That the gods, when they are dining,
  May comment the golden mean.
  Ne'er till now have they been blest
  With a beef-steak daily drest:
  Ne'er till this auspicious morn
  When the Gridiron was born."

       *       *       *       *       *

The most ignorant of the world's fools are those called "knowing
ones," a phrase satirical with the very glee of irony.

       *       *       *       *       *


THE MYSTERIOUS COMPACT.

A FREE TRANSLATION FROM THE GERMAN.

PART II--CONCLUSION

(CONCLUDED FROM PAGE 192.)

Several weeks passed away. Edward spared no pains to discover
some trace of the lady in question, but all in vain. No one in the
neighborhood knew the family; and he had already determined, as
soon as the spring began, to ask for leave of absence, and to travel
through the country where Ferdinand had formed his unfortunate
attachment, when a circumstance occurred which coincided strangely
with his wishes. His commanding-officer gave him a commission to
purchase some horses, which, to his great consolation, led him exactly
into that part of the country where Ferdinand had been quartered.
It was a market-town of some importance. He was to remain there some
time, which suited his plans exactly; and he made use of every leisure
hour to cultivate the acquaintance of the officers, to inquire into
Ferdinand's connections and acquaintance, to trace the mysterious name
if possible, and thus fulfill a sacred duty. For to him it appeared a
sacred duty to execute the commission of his departed friend--to get
possession of the ring, and to be the means, as he hoped, of giving
rest to the troubled spirit of Ferdinand.

Already, on the evening of the second day, he was sitting in the
coffee-room with burghers of the place and officers of different
regiments.

A newly-arrived cornet was inquiring whether the neighborhood were a
pleasant one, of an infantry officer, one of Hallberg's corps. "For,"
said he, "I come from charming quarters."

"There is not much to boast of," replied the captain. "There is no
good fellowship, no harmony among the people."

"I will tell you why that is," cried an animated lieutenant; "that is
because there is no house as a point of reunion, where one is sure
to find and make acquaintances, and to be amused, and where each
individual ascertains his own merits by the effect they produce on
society at large."

"Yes, we have had nothing of that kind since the Varniers left us,"
said the captain.

"Varniers!" cried Edward, with an eagerness he could ill conceal. "The
name sounds foreign."

"They were not Germans--they were emigrants from the Netherlands, who
had left their country on account of political troubles," replied the
captain.

"Ah, that was a charming house," cried the lieutenant, "cultivation,
refinement, a sufficient competency, the whole style of establishment
free from ostentation, yet most comfortable; and Emily--Emily was the
soul of the whole house."

"Emily Varnier!" echoed Edward, while his heart beat fast and loud.

"Yes, yes! that was the name of the prettiest, most graceful, most
amiable girl in the world," said the lieutenant.

"You seem bewitched by the fair Emily," observed the cornet.

"I think you would have been too, had you known her," rejoined the
lieutenant; "she was the jewel of the whole society. Since she went
away there is no bearing their stupid balls and assemblies."

"But you must not forget," the captain resumed once more, "when you
attribute everything to the charms of the fair girl, that not only
she but the whole family has disappeared, and we have lost that
house which formed, as you say, so charming a point of reunion in our
neighborhood."

"Yes, yes; exactly so," said an old gentleman, a civilian, who had
been silent hitherto; "the Varniers' house is a great loss in the
country, where such losses are not so easily replaced as in a large
town. First, the father died, then came the cousin and carried the
daughter away."

"And did this cousin marry the young lady?" inquired Edward, in a tone
tremulous with agitation.

"Certainly," answered the old gentleman; "it was a very great match
for her; he bought land to the value of half a million about here."

"And he was an agreeable, handsome man, we must all allow," remarked
the captain.

"But she would never have married him," exclaimed the lieutenant, "if
poor Hallberg had not died."

Edward was breathless, but he did not speak a word.

"She would have been compelled to do so in any case," said the old
man; "the father had destined them for each other from infancy,
and people say he made his daughter take a vow as he lay on his
death-bed."

"That sounds terrible," said Edward; "and does not speak much for the
good feeling of the cousin."

"She could not have fulfilled her father's wish," interposed the
lieutenant; "her heart was bound up in Hallberg, and Hallberg's in
her. Few people, perhaps, know this, for the lovers were prudent and
discreet; I, however, knew it all."

"And why was she not allowed to follow the inclination of her heart?"
asked Edward.

"Because her father had promised her," replied the captain: "you used
just now the word terrible; it is a fitting expression, according to
my version of the matter. It appears that one of the branches of the
house of Varnier had committed an act of injustice toward another, and
Emily's father considered it a point of conscience to make reparation.
Only through the marriage of his daughter with a member of the
ill-used branch could that act be obliterated and made up for, and,
therefore, he pressed the matter sorely."

"Yes, and the headlong passion which Emily inspired her cousin with
abetted his designs."

"Then her cousin loved Emily?" inquired Edward.

"Oh, to desperation," was the reply. "He was a rival to her shadow,
who followed her not more closely than he did. He was jealous of the
rose that she placed on her bosom."

"Then poor Emily is not likely to have a calm life with such a man,"
said Edward.

"Come," interposed the old gentleman, with en authoritative tone, "I
think you, gentlemen, go a little too far. I know D'Effernay; he is an
honest, talented man, very rich, indeed, and generous; he anticipates
his wife in every wish. She has the most brilliant house in the
neighborhood, and lives like a princess."

"And trembles," insisted the lieutenant, "when she hears her husband's
footstep. What good can riches be to her? She would have been happier
with Hallberg."

"I do not know," rejoined the captain, "why you always looked upon
that attachment as something so decided. It never appeared so to
me; and you yourself say that D'Effernay is very jealous, which I
believe him to be, for he is a man of strong passions; and this very
circumstance causes me to doubt the rest of your story. Jealousy has
sharp eyes, and D'Effernay would have discovered a rival in Hallberg,
and not proved himself the friend he always was to our poor comrade."

"That does not follow at all," replied the lieutenant, "it only proves
that the lovers were very cautious. So far, however, I agree with you.
I believe that if D'Effernay had suspected anything of the kind he
would have murdered Hallberg."

A shudder passed through Edward's veins.

"Murdered!" he repeated, in a hollow voice; "do you not judge too
harshly of this man when you hint the possibility of such a thing?"

"That does he, indeed," said the old man; "these gentlemen are all
angry with D'Effernay, because he has carried off the prettiest girl
in the country. But I am told he does not intend remaining where he
now lives. He wishes to sell his estates."

"Really," inquired the captain, "and where is he going?"

"I have no idea," replied the other; "but he is selling everything
off. One manor is already disposed of, and there have been people
already in negotiation for the place where he resides."

The conversation now turned on the value of D'Effernay's property, and
of land in general, &c.

Edward had gained materials enough for reflection; he rose soon, took
leave of the company, and gave himself up, in the solitude of his
own room, to the torrent of thought and feeling which that night's
conversation had let loose. So, then, it was true; Emily Varnier was
no fabulous being! Hallberg had loved her, his love had been returned,
but a cruel destiny had separated them. How wonderfully did all he
had heard explain the dream at the Castle, and how completely did
that supply what had remained doubtful, or had been omitted in the
officers' narrative. Emily Varnier, doubtless, possessed that ring, to
gain possession of which now seemed his bounden duty. He resolved not
to delay its fulfillment a moment, however difficult it might prove,
and he only reflected on the best manner in which he should perform
the task allotted to him. The sale of the property appeared to him a
favorable opening. The fame of his father's wealth made it probable
that the son might wish to be purchaser of a fine estate, like the one
in question. He spoke openly of such a project, made inquiries of the
old gentleman, and the captain, who seemed to him to know most about
the matter; and as his duties permitted a trip for a week or so, he
started immediately, and arrived on the second day at the place of his
destination. He stopped in the public house in the village to inquire
if the estate lay near, and whether visitors were allowed to see the
house and grounds. Mine host, who doubtless had had his directions,
sent a messenger immediately to the Castle, who returned before long,
accompanied by a chasseur, in a splendid livery, who invited the
stranger to the Castle in the name of M. D'Effernay.

This was exactly what Edward wished, and expected. Escorted by
the chasseur he soon arrived at the Castle, and was shown up
a spacious staircase into a modern, almost, one might say, a
magnificently-furnished room, where the master of the house received
him. It was evening, toward the end of winter, the shades of twilight
had already fallen, and Edward found himself suddenly in a room quite
illuminated with wax candles. D'Effernay stood in the middle of the
saloon, a tall, thin young man. A proud bearing seemed to bespeak
a consciousness of his own merit, or at least of his position. His
features were finely formed, but the traces of strong passion, or of
internal discontent, had lined them prematurely.

In figure he was very slender, and the deep-sunken eye, the gloomy
frown which was fixed between his brows, and the thin lips, had no
very prepossessing expression, and yet there was something imposing in
the whole appearance of the man.

Edward thanked him civilly for his invitation, spoke of his idea of
being a purchaser as a motive for his visit, and gave his own, and
his father's name. D'Effernay seemed pleased with all he said. He had
known Edward's family in the metropolis; he regretted that the late
hour would render it impossible for them to visit the property to-day,
and concluded by pressing the lieutenant to pass the night at the
Castle. On the morrow they would proceed to business, and now he would
have the pleasure of presenting his wife to the visitor. Edward's
heart beat violently--at length then he would see her! Had he loved
her himself he could not have gone to meet her with more agitation.
D'Effernay led his guest through many rooms, which were all as well
furnished, and as brilliantly lighted as the first he had entered.
At length he opened the door of a small boudoir, where there was no
light, save that which the faint, gray twilight imparted through the
windows.

The simple arrangement of this little room, with dark green walls,
only relieved by some engravings and coats of arms, formed a pleasing
contrast to Edward's eyes, after the glaring splendor of the other
apartments. From behind a piano-forte, at which she had been seated
in a recess, rose a tall, slender female form, in a white dress of
extreme simplicity.

"My love," said D'Effernay, "I bring you a welcome guest, Lieutenant
Wensleben, who is willing to purchase the estate."

Emily courtesied; the friendly twilight concealed the shudder that
passed over her whole frame, as she heard the familiar name which
aroused so many recollections.

She bade the stranger welcome, in a low, sweet voice, whose tremulous
accents were not unobserved by Edward; and while the husband made some
further observation, he had leisure to remark, as well as the fading
light would allow, the fair outline of her oval face, the modest
grace of her movements, her pretty, nymph-like figure--in fact, all
those charms which seemed familiar to him through the impassioned
descriptions of his friend.

"But what can this fancy be, to sit in the dark?" asked D'Effernay, in
no mild tone; "you know that is a thing I cannot bear." and with these
words, and without waiting his wife's answer, he rang the bell over
her sofa, and ordered lights.

While these were placed on the table the company sat down by the fire,
and conversation commenced. By the full light Edward could perceive
all Emily's real beauty--her pale, but lovely face, the sad expression
of her large blue eyes, so often concealed by their dark lashes, and
then raised, with a look full of feeling, a sad, pensive, intellectual
expression; and he admired the simplicity of her dress, and of every
object that surrounded her: all appeared to him to bespeak a superior
mind.

They had not sat long, before D'Effernay was called away. One of
his people had something important, something urgent to communicate
to him, which admitted of no delay. A look of fierce anger almost
distorted his features; in an instant his thin lips moved rapidly, and
Edward thought he muttered some curses between his teeth. He left the
room, but in so doing, he cast a glance of mistrust and ill-temper
on the handsome stranger with whom he was compelled to leave his wife
alone. Edward observed it all. All that he had seen to-day, all that
he had heard from his comrades of the man's passionate and suspicious
disposition, convinced him that his stay here would not be long, and
that perhaps a second opportunity of speaking alone with Emily might
not offer itself.

He determined, therefore, to profit by the present moment; and no
sooner had D'Effernay left the room, than he began to tell Emily she
was not so complete a stranger to him as it might seem; that long
before he had had the pleasure of seeing her--even before he had heard
her name--she was known to him, so to speak, in spirit.

Madame D'Effernay was moved. She was silent for a time, and gazed
fixedly on the ground; then she looked up; the mist of unshed tears
dimmed her blue eyes, and her bosom heaved with the sigh she could not
suppress.

"To me also the name of Wensleben is familiar. There is a link between
our souls. Your friend has often spoken of you to me."

But she could say no more; tears checked her speech.

Edward's eyes were glistening also, and the two companions were
silent; at length he began once more:

"My dear lady," he said, "my time is short, and I have a solemn
message to deliver to you. Will you allow me to do so now?"

"To me?" she asked, in a tone of astonishment.

"From my departed friend," answered Edward, emphatically.

"From Ferdinand?--and that now--after--" she shrunk back, as if in
terror.

"Now that he is no longer with us, do you mean? I found the message
in his papers, which have been intrusted to me only lately, since I
have been in the neighborhood. Among them was a token which I was to
restore to you." He produced the ring. Emily seized it wildly, and
trembled as she looked upon it.

"It is indeed my ring," she said at length, "the same which I gave
him when we plighted our troth in secret. You are acquainted with
everything, I perceive; I shall therefore risk nothing if I speak
openly."

She wept, and pressed the ring to her lips.

"I see that my friend's memory is dear to you," continued Edward. You
will forgive the prayer I am about to make to you: my visit to you
concerns his ring."

"How--what is it you wish?" cried Emily; terrified.

"It was _his_ wish," replied Edward. "He evinced an earnest desire
to have this pledge of an unfortunate and unfulfilled engagement
restored."

"How is that possible? You did not speak with him before his
death; and this happened so suddenly after, that, to give you the
commission--"

"There was no time for it! that is true," answered Edward, with an
inward shudder, although outwardly he was calm. "Perhaps this wish
was awakened immediately before his death. I found it, as I told you,
expressed in those papers."

"Incomprehensible!" she exclaimed. "Only a short time before his
death, we cherished--deceitful, indeed, they proved, but, oh, what
blessed hopes! we reckoned on casualties, on what might possibly
occur to assist as. Neither of us could endure to dwell on the idea
of separation; and yet--yet since--Oh, my God," she cried, overcome by
sorrow, and she hid her face between her hands.

Edward was lost in confused thought. For a time both again were
silent: at length Emily started up--

"Forgive me, M. de Wensleben. What you have related to me, what you
have asked of me, has produced so much excitement, so much agitation,
that it is necessary that I should be alone for a few moments, to
recover my composure."

"I am gone," cried Edward, springing from his chair.

"No! no!" she replied, "you are my guest; remain here. I have a
household duty which calls me away." She laid a stress on these words.

She leant forward, and with a sad, sweet smile, she gave her hand to
the friend of her lost Ferdinand, pressing his gently, and disappeared
through the inner door.

Edward stood stunned, bewildered; then he paced the room with hasty
steps, threw himself on the sofa, and took up one of the books that
lay on the table, rather to have something in his hand, than to read.
It proved to be Young's "Night Thoughts." He looked through it, and
was attracted by many passages, which seemed, in his present frame
of mind, fraught with peculiar meaning; yet his thoughts wandered
constantly from the page to his dead friend. The candles, unheeded
both by Emily and him, burned on with long wicks, giving little light
in the silent room, over which the red glare from the hearth shed a
lurid glow. Hurried footsteps sounded in the anteroom; the door was
thrown open.

Edward looked up, and saw D'Effernay staring at him, and round the
room, in an angry, restless manner.

Edward could not but think there was something almost unearthly in
those dark looks and that towering form.

"Where is my wife?" was D'Effernay's first question.

"She is gone to fulfill some household duty," replied the other.

"And leaves you here alone in this miserable darkness! Most
extraordinary!--indeed, most unaccountable!" and as he spoke he
approached the table and snuffed the candles, with a movement of
impatience.

"She left me here with old friends," said Edward, with a forced smile.
"I have been reading."

"What, in the dark?" inquired D'Effernay, with a look of mistrust.
"It was so dark when I came in, that you could not possibly have
distinguished a letter."

"I read for some time, and then I fell into a train of thought, which
is usually the result of reading Young's 'Night Thoughts.'"

"Young! I cannot bear that author. He is so gloomy."

"But you are fortunately so happy, that the lamentations of the lonely
mourner can find no echo in your breast."

"You think so!" said D'Effernay, in a churlish tone, and he pressed
his lips together tightly, as Emily came into the room: he went to
meet her.

"You have been a long time away," was his observation, as he looked
into her eyes, where the trace of tears might easily be detected. "I
found our guest alone."

"M. de Wensleben was good enough to excuse me," she replied; "and then
I thought you would be back immediately."

They sat down to the table; coffee was brought, and the past appeared
to be forgotten.

The conversation at first was broken by constant pauses. Edward saw
that Emily did all she could to play the hostess agreeably, and to
pacify her husband's ill-humor.

In this attempt the young man assisted her, and at last they were
successful. D'Effernay became more cheerful; the conversation more
animated; and Edward found that his host could be a very agreeable
member of society when he pleased, combining a good deal of
information with great natural powers. The evening passed away more
pleasantly than it promised at one time; and after an excellent and
well-served supper, the young officer was shown into a comfortable
room, fitted up with every modern luxury; and weary in mind and body,
he soon fell asleep. He dreamed of all that had occupied his waking
thoughts-of his friend, and his friend's history.

But in that species of confusion which often characterizes dreams,
he fancied that he was Ferdinand, or at least, his own individuality
seemed mixed up with that of Hallberg. He felt that he was ill. He lay
in an unknown room, and by his bedside stood a small table, covered
with glasses and phials, containing medicines, as is usual in a sick
room.

The door opened, and D'Effernay came in, in his dressing-gown, as
if he had just left his bed: and now in Edward's mind dreams and
realities were mingled together, and he thought that D'Effernay came,
perhaps, to speak with him on the occurrences of the preceding day.
But no! he approached the table on which the medicines stood, looked
at the watch, took up one of the phials and a cup, measured the
draught, drop by drop, then he turned and looked round him stealthily,
and then he drew from his breast a pale blue, coiling serpent, which
he threw into the cup, and held it to the patient's lips, who drank,
and instantly felt a numbness creep over his frame which ended in
death. Edward fancied that he was dead; he saw the coffin brought, but
the terror lest he should be buried alive, made him start up with a
sudden effort, and he opened his eyes.

The dream had passed away; he sat in his bed safe and well; but it was
long ere he could in any degree recover his composure, or get rid of
the impression which the frightful apparition had made on him. They
brought his breakfast, with a message from the master of the house
to inquire whether he would like to visit the park, farms, &c. He
dressed quickly, and descended to the court, where he found his host
in a riding dress, by the side of two fine horses, already saddled.
D'Effernay greeted the young man courteously; but Edward felt
an inward repugnance as he looked on that gloomy though handsome
countenance, now lighted up by the beams of the morning sun, yet
recalling vividly the dark visions of the night. D'Effernay was full
of attentions to his new friend. They started on their ride, in spite
of some threatening clouds, and began the inspection of meadows,
shrubberies, farms, &c. After a couple of hours, which were consumed
in this manner, it began to rain a few drops, and at last burst out
into a heavy shower. It was soon impossible even to ride through the
woods for the torrents that were pouring down, and so they returned to
the castle.

Edward retired to his room to change his dress, and to write some
letters, he said, but more particularly to avoid Emily, in order not
to excite her husband's jealousy. As the bell rang for dinner he
saw her again, and found to his surprise that the captain, whom he
had first seen in the coffee-room, and who had given him so much
information, was one of the party. He was much pleased, for they had
taken a mutual fancy to each other. The captain was not at quarters
the day Edward had left them, but as soon as he heard where his friend
had gone, he put horses to his carriage and followed him, for he said
he also should like to see these famous estates. D'Effernay seemed
in high good humor to-day, Emily far more silent than yesterday,
and taking little part in the conversation of the men, which turned
on political economy. After coffee she found an opportunity to give
Edward (unobserved) a little packet. The look with which she did so,
told plainly what it contained, and the young man hurried to his room
as soon as he fancied he could do so without remark or comment. The
continued rain precluded all idea of leaving the house any more that
day. He unfolded the packet; there were a couple of sheets, written
closely in a woman's fair hand, and something wrapped carefully in a
paper, which he knew to be the ring. It was the fellow to that which
he had given the day before to Emily, only Ferdinand's name was
engraved inside instead of hers. Such were the contents of the
papers:--

"Secrecy would be misplaced with the friend of the dead. Therefore,
will I speak to you of things which I have never uttered to a human
being until now. Jules D'Effernay is nearly related to me. We knew
each other in the Netherlands, where our estates joined. The boy loved
me already with a love that amounted to passion; this love was my
father's greatest joy, for there was an old and crying injustice which
the ancestors of D'Effernay had suffered from ours, that could alone,
he thought, be made up by the marriage of the only children of the two
branches. So we were destined for each other almost from our cradles;
and I was content it should be so, for Jules's handsome face and
decided preference for me were agreeable to me, although I felt no
great affection for him. We were separated: Jules traveled in France,
England, and America, and made money as a merchant, which profession
he had taken up suddenly. My father, who had a place under government,
left his country in consequence of political troubles, and came into
this part of the world where some distant relations of my mother's
lived. He liked the neighborhood; he bought land; we lived very
happily; I was quite contented in Jules's absence; I had no yearning
of the heart toward him, yet I thought kindly of him, and troubled
myself little about my future. Then--then I learned to know your
friend. Oh, then! I felt, when I looked upon him, when I listened to
him, when we conversed together, I felt, I acknowledged that there
might be happiness on earth, of which I had hitherto never dreamed.
Then I loved for the first time, ardently, passionately, and was
beloved in return. Acquainted with the family engagements, he did not
dare openly to proclaim his love, and I knew I ought not to foster
the feeling; but, alas! how seldom does passion listen to the voice
of reason and of duty. Your friend and I met in secret; in secret we
plighted our troth, and exchanged those rings, and hoped and believed
that by showing a bold front to our destiny we should subdue it to our
will. The commencement was sinful, it has met with a dire retribution,
Jules's letters announced his speedy return. He had sold everything
in his own country, had given up all his mercantile affairs, through
which he had greatly increased an already considerable fortune, and
now he was about to join us, or rather me, without whom he could not
live. This appeared to me like the demand for payment of a heavy debt.
This debt I owed to Jules, who loved me with all his heart, who was
in possession of my father's promised word and mine also. Yet I could
not give up your friend. In a state of distraction I told him all; we
meditated flight. Yes, I was so far guilty, and I make the confession
in hopes that some portion of my errors may be expiated by repentance.
My father, who had long been in a declining state, suddenly grew
worse, and this delayed and hindered the fulfillment of our designs.
Jules arrived. During the five years he had been away he was much
changed in appearance, and that advantageously. I was struck when
I first saw him, but it was also easy to detect in those handsome
features and manly bearing, a spirit of restlessness and violence
which had already shown itself in him as a boy, and which passing
years, with their bitter experience and strong passions, had greatly
developed. The hope that we had cherished of D'Effernay's possible
indifference to me, of the change which time might have wrought in
his attachment, now seemed idle and absurd. His love was indeed
impassioned. He embraced me in a manner that made me shrink from him,
and altogether his deportment toward me was a strange contrast to
the gentle, tender, refined affection of our dear friend. I trembled
whenever Jules entered the room, and all that I had prepared to say
to him, all the plans which I had revolved in my mind respecting
him, vanished in an instant before the power of his presence, and
the almost imperative manner in which he claimed my hand. My father's
illness increased; he was now in a very precarious state, hopeless
indeed. Jules rivaled me in filial attentions to him, that I can never
cease to thank him for; but this illness made my situation more and
more critical, and it accelerated the fulfillment of the contract.
I was now to renew my promise to him by the death-bed of my father.
Alas, alas! I fell senseless to the ground when this announcement
was made to me. Jules began to suspect. Already my cold, embarrassed
manner toward him since his return had struck him as strange. He began
to suspect, I repeat, and the effect that this suspicion had on him,
it would be impossible to describe to you. Even now, after so long a
time, now that I am accustomed to his ways, and more reconciled to my
fate by the side of a noble, though somewhat impetuous man, it makes
me tremble to think of those paroxysms, which the idea that I did not
love him called forth. They were fearful; he nearly sank under them.
During two days his life was in danger. At last the storm passed, my
father died; Jules watched over me with the tenderness of a brother,
the solicitude of a parent; for that indeed I shall ever be grateful.
His suspicion once awakened, he gazed round with penetrating looks
to discover the cause of my altered feelings. But your friend never
came to our house; we met in an unfrequented spot, and my father's
illness had interrupted these interviews. Altogether I cannot tell
if Jules discovered anything. A fearful circumstance rendered all
our precautions useless, and cut the knot of our secret connection,
to loose which voluntarily I felt I had no power. A wedding feast,
at a neighboring castle, assembled all the nobility and gentry, and
officers quartered near, together; my deep mourning was an excuse for
my absence. Jules, though he usually was happiest by my side, could
not resist the invitation, and your friend resolved to go, although he
was unwell; he feared to raise suspicion by remaining away, when I was
left at home. With great difficulty he contrived the first day to make
one at a splendid hunt, the second day he could not leave his bed.
A physician, who was in the house, pronounced his complaint to be
violent fever, and Jules, whose room joined that of the sick man,
offered him every little service and kindness which compassion and
good feeling prompted; and I cannot but praise him all the more for
it, as who can tell, perhaps, his suspicion might have taken the right
direction? On the morning of the second day--but let me glance quickly
at that terrible time, the memory of which can never pass from my
mind--a fit of apoplexy most unexpectedly, but gently, ended the
noblest life, and separated us forever! Now you know all. I inclose
the ring. I cannot write more. Farewell!"

The conclusion of the letter made a deep impression on Edward. His
dream rose up before his remembrance, the slight indisposition, the
sudden death, the fearful nursetender, all arranged themselves in
order before his mind, and an awful whole rose out of all these
reflections, a terrible suspicion which he tried to throw off. But
he could not do so, and when he met the captain and D'Effernay
in the evening, and the latter challenged his visitors to a game
of billiards, Edward glanced from time to time at his host in
a scrutinizing manner, and could not but feel that the restless
discontent which was visible in his countenance, and the unsteady
glare of his eyes, which shunned the fixed look of others, only fitted
too well into the shape of the dark thoughts which were crossing his
own mind. Late in the evening, after supper, they played whist in
Emily's boudoir. On the morrow, if the weather permitted, they were
to conclude their inspection of the surrounding property, and the next
day they were to visit the iron foundries, which, although distant
from the Castle several miles, formed a very important item in the
rent-roll of the estates. The company separated for the night.
Edward fell asleep; and the same dream, with the same circumstances,
recurred, only with the full consciousness that the sick man
was Ferdinand. Edward felt overpowered, a species of horror
took possession of his mind, as he found himself now in regular
communication with the beings of the invisible world.

The weather favored D'Effernay's projects. The whole day was passed
in the open air. Emily only appeared at meals, and in the evening when
they played at cards. Both she and Edward avoided, as if by mutual
consent, every word, every look that could awaken the slightest
suspicion or jealous feeling in D'Effernay's mind. She thanked him
in her heart for this forbearance, but her thoughts were in another
world; she took little heed of what passed around her. Her husband was
in an excellent temper; he played the part of host to perfection; and
when the two officers were established comfortably by the fire, in the
captain's room, smoking together, they could not but do justice to his
courteous manners.

"He appears to be a man of general information," remarked Edward.

"He has traveled a great deal, and read a great deal, as I told you
when we first met: he is a remarkable man, but one of uncontrolled
passions, and desperately jealous."

"Yet he appears very attentive to his wife."

"Undoubtedly he is wildly in love with her; yet he makes her unhappy,
and himself too."

"He certainly does not appear happy, there is so much restlessness."

"He can never bear to remain in one place for any length of time
together. He is now going to sell the property he only bought last
year. There is an instability about him; everything palls on him."

"That is the complaint of many who are rich and well to do in the
world."

"Yes; only not in the same degree. I assure you it has often struck me
that man must have a bad conscience."

"What an idea!" rejoined Edward, with a forced laugh, for the
captain's remark struck him forcibly. "He seems a man of honor."

"Oh, one may be a man of honor, as it is called, and yet have
something quite bad enough to reproach yourself with. But I know
nothing about it, and would not breathe such a thing except to you.
His wife, too, looks so pale and so oppressed."

"But, perhaps, that is her natural complexion and expression."

"Oh, no! no! the year before D'Effernay came from Paris, she was as
fresh as a rose. Many people declare that your poor friend loved her.
The affair was wrapped in mystery, and I never believed the report,
for Hallberg was a steady man, and the whole country knew that Emily
had been engaged a long time."

"Hallberg never mentioned the name in his letters," answered Edward,
with less candor than usual.

"I thought not. Besides D'Effernay was very much attached to him, and
mourned his death."

"Indeed!"

"I assure you the morning that Hallberg was found dead in his bed so
unexpectedly, D'Effernay was like one beside himself."

"Very extraordinary. But as we are on the subject, tell me, I pray
you, all the circumstances of my poor Ferdinand's illness, and awful
sudden death."

"I can tell you all about it, as well as any one, for I was one of the
guests at that melancholy wedding. Your friend, and I, and many others
were invited. Hallberg had some idea of not going; he was unwell, with
violent headache and giddiness. But we persuaded him, and he consented
to go with us. The first day he felt tolerably well. We hunted in
the open field; we were all on horseback, the day hot. Hallberg felt
worse. The second day he had a great deal of fever; he could not
stay up. The physician (for fortunately there was one in the company)
ordered rest, cooling medicine, neither of which seemed to do him
good. The rest of the men dispersed, to amuse themselves in various
ways. Only D'Effernay remained at home; he was never very fond of
large societies, and we voted that he was discontented and out of
humor because his betrothed bride was not with him. His room was next
to the sick man's, to whom he gave all possible care and attention,
for poor Hallberg, besides being ill, was in despair at giving so
much trouble in a strange house. D'Effernay tried to calm him on
this point; he nursed him, amused him with conversation, mixed his
medicines, and, in fact, showed more kindness and tenderness, than any
of us would have given him credit for. Before I went to bed I visited
Hallberg, and found him much better, and more cheerful; the doctor
had promised that he should leave his bed next day. So I left him and
retired with the rest of the world, rather late, and very tired, to
rest. The next morning I was awoke by the fatal tidings. I did not
wait to dress, I ran to his room, it was full of people."

"And how, how was the death first discovered?" inquired Edward, in
breathless eagerness.

"The servant, who came in to attend on him, thought he was asleep, for
he lay in his usual position, his head upon his hand. He went away
and waited for some time; but hours passed, and he thought he ought to
wake his master to give him his medicine. Then the awful discovery was
made. He must have died peacefully, for his countenance was so calm,
his limbs undisturbed. A fit of apoplexy had terminated his life, but
in the most tranquil manner."

"Incomprehensible," said Edward, with a deep sigh. "Did they take no
measures to restore animation?"

"Certainly; all that could be done was done, bleeding, fomentation,
friction; the physician superintended, but there was no hope, it was
all too late. He must have been dead some hours, for he was already
cold and stiff. If there had been a spark of life in him he would have
been saved. It was all over; I had lost my good lieutenant, and the
regiment one of its finest officers."

He was silent, and appeared lost in thought. Edward, for his part,
felt overwhelmed by terrible suspicions and sad memories. After a long
pause he recovered himself: "and where was D'Effernay?" he inquired.

"D'Effernay," answered the Captain, rather surprised at the question;
"oh! he was not in the Castle when we made the dreadful discovery: he
had gone out for an early walk, and when he came back late, not before
noon, he learned the truth, and was like one out of his senses. It
seemed so awful to him, because he had been so much, the very day
before, with poor Hallberg."

"Aye," answered Edward, whose suspicions were being more and more
confirmed every moment. "And did he see the corpse, did he go into the
chamber of death?"

"No," replied the captain; "he assured us it was out of his power to
do so; he could not bear the sight; and I believe it. People with such
uncontrolled feelings as this D'Effernay, are incapable of performing
those duties which others think it necessary and incumbent on them to
fulfill."

"And where was Hallberg buried?"

"Not far from the castle where the mournful event took place.
To-morrow, if we go to the iron foundry, we shall be near the spot."

"I am glad of it," cried Edward eagerly, while a host of projects rose
up in his mind. "But now, captain, I will not trespass any longer on
your kindness. It is late, and we must be up betimes to-morrow. How
far have we to go?"

"Not less than four leagues certainly. D'Effernay has arranged that we
shall drive there, and see it all at our leisure: then we shall return
in the evening. Good night, Wensleben."

They separated: Edward hurried to his room; his heart overflowed.
Sorrow on the one hand, horror and even hatred on the other, agitated
him by turns. It was long before he could sleep. For the third time
the vision haunted him; but now it was clearer than before; now he
saw plainly the features of him who lay in bed, and of him who stood
beside the bed--they were those of Hallberg and of D'Effernay.

This third apparition, the exact counterpart of the two former (only
more vivid), all that he had gathered from conversations on the
subject, and the contents of Emily's letter, left scarcely the shadow
of a doubt remaining as to how his friend had left the world.

D'Effernay's jealous and passionate nature seemed to allow of the
possibility of such a crime, and it could scarcely be wondered at, if
Edward regarded him with a feeling akin to hatred. Indeed the desire
of visiting Hallberg's grave, in order to place the ring in the
coffin, could alone reconcile Wensleben to the idea of remaining any
longer beneath the roof of a man whom he now considered the murderer
of his friend. His mind was a prey to conflicting doubts; detestation
for the culprit, and grief for the victim, pointed out one line of
conduct, while the difficulty of proving D'Effernay's guilt, and still
more, pity and consideration for Emily, determined him at length to
let the matter rest, and to leave the murderer, if such he really
were, to the retribution which his own conscience and the justice of
God would award him. He would seek his friend's grave, and then he
would separate from D'Effernay, and never see him more. In the midst
of these reflections the servant came to tell him that the carriage
was ready. A shudder passed over his frame as D'Effernay greeted him;
but he commanded himself, and they started on their expedition.

Edward spoke but little, and that only when it was necessary, and
the conversation was kept up by his two companions; he had made every
inquiry, before he set out, respecting the place of his friend's
interment, the exact situation of the tomb, the name of the village,
and its distance from the main road. On their way home, he requested
that D'Effernay would give orders to the coachman to make a round of
a mile or two as far as the village of ----, with whose rector he
was particularly desirous to speak. A momentary cloud gathered on
D'Effernay's brow, yet it seemed no more than his usual expression
of vexation at any delay or hindrance; and he was so anxious to
propitiate his rich visitor, who appeared likely to take the estate
off his hands, that he complied with all possible courtesy. The
coachman was directed to turn down a by-road, and a very bad one it
was. The captain stood up in the carriage and pointed out the village
to him, at some distance off; it lay in a deep ravine at the foot of
the mountains.

They arrived in the course of time, and inquired for the clergyman's
house, which, as well as the church, was situated on rising ground.
The three companions alighted from the carriage, which they left at
the bottom of the hill, and walked up together in the direction of the
rectory. Edward knocked at the door and was admitted, while the two
others sat on a bench outside. He had promised to return speedily,
but to D'Effernay's restless spirit, one-quarter of an hour appeared
interminable.

He turned to the captain and said, in a tone of impatience, "M. de
Wensleben must have a great deal of business with the rector: we have
been here an immense time, and he does not seem inclined to make his
appearance.

"Oh, I dare say he will come soon. The matter cannot detain him long."

"What on earth can he have to do here?"

"Perhaps you would call it a mere fancy--the enthusiasm of youth."

"It has a name, I suppose?"

"Certainly, but--"

"Is it sufficiently important, think you, to make us run the risk of
being benighted on such roads as these?"

"Why, it is quite early in the day."

"But we have more than two leagues to go. Why will you not
speak?--there cannot any great mystery."

"Well, perhaps not a mystery, exactly, but just one of those subjects
on which we are usually reserved with others."

"So! so!" rejoined D'Effernay, with a little sneer. "Some love affair;
some girl or another who pursues him, that he wants to get rid of."

"Nothing of the kind, I can assure you," replied the captain drily.
"It could scarcely be more innocent. He wishes, in fact, to visit his
friend's grave."

The listener's expression was one of scorn and anger. "It is worth the
trouble certainly," he exclaimed, with a mocking laugh. "A charming
sentimental pilgrimage, truly; and pray who is this beloved
friend, over whose resting-place he must shed a tear and plant a
forget-me-not? He told me he had never been in the neighborhood
before."

"No more he had; neither did he know where poor Hallberg was buried
until I told him."

"Hallberg!" echoed the other in a tone that startled the captain,
and caused him to turn and look fixedly in the speaker's face. It was
deadly pale, and the captain observed the effort which D'Effernay made
to recover his composure.

"Hallberg!" he repeated again, in a calmer tone, "and was Wensleben a
friend of his?"

"His bosom friend from childhood. They were brought up together at the
academy. Hallberg left it a year earlier than his friend."

"Indeed!" said D'Effernay, scowling as he spoke, and working himself
up into a passion. "And this lieutenant came here on this account,
then, and the purchase of the estates was a mere excuse."

"I beg your pardon," observed the captain, in a decided tone of voice;
"I have already told you that it was I who informed him of the place
where his friend lies buried."

"That may be, but it was owing to his friendship, to the wish to learn
something further of his fate, that we are indebted for the visit of
this romantic knight-errant."

"That does not appear likely," replied the captain, who thought it
better to avert, if possible, the rising storm of his companion's
fury. "Why should he seek for news of Hallberg here, when he comes
from the place where he was quartered for a long time, and where all
his comrades now are."

"Well, I don't know," cried D'Effernay, whose passion was increasing
every moment. "Perhaps you have heard what was once gossiped about
the neighborhood, that Hallberg was an admirer of my wife before she
married."

"Oh yes, I have heard that report, but never believed it. Hallberg was
a prudent, steady man, and every one knew that Mademoiselle Varnier's
hand had been promised for some time."

"Yes! yes! but you do not know to what lengths passion and avarice may
lead: for Emily was rich. We must not forget that, when we discuss
the matter; an elopement with the rich heiress would have been a fine
thing for a poor, beggarly lieutenant."

"Shame! shame! M. D'Effernay. How can you slander the character
of that upright young man? If Hallberg were so unhappy as to love
Mademoiselle Varnier--"

"That he did! you may believe me so far, I had reason to know it, and
I did know it."

"We had better change the conversation altogether, as it has taken
so unpleasant a turn, Hallberg is dead; his errors, be they what they
may, lie buried with him. His name stands high with all who knew him
Even you, M. D'Effernay--you were his friend."

"I his friend? I hated him!--I loathed him!" D'Effernay could not
proceed; he foamed at the mouth with rage.

"Compose yourself!" said the Captain, rising as he spoke; "you look
and speak like a madman."

A madman! Who says I am mad? Now I see it all--the connection of the
whole--the shameful conspiracy."

"Your conduct is perfectly incomprehensible to me," answered the
captain, with perfect coolness. "Did you not attend Hallberg in his
last illness, and give him his medicines with your own hand?"

"I!" stammered D'Effernay. "No! no! no!" he cried, while the
captain's growing suspicions increased every moment, on account of
the perturbation which his companion displayed. "I never gave his
medicines; whoever says that is a liar."

"I say it!" exclaimed the officer, in a loud tone, for his patience
was exhausted. "I say it, because I know that it was so, and I will
maintain that fact against any one at any time. If you choose to
contradict the evidence of my senses, it is you who are a liar!"

"Ha! you shall give me satisfaction for this insult. Depend upon it,
I am not one to be trifled with, as you shall find. You shall retract
your words."

"Never! I am ready to defend every word I have uttered here on this
spot, at this moment, if you please. You have your pistols in the
carriage, you know."

D'Effernay cast a look of hatred on the speaker, and then dashing
down the little hill, to the surprise of the servants, he dragged
the pistols from the sword-case, and was by the captain's side in a
moment. But the loud voices of the disputants had attracted Edward to
the spot, and there he stood on D'Effernay's return; and by his side a
venerable old man, who carried a large bunch of keys in his hand.

"In heaven's name, what has happened?" cried Wensleben.

"What are you about to do?" interposed the rector, in a tone of
authority, though his countenance was expressive of horror. "Are you
going to commit murder on this sacred spot, close to the precincts of
the church?"

"Murder! who speaks of murder?" cried D'Effernay. "Who can prove it?"
and as he spoke, the captain turned a fierce, penetrating look upon
him, beneath which he quailed.

"But, I repeat the question," Edward began once more, "what does all
this mean? I left you a short time ago in friendly conversation. I
come back and find you both armed--both violently agitated--and M.
D'Effernay, at least, speaking incoherently. What do you mean by
'proving it?'--to what do you allude?" At this moment, before any
answer could be made, a man came out of the house with a pick-axe
and shovel on his shoulder, and advancing toward the rector, said
respectfully, "I am quite ready, sir, if you have the key of the
churchyard."

It was now the captain's turn to look anxious: "What are you going
to do, you surely don't intend--?" but as he spoke, the rector
interrupted him.

"This gentleman is very desirous to see the place where his friend
lies buried."

"But these preparations, what do they mean?"

"I will tell you," said Edward, in a voice and tone that betrayed
the deepest emotion, "I have a holy duty to perform. I must cause the
coffin to be opened."

"How, what!" screamed D'Effernay, once again. "Never--I will never
permit such a thing."

"But, sir," the old man spoke, in a tone of calm decision, contrasting
wonderfully with the violence of him whom he addressed, "you have no
possible right to interfere. If this gentleman wishes it, and I accede
to the proposition, no one can prevent us from doing as we would."

"I tell you I will not suffer it," continued D'Effernay, with the same
frightful agitation. "Stir at your peril," he cried, turning sharply
round upon the grave-digger, and holding a pistol to his head; but the
captain pulled his arm away, to the relief of the frightened peasant.

"M. D'Effernay," he said, "your conduct for the last half-hour has
been most unaccountable--most unreasonable."

"Come, come," interposed Edward, "Let us say no more on the subject;
but let us be going," he addressed the rector; "we will not detain
these gentlemen much longer."

He made a step toward the churchyard, but D'Effernay clutched his arm,
and, with an impious oath, "you shall not stir," he said; "that grave
shall not be opened."

Edward shook him off, with a look of silent hatred, for now indeed all
his doubts were confirmed.

D'Effernay saw that Wensleben was resolved, and a deadly pallor spread
itself over his features, and a shudder passed visibly over his frame.

"You are going!" he cried, with every gesture and appearance of
insanity. "Go, then;" ... and he pointed the muzzle of the pistol to
his mouth, and before any one could prevent him, he drew the trigger,
and fell back a corpse. The spectators were motionless with surprise
and horror; the captain was the first to recover himself in some
degree. He bent over the body with the faint hope of detecting some
sign of life. The old man turned pale and dizzy with a sense of
terror, and he looked as if he would have swooned, had not Edward led
him gently into his house, while the two others busied themselves with
vain attempts to restore life.

The spirit of D'Effernay had gone to its last account!

It was, indeed, an awful moment. Death in its worst shape was before
them, and a terrible duty still remained to be performed.

Edward's cheek was blanched; his eye had a fixed look, yet he moved
and spoke with a species of mechanical action, which had something
almost ghastly in it. Causing the body to be removed into the house,
he bade the captain summon the servants of the deceased, and then
motioning with his hand to the awe-struck sexton, he proceeded with
him to the churchyard. A few clods of earth alone were removed ere the
captain stood by his friend's side.

Here we must pause. Perhaps it were better altogether to emulate the
silence that was maintained then and afterward by the two comrades.
But the sexton could not be bribed to entire secrecy, and it was a
story he loved to tell, with details we gladly omit, of how Wensleben
solemnly performed his task--of how no doubt could any longer exist
as to the cause of Hallberg's death. Those who love the horrible must
draw on their own imaginations to supply what we resolutely withhold.

Edward, we believe, never alluded to D'Effernay's death, and all the
awful circumstances attending it, but twice--once, when, with every
necessary detail, he and the captain gave their evidence to the legal
authorities; and once, with as few details as possible, when he had an
interview with the widow of the murderer, the beloved of the victim.
The particulars of this interview he never divulged, for he considered
Emily's grief too sacred to be exposed to the prying eyes of the
curious and the unfeeling. She left the neighborhood immediately,
leaving her worldly affairs in Wensleben's hands, who soon disposed
of the property for her. She returned to her native country, with the
resolution of spending the greater part of her wealth in relieving
the distresses of others, wisely seeking, in the exercise of piety
and benevolence, the only possible alleviation of her own deep
and many-sided griefs. For Edward, he was soon pronounced to have
recovered entirely from the shock of these terrible events. Of a
courageous and energetic disposition, he pursued the duties of his
profession with a firm step, and hid his mighty sorrow deep in the
recesses of his heart. To the superficial observer, tears, groans, and
lamentations are the only proofs of sorrow: and when they subside,
the sorrow is said to have passed away also. Thus the captive, immured
within the walls of his prison-house, is as one dead to the outward
world, though the gaoler be a daily witness to the vitality of
affliction.

       *       *       *       *       *

Paris has been again emptied of its citizens to see M. Poitevin make
his second ascent on horseback from the Champ de Mars. To show that he
was not fastened to his saddle, the idiot, when some hundred yards
up in the air, stood upright on his horse, and saluted the multitude
below with both his hands.

       *       *       *       *       *


PEASANT LIFE IN GERMANY.

We copy the following interesting paragraph from a work just issued in
London on "The Social Condition and Education of the People of England
and Europe," by Joseph Kay, of Cambridge University.

    "As I have already said, the _moral, intellectual and physical
    condition of the peasants and operatives_ of Prussia, Saxony
    and other parts of Germany, of Holland, and of the Protestant
    cantons of Switzerland, and the social condition of the
    peasants in the greater part of France, _is very much higher
    and happier, and very much more satisfactory, than that of
    the peasants and operatives of England_; the condition of the
    _poor_ in the North German, Swiss and Dutch _towns_, is as
    remarkable a contrast to that of the poor of the _English
    towns_ as can well be imagined; and that the condition of the
    _poorer classes_ of Germany, Switzerland, Holland and France
    is _rapidly improving_. The great _superiority_ of the
    _preparation_ for life which a _poor man_ receives in those
    countries I have mentioned, to that which a peasant or
    operative receives _in England_, and the difference of the
    social position of a poor man in those countries to that of
    a peasant or operative in England, seem sufficient to explain
    the difference which exists between the moral and social
    condition of the poor of our own country and of the other
    countries I have named. In Germany, Holland, and Switzerland,
    a child begins its life in the society of parents who have
    been educated and brought up for years in the company of
    learned and gentlemanly professors, and in the society and
    under the direction of a father who has been exercised in
    military arts, and who has acquired the bearing, the clean and
    orderly habits, and the taste for respectable attire, which
    characterize the soldier. The children of these countries
    spend the first six years of their lives in homes which
    are well regulated. They are during this time accustomed to
    orderly habits, to neat and clean clothes, and to ideas of the
    value of instruction, of the respect due to the teachers,
    and of the excellence of the schools, by parents who have, by
    their training in early life, acquired such tastes and ideas
    themselves. Each child at the age of six begins to attend a
    school, which is perfectly clean, well ventilated, directed by
    an able and well-educated gentleman, and superintended by the
    religious ministers and by the inspectors of the Government.
    Until the completion of its _fourteenth_ year, each child
    continues regular daily attendance at one of these schools,
    daily strengthening its habits of cleanliness and order,
    learning the rudiments of useful knowledge, receiving the
    principles of religion and morality, and gaining confirmed
    health and physical energy by the exercise and drill of the
    school playground. _No children are left idle in the streets
    of the towns; no children are allowed to grovel in the
    gutters; no children are allowed to make_ their appearance
    at the schools dirty, or in ragged clothes; and the local
    authorities are obliged to clothe all whose parents cannot
    afford to clothe them. The children of the _poor_ of
    Germany, Holland and Switzerland acquire stronger habits of
    cleanliness, neatness and industry at the _primary_ schools,
    than the children of the _small shopkeeping_ classes of
    England do at the private schools of England; and they
    leave the _primary schools_ of these countries _much better
    instructed_ than those who leave our _middle class private
    schools_. After having learnt reading, writing, arithmetic,
    singing, geography, history and the Scriptures, the children
    leave the schools, carrying with them into life habits of
    cleanliness, neatness, order and industry, and awakened
    intellect, capable of collecting truths and reasoning upon
    them."

       *       *       *       *       *


[FROM THE DUBLIN UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE.]

SUMMER PASTIME.

  Do you ask how I'd amuse me
    When the long bright summer comes,
  And welcome leisure woos me
    To shun life's crowded homes;
  To shun the sultry city,
    Whose dense, oppressive air
  Might make one weep with pity
    For those who must be there.

  I'll tell you then--I would not
    To foreign countries roam,
  As though my fancy could not
    Find occupance at home;
  Nor to home-haunts of fashion
    Would I, least of all, repair,
  For guilt, and pride, and passion,
    Have summer-quarters there.

  Far, far from watering-places
    Of note and name I'd keep,
  For there would vapid faces
    Still throng me in my sleep;
  Then contact with the foolish,
    The arrogant, the vain,
  The meaningless--the mulish,
    Would sicken heart and brain.

  No--I'd seek some shore of ocean
    Where nothing comes to mar
  The ever-fresh commotion
    Of sea and land at war;
  Save the gentle evening only
    As it steals along the deep,
  So spirit-like and lonely,
    To still the waves to sleep.

  There long hours I'd spend in viewing
    The elemental strife,
  My soul the while subduing
    With the littleness of life;
  Of life, with all its paltry plans,
    Its conflicts and its cares--
  The feebleness of all that's man's--
    The might that's God's and theirs!

  And when eve came I'd listen
    To the stilling of that war,
  Till o'er my head should glisten
    The first pure silver star;
  Then, wandering homeward slowly,
    I'd learn my heart the tune
  Which the dreaming billows lowly,
    Were murmuring to the moon!

R.C.

       *       *       *       *       *

True genius is perpetual youth, health, serenity, and strength. The
eye is bright with a fine fire that is undimmed by time, and the mind,
not sharing the body's decline from the prime of middle age, continues
on with illimitable accession of spiritual power.

Our convictions should be based on conceptions got from insight of
principles, and not upon opinions spawned of authority and expediency.
Every man shall influence me, no man can decide for me.

       *       *       *       *       *


[FROM THE SPIRIT OF THE TIMES]

REMINISCENCES OF SARGENT S. PRENTISS, OF MISSISSIPPI.

BY T.B. THORPE.

AUTHOR OF "TOM OWEN, THE BEE HUNTER."

The death of Sargeant S. Prentiss has called forth an universal
feeling of sorrow; the consciousness that "a great man has fallen" is
depicted upon the faces of the multitude.

The eloquent offerings to his virtues and to his genius that
everywhere follow the news of his demise, are but slight tokens of
that sorrow that fills the heart of all who knew the gifted Prentiss.
Having known him long, and having had frequent occasions to witness
exhibitions of his great mental powers, I cannot refrain from paying
an imperfect tribute to his memory.

I first met Mr. Prentiss when he was in the full maturity of his
power, but I have the pleasure of knowing hundreds who were well
acquainted with his early history and early triumphs. Volumes of
interest might be written upon the life of Mr. Prentiss. And then
his high sense of honor, his brave spirit, his nobleness of soul, his
intense but commendable pride, his classical attainments, and his deep
knowledge of the law, can scarcely be illustrated, so universal and
superior were his accomplishments and acquirements.

In his early career, I consider Mr. Prentiss both fortunate and
unfortunate. I have often imagined the shrinking but proud boy, living
unnoticed and unknown among the wealthiest citizens of the south.
Buried in the obscurity of his humble school, he looked out upon the
busy world, and measured the mighty capacities of his own soul with
those whom society had placed above him. I think I see him brooding
over his position, and longing to be free, as the suffocating man
longs for the boundless air of heaven. His hour of triumph came,
and surpassed, perhaps, his own aspirations. From the schoolroom he
entered that of the court--a chance offered--a position gained--the
law his theme, he at once not only equaled, but soared even beyond the
aim of the most favored of his compeers.

The era was one of extravagance. The virgin soil of Mississippi was
pouring into the laps of her generous sons untold abundance. There
were thousands of her citizens, full of health and talent, who adorned
excesses of living by the tasteful procurements of wealth, and the
highest accomplishments of mind. Into this world Prentiss entered,
heralded by naught save his own genius. The heirs of princely
fortunes, the descendants of heroes, men of power and place, of family
pride, of national associations, were not more proud, more gallant,
than was Prentiss, for "he was reckoned among the noblest Romans of
them all."

Each step in his new fortune seemed only to elicit new qualities
for admiration. At the forum he dazzled--the jury and the judge were
confounded--the crowd carried him to the stump, and the multitude
listened as to one inspired. Fair ladies vied with each other in
waving tiny hands in token of admiration--the stolid judges of the
Supreme Court wondered at the mind of the apparent boy--even the walls
of Congress echoed forth pæans to his praise. His course was as rapid
and brilliant as that of the meteor that suddenly springs athwart the
heavens, but he was human and accomplished his task, herculean as he
was, at the price of an injured constitution.

In personal appearance Prentiss was eminently handsome, and yet
eminently manly. Although of medium height, there was that in the
carriage of his head that was astonishingly impressive. I shall never
forget him on one occasion, "in '44," when he rose at a public meeting
to reply to an antagonist worthy of his steel. His whole soul was
roused, his high smooth forehead fairly coruscated. He remained silent
for some seconds, and only _looked_. The bald eagle never glanced
so fiercely from his eyry. It seemed as if his deep blue eye would
distend until it swallowed up the thousands of his audience. For an
instant the effect was painful; he saw it and smiled, when a cheer
burst from the admiring multitude that fairly shook the earth.

His voice was clear and sweet, and could be heard at an immense
distance, and yet, to be all like Demosthenes, he had a perceptible
impediment in his speech. As a reader he had no superior. His
narration was clear and unadorned, proper sentences were subduedly
humorous, but the impressive parts were delivered with an effect that
reminded me of the elder Kean.

His imagination was unsurpassed, and the rich stores of his mind
supplied him with never-ending material, quoted and original.
The slightest allusion to anything gave him the key to all its
peculiarities if he had occasion to allude to the diamond, its bed in
the Golconda, its discovery by some poor native, its being associated
with commerce, its polish by the lapidary, its adorning the neck
of beauty, its rays brilliant and serene, its birth, its life,
its history, all flashed upon him. So with every idea in the vast
storehouse of his mind. He seemed to know all things, in mass and in
particulars, never confused, never at a loss--the hearer listened,
wondered, and dreamed. Thoughts of moment came forth as demanded, but
ten thousand other thoughts rare and beautiful, continued to bubble
up, after all effort ceased.

No man had a more delicate or subtle wit than Prentiss, or a more
Falstaffian humor when it suited his purpose. Who will ever forget the
spending of a social dinner hour with him, when his health was high
and his mind at ease? Who so lovely?--who so refined? What delight
was exhibited by sweet ladies who listened to his words! Who could
so eloquently discourse of roses and buds, of lilies and pearls, of
eyes and graces, of robes and angels, and yet never offend the most
sensitive of the sex, or call other than the blush of pleasure and
joy to the cheek? Who could, on the "public day," ascend so gracefully
from the associations of tariffs, and banks, and cotton, and sugar,
to greet the fair ladies that honored him with their presence? How
he would lean toward them, as he dwelt upon "the blessed of all God's
handiwork," compared their bright eyes to "day-stars" that lit up the
dark recesses of his own clouded imagination; and how he would revel,
like another Puck, among the rays and beams of smiles called forth by
his own happy compliments--and how he would change from all this, and
in an instant seemingly arm himself with the thunderbolts of Jove,
which he would dash with appalling sound among his antagonists, or at
principles he opposed, and yet with such a charm, with such a manner,
that these very daughters of the sunny South who had listened to his
syren-song so admiringly, would now stare, and wonder, and pallor, and
yet listen, even as one gazes over the precipice, and is fascinated at
the very nearness to destruction.

Prentiss had originally a constitution of iron; his frame was so
perfect in its organization, that, in spite of the most extraordinary
negligence of health, his muscles had all the compactness, glossiness,
and distinctiveness of one who had specially trained by diet and
exercise. It was this constitution that enabled him to accomplish
so much in so short a time. He could almost wholly discard sleep for
weeks, with apparent impunity; he could eat or starve; do anything
that would kill ordinary men, yet never feel a twinge of pain. I
saw him once amidst a tremendous political excitement; he had been
talking, arguing, dining, visiting, and traveling, without rest for
three whole days. His companions would steal away at times for sleep,
but Prentiss was like an ever-busy spirit, here, and there, and
everywhere. The morning of the fourth day came, and he was to appear
before an audience familiar with his fame, but one that had never
heard him speak; an audience critical in the last degree, he desired
to succeed, for more was depending than he had ever before had cause
to stake upon such an occasion. Many felt a fear that he would be
unprepared. I mingled in the expecting crowd: I saw ladies who had
never honored the stump with their presence struggling for seats,
counselors, statesmen, and professional men, the elite of a great
city, were gathered together. An hour before I had seen Prentiss,
still apparently ignorant of his engagement.

The time of trial came, and the remarkable man presented himself,
the very picture of buoyant health, of unbroken rest. All this had
been done _by the unyielding resolve of his will_--his triumph was
complete; high-wrought expectations were more than realized, prejudice
was demolished, professional jealousy silenced, and he descended from
the rostrum, freely accorded his proper place among the orators and
statesmen of the "Southern Metropolis."

Mr. Clay visited the South in the fall of '44, and, as he was
then candidate for the Presidency, he attracted in New Orleans, if
possible, more than usual notice. His hotel was the St. Charles;
toward noon he reached that magnificent palace. The streets presented
a vast ocean of heads, and every building commanding a view was
literally covered with human beings. The great "Statesman of the West"
presented himself to the multitude between the tall columns of the
finest portico in the world. The scene was beyond description, and of
vast interest. As the crowd swayed to and fro, a universal shout was
raised for Mr. Clay to speak; he uttered a sentence or two, waved his
hand in adieu, and escaped amidst the prevailing confusion. Prentiss
meanwhile was at a side window, evidently unconscious of being himself
noticed, gazing upon what was passing with all the delight of the
humblest spectator. Suddenly his name was announced. He attempted to
withdraw from public gaze, but his friends pushed him forward. Again
his name was shouted, hats and caps were thrown in the air, and he
was finally compelled to show himself on the portico. With remarkable
delicacy, he chose a less prominent place than that previously
occupied by Mr. Clay, although perfectly visible. He thanked his
friends for their kindness by repeated bows, and by such smiles as he
alone could give. "A speech! A speech!" thundered a thousand voices.
Prentiss lifted his hand; in an instant everything was still--then
pointing to the group that surrounded Mr. Clay, he said,
"Fellow-citizens, when the eagle is soaring in the sky, the owls
and the bats retire to their holes." And long before the shout that
followed this remark had ceased, Prentiss had disappeared amid the
multitude.

But the most extraordinary exhibition of Prentiss' powers of mind and
endurance of body, was shown while he was running for Congress. He
had the whole State to canvass, and the magnitude of the work was just
what he desired. From what I have learned from anecdotes, that canvass
must have presented some scenes combining the highest mental and
physical exertion that was ever witnessed in the world. Prentiss was
in perfect health, and in the first blush of success, and it cannot be
doubted but that his best efforts of oratory were then made, and now
live recorded only in the fading memories of his hearers. An incident
illustrative of the time is remembered, that may hear repeating.

The whole state of Mississippi was alive with excitement; for the
moment, she felt that her sovereign dignity had been trifled with,
and that her reputation demanded the return of Prentiss to Congress.
Crowds followed him from place to place, making a gala time of weeks
together. Among the shrewd worldlings who take advantage of such times
"to coin money," was the proprietor of a traveling menagerie, and he
soon found out that the multitude followed Prentiss. Getting the list
of that remarkable man's "appointments," he filled up his own, and it
was soon noticed as a remarkable coincidence, that the orator always
"arrived along with the other 'lions.'" The reason of this meeting was
discovered, and the "boys" decided that Prentiss should "next time"
speak from the top of the lion's cage. Never was the menagerie more
crowded. At the proper time, the candidate gratified his constituents,
and mounted his singular rostrum. I was told by a person, who
professed to be an eye witness, that the whole affair presented a
singular mixture of the terrible and the comical. Prentiss was, as
usual, eloquent, and, as if ignorant of the novel circumstances with
which he was surrounded, went deeply into the matter in hand, his
election. For a while the audience and the animals were quiet, the
former listening, the latter eyeing the speaker with grave intensity.
The first burst of applause electrified the menagerie; the elephant
threw his trunk into the air and echoed back the noise, while the
tigers and bears significantly growled. On went Prentiss, and as each
peculiar animal vented his rage or approbation, he most ingeniously
wrought in its habits, as a facsimile of some man or passion. In the
meanwhile, the stately king of beasts, who had been quietly treading
the mazes of his prison, became alarmed at the footsteps over
his head, and placing his mouth upon the floor of his cage, made
everything shake by his terrible roar. This, joined with the already
excited feelings of the audience, caused the ladies to shriek, and
a fearful commotion for a moment followed. Prentiss, equal to every
occasion, changed his tone and manner; he commenced a playful strain,
and introduced the fox, the jackal, and hyena, and capped the climax
by likening some well known political opponent to a grave baboon that
presided over the "cage with monkeys"; the resemblance was instantly
recognized, and bursts of laughter followed, that literally set many
into convulsions. The baboon, all unconscious of the attention he
was attracting, suddenly assumed a grimace, and then a serious face,
when Prentiss exclaimed--"I see, my fine fellow, that your feelings
are hurt by my unjust comparison, and I humbly beg your pardon."
The effect of all this may be vaguely imagined, but it cannot be
described.

Of Prentiss' power before a jury too much cannot be said. Innumerable
illustrations might be gathered up, showing that he far surpassed
any living advocate. "The trial of the Wilkinsons" might be cited,
although it was far from being one of his best efforts. Two young men,
only sons, and deeply attached as friends, quarreled, and in the mad
excitement of the moment, one of them was killed. Upon the trial, the
testimony of the mother of the deceased was so direct, that it seemed
to render "the clearing of the prisoner" hopeless. Prentiss spoke to
the witness in the blandest manner and most courtly style. The mother,
arrayed in weeds, and bowed down with sorrow, turned toward Prentiss,
and answered his inquiries with all the dignity of a perfectly
accomplished lady--she calmly uttered the truth, and every word she
spoke rendered the defense apparently more hopeless.

"Would you punish that young man with death?" said Prentiss, pointing
to the prisoner.

The questioned looked, and answered--"He has made me childless, let
the law take its course."

"And would wringing his mother's heart and hurrying her gray hairs
with sorrow into the grave, by rendering her childless, assuage your
grief?"

All present were dissolved in tears--even convulsive sobbing was heard
in the courtroom.

"No!" said the witness, with all the gushing tenderness of a
mother--"No! I would not add a sorrow to her heart, nor that of her
son!"

Admissions in the evidence followed, and hopes were uttered for
the prisoner's acquittal, that changed the whole character of the
testimony. What was a few moments before so dark, grew light, and
without the slightest act that might be construed into an unfair
advantage, in the hands of Prentiss, the witness pleaded for the
accused.

Soon after Mr. Prentiss settled in New Orleans, a meeting was held
to raise funds for the erection of a suitable monument to Franklin.
On that occasion, the lamented Wilde and the accomplished McCaleb
delivered ornate and chaste addresses upon the value of art, and the
policy of enriching New Orleans with its exhibition. At the close
of the meeting, as the audience rose to depart, some one discovered
Prentiss, and calling his name, it was echoed from all sides--he tried
to escape, but was literally carried on the stand.

As a rich specimen of off-hand eloquence, I think the address he
delivered on that occasion was unequaled. Unlike any other speech,
he had the arts to deal with, and of course the associations were of
surpassing splendor. I knew that he was ignorant of the technicalities
of art, and had paid but little attention to their study, and my
surprise was unbounded to see him, thus unexpectedly called upon,
instantly arrange in his mind ideas, and expressing facts and
illustrations that would have done honor to Burke, when dwelling upon
the sublime and beautiful. Had he been bred to the easel, or confined
to the sculptor's room, he could not have been more familiar with the
details of the studio--he painted with all the brilliancy of Titian,
and with the correctness of Raphael, while his images in marble
combined the softness of Praxiteles, and the nervous energy of Michael
Angelo. All this with Prentiss was intuition--I believe that the whole
was the spontaneous thought of the moment, the crude outlines that
floated through his mind being filled up by the intuitive teachings of
his surpassing genius. His conclusion was gorgeous--he passed Napoleon
to the summit of the Alps--his hearers saw him and his steel clad
warriors threading the snows of Mount St. Bernard, and having gained
the dizzy height, Prentiss represented "the man of destiny" looking
down upon the sunny plains of Italy, and then with a mighty swoop,
descending from the clouds and making the grasp of Empire secondary to
that of Art.

I had the melancholy pleasure of hearing his last, and, it would seem
to me, his greatest speech. Toward the close of the last Presidential
campaign, I found him in the interior of the State, endeavoring
to recruit his declining health. He had been obliged to avoid all
public speaking, and had gone far into the country to get away from
excitement. But there was a "gathering" near by his temporary home,
and he consented to be present. It was late in the evening when
he ascended the "stand," which was supported by the trunks of two
magnificent forest trees, through which the setting sun poured with
picturesque effect. The ravages of ill health were apparent upon his
face, and his high massive forehead was paler, and seemingly more
transparent than usual. His audience, some three or four hundred, was
composed in a large degree of his old and early friends. He seemed to
feel deeply, and as there was nothing to oppose, he assumed the style
of the mild and beautiful--he casually alluded to the days of his
early coming among his Southern friends--of hours of pleasure he had
massed, and of the hopes of the future. In a few moments the bustle
and confusion natural to a fatiguing day of political wrangling
ceased--one straggler after another suspended his noisy demonstration,
and gathered near the speaker. Soon a mass of silent but heart-heaving
humanity was crowded compactly before him. Had Prentiss, on that
occasion, held the very heart-strings of his auditors in his hand, he
could not have had them more in his power. For an hour he continued,
rising from one important subject to another, until the breath was
fairly suspended in the excitement. An uninterested spectator would
have supposed that he had used sorcery in thus transfixing his
auditors. While all others forgot, he noticed the day was drawing to a
close, he turned and looked toward the setting sun, and apostrophized
its fading glory--then in his most touching voice and manner,
concluded as follows:--

"Friends--That glorious orb reminds me that the day is spent, and
that I too must close. Ere we part, let me hope that it may be our
good fortune to end our days in the same splendor, and that when the
evening of life comes, we may sink to rest with the clouds that close
in on our departure, gold-tipped with the glorious effulgence of a
well-spent life!"

In conclusion, I would ask, will some historian, who can sympathize
with the noble dead, gather up the now fleeting memorials that still
live in memory, and combine them together, that future generations may
know something of the mighty mind of Prentiss.

The remains of the orator must ever be imperfect--the tone of
voice--the flashing eye--the occasion, and the mighty shout of the
multitude, cannot be impressed; but still Prentiss has left enough
in his brilliant career, if treasured up, to show posterity that he
was every inch a man. Let his fragmentary printed speeches--let the
reminiscences of his friends that treat of his power as an orator,
be brought together, and unsatisfactory as they may be, there will
be found left intrinsic value enough to accomplish the object. There
will be in the fluted column, though shattered and defaced, an Ionian
beauty that will tell unerringly of the magnificent temple that it
once adorned.

BATON ROUGE, July 9, 1850.


       *       *       *       *       *


[FROM HOUSEHOLD WORDS.]

THE CHEMISTRY OF A CANDLE.

The Wilkinsons were having a small party,--it consisted of themselves
and Uncle Bagges--at which the younger members of the family, home
for the holidays, had been just admitted to assist after dinner. Uncle
Bagges was a gentleman from whom his affectionate relatives cherished
expectations of a testamentary nature. Hence the greatest attention
was paid by them to the wishes of Mr. Bagges, as well as to every
observation which he might be pleased to make.

"Eh! what? you sir," said Mr. Bagges, facetiously addressing himself
to his eldest nephew, Harry,--"Eh! what? I am glad to hear, sir, that
you are doing well at school. Now--eh? now, are you clever enough to
tell where was Moses when he put the candle out?"

"That depends, uncle," said the young gentleman, "on whether he had
lighted the candle to see with at night, or by daylight, to seal a
letter."

"Eh! Very good, now! 'Pon my word, very good," exclaimed Uncle Bagges.
"You must be Lord Chancellor, sir--Lord Chancellor, one of these
days."

"And now, uncle," asked Harry, who was a favorite with his uncle, "can
you tell me what you do when you put a candle out?"

"Clap an extinguisher on it, you young rogue, to be sure."

"Oh! but I mean, you cut off its supply of oxygen," said Master Harry.

"Cut off its ox's--eh? what? I shall cut off your nose, you young dog,
one of these fine days."

"He means something he heard at the Royal Institution," observed Mrs.
Wilkinson. "He reads a great deal about chemistry, and he attended
Professor Faraday's lectures there on the chemical history of a
candle, and has been full of it ever since."

"Now, you sir," said Uncle Bagges, "come you here to me, and tell
me what you have to say about this chemical, eh?--or comical:
which?--this comical chemical history of a candle."

"He'll bore you, Bagges," said Mr. Wilkinson. "Harry, don't be
troublesome to your uncle."

"Troublesome! Oh, not at all. He amuses me. I like to hear him. So let
him teach his old uncle the comicality and chemicality of a farthing
rushlight."

"A wax candle will be nicer and cleaner, uncle, and answer the same
purpose. There's one on the mantel-shelf. Let me light it.

"Take care you don't burn your fingers, Or set anything on fire," said
Mrs. Wilkinson.

"Now, uncle," commenced Harry, having drawn his chair to the side of
Mr. Bagges, "we have got our candle burning. What do you see?"

"Let me put on my spectacles," answered the uncle.

"Look down on the top of the candle around the wick. See, it is a
little cup full of melted wax. The heat of the flame has melted the
wax just round the wick. The cold air keeps the outside of it hard,
so as to make the rim of it. The melted wax in the little cup goes up
through the wick to be burnt, just as oil does in the wick of a lamp.
What do you think makes it go up, uncle?"

"Why--why, the flame draws it up, doesn't it?"

"Not exactly, uncle. It goes up through little tiny passages in the
cotton wick, because very, very small channels, or pipes, or pores,
have the power in themselves of sucking up liquids. What they do it by
is called cap--something."

"Capillary attraction, Harry," suggested Mr. Wilkinson.

"Yes, that's it; just as a sponge sucks up water, or a bit of
lump-sugar the little drop of tea or coffee left in the bottom of a
cup. But I mustn't say much more about this, or else you will tell me
I am doing something very much like teaching my grandmother to--you
know what."

"Your grandmother, eh, young sharp-shins?"

"No--I mean my uncle. Now, I'll blow the candle out, like Moses; not
to be in the dark, though, but to see into what it is. Look at the
smoke rising from the wick. I'll hold a bit of lighted paper in the
smoke, so as not to touch the wick. But see, for all that, the candle
lights again. So this shows that the melted wax sucked up through
the wick is turned into vapor; and the vapor burns. The heat of the
burning vapor keeps on melting more wax, and that is sucked up too
within the flame, and turned into vapor, and burnt, and so on till the
was is all used up, and the candle is gone. So the flame, uncle, you
see, is the last of the candle, and the candle seems to go through the
flame into nothing--although it doesn't, but goes into several things,
and isn't it curious, as Professor Faraday said, that the candle
should look so splendid and glorious in going away?"

"How well he remembers, doesn't he?" observed Mrs. Wilkinson.

"I dare say," proceeded Harry, "that the flame of the candle looks
flat to you; but if we were to put a lamp glass over it, so as
to shelter it from the draught, you would see it is round,--round
sideways and running up to a peak. It is drawn up by the hot air; you
know that hot air always rises, and that is the way smoke is taken up
the chimney. What should you think was in the middle of the flame?"

"I should say fire," replied Uncle Bagges.

"Oh, no! The flame is hollow. The bright flame we see is something
no thicker than a thin peel, or skin; and it doesn't touch the wick.
Inside of it is the vapor I told you of just now. If you put one end
of a bent pipe into the middle of the flame, and let the other end of
the pipe dip into a bottle, the vapor or gas from the candle will mix
with the air there; and if you set fire to the mixture of gas from the
candle and air in the bottle, it would go off with a bang."

"I wish you'd do that, Harry," said Master Tom, the younger brother of
the juvenile lecturer.

"I want the proper things," answered Harry. "Well, uncle, the flame
of the candle is a little shining case, with gas in the inside of it,
and air on the outside, so that the case of flame is between the air
and the gas. The gas keeps going into the flame to burn, and when the
candle burns properly, none of it ever passes out through the flame;
and none of the air ever gets in through the flame to the gas. The
greatest heat of the candle is in this skin, or peel, or case of
flame."

"Case of flame!" repeated Mr. Bagges. "Live and learn. I should have
thought a candle-flame was as thick as my poor old noddle."

"I can show you the contrary," said Harry. "I take this piece of white
paper, look, and hold it a second or two down upon the candle-flame,
keeping the flame very steady. Now I'll rub off the black of the
smoke, and--there--you find that the paper is scorched in the shape
of a ring; but inside the ring it is only dirtied, and not singed at
all."

"Seeing is believing," remarked the uncle.

"But," proceeded Harry, "there is more in the candle-flame than the
gas that comes out of the candle. You know a candle won't burn without
air. There must be always air around the gas, and touching it like, to
make it burn. If a candle hasn't got enough air, it goes out, or burns
badly, so that some of the vapor inside of the flame comes out through
it in the form of smoke, and this is the reason of a candle smoking.
So now you know why a great clumsy dip smokes more than a neat wax
candle; it is because the thick wick of the dip makes too much fuel in
proportion to the air that can get to it."

"Dear me! Well, I suppose there is a reason for everything," exclaimed
the young philosopher's mamma.

"What should you say now," continued Harry, "if I told you that the
smoke that comes out of a candle is the very thing that makes a candle
light? Yes; a candle shines by consuming its own smoke. The smoke of
a candle is a cloud of small dust, and the little grains of the dust
are bits of charcoal, or carbon, as chemists call it. They are made in
the flame, and burnt in the flame, and, while burning, make the flame
bright. They are burnt the moment they are made; but the flame goes on
making more of them as fast as it burns them: and that is how it keeps
bright. The place they are made in, is in the ease of flame itself,
where the strong heat is. The great heat separates them from the gas
which conies from the melted wax, and, as soon as they touch the air
on the outside of the thin case of flame, they burn."

"Can you tell how it is that the little bits of carbon came the
brightness of the flame?" asked Mr. Wilkinson.

"Because they are pieces of solid matter," answered Harry. "To make
a flame shine, there must always be some solid--or at least
liquid-matter in it."

"Very good." said Mr. Bagges,--"solid stuff necessary to brightness."

"Some gases and other things," resumed Harry, "that burn with a
flame you can hardly see, burn splendidly when something solid is
put into them. Oxygen and hydrogen--tell me if I use too hard words,
uncle--oxygen and hydrogen gases, if mixed together and blown through
a pipe, burn with plenty of heat but with very little light. But if
their flame is blown upon a piece of quick-lime, it gets so bright
as to be quite dazzling, Make the smoke of oil of turpentine pass
through the same flame, and it gives the flame a beautiful brightness
directly."

"I wonder," observed Uncle Bagges, "what has made you such a bright
youth."

"Taking after uncle, perhaps," retorted his nephew. "Don't put my
candle and me out. Well, carbon, or charcoal is what causes the
brightness of all lamps, and candles, and other common lights; so, of
course, there is carbon in what they are all made of."

"So carbon is smoke, eh? and light is owing to your carbon. Giving
light out of smoke, eh? as they say in the classics," observed Mr.
Bagges.

"But what becomes of the candle," pursued Harry, "as it burns away?
where does it go?"

"Nowhere," said his mamma, "I should think. It burns to nothing."

"Oh, dear, no!" said Harry, "everything--everybody goes somewhere."

"Eh!--rather an important consideration, that," Mr. Bagges moralized.

"You can see it goes into smoke, which makes soot, for one thing,"
pursued Harry. "There are other things it goes into, not to be seen
by only looking, but you can get to see them by taking the right
means,--just put your hand over the candle, uncle."

"Thank you, young gentleman, I had rather be excused."

"Not close enough down to burn you, uncle; higher up. There--you
feel a stream of hot air; so something seems to rise from the candle.
Suppose you were to put a very long slender gas-burner over the flame,
and let the flame burn just within the end of it, as if it were a
chimney,--some of the hot steam would go up and come out at the top,
but a sort of dew would be left behind in the glass chimney, if
the chimney was cold enough when you put it on. There are ways of
collecting this sort of dew, and when it is collected it turns out to
be really water. I am not joking, uncle. Water is one of the things
which the candle turns into in burning,--water coming out of fire. A
jet of oil gives above a pint of water in burning. In some lighthouses
they burn, Professor Faraday says, up to two gallons of oil in a
night, and if the windows are cold the steam from the oil clouds the
inside of the windows, and, in frosty weather, freezes into ice."

"Water out of a candle, eh?" exclaimed Mr. Bagges. "As hard to get, I
should have thought, as blood out of a post. Where does it come from?"

"Part from the wax, and part from the air, and yet not a drop of
it comes either from the air or the wax. What do you make of that,
uncle?"

"Eh? Oh! I'm no hand at riddles. Give it up."

"No riddle at all, uncle. The part that comes from the wax isn't
water, and the part that comes from the air isn't water, but when put
together they become water. Water is a mixture of two things then.
This can be shown. Put some iron wire or turnings into a gun barrel
open at both ends. Heat the middle of the barrel red-hot in a little
furnace. Keep the heat up, and send the steam of boiling water through
the red-hot gun barrel. What will come out at the other end of the
barrel won't be steam; it will be gas, which doesn't turn to water
again when it gets cold, and which burns if you put a light to it.
Take the turnings out of the gun-barrel, and you will find them
changed to rust, and heavier than when they were put in. Part of the
water is the gas that comes out of the barrel, the other part is what
mixes with the iron turnings, and changes them to rust, and makes
them heavier. You can fill a Wadder with the gas that comes out of
the gun-barrel, or you can pass bubbles of it up into a jar of water
turned upside down in a trough, and, as I said, you can make this part
of the water burn."

"Eh?" cried Mr. Bagges. "Upon my word! One of these day, we shall have
you setting the Thames on fire."

"Nothing more easy," said Harry, "than to burn part of the Thames, or
of any other water; I mean the gas that I have just told you about,
which is called hydrogen. In burning, hydrogen produces water again,
like the flame of a candle. Indeed, hydrogen is that part of the water
formed by a candle burning, that comes from the wax. All things that
have hydrogen in them produce water in burning, and the more there
is in them the more they produce. When pure hydrogen burns, nothing
comes from it but water, no smoke or soot at all. If you were to burn
one ounce of it, the water you would get would be just nine ounces.
There are many ways of making hydrogen besides out of steam by the
hot gun-barrel. I could show it you in a moment by pouring a little
sulphuric acid mixed with water into a bottle upon a few zinc or steel
filings, and putting a cork in the bottle with a little pipe through
it, and setting fire to the gas that would come from the mouth of
the pipe. We should find the flame very hot, but having scarcely
any brightness. I should like you to see the curious qualities of
hydrogen, particularly how light it is, so as to carry things up in
the air; and I wish I had a small balloon to fill with it, and make go
up to the ceiling, or a bag-pipe full of it to blow soap-bubbles with,
and show how much faster they rise than common ones, blown with the
breath."

"So do I," interposed Master Tom.

"And so," resumed Harry, "hydrogen, you know, uncle, is part of water,
and just one-ninth part."

"As hydrogen is to water, so is a tailor to an ordinary individual,
eh?" Mr. Bagges remarked.

"Well, now then, uncle, if hydrogen is the tailor's part of the
water, what are the other eight parts? The iron turnings used to make
hydrogen in the gun-barrel, and rusted, take just those eight parts
from the water in the shape of steam, and are so much the heavier.
Burn iron turnings in the air, and they make the same rust, and gain
just the same in weight. So the other eight parts must be found in the
air for one thing, and in the rusted iron turnings for another, and
they must also be in the water; and now the question is, how to get at
them?"

"Out of the water? Fish for them, I should say," suggested Mr. Bagges.

"Why, so we can," said Harry. "Only, instead of hooks and lines, we
must use wires--two wires, one from one end, the other from the other,
of a galvanic battery. Put the points of these wires into water, a
little distance apart, and they instantly take the water to pieces.
If they are of copper, or a metal that will rust easily, one of them
begins to rust, and air-bubbles come up from the other. These bubbles
are hydrogen. The other part of the water mixes with the end of the
wire and makes rust. But if the wires are of gold, or a metal that
does not rust easily, air-bubbles rise from the ends of both wires.
Collect the bubbles from both wires in a tube, and fire them, and they
turn to water again; and this water is exactly the same weight as the
quantity that has been changed into the two gases. Now then, uncle,
what should you think water was composed of?"

"Eh? well--I suppose of those very identical two gases, young
gentleman."

"Right, uncle. Recollect that the gas from one of the wires was
hydrogen, the one-ninth of water. What should you guess the gas from
the other wire to be?"

"Stop--eh?--wait a bit--eh?--oh! why, the other eight-ninths, to be
sure."

"Good again, uncle. Now this gas that is eight-ninths of water is the
gas called oxygen that I mentioned just now. This is a very curious
gas. It won't burn in air at all itself, like gas from a lamp, but it
has a wonderful power of making things burn that are lighted and put
into it. If you fill a jar with it--"

"How do you manage that?" Mr. Bagges inquired.

"You fill the jar with water," answered Harry, "and you stand it
upside down in a vessel full of water too. Then you let bubbles of the
gas up into the jar, and they turn out the water and take its place.
Put a stopper in the neck of the jar, or hold a glass plate against
the mouth of it, and you can take it out of the water and so have
bottled oxygen. A lighted candle put into a jar of oxygen blazes up
directly, and is consumed before you can say Jack Robinson. Charcoal
burns away in it as fast, with beautiful bright sparks--phosphorus
with a light that dazzles you to look at--and a piece of iron or steel
just made red-hot at the end first, is burnt in oxygen quicker than
a stick would be in common air. The experiment of burning things in
oxygen beats any fire-works."

"Oh, how jolly!" exclaimed Tom.

"Now we see, uncle," Harry continued, "that water is hydrogen and
oxygen united together, that water is got wherever hydrogen is burnt
in common air, that a candle won't burn without air, and that when a
candle burns there is hydrogen in it burning, and forming water. Now,
then, where does the hydrogen of the candle get the oxygen from, to
turn into water with it?"

"From the air, eh?"

"Just so. I can't stop to tell you of the other things which there is
oxygen in, and the many beautiful and amusing ways of getting it. But
as there is oxygen in the air, and as oxygen makes things burn at such
a rate, perhaps you wonder why air does not make things burn as fast
as oxygen. The reason is, that there is something else in the air that
mixes with the oxygen and weakens it."

"Makes a sort of gaseous grog of it, eh?" said Mr. Bagges. "But how is
that proved?"

"Why, there is a gas, called nitrous gas, which, if you mix it with
oxygen, takes all the oxygen into itself, and the mixture of the
nitrous gas and oxygen, if you put water with it, goes into the water.
Mix nitrous gas and air together in a jar over water, and the nitrous
gas takes away the oxygen, and then the water sucks up the mixed
oxygen and nitrous gas, and that part of the air which weakens the
oxygen is left behind. Burning phosphorus in confined air will also
take all the oxygen from it, and there are other ways of doing the
same thing. The portion of the air left behind is called nitrogen. You
wouldn't know it from common air by the look; it has no color, taste,
nor smell, and it won't burn. But things won't burn in it, either;
and anything on fire put into it goes out directly. It isn't fit to
breathe, and a mouse, or any animal, shut up in it, dies. It isn't
poisonous, though; creatures only die in it for want of oxygen. We
breathe it with oxygen, and then it does no harm, but good: for if
we breathed pure oxygen, we should breathe away so violently, that
we should soon breathe our life out. In the same way, if the air were
nothing but oxygen, a candle would not last above a minute.

"What a tallow-chandler's bill we should have!" remarked Mrs.
Wilkinson.

"'If a house were on fire in oxygen,' as Professor Faraday said,
'every iron bar, or rafter, or pillar, every nail and iron tool,
and the fire-place itself; all the zinc and copper roofs, and leaden
coverings, and gutters, and pipes, would consume and burn, increasing
the combustion.'"

"That would be, indeed, burning 'like a house on fire,'" observed Mr.
Bagges.

"'Think,'" said Harry, continuing his quotation, "'of the Houses
of Parliament, or a steam-engine manufactory. Think of an iron
proof-chest no proof against oxygen. Think of a locomotive and its
train,--every engine, every carriage, and even every rail would be set
on fire and burnt up.' So now, uncle, I think you see what the use of
nitrogen is, and especially how it prevents a candle from burning out
too fast."

"Eh?" said Mr. Bagges. "Well, I will say I do think we are under
considerable obligations to nitrogen."

"I have explained to you, uncle," pursued Harry, "how a candle, in
burning, turns into water. But it turns into something else. besides
that. There is a stream of hot air going up from it that won't
condense into dew; some of that is the nitrogen of the air which the
candle has taken all the oxygen from. But there is more in it than
nitrogen. Hold a long glass tube over a candle, so that the stream
of hot air from it may go up through the tube. Hold a jar over the
end of the tube to collect some of the stream of hot air. Put some
lime-water, which looks quite clear, into the jar; stop the jar,
and shake it up. The lime-water, which was quite clear before, turns
milky. Then there is something made by the burning of the candle that
changes the color of the lime-water. That is a gas, too, and you can
collect it, and examine it. It is to be got from several things,
and is a part of all chalk, marble, and the shells of eggs or of
shell-fish. The easiest way to make it is by pouring muriatic or
sulphuric acid on chalk or marble. The marble or chalk begins to hiss
or bubble, and you can collect the bubbles in the same way that you
can oxygen. The gas made by the candle in burning, and which also is
got out of the chalk and marble, is called carbonic acid. It puts out
a light in a moment; it kills any animal that breathes it, and it is
really poisonous to breathe, because it destroys life even when mixed
with a pretty large quantity of common air. The bubbles made by beer
when it ferments, are carbonic acid, so is the air that fizzes out of
soda-water, and it is good to swallow though it is deadly to breathe.
It is got from chalk by burning the chalk as well as by putting acid
to it, and burning the carbonic acid out of chalk makes the chalk
lime. This is why people are killed sometimes by getting in the way of
the wind that blows from lime-kilns."

"Of which it is advisable carefully to keep to the windward." Mr.
Wilkinson observed.

"The most curious thing about carbonic acid gas," proceeded Harry, "is
its weight. Although it is only a sort of air, it is so heavy that
you can pour it from one vessel into another. You may dip a cup of it
and pour it down upon a candle, and it will put the candle out, which
would astonish an ignorant person; because carbonic acid gas is as
invisible as the air, and the candle seems to be put out by nothing. A
soap-bubble or common air floats on it like wood on water. Its weight
is what makes it collect in brewers' vats; and also in wells, where
it is produced naturally; and owing to its collecting in such places
it causes the deaths we so often hear about of those who go down into
them without proper care. It is found in many springs of water, more
or less; and a great deal of it comes out of the earth in some places.
Carbonic acid gas is what stupefies the dogs in the Grotto del Cane.
Well, but how is carbonic acid gas made by the candle?"

"I hope with your candle you'll throw some light upon the subject,"
said Uncle Bagges.

"I hope so," answered Harry. "Recollect it is the burning of the
smoke, or soot, or carbon of the candle, that makes the candle-flame
bright. Also that the candle won't burn without air. Likewise that it
will not burn in nitrogen, or air that has been deprived of oxygen.
So the carbon of the candle mingles with oxygen, in burning, to make
carbonic acid gas; just as the hydrogen does to form water. Carbonic
acid gas, then, is carbon or charcoal dissolved in oxygen. Here is
black soot getting invisible and changing into air; and this seems
strange, uncle, doesn't it?"

"Ahem! Strange, if true," answered Mr. Bagges. "Eh? Well! I suppose
it's all right."

"Quite so, uncle. Burn carbon or charcoal either in the air or in
oxygen, and it is sure always to make carbonic acid, and nothing else,
if it is dry. No dew or mist gathers in a cold glass jar if you burn
dry charcoal in it. The charcoal goes entirely into carbonic acid gas,
and leaves nothing behind but ashes, which are only earthy stuff that
was in the charcoal, but not part of the charcoal itself. And now,
shall I tell you something about carbon?"

"With all my heart," assented Mr. Bagges.

"I said that there was carbon or charcoal in all common lights, so
there is in every common kind of fuel. If you heat coal or wood away
from the air, some gas comes away, and leaves behind coke from coal,
and charcoal from wood; both carbon, though not pure. Heat carbon
as much as you will in a close vessel, and it does not change in the
least; but let the air get to it, and then it burns and flies off in
carbonic acid gas. This makes carbon so convenient for fuel. But it is
ornamental as well as useful, uncle. The diamond is nothing else than
carbon."

"The diamond, eh! You mean the black diamond."

"No: the diamond, really and truly. The diamond is only carbon in the
shape of a crystal."

"Eh? and can't some of your clever chemists crystalize a little bit of
carbon, and make a Koh-i-noor?"

"Ah, uncle, perhaps we shall, some day. In the mean time I suppose we
must be content with making carbon so brilliant as it is in the flame
of a candle. Well; now you see that a candle-flame is vapor burning,
and the vapor, in burning, turns into water and carbonic acid gas. The
oxygen of both the carbonic acid gas and the water comes from the air,
and the hydrogen and carbon together are the vapor. They are distilled
out of the melted was by the heat. But, you know, carbon alone can't
be distilled by any heat. It can be distilled, though, when it is
joined with hydrogen, as it is in the wax, and then the mixed hydrogen
and carbon rise in gas of the same kind as the gas in the streets, and
that also is distilled by heat from coal. So a candle is a little gas
manufactory in itself, that burns the gas as fast as it makes it."

"Haven't you pretty nearly come to your candle's end'!" said Mr.
Wilkinson.

"Nearly. I only want to tell uncle, that the burning of a candle is
almost exactly like our breathing. Breathing is consuming oxygen,
only not so fast as burning. In breathing we throw out water in vapor
and carbonic acid from our lungs, and take oxygen in. Oxygen is as
necessary to support the life of the body, as it is to keep up the
flame of a candle."

"So," said Mr. Bagges, "man is a candle, eh? and Shakspeare knew that,
I suppose, (as he did most things,) when he wrote

  'Out, out, brief candle!'

"Well, well; we old ones are moulds, and you young squires are dips
and rushlights, eh? Any more to tell us about the candle?"

"I could tell you a great deal more about oxygen, and hydrogen, and
carbon, and water, and breathing, that Professor Faraday said, if I
had time; but you should go and hear him yourself, uncle."

"Eh? well! I think I will. Some of us seniors may learn something from
a juvenile lecture, at any rate, if given by a Faraday. And now, my
boy. I will tell you what," added Mr. Bagges, "I am very glad to find
you so fond of study and science; and you deserve to be encouraged:
and so I'll give you a what-d'ye-call-it'?--a Galvanic Battery, on
your next birth-day; and so much for your teaching your old uncle the
chemistry of a candle."

       *       *       *       *       *


[FROM A REVIEW OF GRISWOLD'S _PROSE WRITERS OF AMERICA_, IN THE
SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSENGER.]

DANIEL WEBSTER,

AS A STATESMAN, AND AS A MAN OF LETTERS.

Mr. Webster is properly selected as the representative of the
best sense, and highest wisdom, and most consummate dignity, of
the politics and oratory of the present times, because his great
intelligence has continued to be so finely sensitive to all the
influences that stir the action and speculation of the country.

With elements of reason, definite, absolute, and emphatic; with
principles settled, strenuous, deep and unchangeable as his being;
his wisdom is yet exquisitely practical: with subtlest sagacity it
apprehends every change in the circumstances in which it is to act,
and can accommodate its action without loss of vigor, or alteration
of its general purpose. Its theories always "lean and hearken" to
the actual. By a sympathy of the mind, almost transcendental in
its delicacy, its speculations are attracted into a parallelism
with the logic of life and nature. In most men, that intellectual
susceptibility by which they are capable of being reacted upon by the
outer world, and having their principles and views expanded, modified
or quickened, does not outlast the first period of life; from
that time they remain fixed and rigid in their policy, temper and
characteristics; if a new phase of society is developed, it must
find its exponent in other men. But in Webster this fresh suggestive
sensibility of the judgment has been carried on into the matured and
determined wisdom of manhood. His perceptions, feelings, reasonings,
tone, are always up to the level of the hour, or in advance of it;
sometimes far, very far in advance, as in the views thrown out in his
speech at Baltimore, on an international commercial system, in which
he showed that he then foresaw both the fate of the tariff and the
fallacy of free-trade. No man has ever been able to say, or now can
say, that he is before Webster. The youngest men in the nation look to
him, not as representing the past, but as leading in the future.

This practicalness and readiness of adaptation are instinctive,
not voluntary and designed. They are united with the most decided
preference for certain opinions and the most earnest averseness to
others. Nothing can be less like Talleyrand's system of waiting
for events. He has never, in view of a change which he saw to be
inevitable, held himself in reserve and uncommitted. What Webster is
at any time, that he is strenuously, entirely, openly. He has first
opposed, with every energy of his mind and temper, that which, when
it has actually come, he is ready to accept, and make the best of. He
never surrenders in advance a position which knows will be carried; he
takes his place, and delivers battle; he fights as one who is fighting
the last battle of his country's hopes; he fires the last shot. When
the smoke and tumult are cleared off, where is Webster! Look around
for the nearest rallying point which the view presents; there he
stands, with his hand upon his heart, in grim composure; calm,
dignified, resolute; neither disheartened nor surprised by defeat.
"Leaving the things that are behind," is now the trumpet-sound by
which he rallies his friends to a new confidence, and stimulates them
to fresh efforts. It is obvious that Webster, when contending with
all his force for or against some particular measure, has not been
contemplating the probability of being compelled to oppose or defend a
different policy, and, so, choosing his words warily, in reference to
future possibilities of a personal kind: yet when the time has come
that he has been obliged to fight with his face in another direction,
it has always been found that no one principle had been asserted, no
one sentiment displayed, incompatible with his new positions. This
union of consistency with practicability has arisen naturally from
the extent and comprehensiveness of his views, from the breadth and
generality with which the analytical power of his understanding has
always led him to state his principles and define his position. From
the particular scheme or special maxim which his party was insisting
upon, his mind rose to a higher and more general formula of truth.

Owing to the same superior penetration and reach of thought, the gloom
of successive repulses has never been able to paralyze the power
which it has saddened. The constitution has been so often invaded
and trampled upon, that to a common eye it might well seem to have
lost all the resentments of vitality. But Webster has distinguished
between the constitution and its administration. He has seen that the
constitution, though in bondage, is not killed; that the channels
of its life-giving wisdom are stuffed up with rubbish, but not
obliterated. He has been determined that if the rulers of the country
will deny the truth, they shall not debauch it; if they depart from
the constitution, they shall not deprave it. He has been resolved,
that when this tyranny of corruption shall be overpast, and the
constitution draws again its own free breath of virtue, truth and
wisdom, it shall be found perfect of limb and feature, prepared to
rise like a giant refreshed by sleep.

Mr. Griswold, we suppose, is quite right in suggesting that the only
name in modern times to which reference can with any fitness be made
for purposes of analogy or comparison with Webster is that of Burke.
In many respects there is a correspondence between their characters;
in some others they differ widely. As a prophet of the truth of
political morals, as a revealer of those essential elements in the
constitution of life, upon which, or of which, society is constructed
and government evolved, Burke had no peer. In that department he rises
into the distance and grandeur of inspiration; _nil mortote sonans_.
Nor do we doubt that the Providence of God had raised him up for the
purposes of public safety and guidance, any more than we doubt the
mission of Jeremiah or Elisha, or any other of the school of the
Lord's prophets. But leaving Burke unapproached in this region of
the nature and philosophy of government, and looking at him, in his
general career, as a man of intellect and action, we might indicate an
analogy of this kind, that the character, temper and reason of Burke
seem to be almost an image of the English constitution, and Webster's
of the American. To get the key to Burke's somewhat irregular and
startling career, it is necessary, to study the idea of the old whig
constitution of the English monarchy: viewing his course from that
point of view, we comprehend his almost countenancing and encouraging
rebellion in the case of the American colonies; his intense hostility
to Warren Hastings' imperial system; his unchastised earnestness
in opposition to French maxims in the decline of his life. The
constitution of the United States, that most wonderful of the
emanations of providential wisdom, seems to be not only the home of
Webster's affections and seat of his proudest hopes, but the very type
of his understanding and fountain of his intellectual strength:

    ----"hic illius arma;----
         Hic currus."

The genius of Burke, like the one, was inexhaustible in resources,
so composite and so averse from theory as to appear incongruous, but
justified in the result; not formal, not always entirely perspicuous.
Webster's mind, like the other, is eminently logical, reduced
into principles, orderly, distinct, reconciling abstraction with
convenience, various in manifestation, yet pervaded by an unity of
character.

Mr. Webster has not merely illustrated a great range of mental powers
and accomplishments, but has filled, in the eye of the nation, on a
great scale, and to the farthest reach of their exigency, a diversity
of intellectual characters; while the manner in which Burke's wisdom
displayed itself was usually the same. We cannot suppose that Burke
could have been a great lawyer. Webster possesses a consummate legal
judgment and prodigious powers of legal logic, and is felt to be
the highest authority on a great question of law in this country.
The demonstrative faculty; the capacity to analyze and open any
proposition so as to identify its separate elements with the very
consciousness of the reader's or hearer's mind; this, which is the
lawyer's peculiar power, had not been particularly developed in Burke,
but exists in Webster in greater expansion and force than in any
one since Doctor Johnson, who, it always appeared to us, had he been
educated for the bar, would have made the greatest lawyer that ever
led the decisions of Westminster-Hall. We should hardly be justified
in saying that Burke would have made a great First Lord of the
Treasury. Mr. Webster, as Secretary of State, proved himself to be
a practical statesman of the highest; finest, promptest sagacity and
foresight that this or any nation ever witnessed. Who now doubts the
surpassing wisdom, who now but reverences the exalted patriotism,
of the advice and the example which he gave, but gave in vain, to
the Whig party at the beginning of Mr. Tyler's administration? His
official correspondence would be lowered by a comparison with any
state papers since the secretaryship of John Marshall. Does the public
generally know what has become of that portentous difficulty about the
Right of Search, upon which England and America, five years ago, were
on the point of being "_lento collisæ duello_." Mr. Webster settled it
by mere force of mind: he dissipated the Question, _by seeing through
it_, and by compelling others to see a fallacy in its terms which
before had imposed upon the understanding of two nations. In the
essential and universal philosophy of politics, Webster is second only
to Burke. After Burke, there is no statesman whose writings might be
read with greater advantage by foreign nations, or would have been
studied with so much respect by antiquity, as Webster's.

In a merely literary point of view, this perhaps may be said of Mr.
Webster, that he is the only powerful and fervid orator, since the
glorious days of Greece, whose style is so disciplined that any of
his great public harangues might be used as models of composition. His
language is beautifully pure, and his combinations of it exhibit more
knowledge of the genius, spirit, and classic vigor of the English
tongue, than it has entered the mind of any professor of rhetoric to
apprehend. As the most impetuous sweeps of passion in him are pervaded
and informed and guided by intellect, so the most earnest struggles
of intellect seem to be calmed and made gentle in their vehemence,
by a more essential rationality of taste. That imperious mind, which
seems fit to defy the universe, is ever subordinate, by a kind of
fascination, to the perfect law of grace. In the highest of his
intellectual flights--and who can follow the winged rush of that eagle
mind?--in the widest of his mental ranges-and who shall measure their
extent?--he is ever moving within the severest line of beauty. No one
would think of saying that Mr. Webster's speeches are thrown off with
ease, and cost him but little effort; they are clearly the result
of the intensest stress of mental energy; yet the manner is never
discomposed; the decency and propriety of the display never interfered
with; he is always greater than his genius; you see "the depth out not
the tumult" of the mind. Whether, with extended arm, he strangles
the "reluctantes dracones" of democracy, or with every faculty called
home, concentrates the light and heat of his being in developing into
principles those great sentiments and great instincts which are his
inspiration; in all, the orator stands forth with the majesty and
chastened grace of Pericles himself. In the fiercest of encounters
with the deadliest of foes, the mind, which is enraged, is never
perturbed; the style, which leaps like the fire of heaven, is never
disordered. As in Guido's picture of St. Michael piercing the dragon,
while the gnarled muscles of the arms and hands attest the utmost
strain of the strength, the countenance remains placid, serene, and
undisturbed. In this great quality of mental dignity, Mr. Webster's
speeches have become more and more eminent. The glow and luster
which set his earlier speeches a-blaze with splendor, is in his
later discourses rarely let forth; but they have gained more, in the
increase of dignity, than they have parted with in the diminution
of brilliancy. We regard his speech before the shop-keepers, calling
themselves merchants, of Philadelphia, as one of the most weighty
and admirable of the intellectual efforts of his life. The range of
profound and piercing wisdom; the exquisite and faultless taste; but
above all, the august and indefectible dignity, that are illustrated
from the beginning to the end of that great display of matured
and finished strength, leave us in mingled wonder and reverence.
There is one sentence there which seems to us almost to reach the
_intellectual_ sublime; and while it stirs within us the depths of
sympathy and admiration, we could heartily wish that the young men of
America would inhale the almost supra-mortal spirit which it breathes:
"I would not with any idolatrous admiration regard the Constitution
of the United States, nor any other work of man; but this side of
idolatry, I hold it in profound respect. I believe that no human
working on such a subject, no human ability exerted for such an end,
has ever produced so much happiness, or holds out now to so many
millions of people the prospect, through such a succession of ages and
ages, of so much happiness, as the Constitution of the United States.
We who are here for one generation, for a single life, and yet in our
several stations and relations in society intrusted in some degree
with its protection and support, what duty does it devolve, what duty
does it _not_ devolve, upon us!" In the name of distant ages, and a
remote posterity, we hail the author of this and similar orations, as
Webster the _Olympian_.

But we leave a subject which we have incidentally touched, sincerely
disclaiming any attempt to estimate the character or define the
greatness of Webster. In reference to him we feel, as Cicero said to
Cæsar, "_Nil vulgare te dignum videri possit._"

       *       *       *       *       *


[FROM THE ATHENÆUM.]

THE NEW PROPHET IN THE EAST.[5]

The vicissitudes of the war in the Caucasus of late have been
surprising enough to awaken the interest of Western Europe, even
amidst her own nearer anxieties. Last year it was said that the
conquest of Achulgo, the stronghold of the redoubtable Schamyl,
had effectually broken the power of that daring leader. In direct
contradiction to such reports, later accounts from Daghestan tell
of the reappearance of the notable partisan amidst the lines of the
Russians, and of a defeat of the latter, the most severe, if the
details of the event be true, that they have yet suffered in the
Caucasus. In any case, these exciting changes of fortune would be in
favor of a book professing to describe this interesting region, and
to add to our knowledge of its brave inhabitants. The main interest
of Herr Bodenstedt's work will now be enhanced by its undertaking
to give a more precise account than had previously appeared of the
priest-warrior of Daghestan. and of the new sect as the prophet of
which he succeeded in arraying the independent mountain clans against
their common enemy with a kind of combination unknown in earlier
periods of the struggle.

[Footnote 5: The people of the Caucasus, and their Struggle for
Liberty with the Russians--(_Die Volker des Caucasus, &c._) By
Friedrich Bodenstedt. Second Edition. Frankfurt am Main, Lizius;
London, Nutt.]

The author has evidently lived for some time in the region which he
describes, or in the bordering districts along the Caspian, both in
Georgia and in North Daghestan, His acquaintance with Asiatic and
Russian languages and customs appears to have been gained both by
study and from intercourse with the natives of the south-eastern
frontier. He is not ignorant of Oriental writings that refer to
his subject; and his Russian statistics prove an access to official
authorities which are not to be found in print. These, however
obtained, can scarcely have been imparted to him as one of those
writers whom the Court of St. Petersburg hires to promote its views
through the press of Western Europe. His sympathies are declared
against Russian usurpation; and the tendency of his essay is to prove
how little real progress it has yet made in subduing the Caucasus, the
enormous waste of money and life with which its fluctuating successes
have been bought, and the fallacy of expecting a better result
hereafter.

What it has cost in life on the Russian side to attack-hitherto with
no lasting effect--the handful of Caucasian mountaineers, may be
guessed from a single note, dated 1847: "The present Russian force in
the Caucasus"--including of course, the armed Cossacks of the Kuban
and Terek--"amounts to two hundred thousand." Taking into account the
numbers yearly cut off by disease, more fatal even than the mountain
war, every step of which must be won by the most reckless waste
of life,--the "Russian Officer" may perhaps truly affirm that the
_annual_ expenditure of life by Russia, in her warfare with Schamyl,
has for many years past exceeded the whole number of the population at
any one time directly under the rule of that chieftain.

We have said that the most instructive part of Herr Bodenstedt's essay
is his sketch of that politico-religious scheme which made Schamyl
formidable to the Russians. This system, it is to be observed, arose
and has since been fully developed only in the Eastern Caucasus, where
of late the main stress of the war has been. The western tribes (our
"Circassians") who took the lead at an earlier stage of the contest,
were not then, nor have they since been, inspired by the fanatic zeal
which united the tribes of Daghestan. They fought from a mere love
of independence, each little republic by itself; and their efforts,
however heroic, being without concert, gradually declined before the
vast force of the invader. In the region looking westward from the
Georgian frontier on the Euxine, on the one side of the Caucasian
range, and along the lower Kuban on the other, the Russian posts
are now seldom threatened but by small predatory bands; the natives,
retired to their mountain villages, have for some time made but few
more formidable incursions. The war is transferred to the region
spreading eastward from the Elbrus to the Caspian; where the strife
for free existence is animated not less by the hatred of Russian
slavery than by a fresh outbreak of Mohammedan zeal against infidel
invasion,--a revival, in fact, of that war-like fanaticism which made
the Moslem name terrible from the eighth to the sixteenth century.

It dates from the years 1823-4; at which period a "new doctrine" began
to be preached, secretly at first, to the select Uléma, afterward to
greater numbers, in word and writing, by one Mullah Mohammed, a famous
teacher and a judge (or _kadi_) of Jarach, in the Kurin district of
Daghestan. He professed to have learnt it from Hadis-Ismail, an Alim
of Kurdomir, highly famed for wisdom and sanctity. It laid bare the
degradation into which his countrymen had sunk by irreligion and by
the jealousy of sect; their danger, in consequence, from enemies
of the true faith; and urged the necessity of reform in creed and
practice, in order to regain the invincible character promised by the
Prophet to believers. The theoretical part of the reformed doctrine
seems to be a kind of Sufism,--the general character of which mode
of Islam, long prevalent in the adjacent kingdom of Persia, has
been described by our own orientalists. Disputed questions as to its
origin, whether in Brahmin philosophy or in the reveries of Moslem
mystics, cannot be discussed here; it must suffice to indicate those
points which appear to connect it with the hieratic policy that has
given a new aspect to the war in the Caucasus.

Proceeding nominally on the basis of the Koran, it inculcates or
expounds a kind of spiritual transcendentalism; in which the adept is
raised above the necessity of formal laws, which are only requisite
for those who are not capable of rising to a full intelligence of the
supreme power. To gain this height, by devout contemplation, must be
the personal work and endeavor of each individual. The revelation of
divine truth, once attained, supersedes specific moral injunctions;
ceremonies and systems, even, of religion, become indifferent to the
mind illuminated by the sacred idea. A higher degree is the perfect
conception or ecstatic vision of the Deity;--the highest-reserved
only for the prophetic few--a real immediate union with his essence.
Here, it will be seen, are four steps or stages, each of which has
its sacred manual or appropriate system of teaching. In the hieratic
system, of which Schamyl is the head, the divisions seem to correspond
pretty nearly with this arrangement, as follows:--

The _first_ includes the mass of the armed people; whose zeal it
promotes by strict religious and moral injunctions enjoining purity of
life, exact regard to the ritual of the Koran, teaching pilgrimages,
fasting, ablutions; the duty of implacable war against the Infidel,
the sin of enduring his tyranny.

The _second_ is composed of those, who, in virtue of striving upward
to a higher Divine intelligence, are elevated above ceremonial
religion. Of these the _Murids_ (_seekers_ or _strugglers_,) are
formed: a body of religious warriors attached to the Imam, whose
courage in battle, raised to a kind of frenzy, despises numbers and
laughs at death. To accept quarter, or to fly from the Infidel, is
forbidden to this class.

The _third_ includes the more perfect acolytes, who are presumed to
have risen to the ecstatic view of the Deity. These are the elect,
whom the Imam makes _Naibs_ or vice-regents,--invested with nearly
absolute power in his absence.

The _fourth_, or highest, implying entire union with the Divine
essence, is held by Schamyl alone. In virtue of this elevation and
spiritual endowment, the Imam, as an immediate organ of the Supreme
Will, is himself the source of all law to his followers, unerring,
impeccable; to question or disobey his behests is a sin against
religion, as well as a political crime. It may be seen what advantage
this system must have given to Schamyl in his conflict with the
Russians. The doctrine of the indifference of sects and forms enabled
him to unite the divided followers of Omar and of Ali, in a region
where both abound, and where the schism had formerly been one of
the most effectual instruments of the enemy. The belief in a Divine
mission and spiritual powers sustains his adherents in all reverses;
while it invites to defection from the Russian side those of the
Mohammedan tribes who have submitted to the invader. Among these,
however, Schamyl, like his predecessors in the same priestly office,
by no means confides the progress of his sect to spiritual influences
only. The work of conversion, where exhortation fails, is carried on
remorselessly by fire and sword; and the Imam is as terrible to those
of his countrymen whom fear or interest retains in alliance with
Russia, as to the soldiers of the Czar. With a character in which
extreme daring is allied with coolness, cunning, and military genius,
with a good fortune which has hitherto preserved his life in many
circumstances where escape seemed impossible,--it may be seen that the
belief in his supernatural gifts and privileges, once created, must
always tend to increase in intensity and effect among the imaginative
and credulous Mohammedans of the Caucasus; and that this apt
combination of the warrior with the politician and prophet accounts
for his success in combining against the Russians a force of the once
discordant tribes of Daghestan, possessing more of the character
of a national resistance than had been ever known before in the
Caucasus,--and compelling the invaders to purchase every one of their
few, trifling, and dubious advances by the terrible sacrifice of life
already noticed.

In this formidable movement the highlander's natural freedom is fanned
into a blaze by a religious zeal like that which once led the armies
of Islam over one half of Asia and Europe. Although it reached its
highest energy and a more consummate development under Schamyl, it was
begun by his predecessors. Of the Mullah Mohammed, who first preached
the duty of casting off the yoke of the Giaour, and the necessity of
a religious reform and union of rival sects, as a means to that end,
we have already spoken. This founder of the new system, an aged man,
untrained in arms, never himself drew the sword in the cause; but was
active in diffusing its principles and preparing a warlike rising by
exhortations and letters circulated through all Daghestan. Suspected
of these designs, he was seized, in 1826, by the orders of Jermoloff;
and although be escaped,--by the connivance, it is said, of the native
prince employed to capture him,--he afterward lived, in a kind of
concealment, for some years. The post of Imam was thereupon assumed
by a priest who was able to fight for the new doctrine as well as
to preach it. The first armed outbreak took place under Kasi-Mullah,
about the year 1829; from which time, until his death in a battle at
Himry, in 1831, he waged a terrible, and, although often defeated,
a virtually successful warfare, against the Russians, while he
prosecuted the work of conversion among the tribes of Islam who
delayed to acknowledge his mission, and to join in his enmity to the
Russians, by the extremities of bloodshed and rapine. His death, after
an heroic resistance, was hailed as a triumph by the Russians. They
counted on the extinction of the new sect in the defeat of its leader,
whose dead body they carried about the country to prove the imposture
of his pretensions. This piece of barbarism produced an effect the
reverse of what they expected. The venerable face of the Imam, the
attitude in which he had expired, with one hand pointed as if to
heaven, was more impressive to those who crowded round the body than
his fearless enthusiasm had been,--and thousands who till then had
held aloof, now joined his followers in venerating him as a prophet.
Of this first warrior-priest of Daghestan, Schamyl was the favorite
disciple and the most trusted soldier. Kasi-Mullah was not killed
until Schamyl had already fallen as it seemed, under several deadly
wounds:--his reappearance after this bloody scene was but the first of
many similar escapes, the report of which sounds like a fable. He did
not, however, at once succeed to the dignity of Imam: the office was
usurped for more than a year by Hamsad Beg (Bey), whose rapacious and
savage treatment of some of the princely families of Daghestan nearly
caused a fatal reaction against the new sect, and the destruction
of its main support, the Murids. Hamsad Beg performed no action of
consequence against the Russians; but expended his rage upon the
natives allied with them, or reluctant to obey his mandates. He
was assassinated in 1834, by some kinsmen of a princely house whose
territories he had usurped after a massacre of its princes. In the
affray which took place on this occasion, there perished with him
many of the fanatic Murids, who had become odious as instruments of
the cruelties of their Imam. On his death, Schamyl was raised to
the dignity,--but it was some time before the mischief done by his
predecessor was so far repaired as to allow him to act with energy
as the prophet of the new doctrine. One of the ill effects of Hamsad
Beg's iniquities had been the defection to the Russians of n notable
partisan--Hadjii Murad--for many years a fatal thorn in the side of
the independent party.[6] This and other difficulties, among which was
the unpopularity of the Murids under Hamsad Beg, were removed by new
alliances and precautions, while all that eloquence and skill could
perform was applied to restore the credit of the religious system,
before Schamyl could hazard a direct attack of the Russian enemy,
who meanwhile had taken advantage of the delay and disunion to gain
ground in many parts of Daghestan. From the year 1839, however, the
tide rapidly turned; and the result, from that date until the period
at which the account closes (1845)--when Woronzow was appointed to
command in the Caucasus, with nearly unlimited powers,--has been,
that the Russians, in spite of tremendous sacrifices, were constantly
losing ground and influence, while Schamyl gained both in equal
proportion. The details of the campaigns during this interval are
highly interesting; and we regret that conditions of space forbid
us to translate some of the exciting episodes recorded by Herr
Bodenstedt. We may, however, extract the following account of the
Caucasian hero,--whose portrait, we believe, has never before been so
fully exhibited to European readers;--

[Footnote 6: It is worth noting--as a characteristic of Russian
misrule and of its consequences--that this chieftain, after having
been a devoted soldier of the Emperor for seven years, was goaded by
the ill treatment of his officers into abjuring the service; make the
offer of his sword to Schamyl, against whom he had fought with the
utmost animosity; was heartily welcomed by that prudent leader, and
became one of his principal lieutenants.]

"Schamyl is of middle stature; he has light hair, gray eyes, shaded
by bushy and well-arched eyebrows,--a nose finely moulded, and a small
mouth. His features are distinguished from those of his race by a
peculiar fairness of complexion and delicacy of skin: the elegant form
of his hands and feet is not less remarkable. The apparent stiffness
of his arms, when he walks, is a sign of his stern and impenetrable
character. His address is thoroughly noble and dignified. Of himself
he is completely master; and he exerts a tacit supremacy over all who
approach him. An immovable stony calmness, which never forsakes him,
even in moments of the utmost danger, broods over his countenance.
He passes a sentence of death with the same composure with which
he distributes "the sabre of honor" to his bravest Murids, after a
bloody encounter. With traitors or criminals whom he has resolved to
destroy, he will converse without betraying the least sign of anger or
vengeance. He regards himself as a mere instrument in the hands of a
higher Being; and holds, according to the Sufi doctrine, that all his
thoughts and determinations are immediate inspirations from God. The
flow of his speech is as animating and irresistible as his outward
appearance is awful and commanding. "He shoots flames from his eyes,
and scatters flowers from his lips,"--said Bersek Bey, who sheltered
him for some days after the fall of Achulgo,--when Schamyl dwelt for
some time among the princes of the Djighetes and Ubiches, for the
purpose of inciting the tribes on the Black Sea to rise against the
Russians. Schamyl is now (_circa_ 1847?) fifty years old, but still
full of vigor and strength: it is however said, that he has for some
years past suffered from an obstinate disease of the eyes, which is
constantly growing worse. He fills the intervals of leisure which his
public charges allow him, in reading the Koran, fasting, and prayer.
Of late years he has but seldom, and then only on critical occasions,
taken a personal share in warlike encounters. In spite of his almost
supernatural activity, Schamyl is excessively severe and temperate in
his habits. A few hours of sleep are enough for him: at times he will
watch for the whole night, without Showing the least trace of fatigue
on the following day. He eats little, and water is his only beverage.
According to Mohammedan custom, he keeps several wives--[this
contradicts Wagner, who affirms that Schamyl always confined himself
to one]; in 1844 he had _three_, of which his favorite, _Dur Heremen_,
(Pearl of the Harem) as she was called, was an Armenian, of exquisite
beauty."

Will Russian arms prevail in the end? The following is Herr
Bodenstedt's answer; after noticing the arrival of Woronzow, and the
expectations raised by his talents, by the immense resources at
his command, as well as by such events as the storm of Schamyl's
stronghold of Cargo:--

"He who believes that the issue of this contest hangs on the
destruction of stone fortresses, on the devastation of tracts of
forest, has not yet conceived the essential nature of the war in the
Caucasus. This is not merely a war of men against men--it is a strife
between the mountain and the steppe. The population of the Caucasus
may be changed; the air of liberty wafted from its heights will
ever remain the same. Invigorated by this atmosphere, even Russian
hirelings would grow into men eager for freedom: and among their
descendants a new race of heroes would arise, to point their weapons
against that servile constitution, to extend which their fathers had
once fought, as blind, unquestioning slaves."

To this answer of Herr Bodenstedt's we will add nothing of our own. We
are weary with waiting for the events of history such as we would have
them.

       *       *       *       *       *


COOLING A BURNING SPIRIT.

An incident which occurred soon after the accession of the present
Sultan, shows that, in some respects, at least, he is not indisposed
to follow up the strong traditions of his race. At the beginning
of his reign, the Ulema was resolved, if possible, to prevent the
new Sultan from carrying on those reforms which had ever been so
distasteful to the Turks, grating at once against their religious
associations and their pride of race, and which recent events
had certainly proved not to be productive of those good results
anticipated by Sultan Mamoud. To attain this object, the Muftis
adopted the expedient of working on the religious fears of the
youthful prince. One day as he was praying, according to his custom,
at his father's tomb, he heard a voice from beneath reiterating, in a
stifled tone, the words, "I burn." The next time that he prayed there
the same words assailed his ears. "I burn" was repeated again and
again, and no word beside. He applied to the chief of the Imams to
know what this prodigy might mean; and was informed in reply, that
his father, though a great man, had also been, unfortunately, a great
reformer, and that as such it was too much to be feared that he had
a terrible penance to undergo in the other world. The Sultan sent for
his brother-in-law to pray at the same place, and afterward several
others of his household; and on each occasion the same portentous
words were heard. One day he announced his intention of going in state
to his father's tomb, and was attended thither by a splendid retinue,
including the chief doctors of the Mahometan law. Again, during his
devotions, were heard the words, "I burn," and all except the Sultan
trembled. Rising from his prayer-carpet, he called in his guards, and
commanded them to dig up the pavement and remove the tomb. It was in
vain that the Muftis interposed, reprobating so great a profanation,
and uttering warnings as to its consequences. The Sultan persisted,
the foundations of the tomb were laid bare, and in a cavity skillfully
left among them was found--not a burning Sultan, but a Dervise. The
young monarch regarded him for a time fixedly and in silence, and then
said, without any further remark or the slightest expression of anger,
"You burn?--We must cool you in the Bosphorus." In a few minutes more
the dervise was in a bag, and the bag immediately after was in the
Bosphorus.--_De Vere's Sketches_.

       *       *       *       *       *


[FROM HOUSEHOLD WORDS.]

AN OLD HAUNT.

  The rippling water, with its drowsy tone,--
    The tall elms, tow 'ring in their stately pride,--
  And--sorrow's type--the willow sad and lone,
    Kissing in graceful woe the murmuring tide;--

  The grey church-tower,--and dimly seen beyond,
    The faint hills gilded by the parting sun,--
  All were the same, and seem'd with greeting fond
    To welcome me as they of old had done.

  And for a while I stood as in a trance,
    On that loved spot, forgetting toil and pain;--
  Buoyant my limbs, and keen and bright my glance,
    For that brief space I was a boy again!

  Again with giddy mates I careless play'd,
    Or plied the quiv'ring oar, on conquest bent:--
  Again, beneath the tall elms' silent shade,
    I woo'd the fair, and won the sweet consent.

  But brief, alas! the spell,--for suddenly
    Peal'd from the tower the old familiar chimes,
  And with their clear, heart-thrilling melody,
    Awaked the spectral forms of darker times

  And I remember'd all that years had wrought--
    How bow'd my care-worn frame, how dimm'd my eye,
  How poor the gauds by Youth so keenly sought,
    How quench'd and dull Youth's aspirations high!

  And in half mournful, half upbraiding host,
    Duties neglected--high resolves unkept--
  And many a heart by death or falsehood lost,
    In lightning current o'er my bosom swept.

  Then bow'd the stubborn knees, as backward sped
    The self-accusing thoughts in dread array,
  And, slowly, from their long-congealed bed,
    Forced the remorseful tears their silent way.

  Bitter yet healing drops in mercy sent,
    Like soft dews tailing on a thirsty plain,--
  And ere those chimes their last faint notes had spent,
    Strengthen'd and calm'd, I stood erect again.

  Strengthen'd, the tasks allotted to fulfill;--
    Calm'd the thick-coming sorrows to endure;
  Fearful of nought but of my own frail will,--
    In His Almighty strength and aid secure.

  For a sweet voice had whisper'd hope to me,--
    Had through my darkness shed a kindly ray;--
  It said: "The past is fix'd immutably,
    Yet is there comfort in the coming day!"

       *       *       *       *       *


KILLING A GIRAFFE.

At every stride I gained upon the giraffes, and, after a short burst
at a swingeing gallop, I was in the middle of them, and turned
the finest cow out of the herd. On finding herself driven from her
comrades and hotly pursued, she increased her pace, and cantered along
with tremendous strides, clearing an amazing extent of ground at every
bound; while her neck and breast, coming in contact with the dead old
branches of the trees, were continually strewing them in my path. In
a few minutes I was riding within five yards of her stern, and, firing
at a gallop, I sent a bullet into her back. Increasing my pace, I next
rode alongside, and, placing the muzzle of my rifle within a few feet
of her, I fired my second shot behind the shoulder; the ball, however,
seemed to have little effect. I then placed myself directly in front,
when she came to a walk. Dismounting, I hastily loaded both barrels,
putting in double charges of powder. Before this was accomplished, she
was off at a canter. In a short time I brought her to a stand in the
dry bed of a watercourse, where I fired at fifteen yards, aiming where
I thought the heart lay, upon which she again made off. Having loaded,
I followed, and had very nearly lost her; she had turned abruptly
to the left, and was far out of sight among the trees. Once more I
brought her to a stand, and dismounted from my horse. There we stood
together alone in the wild wood. I gazed in wonder at her extreme
beauty, while her soft dark eye, with its silky fringe, looked down
imploringly at me, and I really felt a pang of sorrow in this moment
of triumph for the blood I was shedding. Pointing my rifle toward the
skies, I sent a bullet through her neck. On receiving it she reared
high on her hind legs and fell back with a heavy crash, making the
earth shake around her. A thick stream of dark blood spouted out
from the wound, her colossal limbs quivered for a moment, and she
expired.--_Cummings' Adventures_.

       *       *       *       *       *


THE VETERAN KOLOMBESKI.

Several journals have spoken of the entry into the Hotel des Invalides
of a soldier, stated to be 126 years of age. This is not quite
correct. The following are some precise details respecting this
extraordinary man, who arrived at the Hotel on the 21st inst.:--Jean
Kolombeski, born at Astrona (Poland), on the 1st of March, 1730,
entered the service of France, as a volunteer in the Bourbon regiment
of infantry, in 1774, at the age of forty-four. He was made corporal
in 1790, at the age of sixty. He made all the campaigns of the
Revolution and of the Empire, in different regiments of infantry,
and was incorporated, in 1808, in the 3d regiment of the Vistula. He
was wounded in 1814, and entered the hospital at Poitiers, which he
soon afterward left to be placed _en subsistence_ in the 2d regiment
of light infantry. On the 11th of October of the same year he was
admitted into the 1st company of _sous-officiers sedentaires_, and, in
1846, into the 5th company of Veteran Sub-Officers. The last three of
these companies having just been suppressed by the Minister of War,
Kolombeski was placed _en subsistence_ in the 61st regiment of the
line, received a retiring pension by decree of May 17, 1850, and the
Minister authorized his admission into the Invalides. Kolombeski is,
therefore, more than 120 years of age; he reckons seventy-five and
a half years of service, and twenty-nine campaigns. He enjoys good
health, is strong and well made, and does not appear to be more than
seventy or eighty. He performed every duty with big comrades of the
5th company of Veterans, When King Louis Philippe visited Dreus,
Kolombeski was presented to him, who, taking the decoration from
his breast, presented it to the veteran soldier. This is the most
astonishing instance of longevity that has, perhaps, been ever known
in the army. The Marshal Governor of the Invalides ordered that
Kolombeski should be brought to him on his arrival; but, as the old
soldier was fatigued, he was taken to the infirmary, and the Governor,
informed of it, went to his bedside with General Petit, the commandant
of the hotel, and addressed the veteran in the kindest manner. The
Governor has issued an order that, for the future, all centenarian
soldiers admitted into the hospital shall mess with the officers, in
order to show his respect for their age, and for the long services
they have rendered to the state.--_Galignani's Messenger_.

       *       *       *       *       *


ANECDOTE OF LORD BROUGHAM.

The "Life of the Rev. Dr. Hugh Heugh" has a description of an
interview which a deputation of Scotch dissenters had some years ago
with Lord Brougham. The _Scotsman_ adds, from its private knowledge,
some odd incidents of the affair.

His lordship, on coming out of the court to meet the deputation,
immediately on being informed of their object, burst out in a volley
of exclamations to the effect that, but for dissent, there would be
"No vital religion--no vital religion, gentlemen, no vital religion."
While pouring forth this in a most solemn tone, he was all the while
shaking violently the locked doors of a lobby full of committee rooms,
into one of which he wished to find entrance, and calling for an
absent official not only in passionate tones, but in phraseology
which the reverend deputation, at first unwilling to trust their own
ears, were at last forced to believe was nothing better than profane
swearing. At last, he suddenly drew himself up to the wall opposite a
locked door, and with a tremendous kick, smashed the lock, and entered
(exclaiming, first in a vehement and then in a solemn tone, but
without pause) "--that fellow! where the ---- does he always go to! No
vital religion, gentlemen, no vital religion--no, no, no."

       *       *       *       *       *





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "International Weekly Miscellany - Volume 1, No. 9, August 26, 1850" ***

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