BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCXCII.         JUNE, 1848.         Vol. LXIII.

CONTENTS

EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET;
AND 37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.
To whom all Communications (post paid) must be addressed.
SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

[653]

HOW TO DISARM THE CHARTISTS.

The tempest which has lately passed over the moral world has begun to subside,—we no longer hear of empires revolutionised, monarchies overturned, by every post. The states which were to be prostrated by the blast have already fallen; those which have withstood the shock, like a cannon which has borne a double-shotted discharge, are only the more firm from having escaped uninjured from such a trial. France has been utterly revolutionised: Prussia, to all appearance, scarcely less thoroughly convulsed: Italy has been thrown into transports: the smaller states of Germany have, more or less, become republican: Austria has been violently shaken: the seeds of another bootless democratic convulsion sown in Poland. This is enough for three months. Even M. Ledru Rollin and Louis Blanc could scarcely, in their wildest imaginations, have figured a more rapid consummation of their wishes. But other states have stood firm. England, the firstborn of freedom, has shown herself worthy of her glorious inheritance:—she has repelled tyranny in the form of democracy, as she has repelled tyranny in the hands of kings. Russia is yet unshaken;—her people have responded to the call of the Czar, and are preparing on the Vistula for a crusade into western Europe. Belgium, contrary to all expectation, has withstood the tempter; the hordes sent down from Paris to carry desolation into its beautiful plains have been repelled with disgrace. Denmark has boldly thrown down the gauntlet to revolutionised and spoliating Prussia, and is striving to maintain its comparatively inconsiderable dominions against its gigantic aggressor; and even the rickety and half-revolutionised monarchy of Spain has survived the shock, and the streets of Madrid have witnessed the overthrow of a power which the arms of France proved unable to combat.

The worst, therefore, is over, considering the convulsion as one affecting the internal government and social concerns of nations. The wild-beast has made his spring: he has cruelly lacerated some of the party, but many have repelled his claws, and against others he has missed his blow. But, even more than that, we derive consolation from this reflection, that the force of the cosmopolitan and general transports has been weakened, and they are rapidly turning into their ordinary and comparatively regulated evils of war, conquest, and military devastation. The polyglot fervour, for the present at least, is stilled: the national are fast resuming the ascendency over the social passions. Prussia is at open war with Denmark, in the hope of wresting from it the German possessions of the Danish crown: Piedmont, Tuscany, and Lombardy are combating Austria on the Adige: Naples has declared war against Sicily, and Russia is only waiting till its gigantic strength is collected in Poland to crush the efforts of revolution in the Grand-duchy of Warsaw and Duchy of Posen. Thus revolution is leading every where to its natural and oft[654] predicted result of universal hostility. The robbery of the weak by the strong, as in a nation where the authority of law is at an end, has become general. Spoliation is the order of the day. Nation is rising up against nation—people against people; civil war has already broken out in many parts of France—in others it is threatened: Paris is openly preparing for the conflict: and the reign of liberty, equality, and fraternity in France is, to all appearance, about to deluge the world with a stream of blood; second, perhaps, only to that which followed and punished the first revolution.

God forbid that we should speak lightly of the calamities which such general warfare must bring in its train. None know them better, or deplore them more deeply than ourselves. But they are light in comparison of the evils of successful revolution. War, even in its bloodiest form, is under some control; it is conducted according to fixed usages, and by men subject to discipline. But revolutions have no customs: happily they have not been so frequent in history as to have induced any consuetudinary usage. They are subject to no discipline; the principle on which they proceed is the negation of all authority. They are preceded by the destruction of all those barriers which experience had erected, and found necessary to restrain vice's baneful influence. If they bear any resemblance to war, it is to the universal burst of passion which follows the storming of a fortress or sack of a city. The murder, rape, and conflagration which then invariably ensue, are but faint images of the wide-spread ruin which never fails to follow even the least bloody successful revolution. The evils of pillage, massacre, or storm affect only the immediate sufferers under the soldiers' violence: even the dread of plunder by a victorious host extends only as far as the arm of the marauder can reach. But the shock to credit, the destruction of capital, the wasting of industry by a successful revolution, are confined to no such limits; it devastates like a conflagration every thing within its reach, and spreads its baneful influence over the whole extent of the civilised world. There are few operatives in Britain who are not suffering at this moment under the effects of the French revolution. Who ever heard of a war which, in two months, destroyed two-thirds of the capital of a nation, and subjected thirty-four millions of men to the despotism of two hundred thousand armed janizaries in the capital, as the recent revolution has done in France?

Delivered by the firmness of our government, and the spirit of our people—by the wisdom which centuries of freedom has diffused, and the habits which wide-spread and long-continued prosperity have rendered general—from the immediate dangers of a similar convulsion, it well becomes us to take advantage of the breathing time thus afforded, to consider how we may lessen the danger in future times, and remove those causes which rendered it serious in the crisis through which we have passed. It is in vain to conceal that the danger was very great. For the first time for a hundred and sixty years, Revolution walked our streets; a large portion of our manufacturing population looked only for the telegraph from London on the 10th April to commence the work of insurrection. That such insane attempts would have been defeated is indeed certain; but what unutterable misery to the persons engaged in them, and the whole industrious population in the realm, awaited the successful issue of treason, even for a brief period, and in a single city? If Glasgow had been three days in the hands of the mob after the 6th March; if a portion even of London had remained in the possession of the Chartists on the night of the 10th April; if Dublin had become the theatre of a second rebellion on the 17th March, and Sackville Street had witnessed the throwing of rockets and storming of barricades, as Elbœuf and Rouen have lately done, who can estimate the shock which would have been given to industry, the ruin to capital, the destruction of employment, that must inevitably have ensued throughout the empire? It would not have been—as was said of the failure of the potatoes in Ireland—a famine of the thirteenth, with the population of the nineteenth century; it would have been the horrors of the[655] Jacquerie, decimating the myriads of ancient Babylon.

The democratic party throughout the empire have a very simple remedy for the evils which we have suffered and those we have escaped. They say, "Extend the suffrage." It has already become evident that it is to this point that all their efforts will be directed, and in a way more likely in the end to be successful than by the coarse weapons, false declamation, and monster meetings of the Chartists. Already an "Extension of the Suffrage League" has been formed in Manchester with Mr Cobden at its head; and its ramifications and efforts may be seen in simultaneous meetings called on the subject in Glasgow, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, and other manufacturing towns. There is the more reason to apprehend serious consequences from such a league from the habit which government, following Sir R. Peel's example, has got into of late years of yielding to any clamour soever, provided it is sufficiently loud and lasting. There is reason to fear, from some ominous hints that have been dropped in several influential Journals, particularly the Times, that it may be in the contemplation of government, by some concession in regard to the national representation, to allay, as they conceive, the discontent which has fostered Chartism in the manufacturing districts, and establish the legislature in a way more adapted "to the spirit of the age, and the growing intelligence of the people." It becomes of the last importance, therefore, to consider what it is of which the Chartists and discontented operatives really complain; what are the evils which have rendered their discontent general and alarming on the present occasion; and what effect an extension of the suffrage would have on the actual, and, we fear, deep-rooted seats of evil, which at present disturb the tranquillity and interrupt the industry, and may, in the end, endanger the existence of the British empire.

The grand practical object of complaint, on the part of the working classes at present, is want of employment. This is so general, at least in the manufacturing districts, that it may be regarded as all but universal in those who depend on the chief branches of paid industry. Statistical facts of unquestionable accuracy demonstrate that this complaint is too well-founded, and in no situations more so than in the chief marts of our manufacturing industry. The weekly returns, made with so much accuracy by the police in Manchester, have exhibited an average, for the last six months, of about 9000 operatives out of employment, and 11,000 working at short time;[1] which, supposing there are only two persons on an average dependent on each, will imply above 27,000 persons out of employment, and 30,000 working short time. At Glasgow, matters are still worse. From inquiries made by the magistrates of that city, at the principal manufacturing establishments, with a view to furnish with information the deputation which was sent up to endeavour to procure some aid from government to restore credit and relieve the unemployed, it was ascertained that there are in that city above 11,000 persons out of employment, and 7000 working on short time, and 14,000 railway labourers on the railways connected with that city, who have been dismissed. Taking the ascertained and known unemployed at 25,000, and their dependents at 2 each, which is below the average of 2½, it is certain there are 75,000 unemployed persons in Glasgow and its vicinity. And if the unascertained poor, casual labourers, and Irish are taken into account, it is much within the mark to say, that there are A HUNDRED THOUSAND PERSONS IN GLASGOW AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD OUT OF EMPLOYMENT, besides at least twenty thousand working short time! So great and lamentable a prostration of industry is probably unparalleled in Great Britain.

What is in a peculiar manner worthy of observation in this deplorable prospect, is the universality of the depression. It is not confined to one branch of industry, or one[656] employment; it spreads alike over all the urban population in the empire. Doubtless it is more severely felt in the manufacturing districts than elsewhere, from the entire dependence of industry in commercial localities on credit, and the fearful sensitiveness with which any shock to the monetary system is felt throughout the remotest ramifications of the mercantile world. But distress, more or less, in towns at least, is now universal. In Edinburgh the unemployed are increasing to such a degree, as to excite serious alarm in the better class of citizens. In Dublin, between general distress and repeal agitation, business is entirely at a stand; rents cannot be recovered, sales have ended; and the universal prostration resembles nothing known in recent times but the still more general and poignant distress which in Paris has followed the triumph of the revolutionists. London has suffered, as yet, much less than any other part of the empire from the general depression, because it is the seat of all the realised wealth and durable fortune of the empire: it is the place where money is spent, fully more than where it is made. But even in London, distress, wide-spread and serious, is beginning to be felt: the diminished expenditure of the West End is loudly complained of, and the incessant introduction of foreign manufactures is a standing subject of irritation to the operative classes. The revenue is collected slowly and with difficulty; and its diminished amount, showing a falling off of above two millions a-year, demonstrates that the permanent sources of our strength have at length come to be affected.

It is extremely remarkable, too—and to this point we in an especial manner request the attention of our readers—that the distress is felt much more strongly in the commercial than the agricultural classes. Indeed, were it not for the increased weight of poor-rates, owing to the manufacturing distress, the multitude of railway labourers thrown idle by the stoppage of their lines, and the number of land-holders who have had their finances crippled by the universal fall of railway and other shares, it may be doubted whether there would now be any agricultural distress in the empire at all. Where it exists, it is entirely the reflexion or re-echo, as it were, of commercial ruin. This is the more remarkable, that the only serious and real disaster which has affected the country since the depression began, has been the failure of the potato crop in 1846, which of course blasted, in the first instance at least, the labours of the cultivators only; and that the distress now felt as so poignant has been continued only, not created, by the French and German revolutions. Down to February last, no class had suffered by real external calamity but the farmers: and yet the distress which has become so extreme, has arisen not among them, but among the merchants and manufacturers. This, too, has occurred at a time when a great change has been made for the interest, and at the desire, of the commercial classes, in our foreign mercantile policy,—when free trade has been introduced, to cheapen bread, lessen the cost of production, and facilitate exchanges; and when the ruin which was anticipated from the measure was not to the commercial but the landed interest. This is one of the most remarkable circumstances in our present condition, and one on which it most behoves both our legislators, and all interested in their country's welfare, to ponder.

While this deplorable prostration of the interests of industry in all its manufacturing branches has taken place, no corresponding general decline in prices has occurred. The producer has in too many cases been ruined, but the consumers have not as yet at least been benefited. In some branches of manufacture, indeed, a most frightful depreciation of value has taken place. Silks, muslins, and ladies' dresses are now selling for half of what they were a year and a half ago. But that is the effect of the French revolution, which has thrown such an immense quantity of articles of this description into the British market, and of the unparalleled number of failures amongst ourselves, which have forced such prodigious masses of stock, belonging to sequestered estates, to sale. These bankruptcies, and the ruinous contraction of the currency which has occasioned them, afford too satisfactory[657] an explanation of the depressed prices in most of the staple articles of British manufacture. But in those articles which are not so dependent on the maintenance of commercial credit, and in which the good effects of free-trade might have been expected to appear, unmitigated by its attendant disasters, no diminution of price is perceptible.

The last harvest was so fine, that a public thanksgiving was offered for the blessing; and it came on the back of the importation of £31,000,000 worth of foreign grain, or above 12,000,000 quarters in the preceding fifteen months: but the price of wheat is still 51s. a quarter, and that of oats and barley yet higher in proportion. Oxen and sheep, as well as all kinds of provisions, have been imported to an enormous extent during last year;[2] so great, indeed, as to make the able writers in the Times apprehend that they had drained away the whole currency of the country in exchange; but butcher meat is still 7d. a pound. The West Indies are irrecoverably and finally ruined, but we are paying 5d. and 6d. a pound for our slave-grown Cuba and Brazil sugar. The Banker's Circular of May 2, 1848, asks whether there was ever heard of before a monetary crisis which "had lasted a year?" but no man, during that year of fine harvest, general peace, and universal suffering, has found that his household expenses have experienced the least diminution from what they were during the previous years of protected industry, wide-spread contentment, and unbroken prosperity. Free-trade is evidently driving some of the staple branches of British industry out of the field; one is expiring in the West Indies, another languishing in Manchester, a third tottering in Glasgow; and the diminution of home production keeping pace with the increase of foreign supply, prices remain what they were—domestic is superseded by foreign industry; and we shall have the satisfaction of finding that we have ruined many staple branches of our own manufacture without benefiting any class of our people.

It must be evident to every rational observer that this extraordinary and universal depression must have been owing to some cause within the control of the government of this country, and that neither external calamities, nor the inclemencies of nature have had any material share in producing it. Within the short period of three years not only was there no deficiency of employment in any part of the empire, but labour bore a high, in general an extravagantly high price in every part of the empire. Sir R. Peel in an especial manner dwelt on this general flood of prosperity which had set in upon the country in spring 1845, and ascribed it, and the diminution of crime with which it was accompanied, to the measures for liberating commerce from fiscal restraint, which he had introduced on his first coming into power. Since that time no external disaster or warfare has arisen, till the French Revolution broke out in February last, to account for the stoppage of employment, or the general misery into which the lower classes have fallen. We were at peace with all the world: our exports in the year 1845 had reached the unprecedented amount, including the colonial productions, of £150,000,000;[3] and railways, penetrating the country in all directions, gave an extraordinary[658] degree of employment to the working classes. In autumn 1846, it is true, Ireland and the West Highlands of Scotland were visited by a failure, amounting in many places to a total ruin, of the potato crop, which is said to have destroyed agricultural produce to the amount of £15,000,000 sterling. But though this great defalcation was the source of extreme distress to the cultivators who suffered by it, and to a certain degree diminished the general supplies of the empire, yet it could not be considered as the cause, by itself, of the wide-spread ruin which has since overtaken every interest in the empire. The agricultural productions of Great Britain are estimated by statistical writers at above £300,000,000 sterling annually, and the manufacturing and mining certainly exceed £200,000,000.[4] What is a failure of £15,000,000 of potatoes in such a mass? Such as it was, the gap was more than supplied by the importation, in a year after it occurred, of £31,000,000, or double the amount in value, of foreign grain. The harvest of 1847 was so fine that a solemn thanksgiving was, with the general approbation of the nation, offered to Almighty God for its blessings. Prices have since been not excessive, wheat being at an average about 51s. a quarter—yet still, in May 1848, we are in universal distress; and the want of employment is felt much more strongly by the manufacturing classes, who have been affected by no disaster whatever, than the agricultural, who have suffered one which has now passed away.

While these are the social evils which the working classes every where experience, and which have alone rendered the Chartist movement general or serious in the country, the great complaint, in a political point, which they every where make is, that the legislature and the government are alike indifferent to their representations; that they turn a deaf ear to their complaints, show themselves insensible, to their tales of woe, and refuse even to give that moderate relief to them which is easily within their power, which a paternal government is bound to extend to its distressed subjects, and which, in former days, under Tory administrations, was never withheld from the people, when suffering under dispensations not approaching to the present in duration or intensity. To give an idea of the feeling now universal in the commercial and manufacturing districts, we subjoin an extract from a journal conducted with much ability, the Daily Mail of Glasgow.

"The household suffrage movement originates in a deep-seated conviction that the present legislature works ill. There are practical measures offered for its acceptance, which it rejects; and yet the feeling of the country is in their favour. Means of employing the idle are suggested; but by the government and by the parliament they are heedlessly neglected. Some crotchet in political economy is introduced into a plain matter of accounting; and meanwhile the people starve, because their sustenance, in the way proposed, is inconsistent with something that somebody has written in a book. There is an obvious insufficiency of food, of employment, and of investment in the country, while land languishes for lack of tillage; and when the plain remedy for these great deficiencies is pressed, there arises the ghost of long-past folly, waving its parchment before the legislature, and so the living are starved, in strict accordance not with the meaning but with the mistake of the dead. Free-trade is proclaimed to be the rule of our political practice by the same men who enact and maintain laws to fetter and reduce the circulation of the country, which is the life of its trade. We hear of free-trade with foreign countries, in which duties equal to twenty, thirty, and forty per[659] cent are charged upon our products, although the existence of freedom of trade under these circumstances is absolutely impossible.

"The nation holds colonies in all quarters of the world, purchased and maintained at a costly rate, embracing every characteristic of soil and climate on the earth, competent to provide homes and sustenance for nearly the whole population of the world; and the legislature voluntarily casts away all interest to be derived from their progress, except its cost. The national affairs are managed on some kind of rule altogether different from any thing that a prudent man would adopt in the guidance of his private business; and so employment becomes scarce, and food dear together; while the natural and necessary results are, popular irritation, and a desire for change, which have led to the associations for extending the suffrage, now general throughout the great cities of the empire."—Glasgow Daily Mail, May 2, 1848.

There is too much foundation, all must admit, for these complaints. On occasion of the dreadful monetary crisis of October 1847, when ministers were compelled to break through the Bank Charter Act, and nearly all railway labour and mercantile industry in the country was suspended from the impossibility of finding funds to carry them on, the government were besieged with the most earnest memorials from the chambers of commerce in nearly all the commercial cities of the empire, and especially London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Edinburgh, pointing out the ruinous effects of the Bank Restriction Act of 1844; but still they did nothing. They contented themselves with appointing a committee, in which the bullionists were understood to have the majority, in parliament, which, after sitting long, and examining a host of witnesses, and burying the question under heaps of blue folios, will probably end by reporting a year hence in favour of the present system. The most vigorous remonstrances have been made by the same commercial bodies against the threatened abrogation of the Navigation Laws; but that has not in the slightest degree shaken the avowed determination of government, to carry the principle of free-trade without limitation into that vital branch of our national industry.

The West India interest demonstrated in a manner "luce meridiana clarius," that the equalisation of the duties of foreign slave-grown to home free-labour-raised sugar, would prove utter ruin to our West India colonies, and reinstate in frightful activity the infernal traffic of the slave-trade; but this did not produce the slightest impression on government, and they without hesitation consigned these noble colonies to destruction, and restored the slave-trade throughout the globe, rather than abate one iota of the dogmas of free-trade, or raise sugar a penny a-pound.[5] All the great cities of the empire have sent deputations or memorials to government, beseeching in the most earnest manner a grant of exchequer bills, or the aid of treasury credit in some way, to set agoing the unfinished lines of railways, and enable them to find a certain amount of labour for the unemployed; but they have every where, met with a decided refusal. We must have free-trade in every thing, in pauperism, typhus fever, and insurrection, as well as in corn, cotton, or sugar. Laissez faire is the universal[660] system: all government has to do is to hinder the competitors coming to blows. Every thing must find its level, though that level to one-half of the community is the bottom of the cellar. One thing only is to be protected, and that is gold; one class only is to be saved from competition, and that class is the great capitalists.

This obstinate resistance of government to the wishes, and declared insensibility to the wants and necessities of the country, is the more remarkable that it exhibits so striking a contrast to the paternal spirit by which government was formerly actuated. Suffering, never indeed approaching in extent and intensity to that which now afflicts the nation, but still sufficiently distressing, has been often experienced in former times; but on none of these did the government hesitate to come forward with a large grant, founded on the public credit, to alleviate the general calamity, and always with the very best effects. In 1793, in consequence of the breaking out of the war, and the general hoarding which took place in France during the terrors of the Revolution, a great export of gold from the British islands to the Continent took place; but Mr Pitt at once came forward with a grant of £5,000,000 to aid the commercial interest; and so rapidly did this well-timed advance restore credit, that a small part only of this large sum was taken up, and very little of it was lost to the nation. In February 1797, a similar cause produced that great run on the bank which brought that establishment to the verge of ruin; but the same minister instantly introduced the suspension of cash payments, which at once restored credit, revived industry, and carried the nation in a triumphant manner through all the dangers and crises of the war. In 1799 and 1800, two successive bad harvests brought the nation to the verge of starvation; but government interposed by various sumptuary laws regarding food, stopped distillation from grain, and themselves imported immense quantities of Indian corn for the use of the people. In 1811, a similar calamity ensued from the effects of Napoleon's continental blockade, and the American Non-intercourse Act; but government again interposed with an issue of exchequer bills, and confidence was restored, and with it industry and commerce revived.

In 1826 very great depression existed in all branches of industry, in consequence of the dreadful monetary crisis of December 1825; but government stopped the crash, as Lord Ashburton has told us, by issuing £2,000,000 of old and forgotten notes from the Bank of England, and then alleviated the distress by a copious issue of exchequer bills to aid the commercial interest, which soon brought the nation out of its difficulties. But since the government has been popularised by the revolution of 1832, nothing of the kind has been done. The long-protracted distress from 1838 to 1841, and the dreadful suffering of 1847-8, have been alike unable to extort for British suffering one farthing in aid of the national industry from the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The principle laissez faire has prevailed alike over the strongest claims of justice and the most piteous tales of suffering. Government seems resolved that the nation shall drain the lees of free-trade to the dregs, and taste it in all its bitterness. It is no consolation to suffering British industry to see that £10,000,000 was in one year voted to suffering Irish idleness, and £20,000,000 in another to the grand step in West Indian ruin. The people see that the first was yielded to terror, the last to fanaticism; and the melancholy conviction has forced itself on every mind that government now yield to nothing but the strongest pressure from without; and that the doors of the Treasury will be opened only to the fierce demand of threatened high treason, or the reverberated echoes of wide-spread delusion.

Ministers were aware of all this; and they knew also that, on the first declaration of war with France or any foreign power, they would at once raise a loan or issue exchequer bills to the extent of at least £20,000,000 sterling. Here is an enemy worse than the French, or the French and the Repealers united—want, fever, famine, disaffection, despair, actually within our bosom, and consuming the[661] very vitals of the state! A word from the Chancellor of the Exchequer would at once arrest the misery, dispel the sedition, restore bread to millions, revive loyalty in a wasted and perishing state.[6] Why, then, is it not instantly done? why does not government eagerly seize so glorious an opportunity of healing the wounds of the suffering people, and extinguishing, by deeds of beneficence, the demons of discord and disaffection in the realm? Because it would interfere with a principle; it would intercept the free employment of wealth; it might alarm capitalists, lower the value of Exchequer bills, and for a week or two depress the funds a-half, or perhaps one per cent. It would be a substantial extension of the currency, and that would imply an avowal that it had formerly been unduly contracted; it might be quoted against ministers as a tardy and reluctant admission of the error of their former monetary policy in the parliamentary committee, or in the House of Commons! It is for such wretched considerations as these that relief is refused, and want, wretchedness, and treason prolonged throughout the kingdom. Were the subject not so serious, and even terrible in all its bearings, their conduct would remind us of the well-known reasons assigned by Dr Sangrado to Gil Blas, for continuing, to the evident destruction of his patients, the system of hot water and bleeding.

"'Sir,' said I one evening to Dr Sangrado, 'I call heaven to witness, that I exactly follow out your method, nevertheless all my patients slip out of my hands to the other world: one would think they take a pleasure in dying, to discredit our system.... If you would follow my advice,' replied I, 'we would change our system of practice.' 'I would willingly,' replied he, 'make the trial, if it led to no other consequences than those you have mentioned; but I have published a book in which I extol the frequent use of the lancet and hot water; do you wish me to decry my own work?' 'Oh! you are right,' replied I, 'you must never think of giving such a triumph to your enemies: they would say you have at length confessed your error; that would ruin your reputation: perish rather the noblesse, the clergy, and the people. Let us go on as we have begun.' We continued accordingly our system, and went on with such expedition, that in six weeks we had occasioned as many funerals as the siege of Troy."[7]

We speak advisedly, and after a full observation of its effects, when we say, that the great majority of the unhappy persons who, within the last year, have been sent into the Gazette, owe their ruin as completely and exclusively to the measures of government, as Dr Sangrado's patients did their death to the copious bleedings and warm water draughts which he prescribed to them. Only think what our rulers have done, and then say whether any save colossal private fortunes, engaged in mercantile adventures, could withstand the effects of their measures.

I. The government, in the first place, by the bill of 1819, compelled the Bank of England to pay its notes in gold; by the act of 1826 prohibited the issuing of any notes below five pounds; and by the act of 1844 in England, and 1845 in Scotland and[662] Ireland, restricted the notes issuable on securities, in the whole empire, to £32,000,000, declaring that, for every note beyond that limit issued by any bank, sovereigns to an equal amount must be stored up in the vaults of the issuer. In a word, they made the whole circulation beyond £32,000,000 a metallic currency. At the same time, they provided that, for every five sovereigns beyond a certain limit withdrawn from the Bank of England, a five-pound note should be withdrawn by that establishment from the circulation.

II. Having thus laid the nation fast in golden fetters, and prevented the possibility of an extension of the currency, for carrying on all undertakings beyond this £32,000,000, save by an augmentation of the gold coin in the country, government next proceeded to give every possible encouragement to railway undertakings, and to pass bills through the legislature for new undertakings of that description, requiring the outlay from 1845 to 1848 of at least £150,000,000 sterling, in addition to the ordinary expenditure and operations of the country, already raised at that period to an unusual and unprecedented height.

III. Having thus, in 1844 and 1845, landed the empire in an extraordinary and unheard-of amount of undertakings, requiring the utmost possible extension of the currency to carry these on, government, in 1846, next proceeded to introduce the free-trade system—allow the free importation of foreign grain, and throw down the protection barriers which had hitherto alone sheltered the native industry of the empire, and prevented, save on extraordinary emergencies, any considerable drain upon its metallic resources. They thus raised the imports to £85,000,000, sent the metallic circulation headlong out of the country, and of course contracted, by the force of the law of 1844, in a similar proportion, its paper circulation. By the two combined, they occasioned such a strain upon the bank that, in the end of October 1847, it was within a few days of stopping payment. Ministers were in consequence obliged to suspend the Bank Charter Act; but not till an amount of bankruptcy had been brought upon the middle class, and misery upon the people, unparalled in the history of Great Britain.

IV. Free-trade having exposed our colonists in the West Indies, who were charged with an indolent emancipated black population, to a direct competition with the slave colonies of other countries, where sugar, being raised by forced labour, could be brought to the market at little more than half the price which it cost in the British—government next obstinately adhered to their determination to ruin these colonies, and destroy capital to the amount of £100,000,000 sterling, rather than abate one iota of their free-trade principles; realising thus, indeed, the exclamation of Robespierre—"Perish the colonies, rather than one principle be abandoned!" The consequence is, that one half of the estates in the British West India islands will go out of cultivation, and be choked with jungle in the course of this year. Agricultural produce, once averaging £22,000,000 annually, will be destroyed in the next: a market once taking off £3,600,000 of our manufactures, and giving employment to 250,000 tons of our shipping, will be extinguished; and the foreign slave-colonies, having beat down British competition, will get the monopoly of the sugar-market of the world into their own hands, and raise its price to 7d. or 8d. a pound in the English market—thus terminating the miserable advantage for which all these disasters are incurred.

Whoever considers seriously, and in a dispassionate mode, the necessary effect of the measures on the part of government which have now been detailed, so far from being surprised at the extent of the devastation and ruin which has occurred simultaneously in Great Britain, Ireland, the East and West Indies, will only be surprised that it has not been greater and more wide-spread than it actually has been. He will regard it as the most decisive proof of the vast resources of the British empire, and the indomitable energy of the British people, that they have been able to bear up at all against such repeated and gratuitous blows, levelled, not[663] intentionally, but from mistaken principles, by their own rulers at the main sources of national prosperity. And he will not consider it the least remarkable circumstance, in this age of wonders, that when the ruinous effects of these their own measures had been clearly and beyond all dispute demonstrated by experience, government not only positively refused to make the smallest abatement from, or change in their suicidal policy, but in every instance declined to give the slightest assistance to the persons ruined by, or suffering under it.

To us, reflecting on the causes to which this extraordinary and unprecedented conduct on the part of government is to be imputed, it appears that it can only be accounted for from two causes, to the combined operation of which the present distressed condition and recent danger of the British empire are entirely to be ascribed.

The first of these is the fatal and still undiminished influence of the political economists in the legislature. So great and disastrous has it been, that we do not hesitate to say, that we regard that sect as the worst enemies the empire ever had. What has made them so disastrous to the best interests of their country is, that they have introduced the custom of looking upon the science of government, not as a matter to be based upon experience, modified by its lessons, but as consisting of theories to be determined entirely by general reasonings, and considered to depend solely on the conclusions of philosophers, in works of abstract thought. They have thus come to disregard altogether the sufferings of nations or classes of society under their systems, and to adhere to them obstinately in the midst of general ruin and lamentation, as Dr Sangrado did to his bleedings and hot-water cure, though they had occasioned more funerals than the siege of Troy? They look upon a nation as the surgeon does upon a patient who is held down on the marble table to undergo an operations. This was just the case with Turgot—one of the first and most eminent of the economists, and who began the French Revolution by introducing their doctrines into French legislation. "He regarded," says Senac de Meilhan, "the body corporate not as a living and sentient, but as a lifeless and insensible substance, and operated upon it with as little hesitation as an anatomist does on a dead body." Beyond all doubt it was the suffering produced by the contraction of the currency from 1826 to 1830 that brought about the storm of discontent which issued in the Reform Bill. And if the empire is to be further revolutionised, and the Chartist agitation is to end in household or five-pound suffrage, it will unquestionably be owing to the wide-spread misery which the combined operation of free-trade and a fettered currency have extended through the empire.

The second cause to which this strange insensibility of government to the evidence of facts, and the sufferings of the empire, is to be ascribed, is the influence in the legislature of that very class which was installed in power by the revolution of 1832. The movement in that year was essentially democratic—it was by the effort of the masses, joined to that of the middle classes and the Whig aristocracy, that the crown was overawed, and the change forced upon the country. But the change actually made was in the interest and for the benefit of one of these parties only. The shopkeepers, by the framing of the Reform Act, got the government into their own hands. By schedules A and B, the colonies and shipping interest were at once disfranchised; by the ten-pound clause, the majority of votes in the urban constituencies was vested in the shopkeepers; by the places enfranchised, two-thirds of the seats in the House of Commons were for towns and boroughs. Thus the majority, both of the seats and the constituents, was put into the hands of the trading classes. Thence all the changes which have since taken place in our national policy. The practised leaders of parliament soon discovered where power was now practically vested,—they are as quick at finding out that as courtiers are at finding out who are the favourites that influence the sovereign. Thence the free-trade measures, and the obstinate retention of a contracted currency. It is for the interest of capitalists to[664] lower the price of every thing except money, and render it as dear as possible; it is for the interest of the retailer and merchant to buy cheap and sell dear. Thence the free-trade system and contracted currency, which have now spread such unheard-of devastation throughout the empire. When a class obtains the ascendency in government, it becomes wholly inexorable, and deaf to every consideration of justice or expedience urged by any other class. Of such class government may be said, what Thurlow, with his usual wit and sagacity, said to a suitor who was complaining of the denial of justice he had experienced from an incorporation,—"Justice, Sir! did you ever expect justice from an incorporation? which has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked."

It is no doubt true that a large proportion of the persons who have suffered under the system introduced into our colonies, have been the very commercial and manufacturing class who have imposed it upon government. The manufacturing operatives joined the shopkeepers in the cry for free-trade,—and where has it left numbers of them?—in the workhouse and the Gazette. But that is no uncommon thing in human affairs; perhaps the greatest evils which befall both nations and individuals are those which they bring upon themselves by their own folly or grasping disposition. Providence has a sure mode of punishing the selfishness of man, which is to let it work out its natural fruits. If the deserved retribution to selfish and interested conduct were to be taken out of human affairs, how much misery would be avoided here below, but what impunity would exist to crime!

The working classes in the manufacturing districts, who now see how entirely they have been deluded on this subject, and how completely free-trade has turned to their own ruin, have a very simple remedy for the evils under which they labour. They say, "Extend the suffrage; give us a due sway in the legislature, and we will soon protect our own interests. The revolution of 1832 in Great Britain, and that of 1830 in France, has turned entirely to the advantage of the bourgeoisie; and we must have another Reform Bill to give us the blessings which Louis Blanc, Ledru Rollin, and the Socialists promise to France." This idea has taken a great hold of the public mind in a certain class of society. It is the natural reaction of experience against the innumerable evils which free-trade and a contracted currency have brought upon the country. The manufacturing and working classes, who joined the trading interest in raising the cry for these measures, finding themselves now crushed, or deriving no benefit from their effects, see no remedy but in taking the matter entirely into their own hands, and putting an end at once, by obtaining the command of the House of Commons, to all those measures which gratuitously, and for no conceivable purpose but the interest of the trades, spread ruin and desolation through the nation.

We object strenuously to any such change; and that from no attachment to the free-trade and fettered currency system, to which we have always given the most determined resistance, but from a firm desire for, and clear perception of, the interests of the great body of the people, to which, though often in opposition to their blind and mistaken wishes, we have uniformly given the most undeviating support.

A uniform system of voting, such as a £5 or household suffrage, which is now proposed as a remedy for all the evils of society, is of necessity a class representation, and the class to which it gives the ascendency is the lowest in whom the suffrage is vested. It must be so, because the poor being always and in every country much more numerous than the rich, the humblest class of voters under every uniform system must always be incomparably the most numerous. It is this circumstance which has given the ten-pounders the command of the House of Commons under the new constitution; they are the humblest and therefore the most numerous class enfranchised by the Reform Act, and consequently, under the uniform household suffrage, they have the majority. They have so for the same reason that, under a similar uniform system, the privates in an army would outnumber the whole officers, commissioned[665] and non-commissioned. But if the suffrage is reduced so low as to admit the representatives of the operatives and "proletaires," or those whom they influence, (which household or a £5 suffrage would undoubtedly do,) what measures in the present state of society in this country, and feeling throughout the world, would they immediately adopt? We have only to look at the newly formed republic of France, where such a system is established, to receive the answer. Repudiation of state engagements, (as in the case of the railways;) confiscation of property under the name of a graduated income tax; the abolition of primogeniture, in order to ruin the landed interest; the issue of assignats, in order to sustain the state under the shock to credit which such measures would necessarily occasion, might with confidence be looked for. And the question to be considered is, would these measures in the end benefit any class of society, or, least of all, the operative, in a country such as Great Britain, containing, in proportion to its population, a greater number of persons dependent on daily wages for their existence than any other that ever existed?

What is to be expected from such ruin to credit and capital but the immediate stoppage of employment, and throwing of millions out of bread? Even if the whole land in the country were seized and divided, it would afford no general relief—it would only shift the suffering from one class to another. What, under such a system, would become of the millions who now exist on the surplus expenditure of the wealthy? They would all be ruined—England would be overrun by a host of starving cultivators like France or Ireland. A plunge down to household suffrage would soon effect the work of destruction, by reducing us all in a few years to the condition of Irish bog-trotters. It is no security against these dangers to say that the working class, if they get the majority, will take care of themselves, and eschew whatever is hurtful to their interests. Men do not know what is to prove ultimately injurious in public, any more than they perceive, in most cases, what is to be for their final interest in private life. The bourgeoisie got the command of the country in France by the Revolution of 1830, but have they benefited by the change? Let the enormous expenditure of Louis Philippe's government, and the present disastrous state of commerce in France, give the answer. The workmen of Paris got the entire command of the government by the Revolution of 1848, and already 85,000 of them are kept alive, only working at the "Ateliers Nationaux," while 200,000 are lounging about, eating up the country with bayonets in their hands. The middle classes got the command of Great Britain by the Reform Act, and their representatives set about free-trade and restricted currency measures, which have spread distress and bankruptcy to an unparalleled extent among themselves. The Reform Bill, by establishing these measures, has destroyed a fourth of the realised capital of Great Britain.[8] Household or universal suffrage would at once sweep away a half of what remains, as it has recently done in France. And in what condition would the 30,000,000 inhabitants of the British empire be if three-fourths of the capital—in other words, three-fourths of the means of employing labour, or purchasing its fruits—were destroyed? We should have Skibbereens in every village of Great Britain, and grass growing in half of London.

What, then, is to be done to allay the present ferment, and tranquillise the country, when so rudely shaken by internal distress and external excitement? Are we to sit with our hands folded waiting till the tempest subsides? and if the present system is continued, is there any ground for believing it ever will subside? We answer, decidedly not. We must do something—and not a little, but a great deal. But what is required is not to augment the political power of the working classes, but to remove their grievances;—not to give them the government of the state, which they can exercise only to their own and the nation's ruin, but to place[666] them in such a condition that they may no longer desire to govern it. This can be done only by abandoning the system of class government for the interest chiefly of the moneyed interests, and returning to the old system of general protective and national administration.

The first thing which is indispensably necessary towards the restoration of confidence and enterprise in the moneyed classes, and consequent employment and happiness in the poor, is to repeal the Bank Charter Acts of 1844 and 1845; and in lieu thereof to establish such a system as may provide a safe, sufficient, and equable circulation for the empire. Above all, it is necessary to establish a circulation which shall be capable of expanding, instead of contracting, as specie is drawn out of the country. This is the one thing needful. Till this is done, every attempt to alleviate the existing misery, in a durable way, will prove abortive. Nobody wants to have French assignats issued amongst us, or to have every insolvent who chooses to call himself a banker authorised to issue currency ad libitum, and substantially usurp the Queen's prerogative by coining worthless paper into doubtful money. But as little can the nation go on longer with our circulation based exclusively on gold coin, and liable to be contracted as that coin is drawn out of the country; thereby doubling the evil, by first inducing speculation when specie is plentiful, and then withdrawing the currency when it becomes scarce. Still less can this be borne, when a system of free-trade has been established amongst us which has enormously increased our importations, especially in articles of food and rude produce, for which experience proves nothing but cash will be taken by the holders; and which, in consequence, has induced a consequent tendency outward in the precious metals, from which, if no corresponding increase in domestic circulation is permitted, nothing but contraction to credit stoppage to speculation, and ruin to industry is to be anticipated. Least of all can such a system of drawing in paper as the gold goes out, be endured when political circumstances have so much increased the demand for the precious metals in the neighbouring states; when the revolutions in France and Germany have at once rendered hoarding general in those countries, and deluged us with their bankrupt stocks, for which nothing but specie will be taken in exchange; and when the commencement of hostilities, both in Italy and Germany, has occasioned the usual demand for gold, as the most portable of the precious metals, to meet the necessities of war.

The way in which the dreadful evils consequent upon commercial credit, and consequently universal employment, being kept dependent on such an unstable equilibrium as that which gold must ever, and most of all in such circumstances, afford, is perfectly evident. What is wanted is something to equalise the supply of currency; to contract paper when the precious metals are abundant, and, consequently, credit is becoming dangerously expansive, and to expand it when they are withdrawn, and, consequently, credit is in danger of being ruinously contracted. Sir R. Peel's system does just the reverse of this: it pours paper in profusion through the country, and consequently fosters absurd and improvident speculation, when specie is abundant, and draws it in suddenly, and with frightful rapidity, the moment that the precious metals begin to be withdrawn, either from the effect of extended importations or foreign warfare. To go right, and obviate the dreadful evils which their system has introduced, we have nothing to do but to establish a monetary policy precisely the reverse. What is wanted is a sliding scale for paper-money,—a system which shall tend to contract paper issues when specie is abundant, and pour them forth with restorative and beneficial vigour the moment that it begins to disappear. Thus, and thus alone, it was that Mr Pitt enabled the country to combat the dangers and surmount the difficulties of the revolutionary war.[9] Under[667] Sir R. Peel's system, the nation, and every one in it, would have been bankrupt when the bank stopped payment in 1797, and we should long ere this have been irrecoverably rendered a province of France.

It belongs to practical men, versed in the mysteries of Lombard Street and the Stock Exchange, to say how this important object is to be attained with due attention to the security of the notes issued, and sufficient safeguards against an over-issue, and consequent injury to capital, by an undue rise of prices owing to that cause. That the thing is possible is self-evident. It appears to be essential to such a system that one of two things should be done. Either that the issuing of notes should be left to all banks, under the limitation that private banks should be obliged to take up their notes at all times,—in Bank of England paper or gold or silver—and deposit government securities to the extent of the notes so issued, to be appropriated to their payment in case of bankruptcy; and that the Bank of England should be bound to pay its notes in gold or silver, at the price those metals bear at the time of presentment. Or, that the issuing of notes, like the coining of money, should be confined entirely to government or its officers; and that the regulation of their amount should be entrusted to certain elevated functionaries—like the commissioners of the national debt—with instructions to them to regulate their issues by the price of gold and silver, increasing them when the rise in the value of those metals showed that they were leaving the country, and contracting them when the price fell, and it was evident that the necessity for an extended paper circulation was passing away.

Of course it would be necessary, under such a system, to impose some limit to the obligation of the Bank of England to pay in specie; but this might be done either by obliging that establishment to pay in either of those metals at the current price they bore in the market at the date of presentment, or by providing, that beyond a certain amount of notes payable on demand, as £40,000,000 for Great Britain, and Ireland, notes of a different colour, as red, should be issued, which were exchangeable for specie only when the precious metals had again fallen to a certain price in the market. These notes should be issued when gold rises to a certain price, and is evidently leaving the country—just as grain from government stores should be issued to the people in periods of scarcity—and drawn in when it returns, and the price falls. We throw these out only as crude suggestions, which may or may not be adequate to answer the purpose in view. What we rest upon, and press in the most earnest manner upon the consideration of the country, is the absolute necessity of altering the present system of contracting the paper when the gold is taken away—in other words, limiting the issues of bread when the beef fails—and substituting for it one of extending the issue of paper when the precious metals are withdrawn; in other words, increasing the issues of bread when those of beef have become deficient.

The next measure which appears indispensable to secure internal tranquillity in the empire is, to make a very considerable government grant, to enable the railway companies to complete the principal lines now on foot, but still in an unfinished state. Every consideration of justice, expedience, and necessity, calls for such a grant. Many of these railways can be completed in no other way. Their directors have already borrowed all the money on the security of the undertaking which the law allows (a third;) and the diminished means and straitened credit of the shareholders, for the present at least, has disabled them from answering any further calls. The works must stand still, a deformity and a disgrace to the country, if government relief is not afforded. Parliament has declared the expedience of these lines by having passed the bills for their formation. Most, perhaps all, of these would have been completed ere this, had not the fetters imposed on the currency by the Bank Charter Act so straitened credit that it has become impossible. The very name of government being willing to advance a certain sum, as two or three millions, to enable these companies to resume their work, would so restore[668] and vivify credit, that it is probable a very small part of the sum voted would be taken up by these undertakings. The restoration of private credit, by such a measure on the part of government, would unlock the immense coffers of wealth which now, from the prostration of private credit, lie unemployed in the country. For, such is the strange and anomalous condition in which we stand, that while our streets are crowded with thousands and hundreds of thousands of unemployed labourers and artisans seeking employment, our banks and insurance offices are crowded with thousands and hundreds of thousands of unemployed capital seeking investment. Yet these two superfluities cannot reach or relieve each other. Why? Because credit and currency are wanting to enable the one to pass over to the other. Let government lay the foundation of the bridge, and the communication, to mutual advantage, will soon be restored.

Incalculable is the benefit which such a resumption of these works would occasion, both to the individuals connected with, or employed by them, and the country at large. It would give bread at once to hundreds of thousands of unemployed labourers, who have been seduced from their regular avocations by the high wages offered two years ago on the lines, and now find return to their former employments impossible, from these having been filled up: it would thin the Chartist and household suffrage meetings, by stopping the distress which fills them, and giving the working classes something better to do than listening to intemperate and seditious speeches: it would render productive the capital and labour already expended on these undertakings, and give their directors the means both of paying a dividend to the proprietors, and liquidating, at no distant period, the whole debt borrowed from the state: it would assuage and relieve unbounded distress, both in the once wealthy and the labouring classes of the state: it would vivify and facilitate commerce, by opening up means of communication through districts requiring it, and to the formation of which the sanction of the legislature on that ground has been given;—but most of all, it would evince, by deeds more eloquent than words, the sympathy of government with the sufferings of the people, wrest from the agitators their strongest arguments against the constitution as it stands, and relieve government of the fearful imputation to which it is now exposed, of first having encouraged the nation to engage in vast and important internal measures, and then deprived them, by legislative enactments, of the means of carrying them, into complete execution.

A third step which is indispensable to disarm the Chartist agitation and restore internal confidence and peace to the country, is to provide on a great scale, and by government machinery, for the relief of the labour market. Various causes have now conspired to render this a matter of paramount necessity. In Ireland, the long-continued agitation for Repeal, coinciding with the indolent and improvident habits of the people, the desolating effects of the potato famine of 1846, and the enervating consequences of the noble government grant of £10,000,000 to meet its necessities, joined to the seditious and treasonable efforts of the insane Young Ireland party, have so completely paralysed industry, that the Emerald Isle may now be regarded as little more than a huge workshop of pauperism, a sort of officina pauperiei, from whence starving multitudes are incessantly issuing to deluge the adjoining states. The number of emigrants who left it for distant colonies in 1847 was above one hundred thousand, but that is but a small part of the dreadful stream of pauperism which incessantly pours forth from its still crowded shores. In the first nine months of 1847, the number of Irish who came to Glasgow was 49,981: and that number has since been on the increase, for, from the last report of the parochial board of Glasgow, it appears, that in five months and ten days preceding 25th April 1848, the number of Irish who landed in Glasgow was 42,288! This is at the rate of nearly 100,000 a-year; and these squalid immigrants, let it be recollected, come, to a country where labour has already, from the effects of free-trade and a fettered currency, and the[669] disastrous stoppage to orders produced by the French and German revolutions, become a perfect drug in the market; and when in and around the single city of Glasgow, above 100,000 human beings, including dependants, are already out of work! Individual charity, local efforts, are nugatory against such prodigious masses of pauperism; you might as well have expected the staff of the Russian parishes to have resisted the invasion of 1812.

Perhaps there is nothing which has occurred, in our time, so much to be regretted, as that the noble grant of ten millions from Great Britain to relieve the distress of Ireland during the famine, was not, in part at least, devoted to the purposes of emigration. We all know how it was spent. No inconsiderable portion was absorbed by the never-failing frauds of the local Irish agents employed in its distribution, and the remainder in making good roads bad ones. No part was employed in a form which could reproduce itself. There was one thing, and but one, already good in Ireland, and that was the roads. On that one good thing the whole magnificent grant was wasted. Now half the grant, £5,000,000 sterling, would not only have provided 700,000 or 800,000 Irish with the means of crossing the Atlantic, but it would have transported them from the coast up the country to the frontier of the Forest. That is the great point which is never attended to by those who contend for free-trade in emigration; in other words, for liberty to transport the emigrants in crowded and crazy ships, half manned and ill provisioned, to the shores of America, and then leave them in sheds at the first harbour to starve or die of fever.

The advocates for free-trade in emigration forget that labour is as great a drug on the sea-coast of America as on the crowded shores of the Emerald Isle: it is no unusual thing to see five thousand emigrants, chiefly from Ireland, land at New York in a single day. But as much as labour is redundant in the American sea-port towns, it is scarce and in demand in the far west. Millions and tens of millions of unappropriated acres are there to be had for the asking; and an able-bodied man is sure to be instantly taken up at half-a-crown or three shillings a-day. The American papers say that "a stout European, with nothing in the world but his arms and his legs, if moved on to the far west, is worth a thousand dollars to the United States." He is worth more to England; for, if settled in Canada, the Irish pauper immediately becomes a consumer of British manufactures to the extent of £2 a head: if to Australia, to the extent of £10 a head. The free-trader in emigration stops short of all these things: instead of transporting the emigrant to the edge of the Forest, where his labour could produce these results to himself and his country, it leaves him to pine, with his starving children, in a shed on the quay—a burden to the community he is fitted to bless, and carrying with him the seeds of a mortal typhus pestilence into any region which, if he survives, he may visit. As a proof that these statements are not overcharged, we subjoin an official return of the fate of the emigrants who landed under the free-trade system in Canada in 1847.[670][10] It displays the most stupendous instance that ever was exhibited of the manner in which the absurd principles of free-trade, when applied to pauperism, misery, and typhus fever, may convert what might, under proper management, be the greatest possible blessing to our own people and the colonies, into the greatest possible curse to both.

What should be done is perfectly plain and generally acknowledged. You will not find ten men of sense or information in Great Britain, out of the precincts of the colonial and other government offices, who have two opinions on the subject. To relieve the labour market in Great Britain and Ireland, a great effort should immediately be made to transport some hundred thousand of the very poorest class, who cannot emigrate on their own resources, to Canada, the Cape, and Australia. Wages in the latter country are from 4s. to 5s. a-day for common, 6s. and 7s. a-day for skilled labour. Ireland is the great quarter to which this relief should be extended: if its surplus multitudes are taken off, the pressure on Great Britain will speedily be abated. Ships of war, to lighten the cost of transport, should be employed to transport the emigrants as they do our regiments. Government barracks should be established with proper officers, to receive the emigrants at their landing, separate the healthy from the sick, establish the latter in proper hospitals, so as to stop the spread of typhus fever, and forward, at the public expense, the healthy and active to the frontier. Other officers should be appointed there to allot to them ground, find them tools, furnish them with seed, or provide them with employment. This should be done to at least three hundred thousand or four hundred thousand emigrants annually for some years to come. We should like to see the Chartism or Repeal Mania which would long stand against such a course of humane, and withal wise and truly liberal, legislation.

But such great measures would require money. The average cost of each emigrant so transported and looked to in the colony would be £6 or £7; three or four hundred thousand persons so provided with the means of emigration would cost from £2,000,000 to £2,500,000 a-year. Granted.—Could the money be better bestowed? It would not yield no return, like that devoted to making good Irish roads bad ones: it would convert three hundred thousand paupers annually into consumers of British manufactures to the amount of three or four pounds a head: it would add £1,000,000 or £1,200,000 a-year to the export of British manufactures: it would secure a durable vent for our goods by planting British descendants in the New World: it would spread joy and comfort through Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow, not less than Tipperary and Galway: it would extinguish—and extinguish by means of Christian beneficence—the flame of disaffection in the realm: it would give to our people all that French socialism has that is really beneficial, and save them from the unutterable and incalculable evils with which it is fraught: it would restore the balance between capital and industry, so grievously and ruinously deranged by the effects of free-trade of late years: it would go far to alleviate the misery which the pernicious dogmas regarding the currency have spread through the country. For blessings such as these, is the issue of exchequer bills to the extent of two or three millions a-year for some years an extravagant price to pay? Would not five times the sum be at once borrowed by the state in a single year if war were to break out with France or America? Are the dangers of any such war to be compared to those which must inevitably be incurred if the present frightful mass of pauperism, idleness, and destitution, is allowed to continue unrelieved, and to go on increasing in the country? What must, in the end, be the result of such a state of things, but internal anarchy,[671] foreign degradation, ultimate ruin? And is there no obligation upon those whose policy since 1846 has brought these calamities on the nation, to apply the national credit in the attempt at least to relieve them? Hear the just and eloquent observations of the Times on the subject:—

"There is a multitudinous population growing yearly more multitudinous, more exacting, more wretched. The end of each succeeding year sees the addition of nearly a quarter of a million of human beings to the inhabitants of this country. The crowded seats of our manufactures and commerce—Liverpool and Manchester, Nottingham and Stockport—teem with the annual increment of creatures, who exclaim, 'Give us work and bread.' How shall we meet this cry? Shall we tell them that work is an affair of demand; that demand depends upon competition; that competition is an effect of population; that population outruns subsistence; that they are too many; in a word, that they have no right to exist? They would be bold men—that would be a bold government, which should hold such language as this. With Chartism in front, and discontent in the rear, it would be perilous to begin such lecturing. But is not the principle acted on, though not avowed, when—with a vast territorial dominion, in which labour might grow into power, and poverty into wealth—with mines of ore and fields of fertility—with capital calling for labour, and adventure crying for help—the State refuses to acknowledge the duty of settling its redundant multitudes in its own distant lands, or discharges it in a niggardly and grudging mood?

"The danger of such neglect or such parsimony is great. Time glides on, adding alike to the numbers and the discontent of the masses. Misery has strange axioms. The misery of multitudes invents a wild policy. They whose normal condition is endurance, will avenge themselves on the empire by a normal agitation. They whom the national wealth does not assist in bettering their fortune, will wage an obstinate war against wealth, property, and order. We have put down Chartism; but we have not conciliated discontent. Let us beware lest the discontented become the majority. Much depends upon ourselves, much on the use to which we turn our existing establishments; and no establishments have we more valuable than our colonies. A colonial empire founded on the sparings of our superfluous wealth and the cravings of our unemployed industry, would be a grander commemoration of victorious order and triumphant law than a century of hospitals or a myriad of wash-houses. Those who were elated and those who were dejected by the 10th of April, might alike view with pleasure the glorious fabric of a new empire springing from the ruins of a broken faction and the energies of a noble purpose, emblematic of the 'bow of hope that spans the earth'—emblematic of the only faith that ever yet inculcated liberty, fraternity, and equality aright."—Times, May 12, 1848.

But towards finding this vent for our indigent and unemployed population at home, in the colonies, it is indispensable that the colonies should be preserved to the British crown; and from the effects of free-trade, it is very doubtful whether this will long be the case. Every body knows that the West Indies have been utterly ruined by the act of 1846: estates are valueless, and the planting of canes is rapidly ceasing. We know of an estate which, within fifteen years, was sold for £38,000, which was knocked down within these few weeks for £20! To give an idea of the feelings which the unexampled injustice to which they have been subjected have excited in these once noble and loyal islands, we subjoin an extract from the Jamaica Despatch of April 7:—

"The affairs of Jamaica have now arrived at that desperate crisis that there is, we believe, not one man in the colony whose dependence rests solely on property invested within it, that would not, could his single voice effect the change, pronounce at once for adhesion to any other government than that which has beggared him. Loyalty is, at best, but a sentiment dependent for stability upon circumstances. We love our country so long as, and because we think, our country protects our lives, our liberties, and our properties. We are patriots whilst the government of our country secures to us those possessions which our industry has earned for us, and which the written constitution has guaranteed us. All human experience shows this limit to the most exalted spirit of loyalty and patriotism. True it is we have not the power of Canada. We are as unable as we are unwilling to change our lot by force; but let England beware lest passive alienation of every sentiment that can attach us to her as a nation do not prove even more dangerous to her colonial power than any active spirit of disaffection could be. This magnificent colony has, indeed, been sinfully and treasonably[672] sacrificed. The property of the Queen's subjects has been confiscated without offence on their part; whilst, in a political point of view, each day renders the colony less and less valuable to the Crown as a national dependency. All commerce between Jamaica and the mother country must speedily cease. Of exports there can be none. Ministers—the fatal Whig Government, which has proved to be the evil genius of the West Indies whenever destiny has placed it in the ascendant—have pronounced the final doom of West Indian cultivation. After August next, when the present crops shall have been taken off, five estates in six must of necessity cease to become sugar producers."—Jamaica Despatch, April 7.

Canada will, ere long, if the present system be adhered to, follow the example of the West Indies; and having ceased, from the destruction of all its privileges, to have any interest in the maintenance of its connexion with Great Britain, it will take the first convenient opportunity to break it off. If we have lost our colonies, what security have we that they will not refuse to admit the stream of pauperism which now flows into them from the parent state: that they will not treat them as the fraternising French republicans did the British artisans, and send them all home? And even if they should still consent to receive them, what security should we have for the maintenance of export of the £16,000,000 of British manufactures which now go out to our colonies, if, like the Americans, they levy their whole revenue to maintain their independent government upon imports from this country? Recollect the exports to America, with 20,000,000 inhabitants, are not £10,000,000 annually, or 10s. a head; to Canada, with 1,900,000, about £3,800,000, or £2 a head; and to the West Indies, hitherto about £3,000,000 to 800,000 souls, or nearly £4 a head.

If the English like free-trade—if they are content to have their sovereigns by the million go out, as in 1847, to buy foreign grain, and foreign manufactures supplant British in all our staple branches of manufacture, by all means let them have it. Let them perpetuate the year 1847, with all its blessings, to all eternity. Free-trade is their own work; let them taste its fruits, and drain the cup they have selected to the dregs. But the colonies, be it recollected, had no hand in introducing that system. They were utterly and entirely disfranchised by the Reform Bill; schedules A and B cut up their representation by the roots. Free-trade was forced upon them by the representatives of Great Britain, not only without their concurrence, but in opposition to their most earnest remonstrances. Whatever may be said as to our present distress being the work of our own hands, and of our now reaping the fruits of the seed we have sown, that is wholly inapplicable to the colonies. Protection to their industry is what they have always prayed for; it is to them the condition of existence; it is the sole bond which unites them to the empire. Soon the bond and the connexion will be dissolved. And when dissolved, we shall have the woful reflection,—we shall incur the damning imputation with future times, that it was lost for no national or worthy object; from no foreign danger, or external catastrophe; but from the mere ascendency of interested legislation in the parent state: and that the greatest colonial empire that ever existed, that which had grown up during two centuries, and resisted the assaults of Napoleon in the plenitude of his power—was dissolved from the desire to maintain a principle which promised no greater benefit but, for a few years, to lower the price of sugar a penny a pound to the British consumers.

It is from measures such as we have now advocated, and from them alone, that we expect the extinction of the Chartist or household suffrage agitation, and the restoration of the wonted feelings of steady loyalty in the British nation. The subordinate matters, so much the objects of anxiety and care to the legislature, are not to be despised; but they will prove entirely nugatory, if measures such as these are not simultaneously and vigorously adopted. There is no way of really improving the condition of the working classes, but by augmenting the demand for labour. This is what they want; we never hear of them petitioning for wash-houses and[673] cold baths, or a health-of-towns bill: it is a "fair day's wage for a fair day's work" which they always desire. Rely upon it, they are right. By all means give them wash-houses and cold baths; broad streets and common sewers; airy rooms and moderately sized houses; but recollect, if you do not give them work at the same time, it will all prove nugatory. Lodge them all by a miracle, or a successful revolution, in Buckingham Palace and Stafford House to-morrow, and in a week, if you do not give them the means of earning good wages, they will be as filthy, squalid, and diseased as ever. Thirty families will be located in the grand saloon; twenty-five in the green library; forty or fifty starving Irishmen will be comfortably lodged on the great stair. Typhus will spread, sedition will be hatched, treason prepared in the royal palaces, as well as in St Giles, or Manchester. There was not a more depraved or miserable set in Paris than the seven or eight hundred persons who squatted down in the Tuileries after the late revolution, and were only dislodged by bringing up artillery. Restore protection to colonial industry; relieve the great works in progress throughout the empire; engage in a great system of government emigration; give the country a currency adequate to its necessities, and commensurate to its transactions; and you may bid defiance to Chartist agitation, and drain off, if you cannot extirpate, the stream of Irish pauperism and treason.

STODDART AND ANGLING.

[11]

We do not lose a moment—we take the earliest opportunity—to thank Mr Stoddart for his book. Well, this is a cool piece of effrontery! So say some flippant folks, who fancy themselves abreast of the literature of the day, and in whose arid waste of mind, as in the desert, one may pick up now and then a few dates. They are so kind as to remind us that Mr Stoddart's book was published early in the spring of 1847. Apart altogether from our perfect knowledge of the time of the publication, we fling back the charge of effrontery with imperturbable contempt. The spring of 1847! There never was any such season. Who saw the glimpses of its smiles? who heard the chirping of its songs? who smelt its perfume? who felt its refreshing airs? who nibbled its green shoots? None of the human senses recognised its presence, or acknowledged its influence. Notorious it is that a tiny urchin in an infant school, whose little teeth had been previously knocking together in its head in shivering concussion for a month, refused, when brought up to the mellifluous passage, to perpetrate the vernal invocation of Mr James Thomson; and equally defying the allurements or the terrors—the sugar-cane or the birch-rod—the moral or the physical force of tuition, pronounced with Denmanic emphasis any allusion to "etherial mildness," or "showers of roses," even in the month of May 1847, to be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare. He never angled who speaks of the spring of 1847. The gentle craft perished for a while beneath the obdurate inclemency of the weather, and the ceaseless floods of snow-water, which polluted every lucid stream into "gruel thick and slab." We do not pretend to remember when the cloud and the tempest passed away; at all events, it was too late for angling purposes. In breezy, ay in stormy days, there are many bold and happy hits to be made by the cunning hand; but the zany, who throws his line in the teeth of a perpetual tornado, will catch, of course, nothing except what the indignant lexicographer has placed at the extremity farthest from the worm. Besides, there are those, including[674] our author, who think that angling is a bilateral pastime. It is a part of their creed, (which we may look into hereafter,) that the silly fishes enjoy the fun of being captured, and often chuckle audibly on being "encreeled" by a triumphant artist like Mr Stoddart. And lordly salmon, or gentlemanlike trout, may probably dislike, as much as their adversary, an excess of piercing winds and dirty waters. In short, it was thoroughly understood, in the beginning of 1847, by the fisher and the fished, that the atmosphere was too preposterously rude to deserve encouragement at the hands or fins of either party. The temporary cessation of hostilities was accordingly complete. What could we do?

Little difficulty, to be sure, there was in finding pretexts daily for putting up the rod in the dining-room four or five times in the course of the forenoon, and executing, without line, a phantom cast of unerring accuracy across the table diagonally into an imaginary eddy rippling and softly gurgling on the floor round several bottles of Alsop's pale ale, linking sometimes, in our mood of finest frenzy, such preprandial dexterity, with the apparition in the same locality, at a later hour, of a cod's head and shoulders, not without oyster sauce. The music of the reel was also occasionally stirred by the supposititious tugs of a voracious gillaroo, (which is by far the dreadfullest fish of which we any where read,) enacted for the nonce by the same curly scion of truth who disdained to lend himself, in the miscalled spring of 1847, to the untruthful sycophancy of the bard of Ednam. The very fact, however, of its being "our young barbarian at play," and not a gillaroo in earnest, who was thus—

carried the sound of the whirring thread to our ears "with a difference." The glancing armoury of the fishing-book, meriting better than Hector's helmet did the untranslatable epithet of Homeric monotony, was over and over again paraded and arranged, disordered and re-classified, extricated and intermingled, from pocket to pocket, until each particular hook in the pools and currents of our fancy became prospectively commemorative of multitudinous massacres, "making the green one red." But the basket or the bag, (and we prefer the latter,) would have felt, in the mean time, heavier under the burden of a single minnow than it ever did feel beneath the possible pressure of shoals of contingent bull-trouts. The experiment of wading through the house in enormous India-rubber boots, taking four steps at once in coming down stairs, and jumping suddenly from chairs upon the carpet, for the purpose of persuading ourselves that we were getting into deep water, afforded but a very transitory hallucination. The act of jerking at dinner a young turkey, with a gaff, from a remote dish, to our plate, did not elicit the general acknowledgment of its graceful precision which we had anticipated; while an excellent and polished steel-yard, with which, in the absence of a salmon, we had been practising in the kitchen on a casual leg of mutton, having dazzled, perhaps, the eye of the butcher's boy, and being forgotten by us for a brief hour or so, has been, "like the lost Pleiad, seen no more below." During such moments, the memory even of delectable old Isaac was losing a little of its perennial fragrance—the reminiscences of all kinds of fishes were beginning to stink in the nostrils. "Who comes here?—A grenadier;" and in walked "The Angler's Companion to the Lochs and Rivers of Scotland, by Thomas Tod Stoddart."

Ordinary mortals, to whom, as to Peter Bell, yellow primroses are simply yellow primroses, might instantly, upon getting the book, open it, read it, and be delighted with it. But we sat for six weeks gazing at the volume without daring or wishing to lay a finger upon it. There was a great deal for us to think about before spreading our sails for another voyage with an old companion. The fact is, that we were humming, after our own fashion, one of Mr Stoddart's angling songs at the moment when his new work was placed before us, Now, these songs were not published yesterday; and many a time and oft out of them had we amused ourselves by forming[675] the liveliest picture of the angler's life, pursuits, meditations, and emotions. From his being up with the sweet thrushes to meet "the morn upon the lea," till "homeward from the stream he turns," we followed him in Stoddart's musical track. His call to "bring him osier, line, and reel"—his scrutiny of the airs and clouds of heaven—his communings with bird and bee, flower and fay—his welcome to the cuckoo—his blessing of the "spring-tide bland"—his entreaty to the winds to waken—

"For the low welcome sound of their wandering wings"—

his repose and summer trance, "beneath a willow wide"—his pensive musings, and comments, shaped by the enchanting realities around him, or by the pleasant shadows of his own memory and fancy—his feats of guile and skill—his patience and his toil—the excitement of his suspense—the exultation of his victory, and the joyousness and harmony which round his well-spent day,—all were represented and embodied in numbers than which none more melodious, heartier, or happier ever strengthened and gladdened, by stream or board, the disciples of Cotton and Walton. We paused before unfolding a new book; and then we read it thoroughly from beginning to end, without missing any word.

But time brings with it many vicissitudes. Winter, when nobody but a Stoddart fishes; swarms of European revolutions, which keep every thing, including fishing-rods, out of joint; and again, in this present 1848, a terrible spring-tide, which, standing sentinel at our doors with the keenness of a sword and the strength of a portcullis, has forbidden any body to think of fishing this year till June;—these things have inevitably, forcibly, and wisely obliged us to be silent. We take the earliest opportunity to thank Mr Stoddart for his book.

"Who is the happy warrior?" appears to us to be an interrogatory as nearly as possible destitute of all meaning. But upon the double hypothesis that it may have some meaning, and that we can paint in fresco, such a question might suggest an idea that the felicitous gentleman for whom the poet asks would be best pictured as Julius Caesar in the act of correcting the proof-sheets of his Commentaries. To do good and great actions is agreeable, but dangerous; to write well and nobly of the great and good things we have done is also agreeable, but troublesome; but when the danger and the trouble are both past and gone, to read what we have well written of what we have well done, with the conviction that an endless posterity will read it after us with pleasure and approbation, must be, we shall venture to imagine, most prodigiously agreeable to any respectable individual, whether he is actually a soldier, having purchased his commission at a heavy regulation price, or whether he is only provisionally obnoxious to be balloted for militia service, or accidentally liable to be called out, with a curse and a cutlet in his month, for the guerilla warfare of a special constable. We avow for ourselves, without a blush, that we are only one of those who may become warriors hereafter by statutory or municipal contingency. As yet we have not served in any campaign. On one occasion, indeed, the housemaid discovered, at early dawn, sprouting from the key-hole of the door, a notice, by which we were hastily summoned to quell a dreadful tumult at nine o'clock the night before. Late as the summons came, on reading it a thrill of posthumous glory permeated our frame; nor, when perusing in the newspapers at breakfast the eloquent recognition by the public authorities of the services of other special constables, could we repress the riotous throbbings of martial spirit and martial sympathy within us, as being one who, though de facto inert in dressing-gown and slippers, was entitled de jure, as the notice testified, to be active with badge and baton. We severely reprimanded, of course, the housemaid for bringing into the house stray bits of paper, which might have wrapped up most deleterious combustibles. She promised to be more cautious in future; and it has so happened that the magistrates have never taken practical advantage of our vigilant anxiety to protect the tranquillity of the city. But we are well aware that it has ever been exactly with a corresponding spirit that[676] we have studied the Gallic battles and campaigns of the great Roman, where we have been free alike from the risk of fighting, and the botheration of writing. Our impression is, therefore, on the whole, exceedingly strong that the happy warrior may be more faithfully portrayed by ourselves than by Cæsar.

According to these principles of interpretation, let us inquire, who is the happy angler? To such a question any body who, in the former case, prefers Cæsar's claim to ours, will not fail to reply by bawling out the name of Stoddart. The parallel is a very good one. There is nothing in the science of angling theoretically of which Mr Stoddart is ignorant; there is nothing in the art of angling practically which Mr Stoddart has not tried with his own hand. He has been writing the annals of a laborious, persevering, incessant, and successful experience. He tells others what they may do, by showing them vividly and precisely what he has himself done. It is the record of a conqueror whose career exhibits occurrences so numerous, various, and striking, that the simple narrative of events teaches general principles; the mere accumulation of facts causes theory to vegetate—the movements which lead to victory on a particular occasion are adopted as laws to regulate subsequent operations in similar circumstances; the strategy of the emergency is accepted as universally normal. In a history so instructive, there must necessarily be a remarkable amount of patience and zeal, assiduity and skill, quick apprehension, and sagacious reflection. And where, as in the present instance, it happens that all this information is communicated with healthy racy vigour, and picturesque effect of language, while a dewy freshness of enthusiasm exhilarates the whole composition, it is not surely very surprising that, comfortably pendulous in our rocking-chair, conscious of never having encountered a billionth part of the fatigues undergone by Mr Stoddart, and possessing, in the manageable volume in our hand, a complete repertory of the fruits of the toil, experience, and judgment of that "admirable Triton," we should thus complacently believe that we are the happy angler—leaving it of course to Mr Stoddart, if he likes, to be a Julius Cæsar.

From the frontispiece we start, and after perambulating the book, to the frontispiece we return. "A day's fishing" will then be wondrously intelligible, and ought to be regarded with an angler's love, and an angler's pride. The picture from which the engraving is taken has been long familiar to us. Who painted it? At the left-hand corner of the plate the artist's name is legible enough; but there is much more, besides the name, printed in sympathetic ink which is visible only to the eye of the initiated. A word in thine ear, gentlest of piscatorial readers! The skill of the pencil is the animated reflection of the skill of the fishing rod. Nothing finny has the painter drawn which the angler has not killed. On the canvass his faithful brush has placed nothing which his success as an angler has not enabled him to observe for himself, to mark, and to daguerreotype in his inmost soul. No graceful outline has he traced; no gorgeous bulk has he stretched out in massive breadth or wavy length; no small head has he delicately curved; no, flood of light has he poured on gleaming panoply of interwoven scales of gold and silver; no shifting ray of exquisite colour has he caught in the very instant of brilliant evanescence; no purple spot or crimson star has he made to shine with distinctive brightness on the flank; no aureate or orange tint has he permitted to fade away along the body into pearly whiteness; no fin quivers; no tail curls; no gill is muddy red; no eye is lustreless,—without or beyond the bidding, the teaching, the guarantee, and express image of nature. Pity it is that we should not feel at liberty to say a word or two of other matters—of a happy temper, which has cheered us with its mellow sunshine on many a raw and cloudy day; or of a richly-stored mind, which, when fish were sulky, has often made the lagging hours spin on with jocund speed. Almost, under this hot bright sky, we are tempted, unbidden, to enter the studio, and ask to share with yon sequestered stags the shelter of the favourite pines. But we dare not; for[677] we know the man as well as the artist and angler. We know both the anglers. It is, in sooth, fitting that Giles should illustrate Stoddart.

Is not angling cruel? Now, before attempting any responsive observation, be so good as to read the following impetuous passage:—

"Is it not, for instance, in the attitude of hope that the angler stands, while in the act of heaving out his flies over some favourite cast? Of hope increased, when he beholds, feeding within reach of his line, the monarch of the stream? But now, mark him! He has dropt the hook cautiously and skilfully just above the indicated spot; the fish, scarcely breaking the surface, has seized it. A fast, firm hold it has, but the tackle is fine, and the trout strong and active. Look! how the expression of his features is undergoing a change. There is still hope, but mingled with it are traces of anxiety—of fear itself. His attitudes, too, are those of a troubled and distempered man. Ha! all is well. The worst is over. The strong push for liberty has been made, and failed. Desperate as that summerset was, it has proved unsuccessful. The tackle—knot and barb—is sufficient. Look now at the angler. Hope with him is stronger than anxiety, and joy too beams forth under his eyelids; for lo! the fish is showing symptoms of distress. No longer it threatens to exhaust the winch-line; no longer it combats with the rapids; no more it strives, with frantic fling or wily plunge, to disengage the hook. It has lost all heart—almost all energy. The fins, paralysed and powerless, are unable for their task. So far from regulating its movements, they cannot even sustain the balance of the fish. Helpless and hopeless it is drawn ashore, upturning, in the act of submission, its starred and gleamy flanks. The countenance of the captor—his movements, (they are those which the soul dictates,) are all joyous and self-congratulatory. But the emotion, strongly depicted though it be, is short-lived. It gives way successively to the feelings of admiration and pity—of admiration, as excited on contemplating the almost incomparable beauty of the captive, its breadth and depth, the harmony of its proportions, as well as the richness and variety of its colours; of pity, as called forth in accordance with our nature,—an unconscious, uncontrollable emotion, which operates with subduing effect on the triumph of the moment.

"And now, in their turn, content and thankfulness reign in the heart and develop themselves on the countenance of the angler; now haply he is impressed with feelings of adoring solemnity, stirred up by some scene of unlooked-for grandeur, or the transit of some sublime phenomenon. I say nothing of the feelings of disappointment, anger, envy, and jealousy, which sometimes find their way into the bosom, and are portrayed on the features even of the worthiest and best-tempered of our craft. Too naturally they spring up and blend themselves with our better nature; yet well it is that they take no hold on the heart—scorching, it may be true, but not consuming its day of happiness.

"Hence it is, from the very variety of emotions which successively occupy the mind, from their blendings and transitions, that angling derives its pleasures; hence it holds precedence as a sport with men of thoughtful and ideal temperament; hence poets, sculptors, and philosophers—the sons and worshippers of genius—have entered, heart and hand, into its pursuit. Therefore it was that Thomson, Burns, Scott, and Hogg, and, in our present day, Wilson and Wordsworth, exchanged eagerly the gray-goose quill and the companionship of books, for the taper wand and the discourse, older than Homer's measures, of streams and cataracts. Therefore it was that Paley left his meditative home, and Davy his tests and crucibles, and Chantrey his moulds, models, and chisel-work,—each and all to rejoice and renovate themselves; to gather new thoughts and energies, a fresh heart and vigorous hand, in the exercise of that pastime which is teeming with philosophy."

Mr Stoddart blinks our problem altogether. Fish, it will be noticed, are treated, firstly, as bits of cork, and, secondly, as lumps of lead. But the bad example of all the great men before or since Agamemnon will not lessen the cruelty, if it be cruelty, of dragging a large fish or a little fish out of its "native element" forcibly, and against its will. Obliging a fish to come out of the water when it has not the slightest wish to be a fish out of water, has an apparent resemblance to the ejecting of a human being unseasonably from his bed who has made up his mind to prosecute a steady snooze for the next three hours. The absence or presence of a little bodily suffering in the process of ejection, has really nothing to do with the merits of the abstract question.[678] A man who is jerked out of bed by a string tied to his toe must endure an uncomfortable twinge. But the votary of Morpheus may be induced to change his quarters quite as effectually by painlessly removing beyond his reach the blankets and the sheets. It is not the application of positive compulsion to the person, but the disturbance of existing comfort in his present condition, which may be pain, and hardship, and cruelty. In point of fact, it is nothing of the sort, because the analogy, as stated, is entirely fallacious. The true analog is to be stated thus: Any body who, being already in bed, and therefore legitimately somniferous, happens to overhear us in the next room loudly declaring our intention of beginning forthwith a supper of savoury and palatable dishes, and who, thereupon, greedily shakes off his incipient torpidity, and rushes into the apartment in order to share the banquet, but finds no supper, and ourselves laughing at his credulity, has no right at all to assert that he has been subjected to hardships or treated with cruelty. He left his proper sphere, and was punished for his eccentricity. How is a fish that lives in the water entitled to snap at a fly that lives out of the water? But then the fly goes into the water. Very well: but if the fish comes up into the air, as it does, to bite at a fly, which is a denizen of the air, it is just that a fly, when it goes down into the water, should indulge in a reciprocal bite at a fish, which is a denizen of the waters. And if flies cannot bite for themselves, it is a noble thing in man to bite for them. All the fish encreeled by all the human fishers of every year make but a molehill to the mountain of flies butchered and gorged by a single trout in a month. Heliogabalus was temperate, Nero was merciful, when compared with a gillaroo. And as for a Pike!

Let us listen to Stoddart on pikes. It is proper, perhaps, to mention that we are legally informed that the "open and advised speaking" of our author about pikes is very constitutional, although very marvellous. It pleases him now to buffet these freshwater sharks with extremely hard words. Yet have we seen his nerves more fluttered by a dead pike, surreptitiously introduced into his nocturnal couch at Tibbie's—whom mortals, we believe, call Mrs Richardson, and whose green rural hostelry, on the margin of St Mary's Loch, is the sweet and loved haunt of every true brother of the craft—than ever was the heart of fisherman when a twenty-pounder has darted off like an express locomotive towards the foaming and rocky cataract. What horrid shriek is that, making night hideous? With bursts of laughter at this moment returns the scene when that grim visitor murdered the first efforts of the weary angler to woo repose, as his naked feet came into unexpected contact with the slimy mail of the water-pirate. Such recollections are part and parcel of the many hundred things which make the fisher's life a happy one. We shall hear, therefore, Mr Stoddart avenging himself on all pikes, dead or living, not excluding an incidental foray against eels; which latter are not surely, while they live, loveable.

"No one that ever felt the first attack of a pike at the gorge-bait can easily forget it. It is not, as might be supposed from the character of the fish, a bold, eager, voracious grasp; quite the contrary, it is a slow calculating grip. There is nothing about it dashing or at all violent; no stirring of the fins—no lashing of the tail—no expressed fury or revenge. The whole is mouth-work; calm, deliberate, bone-crashing, deadly mouth-work. You think at the moment you hear the action—the clanging action—of the fish's jaw-bones; and such jaw-bones, so powerful, so terrific! You think you hear the compressing, the racking of the victim betwixt them. The sensation is pleasurable to the angler as an avenger. Who among our gentle craft ever pitied a pike? I can fancy one lamenting over a salmon or star-stoled trout or playful minnow; nay, I have heard of those who, on being bereft of a pet gold-fish, actually wept; but a pike! itself unpitying, unsparing, who would pity?—who spare?

"Returning, however, to the point in my narrative at which I broke off. I no sooner felt the well-known intimation, than, drawing out line from my reel, and slightly slackening what had already passed the top-ring of my rod, I stood prepared for further movements on the part of the fish. After a short time he sailed slowly about, confining his excursions to within a yard or two of the spot[679] where he had originally seized the bait. It was evident, as I knew from experience, that he still held the trout cross-wise betwixt his jaws, and had not yet pouched or bolted it. To induce, him, however, to do so without delay, I very slightly, as is my wont, tightened or rather jerked the line towards myself, in order to create the notion that his prey was making resistance, and might escape from his grasp. A moment's halt indicated that he had taken the hint, and immediately afterwards, all being disposed of at one gulp, out he rushed, vigorous as any salmon, exhausting in one splendid run nearly the whole contents of my reel, and ending his exertions, in the meanwhile, with a desperate summerset, which revealed him to my view in all his size, vigour, and ferocity; the jaws grimly expanded, the fins erect, and the whole body in a state of uncontrollable excitement. Being provided with a single-handed rod, and winch-line suited in respect of strength and thickness to light fishing, it was a marvel that either of these stood the test on an occasion so very trying. The worst, however, was over; and although the pike, as fish of its kind under similar circumstances always do, showed signs of remaining strength, coupled with great sullenness, it nevertheless, in the course of a few minutes, submitted to its fate, and allowed itself to be drawn ashore at a convenient landing-place, which fortunately was not far off.

"This fish, the first I ever captured in Teviot, weighed nearly a stone, and preceded in its fate no fewer than four others, of the respective weights, or nearly so, of ten, eight, seven, and three pounds, all of which I took from about the same spot in less than an hour's time. Shortly after, three or four days intervening, I killed two pike of twelve pounds weight each, close to the place mentioned, and in the same season met with an incident which, as it has some connexion with pike-trolling, is worthy of being recorded in this chapter. It happened in the month of July, on which day, Teviot, owing to recent rains, was somewhat discoloured, and I had ventured as far up its banks as the Roxburgh pool, intending to trout with fly and minnow, and also to give the pike a trial. That I might not, however, consume much time upon the latter fish, I had provided myself with a couple of set lines formed of strong cord. These it was my intention to lay out in a portion of the pool hitherto untried, and to allow them to remain there, while I angled for trout higher up the river. With the view of doing this, I had secured, by desultory throwing in my progress, towards Roxburgh, several small trout, and when arriving at the spot where I had intended to lay the lines, was unable to resist an anticipatory trial for pike with the rod itself, which, on this occasion, was a double-handed one, and provided with a good-sized reel and line to correspond.

"Having affixed and baited a gorge-hook, I accordingly commenced operations, and in the course of a few throws hooked what I conceived to be a pike of extraordinary size. It pouched quickly, ran far, and forcibly crossed and recrossed the river, which, at the spot in question, is by no means narrow,—rushed upwards to a distance of at least a hundred yards and down again, seemingly without the least fatigue. Having regained, however, the spot from which it had commenced its run, all on a sudden the fish halted, and immediately, without any jerk or strain on my part, the line came to hand, neatly severed or cut through by the teeth, above the wire-fastenings to which the gorge-hook had been appended. No slight disappointment it was. I fancied of course that I had lost a pike of such uncommon size, as to have been able to engross, in pouching, the whole extent of arming in question, measuring nearly a foot. My sole resource therefore, or hope of retrieve,—and I was by no means sanguine of the result,—lay in the setting of the two lines I had brought along with me, at or near the spot where the fish had made its escape. Accordingly, baiting each with a trout of at least four ounces in weight, I threw them in not far from one another, with small floats attached, in order to show off the lure and keep it from the bottom. This done, I pursued my way further up the river, and commenced trouting. On my return, after the expiry of two or three hours, to the place where I had set the lines, I found that both the corks were out of sight and the cords stretched to the uttermost, but quite motionless. Drawing the nearer one, I was surprised to observe it, although made of strong and fresh material, snapped through at the middle. It was not so, however, with the other. There was evidently something attached to it of considerable weight and bulk, without, however, any live resistance. Imagine my surprise, when, on hauling it nearer the bank, I beheld a huge eel enveloped among the cords, quite choked and lifeless. Of river eels it was the largest I had ever witnessed, although I certainly have seen congers of greater size. About four feet and a half in length, and in girth fully eleven inches, I think it could not have weighed less than[680] twenty pounds. This point, however, I wanted the ready means of determining, although I regret not having made an effort to acquaint myself with it. On examining the stomach of the monster, I found that it contained all the three gorge-hooks employed by me, and the trouts with which, individually, they had been baited. My experience in eel fishing has not been very great, but I have taken some hundreds of them in my time, and I do not remember above one or two that showed fight in the same manner this one did, while on the rod. In general, they waddle or twist about, betake themselves under rocks, stones, or roots of trees, but very seldom push out directly across or up the pool. With the gorge-hook indeed, and a small trout as the bait, I have often, both before and since the occasion above-mentioned, captured them; also while trolling for pike with gimp and swivel tackle, and that in mid water betwixt the bottom and surface; nor, indeed, will eels, when impelled by hunger, shrink from assailing the largest fish, should these happen to be sickly or in adverse circumstances. It is well known that what are termed river cairns, or heaps of stones raised by the tacksman of salmon fishings for the purpose of inveigling running fish into a certain description of net attached to them, afford shelter to large numbers of eels and lampreys, which, if the grilse or salmon happening to become entangled is allowed, through neglect or otherwise, to continue two or three hours in this state of thraldom, will, forcing an entrance through the gill or mouth, speedily disencumber it of its entrails; nay if allowed to pursue their work of molestation unchecked, absolutely hollow it out, until little remains but a sack or skinful of bones."

This is a horrible picture,—"a sack or skinful of bones," while the salmon, we presume, still exists in its ribbed transparency. The dreams of eels, who sup so full of horrors, must be very awful. But infinitely more awful must be the visions which people the slumbers of those mortals who, in their turn, eat those eels who have eaten those salmon. Our repugnance to eel-pies was never strong. It were better for us to think of something else.

A crust of statistics may ward off sickening and remorseful qualms. The indiscriminate destructiveness which characterises pikes, is unfortunately and disgracefully displayed by other queer fish. It is not necessary to enumerate the perplexing multiplicity of devices which human ingenuity has invented and constructed for annihilating salmon. As of the kings about whose deaths their royal brother Richard tells sad stories, so of salmon, however various may be the manner of their dissolutions, it is safe to affirm that they are "all murdered." Statutes kill myriads of them; poachers, in spite of statutes, kill myriads more of them; honest anglers, who sport in the seasons, and with the weapons proper to sportsmen, kill a few individual fishes; and it will be demonstrated that pikes are the powerful and natural allies of statutes and poachers:—

"With regard to the ravages committed among the fry of the salmon, I may mention that almost every pike captured by me during the months of April and May contained in its stomach, or disgorged, on being landed, the remains of one or more smolts. These frequently were quite entire—to all appearance, indeed, newly killed; they were sometimes also in a partly-digested state, and on other occasions presented to the eye little more than was sufficient to distinguish them as having been small fish. I have taken five or six salmon-fry, in the stages above described, out of the stomach of a single pike. Two, three, or four, is a matter of common occurrence. Such being the case, and if it be true, what many ichthyologists affirm, that fish dissolve their food with such astonishing rapidity as to rival in some instances the action of fire; nay, allowing that the stomach of the pike occupied a couple of hours in completing the digestive process, the amount of havoc committed by this ravager on Teviot during the smolt season is quite astonishing. Confining my calculation within very moderate bounds, I shall presume that each pike, on the average, as his daily meal, during the months already referred to, engrosses four salmon or bull-trout fry. This, in the course of sixty days, gives an allowance to every individual in Teviot of two hundred and forty smolts; and supposing there are from Ancrumbridge downward, a stretch of water nine or ten miles in length, not more than one thousand pike, the entire number consumed by these, in less than one-sixth of the year, amounts to two hundred and forty thousand, or nearly a quarter of a million of salmon-fry,—a greater number, there is no question, than is killed[681] during the same extent of time by all the angling poachers in the district put together."

We acknowledge that we must be indiscreet to involve ourselves again in an offensive topic. A hint, however, of our opinion, and we pass away from the subject. The abominable slaughter of "FOUL" fish, perpetrated by people whom we are obliged to repudiate as sportsmen, and whom we are not obliged to recognise as gentlemen, is a shocking, dirty, disreputable mal-practice, to be condemned with unmodified severity of language. Apologies, explanations, palliations, are in vain. The filthy mass which is unrighteously dragged out of the water is not then a fish. It is against the use of nature for the hand of man to touch it. And yet the same man who would with easy indifference "leister" a salmon in that state, teeming with ten thousand thousand lives, shall, on the morrow, in a jury-box, violate his oath by acquitting the guilty in the face of the clearest evidence, because he thinks capital punishments unlawful. Phaugh! Call Mr Stoddart into court as an authoritative witness.

"I find a number of anglers at one with me in opinion upon this subject; and all who have witnessed night-leistering on Tweed during the autumnal or winter months, will acknowledge that even the romantic character which torch-light and scenery invest it with, fails as an apology for the ignoble, wasteful, and injurious nature of the occupation. In nine cases out of ten, it is pursued, either during the spawning season itself, or when the fish are heavy with roe—when they are red or foul, having lain a considerable time in the river, and, moreover, when they have lost all power of escape, or are cut off from exercising it, both by the lowness of water, and by the circumstance of their being hemmed in, at the head and foot of the pool or place of action, by nets and other contrivances stretched from bank to bank.

"It can scarcely be credited, but I relate a fact known to many on Tweedside, that, about four or five years ago, upwards of three hundred breeding fish, salmon and grilses, were slaughtered in the course of a single night, from one boat, out of a stretch of water not far from Melrose, two leisters only being employed; and of this number—I allude to the fish—scarcely one was actually fit to be used as food, while by far the greater part of them were female salmon, on the eve of depositing their ova. In the neighbourhood of Kelso, upwards of ninety have frequently been butchered with this implement during a single night, from one boat,—all of them fish in the same rank and unhealthy condition above described. In September 1846, according to the most moderate calculation, no fewer than four thousand spawning fish, consisting chiefly of full-grown salmon, and comprehending the principal breeding stock of the season—those fish which, from their forward state, promised the earliest and most vigorous supply of fry, were slaughtered in Tweed, with the consent, and under the auspices, of the upper holders of fishings, in the manner I speak of. Need it be said, that the injury done to the salmon-fishings in general by this malpractice on the part of two or three lesser proprietors, is incalculable, and, when linked with the doings of poachers during closetime, to which it unquestionably gives encouragement, and the system pursued on Tweed of capturing and destroying the kelts and baggits, it must operate most prejudicially against every plan devised to further the breeding of this highly-prized article of food."

Simply we shall say, that any body who so leisters fish from this day forward is a BRUTAL BARBARIAN, fit for the society of a Burke or a Hare, who did not venture to immolate their victims till gross physical corruption—the heavy prostration of drunkenness—rendered them in general the easy and stupid prey of a disgusting assassin. Let the leisterer of foul fish be accursed in the sporting calendar.

Under all circumstances, to be quite candid, we remonstrate against the leister. It is not a fair way of going to work—the fish has no option. There is too much of the tinge of the Venetian bravo in the blow. Less apology must there always be for striking a salmon than for striking a man behind his back. The man who detects the stealthy thrust may turn and smite his enemy. The fish, vigilant happily of the descending trident, can but shift its quarters and swim away. Basking, too, at the moment under the broad beam of the all-rejoicing sun—as motionless, as tranquil, as bright, and as beautiful, as the silver pebbles in the river's bed—why[682] should idle human violence invade and extinguish that unsuspecting repose? At this very instant, while he is in such attitude and mood, fling, if you can, with delicate precision, over his snout the most attractive mottled wing in your book, and then—if the pensive Zoroaster of the stream quits his meditations to swallow your temptation—then hook him, play him, land him, and encreel him; but do not, without any warning, plunge a barbed steel fork into his heart. Or, at this very instant, let the seduction of the triple worm travel athwart his ruminations, and if the glutton shall overcome the sage, then, even in his voracious throat, strike home, and overcome the glutton; but do not hack the noble form with ruffianly prongs of rusty iron—

Pr'ythee permit the leister, for the future, to decorate a museum along with other implements of the Cannibal, not the British islands!

Mr Stoddart must feel neither anger nor surprise if we deliberately avoid not merely any discussion, but even any notice whatever, of theories or speculations, directly or collaterally referring to the breeding or propagation of fishes. We have not been, as the pages of Maga prove, unwatchful of what conjectural philosophy might propose, or ingenious experimentalism might exhibit. We hold some piscine opinions, so curious but so true, that if we could enunciate them in a language intelligible to fish (which ought to be the Finnish dialect,) the liveliest salmon in Norway could not execute summersets sufficiently numerous to express his astonishment at our knowledge. We could likewise put such puzzling objections to the most elaborate and seemingly satisfactory systems, as to demonstrate irrefragably that, in spite of every thing which every body has said about every variety of the salmo race, nobody knows any thing certain as to the age Of Old Parr. But, for one good reason, we shall be discreet and silent. Nobody cares a straw, or a horse-hair, or a thread of gut, whether Stoddart is overthrown, or Shaw is predominant,—nobody, whose sole and laudable object is to enjoy a day's good fishing. The great fact remains—the waters are full of fish. What matter is it whence the fins came or come? The question is not how they got into, but how they are to be taken out of the burn, the river, or the lake? It is not we who mean to go

"Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave;"

but up out of it we hope to draw many dozens of its peopling swarms. And we desire to learn from Mr Stoddart how best we may, by baits and guileful spells, reach and inveigle, them—

"In their obscured haunts of inmost bowers."

The companion we want is the Angler's Companion. Now the angler is an individual who sallies out at early dawn, rejoicing, not only in his own strength, and, haply, the strength of a glass of whisky, but in a fishing-basket, or pannier, or bag; in a fishing-rod, or three or four fishing-rods; in a fishing-book, more voluminous in its single volume than the Encyclopædia Britannica; in wading boots and water-proof cloaklets; in a reel, and a gaff, and a landing net, and sometimes a boat; in gut, and in horse hair; in hooks and hackles; in feathers and silk thread; in wax and wire; in leads and floats; in tin boxes of worms, and earthen pots of salmon roe; in minnows, and parr-tails; in swivels and gorge-hooks; in lobs, and in bobs; in ferrules, and in rings; in a brown paper parcel of four large sandwiches, and a pocket flask of six large glasses of sherry; in a dingy coat, and inexpressible unmentionables; and finally, in the best humour, and a shocking bad hat. Is it imaginable that all this can be done, as it is done every day, by any body who has not made up his mind, or who thinks it necessary to know, what fish are, and where they came from? There is no such humbug within him. He goes to the Tweed or the Tay; the Don, or the Conan; to Loch Craggie, or Loch Maree; to Loch Awe, or Loch Etive; to the Clyde, or the Solway; to Loch Doon, or Loch Ken; because all over broad Scotland there is plenty of fish; and because, where-ever he goes, Stoddart can tell him how there most readily, most surely, and most pleasantly to encreel them.[683] Of all the Caledonians who, in countless crowds, daily leave their native homes in the flesh, and return to the domestic hearthstone in the evening, with their flesh more or less fishified, there are not twenty to whom it is not a point of the utmost indifference, whether the fish in the Tweed, or any other river where they have been angling, are rained down once a month from the clouds, or are brought over as ballast in ships once a-week from Denmark. The fish are there. We are going to catch them. Hand us Stoddart's Angler's Companion.

As a teacher of practical angling in Scotland, we look on Mr Stoddart to be without a rival or equal. To call him a good instructor in the art, does not properly describe him. He is strictly and literally a manuductor. Nature has given to him what Beddoes terms "a well organised and very pliant hand," which for more than twenty years, as we can honestly testify, has waved the osier over all the streams of his native country. We exaggerate nothing in declaring angling to have been, during that long period, Stoddart's diurnal and nocturnal study. And the result has been what it ought to be. Nobody else, for example, (we affirm it without fear of any contradiction or cavil,) could have written, as it is written, the sixth chapter,—"On fishing with the worm for trout."

"To a perfect novice in the art of angling, nothing appears simpler than to capture trout with the worm, provided the water be sufficiently muddled to conceal the person and disguise the tackle of the craftsman. A mere urchin, with a pea-stick for a wand, a string for his line, and a pin for his hook, has often, under such favourable circumstances, effected the landing of a good-sized fish. But to class performances of this description among feats of skill were quite ridiculous, and they are just, to as small an extent, samples of successful worm-fishing. It may perhaps startle some, and these no novices in the art, when I declare, and offer moreover to prove, that worm-fishing for trout requires essentially more address and experience, as well as a better knowledge of the habits and instincts of the fish, than fly-fishing. I do not, be it observed, refer to the practice of this branch of the art as it is followed on hill burns and petty rivulets, neither do I allude to it as pursued after heavy rains in flooded and discoloured waters; my affirmation bears solely upon its practice as carried on during the summer months in the southern districts of Scotland, when the rivers are clear and low, the skies bright and warm. Then it is, and then only, that it ought to be dignified with the name of sport; and sport it assuredly is, fully as exciting, perhaps more so, than angling with the fly or minnow. In the hands of a skilful practitioner, indeed, there is no mode of capturing well-conditioned fish with the rod more remunerative;—I say well-conditioned, for in the spawning months, lean, lank, and unhealthy trout may be massacred in any number by means of salmon-roe or pastes formed from that substance.

"In the present chapter, I shall attempt to make plain the principal points to be attended to by the worm-fisher desirous of success. These I class under the following heads:—

1. The rod and tackle to be employed.
2. The kind of worm, and how prepared,
3. When and where to fish.
4. How to bait and manage the line."

Excellently well is the task executed. At the conclusion of the chapter, when he says "I have embraced, methinks, most of the points connected with the subject it treats of, and endeavoured, to the best of my ability, to set them forth in a plain and practical light," he speaks with the modest but honest consciousness of one who has been handling a subject so familiar, and yet so interesting to himself, that if he has only allowed words to clothe his thoughts as they flowed in their natural stream, he feels he must have written clearly, sensibly, agreeably, and usefully. Mind you, we do not intend to reprint Mr Stoddart's volume in these pages. Buy it and read it. But, as we rebuked at starting those who spoke of the spring of 1847, we shall not withhold at once comfort and advice from precipitate anglers, who fancy they cannot commence operations too early in the season.

"On Tweedside, worm-fishing seldom commences until the latter end of May or beginning of June, when the main stream and its tributaries are in ordinary seasons considerably reduced. The trout in a certain measure require to be sated with fly-food before having recourse to any coarser aliment,—at any rate, some change seems to be effected in their tastes[684] and habits, virtually inexplicable, but yet dependent upon the instinct implanted by nature—an instinct which, as regards many animals, has, in all ages, baffled, perplexed, and silenced the minutest inquiry. Before trout take the worm freely, it is necessary also that the temperature of the water should be at a state of considerable elevation—at least fifty degrees of Fahrenheit; and, moreover, that it be acted upon at the time by a fair proportion of sun-light; indeed, a bright hot day is not at all objectionable, the air being calm, or but slightly agitated. Such a condition both of water and weather often occurs during the month of June, and its occurrence is, indeed, frequently protracted throughout July. These, in fact—June and July, added to the latter half of May—constitute, as regards the southern districts of Scotland, our best worm-fishing months. Be it noted, however, by way of repetition, that I am not at present alluding to the simple and coarse practice of the art pursued among starved and unwary fish in mountain rivulets, nor do I refer to worm-fishing in flooded and discoloured streams; but I treat of it solely as respects clear waters, inhabited by cunning, cautious trout, and, in consequence, as a method of angling which requires of the craftsman great skill and no stinted amount of prudence. With regard to hill burn-fishing, undoubtedly it is more in season during August and September, when rains are frequent, than in June and July; and in discoloured waters, trout may be captured with worm throughout the whole year, no one month excepted."

Precocity does not flourish in Scotland. Never do any thing in a hurry. In good time for all good purposes of angling,—not too soon, but not a minute too late, have come our commendations of this admirable treatise and manual. What does it lack? any thing? no, not even a "SIMPLE RECIPE FOR COOKING A WHITLING OR GOOD TROUT BY THE RIVER-SIDE." What a smack there is here of inimitable and beloved Isaac! But, before we part, Mr Stoddart shall pronounce his benison.

"Angler! that all day long hast wandered by sunny stream, and heart and hand plied the meditative art—who hast filled thy pannier brimful of star-sided trout, and with aching arms, and weary back, and faint wavering step, crossed the threshold of some cottage inn—a smiling, rural retreat that starts up when thy wishes are waning into despondency,—how grateful to thee is the merry song of the frying-pan, strewn over with the daintiest of thy spoils, and superintended by a laughter-loving hostess and her blooming image! and thou, too, slayer of salmon! more matured and fastidious, what sound when thy reel is at rest, like the bubbling and frothing of the fish-kettle! what fare more acceptable than the shoulder-cut, snowed over with curd, of a gallant sixteen-pounder; and where, in the wide world, is to be found wholesomer and heartier sauce, to the one as well as to the other, than a goblet generously mixed of Islay, and piping hot? Stretch thy hand over thy mercies, and be thankful."

Indispensable in all time to come, as the very strength and grace of an angler's Tackle and Equipment in Scotland, must and will be "Stoddart's Angler's Companion."

[685]

THE CAXTONS.—PART III.

BOOK II.—CHAPTER I.

It was a beautiful summer afternoon when the coach set me down at my father's gate. Mrs Primmins herself ran out to welcome me; and I had scarcely escaped from the warm clasp of her friendly hand, before I was in the arms of my mother.

As soon as that tenderest of parents was convinced that I was not famished, seeing that I had dined two hours ago at Dr Herman's, she led me gently across the garden towards the arbour. "You will find your father so cheerful," said she, wiping away a tear. "His brother is with him."

I stopped. His brother! Will the reader believe it?—I had never heard that he had a brother, so little were family affairs ever discussed in my hearing.

"His brother!" said I. "Have I then an Uncle Caxton as well as an Uncle Jack?"

"Yes, my love," said my mother. And then she added, "Your father and he were not such good friends as they ought to have been, and the Captain has been abroad. However, thank heaven! they are now quite reconciled."

We had time for no more—we were in the arbour. There, a table was spread with wine and fruit—the gentlemen were at their dessert; and those gentlemen were my father, Uncle Jack, Mr Squills, and, tall, lean, buttoned-to-the-chin—an erect, martial, majestic, and imposing personage, who seemed worthy of a place in my great ancestor's "Boke of Chivalrie."

All rose as I entered; but my poor father, who was always slow in his movements, had the last of me. Uncle Jack had left the very powerful impression of his great seal-ring on my fingers; Mr Squills had patted me on the shoulder, and pronounced me "wonderfully grown;" my new-found relative had with great dignity said, "Nephew, your hand, sir—I am Captain de Caxton;" and even the tame duck had taken her beak from her wing, and rubbed it gently between my legs, which was her usual mode of salutation, before my father placed his pale hand on my forehead, and, looking at me for a moment with unutterable sweetness, said, "More and more like your mother—God bless you!"

A chair had been kept vacant for me between my father and his brother. I sat down in haste, and with a tingling colour on my cheeks and a rising at my throat, so much had the unusual kindness of my father's greeting affected me; and then there came over me a sense of my new position. I was no longer a schoolboy at home for his brief holiday: I had returned to the shelter of the roof-tree, to become myself one of its supports. I was at last a man, privileged to aid or solace those dear ones who had ministered, as yet without return, to me. That is a very strange crisis in our life when we come home "for good." Home seems a different thing: before, one has been but a sort of guest after all, only welcomed and indulged, and little festivities held in honour of the released and happy child. But to come home for good—to have done with school and boyhood—is to be a guest, a child no more. It is to share the every-day life of cares and duties—it is to enter into the confidences of home. Is it not so? I could have buried my face in my hands, and wept!

My father, with all his abstraction and all his simplicity, had a knack now and then of penetrating at once to the heart. I verily believe he read all that was passing in me as easily as if it had been Greek. He stole his arm gently round my waist, and whispered, "Hush!" Then lifting his voice, he cried aloud, "Brother Roland, you must not let Jack have the best of the argument."

"Brother Augustine," replied the Captain, very formally "Mr Jack, if I may take the liberty so to call him"—

"You may indeed," cried Uncle Jack.

"Sir," said the Captain, bowing, "it is a familiarity that does me honour. I was about to say that Mr Jack has retired from the field."

"Far from it," said Squills, dropping an effervescing powder into a chemical mixture which he had been preparing with great attention, composed of sherry and lemon-juice—"far from it. Mr Tibbetts—whose[686] organ of combativeness is finely developed, by the bye—was saying,—"

"That it is a rank sin and shame, in the nineteenth century"—quoth Uncle Jack—"that a man like my friend Captain Caxton"—

"De Caxton, sir—Mr Jack."

"De Caxton—of the highest military talents, of the most illustrious descent—a hero sprung from heroes—should have served twenty-three years in his Majesty's service, and should be only a captain on half-pay. This, I say, comes of the infamous system of purchase, which sets up the highest honours for sale as they did in the Roman Empire"—

My father pricked up his ears; but Uncle Jack pushed on before my father could get ready the forces of his meditated interruption;—

"A system which a little effort, a little union, can so easily terminate. Yes, sir"—and Uncle Jack thumped the table, and two cherries bobbed up and smote Captain de Caxton on the nose—"yes, sir, I will undertake to say that I could put the army upon a very different footing. If the poorer and more meritorious gentlemen, like Captain de Caxton, would, as I was just observing, but unite in a grand anti-aristocratic association, each paying a small sum quarterly, we could realise a capital sufficient to outpurchase all these undeserving individuals, and every man of merit should have his fair chance of promotion."

"Egad, sir!" said Squills, "there is something grand in that—eh, Captain?"

"No, sir," replied the Captain, quite seriously; "there is in monarchies but one fountain of honour. It would be an interference with a soldier's first duty—his respect for his sovereign."

"On the contrary," said Mr Squills, "it would still be to the sovereigns that one would owe the promotion."

"Honour," pursued the Captain, colouring up, and unheeding this witty interruption, "is the reward of a soldier. What do I care that a young jackanapes buys his colonelcy over my head? Sir, he does not buy from me my wounds and my services. Sir, he does not buy from me the medal I won at Waterloo. He is a rich man, and I am a poor man; he is called—colonel, because he paid money for the name. That pleases him; well and good. It would not please me: I had rather remain a captain, and feel my dignity, not in my title, but in the services of my three-and-twenty years. A beggarly, rascally association of stockbrokers, for aught I know, buy me a company! I don't want to be uncivil, or I would say, Damn 'em, Mr—sir—Jack!"

A sort of thrill ran through the Captain's audience—even Uncle Jack looked touched, as I thought, for he stared very hard at the grim veteran, and said nothing. The pause was awkward—Mr Squills broke it. "I should like," quoth he, "to see your Waterloo medal—you have not it about you?"

"Mr Squills," answered the Captain, "it lies next to my heart while I live. It shall be buried in my coffin, and I shall rise with it, at the word of command, on the day of the Grand Review!" So saying, the Captain leisurely unbuttoned his coat, and, detaching from a piece of striped ribbon as ugly a specimen of the art of the silversmith (begging its pardon) as ever rewarded merit at the expense of taste, placed the medal on the table.

The medal passed round, without a word, from hand to hand.

"It is strange," at last said my father, "how such trifles can be made of such value—how in one age a man sells his life for what in the next age he would not give a button! A Greek esteemed beyond price a few leaves of olive twisted into a circular shape, and set upon his head—a very ridiculous headgear we should now call it. An American Indian prefers a decoration of human scalps, which, I apprehend, we should all agree (save and except Mr Squills, who is accustomed to such things) to be a very disgusting addition to one's personal attractions; and my brother values this piece of silver, which may be worth about five shillings, more than Jack does a gold mine, or I do the library of the London Museum. A time will come when people will think that as idle a decoration as leaves and scalps."

"Brother," said the Captain, "there is nothing strange in the matter. It is as plain as a pike-staff to a man who understands the principles of honour."

"Possibly," said my father mildly. "I should like to hear what you have to say upon honour. I am sure it would very much edify us all."

CHAPTER II.

[687]

MY UNCLE ROLAND'S DISCOURSE UPON HONOUR.

"Gentlemen," began the Captain, at the distinct appeal thus made to him—"Gentlemen, God made the earth, but man made the garden. God made man, but man re-creates himself."

"True, by knowledge," said my father.

"By industry," said Uncle Jack.

"By the physical condition of his body," said Mr Squills. "He could not have made himself other than he was at first in the woods and wilds if he had fins like a fish, or could only chatter gibberish like a monkey. Hands and a tongue, sir; these are the instruments of progress."

"Mr Squills," said my father, nodding, "Anaxagoras said very much the same thing before you, touching the hands."

"I can't help that," answered Mr Squills; "one could not open one's lips if one were bound to say what nobody else had said. But, after all, our superiority is less in our hands than the greatness of our thumbs."

"Albinus, De Sceleto, and our own learned William Lawrence, have made a similar remark," again put in my father.

"Hang it, sir!" exclaimed Squills, "what business have you to know every thing?"

"Every thing! No; but thumbs furnish subjects of investigation to the simplest understanding," said my father, modestly.

"Gentlemen," recommenced my Uncle Roland, "thumbs and hands are given to an Esquimaux, as well as to scholars and surgeons—and what the deuce are they the wiser for them? Sirs, you cannot reduce us thus into mechanism. Look within. Man, I say, re-creates himself. How? By the Principle of Honour. His first desire is to excel some one else—his first impulse is distinction above his fellows. Heaven places in his soul, as if it were a compass, a needle that always points to one end,—viz., to honour in that which those around him consider honourable. Therefore, as man at first is exposed to all dangers from wild beasts, and from men as savage as himself, Courage becomes the first quality mankind must honour: therefore the savage is courageous; therefore he covets the praise for courage; therefore he decorates himself with the skins of the beasts he has subdued, or the scalps of the foes he has slain. Sirs, don't tell me that the skins and the scalps are only hide and leather; they are trophies of honour. Don't tell me they are ridiculous and disgusting; they become glorious as proofs that the savage has emerged out of the first brute-like egotism, and attached price to the praise which men never give except for works that secure or advance their welfare. By-and-by, sirs, our savages discover that they cannot live in safety amongst themselves unless they agree to speak the truth to each other; therefore Truth becomes valued, and grows into a principle of honour; so, brother Augustine will tell us that, in the primitive times, truth was always the attribute of a hero."

"Right," said my father: "Homer emphatically gives it to Achilles."

"Out of truth comes the necessity for some kind of rude justice and law. Therefore men, after courage in the warrior, and truth in all, begin to attach honour to the elder, whom they intrust with preserving justice amongst them. So, sirs, Law is born—"

"But the first lawgivers were priests," quoth my father.

"Sirs, I am coming to that. Whence arises the desire of honour, but from man's necessity of excelling—in other words, of improving his faculties for the benefit of others,—though, unconscious of that consequence, man only strives for their praise? But that desire for honour is unextinguishable, and man is naturally anxious to carry its rewards beyond the grave. Therefore, he who has slain most lions or enemies, is naturally prone to believe that he shall have the best hunting fields in the country beyond, and take the best place at the banquet. Nature, in all its operations, impresses[688] him with the idea of an invisible Power; and the principle of honour,—that is, the desire of praise and reward,—makes him anxious for the approval which that Power can bestow. Thence comes the first rude idea of Religion; and in the death-hymn at the stake, the savage chants songs prophetic of the distinctions he is about to receive. Society goes on; hamlets are built; property is established. He who has more than another has more power than another. Power is honoured. Man covets the honour attached to the power which is attached to possession. Thus the soil is cultivated; thus the rafts are constructed; thus tribe trades with tribe; thus Commerce is founded and Civilisation commenced. Sirs, all that seems least connected with honour, as we approach the vulgar days of the present, has its origin in honour, and is but an abuse of its principles. If men now-a-days are hucksters and traders—if even military honours are purchased, and a rogue buys his way to a peerage—still all arise from the desire for honour, which society, as it grows old, gives to the outward signs of titles and gold, instead of, as once, to its inward essentials,—courage, truth, justice, enterprise. Therefore, I say, sirs, that honour is the foundation of all improvement in mankind."

"You have argued like a schoolman, brother," said Mr Caxton admiringly; "but still, as to this round piece of silver,—don't we go back to the most barbarous ages in estimating so highly such things as have no real value in themselves—as could not give us one opportunity for instructing our minds."

"Could not pay for a pair of boots," added Uncle Jack.

"Or," said Mr Squills, "save you one twinge of the cursed rheumatism you have got for life from that night's bivouac in the Portuguese marshes—to say nothing of the bullet in your cranium, and that cork leg, which must much diminish the salutary effects of your constitutional walk."

"Gentlemen," resumed the Captain, nothing abashed, "in going back to these barbarous ages, I go back to the true principles of honour. It is precisely because this round piece of silver has no value in the market that it is priceless, for thus it is only a proof of desert. Where would be the sense of service if it could buy back my leg, or if I could bargain it away for forty thousand a-year? No, sirs, its value is this—that when I wear it on my breast men shall say, 'that formal old fellow is not so useless as he seems. He was one of those who saved England and freed Europe.' And even when I conceal it here," (and devoutly kissing the medal, Uncle Roland restored it to its ribbon and its resting-place,) "and no eye sees it, its value is yet greater in the thought that my country has not degraded the old and true principles of honour by paying the soldier who fought for her in the same coin as that in which you, Mr Jack, sir, pay your bootmaker's bill. No, no, gentlemen. As courage was the first virtue that honour called forth—the first virtue from which all safety and civilisation proceed, so we do right to keep that one virtue at least clear and unsullied from all the money-making, mercenary, pay-me-in-cash abominations which are the vices, not the virtues, of the civilisation it has produced."

My Uncle Roland here came to a full stop; and, filling his glass, rose and said solemnly—"A last bumper, gentlemen.—'To the dead who died for England!'"

CHAPTER III.

"Indeed, my dear, you must take it. You certainly have caught cold: you sneezed three times together."

"Yes, ma'am, because I would take a pinch of Uncle Roland's snuff, just to say that I had taken a pinch out of his box—the honour of the thing, you know."

"Ah, my dear! what was that very clever remark you made at the same time which so pleased your father—something about Jews and the college?"

"Jews and—oh! 'pulverem Olympicum collegisse juvat,' my dear mother—which means, that it is a pleasure[689] to take a pinch out of a brave man's snuff-box. I say, mother, put down the posset. Yes, I'll take it; I will, indeed. Now, then, sit here—that's right—and tell me all you know about this famous old Captain. Imprimis, he is older than my father?"

"To be sure!" exclaimed my mother indignantly; "he looks twenty years older; but there is only five years' real difference. Your father must always look young."

"And why does Uncle Roland put that absurd French de before his name—and why were my father and he not good friends—and is he married—and has he any children?"

Scene of this conference—my own little room, new papered on purpose for my return for good—trellis-work paper, flowers and birds—all so fresh, and so new, and so clean, and so gay—with my books ranged in neat shelves, and a writing-table by the window; and, without the window, shines the still summer moon. The window is a little open; you scent the flowers and new-mown hay. Past eleven; and the boy and his dear mother are all alone.

"My dear, my dear! you ask so many questions at once."

"Don't answer them then. Begin at the beginning, as Nurse Primmins does with her fairy tales—'Once on a time.'"

"Once on a time, then," said my mother—kissing me between the eyes—"once on a time, my love, there was a certain clergyman in Cumberland, who had two sons; he had but a small living, and the boys were to make their own way in the world. But close to the parsonage, on the brow of a hill, rose an old ruin, with one tower left, and this, with half the county round it, had once belonged to the clergyman's family; but all had been sold—all gone piece by piece, you see, my dear, except the presentation to the living, (what they call the advowson was sold too,) which had been secured to the last of the family. The elder of these sons was your Uncle Roland, the younger was your father. Now I believe the first quarrel arose from the absurdest thing possible, as your father says; but Roland was exceedingly touchy on all things connected with his ancestors. He was always poring over the old pedigree, or wandering amongst the ruins, or reading books of knight-errantry. Well, where this pedigree began I know not, but it seems that King Henry II. gave some lands in Cumberland to one Sir Adam de Caxton; and from that time, you see, the pedigree went regularly from father to son till Henry V.; then, apparently from the disorders, produced, as your father says, by the wars of the Roses, there was a sad blank left—only one or two names, without dates or marriages, till the time of Henry VII., except that in the reign of Edward IV. there was one insertion of a William Caxton (named in a deed.) Now in the village church there was a beautiful brass monument to one Sir William de Caxton, who had been killed at the battle of Bosworth, fighting for that wicked King Richard III. And about the same time there lived, as you know, the great printer, William Caxton. Well, your father, happening to be in town on a visit to his aunt, took great trouble in hunting up all the old papers he could find at the Heralds' College; and sure enough he was overjoyed to satisfy himself that he was descended, not from that poor Sir William, who had been killed in so bad a cause, but from the great printer, who was from a younger branch of the same family, and to whose descendants the estate came, in the reign of Henry VIII. It was upon this that your Uncle Roland quarrelled with him; and, indeed, I tremble to think that they may touch on that matter again."

"Then, my dear mother, I must say my uncle is wrong there, so far as common-sense is concerned; but still, somehow or other, I can understand it—surely this was not the only cause of estrangement!"

My mother looked down, and moved one hand gently over the other, which was her way when embarrassed. "What was it, my own mother?" said I, coaxingly.

"I believe—that is, I—I think that they were both attached to the same young lady."

"How! you don't mean to say that my father was ever in love with any one but you?"

[690]"Yes, Sisty—yes, and deeply! and," added my mother after a slight pause, and with a very low sigh, "he never was in love with me; and what is more, he had the frankness to tell me so!"

"And yet you—"

"Married him—yes!" said my mother, raising the softest and purest eyes that ever lover could have wished to read his fate in;—

"Yes, for the old love was hopeless. I knew that I could make him happy. I knew that he would love me at last, and he does so! My son, your father loves me!"

As she spoke, there came a blush as innocent as virgin ever knew, to my mother's smooth cheek; and she looked so fair, so good, and still so young, all the while, that you would have said that either Dusius, the Teuton fiend, or Nock, the Scandinavian sea-imp, from whom the learned assure us we derive our modern Daimones, "The Deuce" and Old Nick, had indeed possessed my father, if he had not learned to love such a creature.

I pressed her hand to my lips, but my heart was too full to speak for a moment or so; and then I partially changed the subject.

"Well, and this rivalry estranged them more? And who was the lady?"

"Your father never told me, and I never asked," said my mother simply. "But she was very different from me, I know. Very accomplished, very beautiful, very high-born."

"For all that, my father was a lucky man to escape her. Pass on. What did the Captain do?"

"Why, about that time your grandfather died, and shortly after an aunt, on the mother's side, who was rich and saving, and unexpectedly left them each sixteen thousand pounds. Your uncle, with his share, bought back, at an enormous price, the old castle and some land round it, which they say does not bring him in three hundred a-year. With the little that remained, he purchased a commission in the army; and the brothers met no more, till last week, when Roland suddenly arrived."

"He did not marry this accomplished young lady?"

"No! but he married another, and is a widower."

"Why, he was as inconstant as my father; and I am sure without so good an excuse. How was that?"

"I don't know. He says nothing about it."

"Has he any children?"

"Two; a son—by the bye, you must never speak about him. Your uncle briefly said, when I asked him what was his family, 'a girl, ma'am. I had a son, but,—'

'He is dead,' cried your father, in his kind pitying voice.

'Dead to me, brother,—and you will never mention his name!' You should have seen how stern your uncle looked. I was terrified."

"But the girl,—why did not he bring her here?"

"She is still in France, but he talks of going over for her; and we have half promised to visit them both in Cumberland.—But, bless me! is that twelve? and the posset quite cold!"

"One word more, dearest mother—one word. My father's book—is he still going on with it?"

"Oh yes, indeed!" cried my mother, clasping her hands; "and he must read it to you, as he does to me—you will understand it so well. I have always been so anxious that the world should know him, and be proud of him as we are,—so—so anxious!—for perhaps, Sisty, if he had married that great lady, he would have roused himself, been more ambitious—and I could only make him happy, I could not make him great!"

"So he has listened to you at last?"

"To me!" said my mother, shaking her head and smiling gently: "No, rather to your Uncle Jack,—who, I am happy to say, has at length got a proper hold over him."

"A proper hold, my dear mother! Pray beware of Uncle Jack, or we shall be all swept into a coal-mine, or explode with a grand national company for making gunpowder out of tea-leaves!"

"Wicked child!" said my mother laughing; and then, as she took up her candle and lingered a moment while I wound my watch, she said musingly,—"Yet Jack is very, very[691] clever,—and if for your sake we could make a fortune, Sisty!"

"You frighten me out of my wits, mother! You are not in earnest?"

"And if my brother could be the means of raising him in the world"—

"Your brother would be enough to sink all the ships in the Channel, ma'am," said I, quite irreverently. I was shocked, before the words were well out of my mouth; and throwing my arms round my mother's neck, I kissed away the pain I had inflicted.

When I was left alone and in my own little crib, in which my slumber had ever been so soft and easy,—I might as well have been lying upon cut straw. I tossed to and fro—I could not sleep. I rose, threw on my dressing-gown, lighted my candle, and sat down by the table near the window. First, I thought of the unfinished outline of my father's youth, so suddenly sketched before me. I filled up the missing colours, and fancied the picture explained all that had often perplexed my conjectures. I comprehended, I suppose by some secret sympathy in my own nature, (for experience in mankind could have taught me little enough,) how an ardent, serious, inquiring mind—struggling into passion under the load of knowledge, had, with that stimulus sadly and abruptly withdrawn, sunk into the quiet of passive, aimless study. I comprehended how, in the indolence of a happy but unimpassioned marriage, with a companion so gentle, so provident and watchful, yet so little formed to rouse, and task, and fire an intellect naturally calm and meditative,—years upon years had crept away in the learned idleness of a solitary scholar. I comprehended, too, how gradually and slowly, as my father entered that stage of middle life, when all men are most prone to ambition—the long silenced whispers were heard again; and the mind at last escaping from the listless weight which a baffled and disappointed heart had laid upon it, saw once more, fair as in youth, the only true mistress of Genius—Fame!

Oh! how I sympathised, too, in my mother's gentle triumph. How now, looking over the past, I could see, year after year, how she had stolen more and more into my father's heart of hearts,—how what had been kindness had grown into love,—how custom and habit, and the countless links in the sweet charities of home, had supplied that sympathy with the genial man, which had been missed at first by the lonely scholar.

Next I thought of the gray, eagle-eyed old soldier, with his ruined tower and barren acres,—and saw before me his proud, prejudiced, chivalrous boyhood, gliding through the ruins or poring over his mouldy pedigree. And this son, so disowned,—for what dark offence?—an awe crept over me. And this girl,—his ewe-lamb—his all,—was she fair? had she blue eyes like my mother, or a high Roman nose and beetle-brows like Captain Roland? I mused, and mused, and mused,—and the candle went out—and the moonlight grew broader and stiller; till at last I was sailing in a balloon with Uncle Jack, and had just tumbled into the Red Sea—when the well-known voice of nurse Primmins restored me to life, with a "God bless my heart! the boy has not been in bed all this 'varsal night!"

CHAPTER IV.

As soon as I was dressed, I hastened down stairs, for I longed to revisit my old haunts—the little plot of garden I had sown with anemones and cresses; the walk by the peach wall; the pond wherein I had angled for roach and perch.

Entering the hall, I discovered my Uncle Roland in a great state of embarrassment. The maid-servant was scrubbing the stones at the hall door; she was naturally plump, and it is astonishing how much more plump a female becomes when she is on all fours!—the maid servant then was scrubbing the stones, her face turned from the Captain, and the Captain evidently meditating a sortie, stood ruefully gazing at the obstacle before him, and hemming loud. Alas, the[692] maid servant was deaf! I stopped, curious to see how Uncle Roland would extricate himself from the dilemma.

Finding that his hems were in vain, my uncle made himself as small as he could, and glided close to the left of the wall: at that instant, the maid turned abruptly round towards the right, and completely obstructed, by this manœuvre, the slight crevice through which hope had dawned on her captive. My uncle stood stock-still,—and to say the truth, he could not have stirred an inch without coming into personal contact with the rounded charms which blockaded his movements. My uncle took off his hat and scratched his forehead in great perplexity. Presently, by a slight turn of the flanks, the opposing party, while leaving him the opportunity of return, entirely precluded all chance of egress in that quarter. My uncle retreated in haste, and now presented himself to the right wing of the enemy. He had scarcely done so, when, without looking behind her, the blockading party shoved aside the pail that crippled the range of her operations, and so placed it that it formed a formidable barricade, which my uncle's cork leg had no chance of surmounting. Therewith Captain Roland lifted his eyes appealingly to heaven, and I heard him distinctly ejaculate—

"Would to God she was a creature in breeches!"

But happily at this moment the maid-servant turned her head sharply round, and seeing the Captain, rose in an instant, moved away the pail, and dropped a frightened curtsey.

My Uncle Roland touched his hat. "I beg you a thousand pardons, my good girl," said he; and, with a half bow, he slid into the open air.

"You have a soldier's politeness, uncle," said I, tucking my arm into Captain Roland's.

"Tush, my boy," said he, smiling seriously, and colouring up to the temples; "tush, say a gentleman's! To us, sir, every woman is a lady, in right of her sex."

Now, I had often occasion later to recall that aphorism of my uncle's; and it served to explain to me, how a man, so prejudiced on the score of family pride, never seemed to consider it an offence in my father to have married a woman whose pedigree was as brief as my dear mother's. Had she been a Montmorenci, my uncle could not have been more respectful and gallant than he was to that meek descendant of the Tibbettses. He held, indeed, a doctrine which I never knew any other man, vain of family, approve or support,—a doctrine deduced from the following syllogisms: 1st, That birth was not valuable in itself, but as a transmission of certain qualities which descent from a race of warriors should perpetuate, viz., truth, courage, honour; 2dly, That, whereas from the woman's side we derive our more intellectual faculties, from a man we derive our moral; a clever and witty man generally has a clever and witty mother; a brave and honourable man, a brave and honourable father. Therefore, all the qualities which attention to race should perpetuate are the manly qualities traceable only from the father's side. Again, he held, that while the aristocracy have higher and more chivalrous notions, the people generally have shrewder and livelier ideas. Therefore, to prevent gentlemen from degenerating into complete dunderheads, an admixture with the people, provided always it was on the female side, was not only excusable but expedient; and, finally, my uncle held, that, whereas a man is a rude, coarse, sensual animal, and requires all manner of associations to dignify and refine him, woman is so naturally susceptible of every thing beautiful in sentiment, and generous in purpose, that she has only to be a true woman to be a fit peer for a king. Odd and preposterous notions, no doubt, and capable of much controversy, so far as the doctrine of race (if that be any way tenable) is concerned; but, then, the plain fact is, that my Uncle Roland was as eccentric and contradictory a gentleman—as—as—why, as you and I are, if we once venture to think for ourselves.

"Well, sir, and what profession are you meant for?" asked my uncle. "Not the army, I fear?"

"I have never thought of the subject, uncle."

"Thank heaven," said Captain Roland, "we have never yet had a[693] lawyer in the family! nor a stockbroker; nor a tradesm—ahem!"

I saw that my great ancestor the printer suddenly rose up in that hem!

"Why, uncle, there are honourable men in all callings."

"Certainly, sir. But in all callings honour is not the first principle of action."

"But it may be, sir, if a man of honour pursue it! There are some soldiers who have been great rascals!"

My uncle looked posed, and his black brows met thoughtfully.

"You are right, boy, I dare say," he answered somewhat mildly. "But do you think that it ought to give me as much pleasure to look on my old ruined tower, if I knew it had been bought by some herring-dealer, like the first ancestor of the Poles, as I do now, when I know it was given to a knight and gentleman, (who traced his descent from an Anglo-Dane in the time of King Alfred,) for services done in Aquitaine and Gascony, by Henry the Plantagenet? And do you mean to tell me, that I should have been the same man, if I had not from a boy associated that old tower with all ideas of what its owners were, and should be, as knights and gentlemen? Sir, you would have made a different being of me, if at the head of my pedigree you had clapped a herring-dealer; though, I dare say, the herring-dealer might have been as good a man as ever the Anglo-Dane was! God rest him!"

"And for the same reason, I suppose, sir, that you think my father never would have been quite the same being he is, if he had not made that notable discovery touching our descent from the great William Caxton, the printer!"

My uncle bounded as if he had been shot; bounded so uncautiously, considering the materials of which one leg was composed, that he would have fallen into a strawberry-bed if I had not caught him by the arm.

"Why, you—you—you young jackanapes," cried the Captain, shaking me off as soon as he had regained his equilibrium. "You do not mean to inherit that infamous crotchet my brother has got into his head? You do not mean to exchange Sir William de Caxton, who fought and fell at Bosworth, for the mechanic who sold blackletter pamphlets in the sanctuary at Westminster?"

"That depends on the evidence, uncle!"

"No, sir, like all noble truths, it depends upon faith. Men, now-a-days," continued my uncle, with a look of ineffable disgust, "actually require that truths should be proved."

"It is a sad conceit on their part, no doubt, my dear uncle. But till a truth is proved, how can we know that it is a truth?"

I thought that in that very sagacious question I had effectually caught my uncle. Not I. He slipped through it like an eel.

"Sir," said he, "whatever, in Truth, makes a man's heart warmer, and his soul purer, is a belief, not a knowledge. Proof, sir, is a handcuff—belief is a wing! Want proof as to an ancestor in the reign of King Richard! Sir, you cannot even prove to the satisfaction of a logician that you are the son of your own father. Sir, a religious man does not want to reason about his religion—religion is not mathematics. Religion is to be felt, not proved. There are a great many things in the religion of a good man which are not in the catechism. Proof!" continued my uncle, growing violent—"Proof, sir, is a low, vulgar, levelling, rascally Jacobin—Belief is a loyal, generous, chivalrous gentleman! No, no—prove what you please, you shall never rob me of one belief, that has made me—"

"The finest hearted creature that ever talked nonsense," said my father, who came up like Horace's deity just at the right moment. "What is it you must believe in, brother, no matter what the proof against you?"

My uncle was silent; and with great energy dug the point of his cane into the gravel.

"He will not believe in our great ancestor the printer," said I, maliciously.

My father's calm brow was overcast in a moment.

"Brother," said the Captain loftily, "you have a right to your own ideas, but you should take care how they contaminate your child."

[694]"Contaminate!" said my father; and for the first time I saw an angry sparkle flash from his eyes, but he checked himself on the instant; "change the word, my dear brother."

"No, sir, I will not change it! to bely the records of the family!"

"Records! A brass plate in a village church against all the books of the College of Arms!"

"To renounce, as your ancestor, a knight who died in the field!"

"For the worst cause that man ever fought for!"

"On behalf of his king!"

"Who had murdered his nephews!"

"A knight! with our crest on his helmet!"

"And no brains underneath it, or he would never have had them knocked out for so bloody a villain!"

"A rascally, drudging, money-making printer!"

"The wise and glorious introducer of the art that has enlightened a world. Prefer, for an ancestor, to one whom scholar and sage never name but in homage, a worthless, obscure, jolter-headed booby in mail, whose only record to men is a brass plate in a church in a village!"

My uncle turned round perfectly livid. "Enough, sir! enough! I am insulted sufficiently. I ought to have expected it. I wish you and your son a very good day."

My father stood aghast. The Captain was hobbling off to the iron gate; in another moment he would have been out of our precincts. I ran up and hung upon him. "Uncle, it is all my fault. Between you and me, I am quite of your side; pray, forgive us both. What could I have been thinking of, to vex you so! And my father, whom your visit has made so happy!"

My uncle paused, feeling for the latch of the gate. My father had now come up, and caught his hand. "What are all the printers that ever lived, and all the books they ever printed, to one wrong to thy fine heart, brother Roland? Shame on me! A bookman's weak point, you know! It is very true, I should never have taught the boy one thing to give you pain, brother Roland;—though I don't remember," continued my father, with a perplexed look, "that I ever did teach it him either! Pisistratus, as you value my blessing, respect, as your ancestor, Sir William de Caxton, the hero of Bosworth. Come, come, brother!"

"I am an old fool," said Uncle Roland, "whichever way we look at it. Ah, you young dog! you are laughing at us both!"

"I have ordered breakfast on the lawn," said my mother, coming out from the porch, with her cheerful smile on her lips; "and I think the devil will be done to your liking to-day, brother Roland."

"We have had enough of the devil already, my love," said my father, wiping his forehead.

So, while the birds sang overhead, or hopped familiarly across the sward for the crumbs thrown forth to them, while the sun was still cool in the east, and the leaves yet rustled with the sweet air of morning, we all sate down to our table, with hearts as reconciled to each other, and as peaceably disposed to thank God for the fair world around us, as if the river had never run red through the field of Bosworth, and that excellent Mr Caxton had never set all mankind by the ears with an irritating invention, a thousand times more provocative of our combative tendencies than the blast of the trumpet and the gleam of the banner!

CHAPTER V.

"Brother," said Mr Caxton, "I will walk with you to the Roman encampment."

The Captain felt that this proposal was meant as the greatest peace-offering my father could think of; for, 1st, it was a very long walk, and my father detested long walks; 2dly, it was the sacrifice of a whole day's labour at the great work. And yet, with that quick sensibility, which only the generous possess, Uncle Roland accepted at once the proposal. If he had not done so, my father would have had a heavier heart for a month to come. And how could the great[695] work have got on while the author was every now and then disturbed by a twinge of remorse?

Half-an-hour after breakfast, the brothers set off arm in arm; and I followed, a little apart, admiring how steadily the old soldier got over the ground, in spite of the cork leg. It was pleasant enough to listen to their conversation, and notice the contrasts between these two eccentric stamps from Dame Nature's ever-variable mould,—Nature who casts nothing in stereotype, for I do believe that not even two fleas can be found identically the same.

My father was not a quick or minute observer of rural beauties. He had so little of the organ of locality, that I suspect he could have lost his way in his own garden. But the Captain was exquisitely alive to external impressions—not a feature in the landscape escaped him. At every fantastic gnarled pollard he halted to gaze; his eye followed the lark soaring up from his feet; when a fresher air came from the hill-top, his nostrils dilated, as if voluptuously to inhale its delight. My father, with all his learning, and though his study had been in the stores of all language, was very rarely eloquent. The Captain had a glow and a passion in his words which, what with his deep, tremulous voice, and animated gestures, gave something poetic to half of what he uttered. In every sentence of Roland's, in every tone of his voice, and every play of his face, there was some outbreak of pride; but, unless you set him on his hobby of that great ancestor the printer, my father had not as much pride as a homœopathist could have put into a globule. He was not proud even of not being proud. Chafe all his feathers, and still you could rouse but the dove. My father was slow and mild, my uncle quick and fiery; my father reasoned, my uncle imagined; my father was very seldom wrong, my uncle never quite in the right; but, as my father once said of him, "Roland beats about the bush till he sends out the very bird that we went to search for. He is never in the wrong without suggesting to us what is the right." All in my uncle was stern, rough, and angular; all in my father was, sweet, polished, and rounded into a natural grace. My uncle's character cast out a multiplicity of shadows like a Gothic pile in a northern sky. My father stood serene in the light like a Greek temple at mid-day in a southern clime. Their persons corresponded with their natures. My uncle's high aquiline features, bronzed hue, rapid fire of eye, and upper lip that always quivered, were a notable contrast to my father's delicate profile, quiet, abstracted gaze, and the steady sweetness that rested on his musing smile. Roland's forehead was singularly high, and rose to a peak in the summit where phrenologists place the organ of veneration, but it was narrow, and deeply furrowed. Augustine's might be as high, but then soft, silky hair waved carelessly over it—concealing its height, but not its vast breadth—on which not a wrinkle was visible. And yet, withal, there was a great family likeness between the two brothers. When some softer sentiment subdued him, Roland caught the very look of Augustine; when some high emotion animated my father, you might have taken him for Roland. I have often thought since, in the greater experience of mankind which life has afforded me, that if, in early years, their destinies had been exchanged—if Roland had taken to literature, and my father had been forced into action—that, strange as it may seem, each would have had greater worldly success. For Roland's passion and energy would have given immediate and forcible effect to study; he might have been a historian or a poet. It is not study alone that produces a writer; it is intensity. In the mind, as in yonder chimney, to make the fire burn hot and quick, you must narrow the draught. Whereas, had my father been forced into the practical world, his calm depth of comprehension, his clearness of reason, his general accuracy in such notions as he once entertained and pondered over, joined to a temper that crosses and losses could never ruffle, an utter freedom from vanity and self-love, from prejudice and passion, might have made him a very wise and enlightened counsellor in the great[696] affairs of life—a lawyer, a diplomatist, a statesman, for what I know, even a great general—if his tender humanity had not stood in the way of his military mathematics.

But, as it was—with his slow pulse never stimulated by action, and too little stirred by even scholarly ambition—my father's mind went on widening and widening, till the circle was lost in the great ocean of contemplation; and Roland's passionate energy, fretted into fever by every let and hindrance, in the struggle with his kind—and narrowed more and more as it was curbed in the channels of active discipline and duty—missed its due career altogether; and, what might have been the poet, contracted into the humourist.

Yet, who that had ever known ye, could have wished you other than ye were—ye guileless, affectionate, honest, simple creatures? simple both, in spite of all the learning of the one, all the prejudices, whims, irritabilities, and crotchets of the other? There you are both seated on the height of the old Roman camp, with a volume of the Stratagems of Polyœnus, (or is it Frontinus?) open on my father's lap; the sheep grazing in the furrows of the circumvallations; the curious steer gazing at you where it halts in the space whence the Roman cohorts glittered forth. And your boy biographer standing behind you with folded arms; and, as the scholar read or the soldier pointed his cane to each fancied post in the war, filling up the pastoral landscape with the eagles of Agrippa and the scythed cars of Boadicea!

CHAPTER VI.

"It is never the same two hours together in this country," said my Uncle Roland, as, after dinner, or rather after dessert, we joined my mother in the drawing-room.

Indeed, a cold drizzling rain had come on within the last two hours; and, though it was July, it was as chilly as if it had been October. My mother whispered to me, and I went out: in ten minutes more, the logs (for we lived in a wooded country) blazed merrily in the grate. Why could not my mother have rung the bell, and ordered the servant to light a fire? My dear reader, Captain Roland was poor, and he made a capital virtue of economy!

The two brothers drew their chairs near to the hearth: my father at the left, my uncle at the right; and I and my mother sat down to "Fox and geese."

Coffee came in—one cup for the Captain—for the rest of the party avoided that exciting beverage. And on that cup was a picture of—His Grace the Duke of Wellington!

During our visit to the Roman camp, my mother had borrowed Mr Squills's chaise, and driven over to our market town, for the express purpose of greeting the Captain's eyes with the face of his old chief.

My uncle changed colour, rose, lifted my mother's hand to his lips, and sate himself down again in silence.

"I have heard," said the Captain, after a pause, "that the Marquis of Hastings, who is every inch a soldier and a gentleman—and that is saying not a little, for he measures seventy-five inches from the crown to the sole—when he received Louis XVIII. (then an exile) at Donnington, fitted up his apartments exactly like those his majesty had occupied at the Tuilleries—it was a kingly attention, (my Lord Hastings, you know, is sprung from the Plantagenets)—a kingly attention to a king. It cost some money and made some noise. A woman can show the same royal delicacy of heart in this bit of porcelain, and so quietly, that we men all think it a matter of course, brother Austin."

"You are such a worshipper of women, Roland, that it is melancholy to see you single. You must marry again!"

My uncle first smiled, then frowned, and lastly sighed somewhat heavily.

"Your time will pass slowly in your old tower, poor brother," continued my father, "with only your little girl for a companion."

[697]"And the past!" said my uncle; "the past, that mighty world—"

"Do you still read your old books of chivalry, Froissart and the Chronicles, Palmerin of England and Amadis of Gaul?"

"Why," said my uncle, reddening, "I have tried to improve myself with studies a little more substantial. And" (he added with a sly smile) "there will be your great book for many a long winter to come."

"Um!" said my father, bashfully.

"Do you know," quoth my uncle, "that Dame Primmins is a very intelligent woman; full of fancy, and a capital story-teller?"

"Is not she, uncle!" cried I, leaving my fox in a corner. "Oh, if you could have heard her tell me the tale of King Arthur and the enchanted lake, or the grim white women!"

"I have already heard her tell both," said my uncle.

"The deuce you have, brother! My dear, we must look to this. These captains are dangerous gentlemen in an orderly household. Pray, where could you have had the opportunity of such private communications with Mrs Primmins?"

"Once," said my uncle, readily, "when I went into her room, while she mended my stock; and once—" he stopped short, and looked down.

"Once when? out with it."

"When she was warming my bed," said my uncle, in a half whisper.

"Dear!" said my mother, innocently, "that's how the sheets came by that bad hole in the middle. I thought it was the warming-pan."

"I am quite shocked!" faltered my uncle.

"You well may be," said my father. "A woman who has been heretofore above all suspicion! But come," he said, seeing that my uncle looked sad, and was no doubt casting up the probable price of twice six yards of Holland; "but come, you were always a famous rhapsodist or tale-teller yourself. Come, Roland, let us have some story of your own; something your experience has left strong in your impressions."

"Let us first have the candles," said my mother.

The candles were brought, the curtain let down—we all drew our chairs to the hearth. But, in the interval, my uncle had sunk into a gloomy reverie; and, when we called upon him to begin, he seemed to shake off with effort some recollections of pain.

"You ask me," he said, "to tell you some tale which my own experience has left deeply marked in my impressions—I will tell you one apart from my own life, but which has often haunted me. It is sad and strange, ma'am."

"Ma'am, brother?" said my mother reproachfully, letting her small hand drop upon that which, large and sunburnt, the Captain waved towards her as he spoke.

"Austin, you have married an angel!" said my uncle; and he was, I believe, the only brother-in-law who ever made so hazardous an assertion.

CHAPTER VII.

MY UNCLE ROLAND'S TALE.

"It was in Spain, no matter where or how, that it was my fortune to take prisoner a French officer of the same rank that I then held—a lieutenant; and there was so much similarity in our sentiments, that we became intimate friends—the most intimate friend I ever had, sister, out of this dear circle. He was a rough soldier, whom the world had not well treated; but he never railed at the world, and maintained that he had had his deserts. Honour was his idol, and the sense of honour paid him for the loss of all else.

"There was something similar, too, in our domestic relationships. He had a son—a child, an infant—who was all in life to him, next to his country and his duty. I, too, had then such a son of the same years." (The Captain paused an instant: we exchanged glances, and a stifling sensation of pain and suspense was felt by all his listeners.) "We were accustomed, brother, to talk of these children—to picture their future, to compare our hopes and dreams. We hoped and dreamed alike. A short time sufficed[698] to establish this confidence. My prisoner was sent to headquarters, and soon afterwards exchanged.

"We met no more till last year. Being then at Paris, I inquired for my old friend, and learned that he was living at R——, a few miles from the capital. I went to visit him. I found his house empty and deserted. That very day he had been led to prison, charged with a terrible crime. I saw him in that prison, and from his own lips learned his story. His son had been brought up, as he fondly believed, in the habits and principles of honourable men; and, having finished his education, came to reside with him at R——. The young man was accustomed to go frequently to Paris. A young Frenchman loves pleasure, sister, and pleasure is found at Paris. The father thought it natural, and stripped his age of some comforts to supply luxuries to the son's youth.

"Shortly after the young man's arrival, my friend perceived that he was robbed. Moneys kept in his bureau were abstracted he knew not how, nor could guess by whom. It must be done in the night. He concealed himself, and watched. He saw a stealthy figure glide in, he saw a false key applied to the lock—he started forward, seized the felon, and recognised his son. What should the father have done? I do not ask you, sister! I ask these men; son and father, I ask you."

"Expelled him the house," cried I.

"Done his duty, and reformed the unhappy wretch," said my father. "Nemo repentè turpissimus semper fuit—No man is wholly bad all at once."

"The father did as you would have, advised, brother. He kept the youth; he remonstrated with him; he did more—he gave him the key of the bureau. 'Take what I have to give,' said he: 'I would rather be a beggar than know my son a thief.'"

"Right: and the youth repented, and became a good man?" exclaimed my father.

Captain Roland shook his head. "The youth promised amendment, and seemed penitent. He spoke of the temptations of Paris, the gaining-table, and what not. He gave up his daily visit to the capital. He seemed to apply to study." Shortly after this, the neighbourhood was alarmed by reports of night robberies on the road. Men, masked and armed, plundered travellers, and even broke into houses.

The police were on the alert. One night an old brother officer knocked at my friend's door. It was late: the veteran (he was a cripple, by the way, like myself—strange coincidence!) was in bed. He came down in haste, when his servant woke, and told him that his old friend, wounded and bleeding, sought an asylum under his roof. The wound, however, was slight. The guest had been attacked and robbed on the road. The next morning the proper authority of the town was sent for. The plundered man described his loss—some billets of five hundred francs in a pocket-book, on which was embroidered his name and coronet (he was a vicomte.) The guest stayed to dinner. Late in the forenoon the son looked in. The guest started to see him: my friend noticed his paleness. Shortly after, on pretence of faintness, the guest retired to his room, and sent for his host. 'My friend,' said he, 'can you do me a favour? go to the magistrate, and recall the evidence I have given.'

"'Impossible,' said the host. 'What crotchet is this?'

"The guest shuddered. 'Peste!' said he: 'I do not wish in my old age to be hard on others. Who knows how the robber may have been tempted, and who knows what relations he may have—honest men, whom his crime would degrade for ever! Good heavens! if detected, it is the galleys, the galleys!'

"'And what then?—the robber knew what he braved.'

"'But did his father know it?' cried the guest.

"A light broke upon my unhappy comrade in arms: he caught his friend by the hand—'You turned pale at my son's sight—where did you ever see him before? Speak!'

"'Last night, on the road to Paris. The mask slipped aside. Call back my evidence!'

"'You are mistaken,' said my friend calmly. 'I saw my son in his bed, and blessed him, before I went to my own.'

"'I will believe you,' said the[699] guest; 'and never shall my hasty suspicion pass my lips—but call back the evidence.'

"The guest returned to Paris before dusk. The father conversed with his son on the subject of his studies; he followed him to his room, waited till he was in bed, and was then about to retire, when the youth said, 'Father, you have forgotten your blessing.'

"The father went back, laid his hand on the boy's head, and prayed. He was credulous—fathers are so! He was persuaded his friend had been deceived. He retired to rest, and fell asleep. He woke suddenly in the middle of the night, and felt (I here quote his words)—'I felt,' said he 'as if a voice had awakened me—a voice that said 'Rise and search.' I rose at once, struck a light, and went to my son's room. The door was locked. I knocked once, twice, thrice—no answer. I dared not call aloud, lest I should rouse the servants. I went down the stairs—I opened the back-door—I passed to the stables. My own horse was there, not my son's. My horse neighed: it was old, like myself—my old charger at Mount St Jean! I stole back, I crept into the shadow of the wall by my son's door, and extinguished my light. I felt as if I were a thief myself.'"

"Brother," interrupted my mother under her breath; "speak in your own words, not in this wretched father's. I know not why, but it would shock me less."

The Captain nodded.

"Before daybreak, my friend heard the back-door open gently; a foot ascended the stair—a key grated in the door of the room close at hand—the father glided through the dark into that chamber, behind his unseen son.

"He heard the clink of the tinder box; a light was struck; it spread over the room, but he had time to place himself behind the window curtain which was close at hand. The figure before him stood a moment or so motionless, and seemed to listen, for it turned to the right, to the left, its visage covered with the black hideous mask which is worn in carnivals. Slowly the mask was removed; could that be his son's face? the son of a brave man?—it was pale and ghastly with scoundrel fears; the base drops stood on the brow; the eye was haggard and bloodshot. He looked as a coward looks when death stands before him.

"The youth walked, or rather sculked to the secretaire, unlocked it, opened a secret drawer; placed within it the contents of his pockets and his frightful mask; the father approached softly, looked over his shoulder, and saw in the drawer the pocket-book embroidered with his friend's name. Meanwhile, the son took out his pistols, uncocked them cautiously, and was about also to secrete them, when his father arrested his arm. 'Robber, the use of these is yet to come.'

"The son's knees knocked together, an exclamation for mercy burst from his lips; but when, recovering the mere shock of his dastard nerves, he perceived it was not the gripe of some hireling of the law, but a father's hand that had clutched his arm, the vile audacity which knows fear only from a bodily cause, none from the awe of shame, returned to him.

"'Tush, sir,' he said, 'waste not time in reproaches, for, I fear, the gens-d'armes are on my track. It is well that you are here; you can swear that I have spent the night at home. Unhand me, old man—I have these witnesses still to secrete,' and he pointed to the garments wet and dabbled with the mud of the roads. He had scarcely spoken when the walls shook, there was the heavy clatter of hoofs on the ringing pavement without.

"'They come!' cried the son. 'Off dotard! save your son from the galleys.'

"'The galleys, the galleys!' said the father, staggering back; 'it is true—he said 'the galleys.''

"There was a loud knocking at the gate. The gens-d'armes surrounded the house. 'Open in the name of the law.' No answer came, no door was opened. Some of the gens-d'armes rode to the rear of the house, in which was placed the stable-yard. From the window of the son's room, the father saw the sudden blaze of torches, the shadowy forms of the men-hunters. He heard the clatter of arms as they swung themselves from their horses. He[700] heard a voice cry 'Yes, this is the robber's gray horse—see, it still reeks with sweat!' And behind and in front, at either door, again came the knocking, and again the shout, 'Open in the name of the law.'

"Then lights began to gleam from the casements of the neighbouring houses; then the space filled rapidly with curious wonderers startled from their sleep; the world was astir, and the crowd came round to know what crime or what shame had entered the old soldier's home.

"Suddenly, within, there was heard the report of a firearm; and a minute or so afterwards the front door was opened, and the soldier appeared.

"'Enter,' he said, to the gens-d'armes: 'what would you?'

"'We seek a robber who is within your walls.'

"'I know it, mount and find him: I will lead the way.'

"He ascended the stairs, he threw open his son's room; the officers of justice poured in, and on the floor lay the robber's corpse.

"They looked at each other in amazement. 'Take what is left you,' said the father. 'Take the dead man rescued from the galleys, take the living man on whose hands rests the dead man's blood!'

"I was present at my friend's trial. The facts had become known beforehand. He stood there with his gray hair, and his mutilated limbs, and the deep scar on his visage, and the cross of the legion of honour on his breast; and when he had told his tale, he ended with these words—'I have saved the son whom I reared for France, from a doom that spared the life to brand it with disgrace. Is this a crime? I give you my life in exchange for my son's disgrace. Does, my country need a victim? I have lived for my country's glory, and I can die contented to satisfy its laws; sure that if you blame me, you will not despise; sure that the hands that give me to the headsman will scatter flowers over my grave. Thus I confess all. I, a soldier, look round amongst a nation of soldiers; and in the name of the star which glitters on my breast, I dare the fathers of France to condemn me!'

"They acquitted the soldier, at least they gave a verdict answering to what in our courts is called 'justifiable homicide.' A shout rose in the court, which no ceremonial voice could still; the crowd would have borne him in triumph to his house, but his look repelled such vanities. To his house he returned indeed, and the day afterwards they found him dead, beside the cradle in which his first prayer had been breathed over his sinless child. Now, father and son, I ask you, do you condemn that man?"

CHAPTER VIII.

My father took three strides up and down the room, and then, halting on his hearth, and facing his brother, he thus spoke—"I condemn his deed, Roland! At best he was but a haughty egotist. I understand why Brutus should slay his sons. By that sacrifice he saved his country! What did this poor dupe of an exaggeration save? nothing but his own name. He could not lift the crime from his son's soul, nor the dishonour from his son's memory. He could but gratify his own vain pride, and, insensibly to himself, his act was whispered to him by the fiend that ever whispers to the heart of man, 'Dread men's opinions more than God's law!' Oh, my dear brother, what minds like yours should guard against the most is not the meanness of evil—it is the evil that takes false nobility, by garbing itself in the royal magnificence of good." My uncle walked to the window, opened it, looked out a moment, as if to draw in fresh air, closed it gently, and came back again to his seat; but during the short time the window had been left open, a moth flew in.

"Tales like these," renewed my father, pityingly—"whether told by some great tragedian or in thy simple style, my brother,—tales like these have their uses: they penetrate the heart to make it wiser; but all wisdom is meek, my Roland. They invite us to put the question to ourselves that[701] thou hast asked—'Can we condemn this man?' and reason answers, as I have answered—'We pity the man, we condemn the deed.' We—take care, my love! that moth will be in the candle. We—whish!— whish!"— and my father stopped to drive away the moth. My uncle turned, and taking his handkerchief from the lower part of his face, on which he had wished to conceal the workings, he flapped away the moth from the flame. My mother moved the candles from the moth. I tried to catch the moth in my father's straw-hat. The deuce was in the moth, it baffled us all; now circling against the ceiling, now swooping down at the fatal lights. As if by a simultaneous impulse, my father approached one candle, my uncle approached the other; and just as the moth was wheeling round and round, irresolute which to choose for its funeral pyre, both were put out. The fire had burned down low in the grate, and in the sudden dimness my father's soft sweet voice came forth as if from an invisible being:—"We leave ourselves in the dark to save a moth from the flame, brother! shall we do less for our fellow-men? Extinguish, oh! humanely extinguish the light of our reason, when the darkness more favours our mercy." Before the lights were relit, my uncle had left the room. His brother followed him; my mother and I drew near to each other and talked in whispers.

GUESSES AT TRUTH.

[12]

We remember perusing this book soon after its first appearance. The shortness of the several sections into which it is divided, and the frequent change of topics, keeping the mind in a constant state of expectation, prevented us, we suppose, from feeling at that time a sense of weariness. In the perpetual anticipation of finding something new in the next paragraph or section, we forgot the disappointment which the last had so often occasioned. It is only thus we can explain the difference of feeling with which we have re-perused this third and late edition of the same work. The brevity of chapters, and interchange of topics, could not practise their kindly deception on us twice. Like those intertwisted walks in a confined shrubbery, which are designed to cheat the pedestrian into the idea of vast extent of space, the imposition succeeds but once. At the second perambulation we discover within what narrow boundaries we have been led up and down, and made our profitless circuit. We are compelled to say that an exceeding weariness came over us on the second perusal of these Guesses at Truth. Notwithstanding the modesty of the title, there are few books which wear so perpetually the air of superiority, of profound and subtle thought, with so very little to justify the pretension. There is a constant smile of self-complacency—but it plays over a very barren landscape. The soil is sterile on which this sunshine is resting. It is not uninstructive to notice how far an assumption of superiority, coupled with a form of composition indulgent to the reader's attention, and stimulating to his curiosity, may succeed in giving popularity and very respectable reputation to a work which, when examined closely, proves to be made up of materials of the slightest possible value.

We are the more disposed to look a little into these Guesses at Truth, because they afford a fair specimen of the manner and lucubrations of a small class, or coterie, whom we have had amongst us, and who may be best described as the Coleridgean school of philosophers. It is a class distinguished by the thorough contempt it manifests for all whom the world has been accustomed to consider as clear and painstaking thinkers—by an overweening, quiet arrogance—by a general indolence of mind interrupted by fitful efforts of thought, and much laborious[702] trifling. They are not genuine conscientious thinkers after any order of philosophy; they are as little followers of Kant as they are of Locke; but they take advantage of the name and reputation of the one to speak with something approximating to disdain of the superficiality of the other. That they alone are right—would be fair enough. To one who strenuously labours to bring out and establish his principles, we readily permit a great confidence in his own opinion; if he did not think others wrong and himself alone right, why should he be labouring at our conviction? But these gentlemen do not labour; they have earned nothing with the sweat of their brow; they hover over all things with a consummate self-complacency; they investigate nothing; they condescend to understand no one. Men of indolent ability, they would be supposed calmly to overlook the whole field of philosophic controversy, and by dint of some learning, by the perpetual proclamation of the shallowness of their contemporaries, and a mysterious intimation of profundities of thought of their own, which they are sufficiently cautious not to attempt too fully to reveal,—they certainly contrive to make a marvellous impression upon the good-natured reader.

That we are right in pronouncing Coleridge as the master who has formed this coterie of writers, many passages in the present work would testify; but Archdeacon Hare, the author of the greater portion of it, has very lately, in the plenitude of his years, proclaimed his great veneration, and a sort of allegiance, towards Coleridge the philosopher. To Coleridge the poet be all honour paid—we join in whatever applause may, within reasonable compass, be bestowed upon him; but Coleridge the sage, the metaphysician, the divine, is a very different person; and with all his undoubted genius, the very last man, we humbly conceive, to give a wise and steady direction to the thinking faculty of others. It is thus, however, that Archdeacon Hare, in his late Memoir of John Sterling, speaks of this wilful, fitful, erratic genius:—"At that time it was beginning to be acknowledged by more than a few that Coleridge is the true sovereign of modern English thought. The Aids to Reflection had recently been published, and were doing the work for which they were so admirably fitted; that book to which many, as has been said by one of Sterling's chief friends, 'owe even their own selves.' Few felt the obligation more deeply than Sterling. 'To Coleridge (he wrote to me in 1836) I owe education. He taught me to believe that an empirical philosophy is none; that faith is the highest reason; that all criticism, whether of literature, laws, or manners, is blind, without the power of discerning the organic unity of the object, &c., &c.'" He taught him to believe he had a meaning where he had none, to slight authors as shallow because they were lucid and intelligible, to substitute occasional efforts, and a dogmatism arising out of generous emotions, for the steady discipline of philosophy, and the calm inquiry after truth. The whole intellectual career of Sterling proves how unfortunate he was in having fallen under the dominion of this "true sovereign of modern English thought." With the finest moral temper in the world, we find him never, for two years together, with the same set of opinions, and his set of opinions at each time were such as a Coleridgean only could hold together in harmony.

Let any one not overawed by sounding reputations, examine the Aids to Reflection,—this work which gives a claim to the sovereignty of modern English thought,—the characteristic that will chiefly strike him is the predominance of hard writing, which at first wears the appearance, and is found to be the melancholy substitute, of hard thinking. On closer examination, he will be surprised to find how much space is wasted in verbal quibbles, which the author in vain endeavours to raise into importance; and how often the quotations from Leighton, dignified with the name of aphorisms, are such as any page of any sermon would have supplied him with. Amidst this jumble of crude metaphysics and distorted theology, there is from time to time an admirable observation admirably expressed; and there is also from time to time an absurdity so flagrant, that it requires all the author's skill of composition to[703] redeem it from the charge of utter nonsense.

At the time when Coleridge wrote, what are known especially as German metaphysics had hardly reached our shores. He had studied them, or, like every active mind, had rather studied on them. They had given an impulse and direction to his own trains of thought; and if Coleridge had been capable of a continuous application, and a complete execution of any one work, he might have introduced a body of metaphysics into this country which, though due in its origin to German thinkers, would still have been justly entitled his own. But for this continuous labour he was not disposed: we have, therefore, a mere dim broken outline of a system of philosophy (intelligible only to those who have studied that system in other works) applied, in a very strange manner, to the dogmatic tenets of theology. This forms the basis of the Aids to Reflection; and very much of aid or assistance it must bring! We venture to say, that no one unacquainted, from any other source, with the speculations of Kant or Schelling,—let him give what attention, or bring what brains he may to his task,—can understand the refracted and partial representation of their tenets which Coleridge occasionally gives. Take, for instance, a long note, which every reader of the book must remember, upon Thesis and Antithesis, and Punctum Indifferens. With all the assistance of scholastic and geometrical terms, and that illustration abruptly enough introduced of "sulphuretted hydrogen," the reader, we are persuaded, if he comes fresh to the subject, must be utterly at a loss for a meaning. We have diagram and tabular view, and algebraic signs, and chemical illustration, and all the paraphernalia of a most desperate development of thought, and not one sentence of lucid explanation.

On the great subject of the existence of God, Coleridge appears to us to assume a most unsatisfactory and a somewhat perilous position. To oppose the school of Locke and Paley—far too simple for his taste—he gives a validity to the ambitious subtleties which made Shelley an atheist. The great argument from design, so convincing to us all, he slights,—it is too vulgar and commonplace for his purpose,—and finds his grounds of belief in the practical reason of Kant, (an afterthought of the philosopher of Kœnigsberg, and evidently at issue with the main tenets of his system,) or in certain ontological dogmas, which of all things are most open to dispute.

"I hold, then, it is true," he says, "that all the (so-called) demonstrations of a God either prove too little, as that from the order or apparent purpose in nature; or too much, namely, that the world is itself God; or they clandestinely involve the conclusion in the premises, passing off the mere analysis or explication of an assertion for the proof of it—a species of logical legerdemain not unlike that of the jugglers at a fair, who, putting into their mouths what seems to be a walnut, draw out a score yards of ribbon, as in the postulate of a First Cause. And, lastly, in all these demonstrations, the demonstrators presuppose the idea or conception of a God without being able to authenticate it; that is, to give an account whence they obtained it. For it is clear that the proof first mentioned, and the most natural and convincing of all (the cosmological, I mean, or that from the order of nature), presupposes the ontological; that is, the proof of a God from the necessity and necessary objectivity of the Idea. If the latter can assure us of a God as an existing reality. the former will go far to prove his power, wisdom, and benevolence. All this I hold. But I also hold, that the truth the hardest to demonstrate, is the one which, of all others, least needs to be demonstrated; that though there may be no conclusive demonstrations of a good, wise, living, and personal God, there are so many convincing reasons for it within and without—a grain of sand sufficing, and a whole universe at hand to echo the decision!—that for every mind not devoid of all reason, and desperately conscience-proof, the truth which it is the least possible to prove, it is little else than impossible not to believe,—only indeed, just so much short of impossible as to leave some room for the will, and the moral election, and thereby to keep it a truth of religion, and the possible subject of a commandment."—(P. 132.)

We are not very partial to this notion of a truth of the reason being a subject for the exercise of moral obedience, and least of all in the case of a truth, the recognition of which must precede any intelligible exercise[704] of the religious conscience. In common with the vast majority of mankind, we hold that the cosmological argument is complete in itself. Ontology, as a branch of metaphysics placed in opposition to psychology, is, by the greater number of reflecting men, regarded as a mere shadow, the region of utter and hopeless obscurity. We know nothing in itself,—only its phenomena; being escapes us, except as that to which the phenomena belong. If we prove, or rather if we see, order and wisdom in the material world, we have all the demonstration of a being, intelligent and wise, that our minds are capable of receiving. We have the same proof for the being of God, as we have for the existence of matter or of mind; we cannot have more, and we have not a jot less.

By way of compensation, our philosopher, when he is once in possession of the Idea of God, evolves from it, by unassisted reason, the most profound mysteries of revealed religion. Mark here the elated step of the triumphant logician:—

"I form a certain notion in my mind, and say, 'This is what I understand by the term God.' From books and conversation, I find that the learned generally connect the same notion with the same word. I then apply the rules laid down by the masters of logic for the involution and evolution of terms [the conjurer that he is!] and prove, to as many as agree with me in my premises, that the notion God involves the notion Trinity."—(P. 126.)

The further description of this successful process of the involution and evolution of terms is postponed to a future work. It was a strange and somewhat affected position that Coleridge assumed between the philosophical and the religious world. He would belong to both, and yet would be unhappy if you did not regard him as standing apart and alone. He was the Punctum Indifferens, which might be both, or neither. The philosopher among divines, the divine among philosophers, he was delighted to appear to each class in a masquerade drawn from the wardrobe of the other. Even on the most ordinary occasions, he would sometimes eke out, or obscure, his explanations by a little of the dialect of the chapel, or the meeting-house. Near the commencement of the book is the following note:—

"Distinction between Thought and Attention.—By Thought is here meant the voluntary reproduction in our own minds of those states of consciousness, or (to use a phrase more familiar to the religious reader) of those inward experiences, to which, as to his best and most authentic documents, the teacher of moral and religious truth refers us. In Attention, we keep the mind passive; in Thought, we rouse it into activity. In the former, we submit to an impression,—we keep the mind steady in order to receive the stamp. In the latter, we seek to imitate the artist, while we ourselves make a copy or duplicate of his work. We may learn arithmetic or the elements of geometry by continued attention alone; but self-knowledge, or an insight into the laws and constitution of the human mind, and, the grounds of religion and true morality, in addition to the effort of attention, requires the energy of thought."

Now this reference to the word experience, as one which would be more familiar to the religious reader, is pure affectation; because he must have known that religious people never use that term in the wide or general sense of states of consciousness, but restrict its meaning to a very peculiar class of feelings. As to the distinction which is here laid down, we thought we agreed with Coleridge till we came to the illustration that was to make all clear. He who has to learn arithmetic, or geometry must assuredly exercise thought as well as attention. It is by that "voluntary reproduction" of the ideas presented to him, by which Coleridge defines thought, that he can alone fully understand and make the subject his own.

At other times this erratic genius rejoices in astonishing all philosophically-minded individuals by some extravagance got from the remotest regions of the religious world. What but some morbid caprice could have induced him to pen such a paragraph as this:—

"It might be the means of preventing many unhappy marriages, if the youth of both sexes had it early impressed on their minds that marriage contracted between Christians is a true and perfect Symbol or Mystery; that is, the actualising Faith being supposed to exist in the receivers, it is an outward sign co-essential with that which it signifies, or a living[705] part of that, the whole of which it represents."

Coleridge never did seriously think—of that we may be sure—that the repetition of this abracadabra could be the means "of preventing many unhappy marriages."

The author of the Aids to Reflection had, however, this undoubted merit—that he was a thinker—that, in his own fitful method, he gave himself from time to time to strenuous meditation. He lacked, indeed, the calm, and serene, and patient thought which characterises the successful inquirer into philosophic truth. He could plunge boldly in, and dive deeply down; but the tranquillity of mind which the diver should possess in those depths where the light is so faint—this he failed in; so that, from his perilous enterprises, he often rose with tangled weeds instead of treasure, spasmodically clasped in both his hands, and held aloft with a shout of triumph. This energy of mind makes itself felt through all the cumbrous obscurity of his exposition, and is the real secret of the influence which he exerted over many, to whom he imparted a noble but irregular impulse, and a sense of proud achievement where nothing complete had been accomplished. His disciples are therefore distinguished, as we have remarked, by undisciplined efforts of thought, and a fancied superiority to the age in which they live,—a notion that they stand upon an intellectual eminence they have neither attained nor fairly toiled for.

But we are in danger of forgetting that it is not the Aids to Reflection, but the Guesses at Truth, we are at present concerned with. Guesses at Truth! You think, of course, that the modest inquirer is about to give us the conclusions to which he has arrived upon the great questions of philosophy,—to collect together the results of his investigations into first principles and the eternal problems of human life. But these results, whatever they may be, are rather assumed than expressed throughout the whole book. As you read on, you find the page still occupied with some trifling discussion about words—strictures upon the contemporary tastes—odd bits of criticism and politics—quibble and conundrum. Over all, indeed, is seen hanging the beetle-brow of the pre-eminent sage, and you are to presume that the meditative man is unbending, and merely at his sport. But he is unbent always: the bow is never strung, or nothing flies from it; the great thinker never sets himself earnestly to work. At last you conclude that there is no work in him—that he never did, and never will work; and that it is useless to wait any longer for this nodding image, with its eternal smile of self-complacency, to turn into an oracle of wisdom.

If, indeed, the writer or writers were verily sportive,—if there were wit or amusement in this unbent condition of the bow, most readers might think there was very little reason to complain: there would be mirth, if not wisdom, to be had. But there is no such compensation. With few exceptions, nothing can be more heavy or cumbrous than their efforts at pleasantry. The illustrations, intended to be humorous and sprightly, have no gaiety in them; and the satirical observations have rarely any other characteristic of satire than their evident injustice.

The manner in which these writers appear to have proceeded, in the excogitation of their detached remarks, is after this fashion,—on all occasions, trivial or important, to carp at any thing that assumes the shape of a commonplace truth, any thing that is generally said or admitted. By this means some merit of originality may surely be obtained, and a lofty character for independence secured. Open the book at the first page:—

"The heart has often been compared to the needle for its constancy: has it ever been so for its variations?"

Why should it? Why should the magnetic needle, which is a popular illustration for constancy of purpose, be chosen as an emblem also for our mutability? Are there not the winds, and the clouds, and the feather blown in the air, and a thousand other similes for this phase of our nature? But "true as the needle to the pole" had been said so long that it was time to see whether the saying could not be reversed. We may as well quote the rest of the passage.

[706]"Yet were any man to keep minutes of his feelings from youth to age, what a table of variations would they present! how numerous! how diverse! how strange! This is just what we find in the writings of Horace. If we consider his occasional effusions—and such they almost all are—as merely expressing the piety or the passion, the seriousness or the levity of the moment, we shall have no difficulty in accounting for those discrepancies in their features which have so much puzzled professional commentators. Their very contradictions prove their truth. Or, could the face even of Ninon de l'Enclos at seventy be just what it was at seventeen? Nay, was Cleopatra before Augustus the same as Cleopatra with Antony? or Cleopatra with Antony the same as with the great Julius?"

A section half a page in length, and on so trite a subject, ought at least to have boasted a greater distinctness of thought. One would hardly have anticipated that the shifting humours of Horace and the decline of Ninon's beauty (of whom it seems to be gravely asked, whether she could be just the same at seventy as at seventeen,) would be put in the same category. The form of composition adopted by the author has not prevented a frequent confusion of ideas, though it has rendered such a fault less excusable. His mode of progression is "like a peacock's walk, a stride and a stand," yet he often fails to take his single step with firmness and decision.

In a work of this kind, we know not how better to proceed than to examine some of the sections in the order they occur; and, as we have begun at the first page, we shall turn over the leaves of the book, and, without too much anxiety of selection, extract for our comment such as appear best to characterise the authors. Nor shall we attempt to make any distinction between the writers. The larger portion, and to which no signature is affixed, is the composition of Archdeacon Hare; those signed U, are by his brother; and there are occasionally other signatures, as A. and L., and A. and O. L., but what names these stand for we are not informed,—nor are we anxious to know. It is as a specimen of a certain class or coterie of thinkers we have been induced to notice the work, and we would at all times rather assail the thing said than the person who says it. It is remarkable that there is as much harmony between the several parts of the work as if the whole had been written by the same individual; and where inconsistencies appear, they will generally be found in the portions which bear the same signature, and which are the composition therefore of the same writer.

"Philosophy, like every thing else, in a Christian nation, should be Christian. We throw away the better half of our means, when we neglect to avail ourselves of the advantages which starting in the right road gives us. It is idle to urge that unless we do this, anti-Christians will deride us. Curs bark at gentlemen on horseback; but who, except a hypochondriac, ever gave up riding on that account?"

To say that philosophy should be Christian, is very much like saying that truth should be Christian. The philosophy of a genuine Christian will be Christian, we presume, unless he be capable of believing contradictory propositions. Or does the writer mean that that alone is Christian philosophy of which Coleridge has given us a slight specimen, and where the attempt is made to deduce from human reason alone the revealed mysteries of Christianity? What follows is as carelessly penned as it is pointless and vapid. "It is idle to urge that unless we do this anti-Christians will deride us." It would be impossible from the mere rules of grammar to know what it is that anti-Christians would deride us for doing,—whether for going right or wrong. But the illustration, by no means very elegant, which follows, comes to our assistance. As the anti-Christians, are the curs, and the gentleman on horseback the Christian philosopher, and as riding on horseback is certainly a very commendable thing, we discover that it is for going right that the anti-Christians would deride us.

The next is an instance how an observation, good in itself, may be run to death.

"'I am convinced that jokes are often accidental. A man in the course of conversation throws out a remark at random, and is as much surprised as any of the company, on hearing it, to find it witty.'

[707]"For the substance of this observation I am indebted to one of the pleasantest men I ever knew, who was doubtless giving the results of his own experience. He might have carried his remark some steps further with ease and profit. It would have done our pride no harm to be reminded, how few of our best and wisest, and even of our newest thoughts, do really and wholly originate in ourselves,—how few of them are voluntary, or at least intentional. Take away all that has been suggested or improved by the hints and remarks of others,—all that has fallen from us accidentally, all that has been struck out by collision, all that has been prompted by a sudden impulse, or has occurred to us when least looking for it—and the remainder, which alone can be claimed as the fruit of our thought and study, will in every man form a small portion of his store, and in most men will be little worth preserving."

This is carrying his friend's observation "a little further with ease and profit!" It is carrying it to where it is utterly lost in mere absurdity. "Take away all that has been suggested," &c.—(take away all that we have ever learned)—"take away all that has been prompted," &c.—(take away all excitement to thinking, as well as all materials of thought)—and we should be glad to know what "remainder" can be left at all. The paragraph continues thus—

"We can no more make thoughts than seeds. How absurd, then, for a man to call himself a poet or maker! The ablest writer is a gardener first, and then a cook," (two very industrious professions at all events.) "His tasks are, carefully to select and cultivate his strongest and most nutritive thoughts; and, when they are ripe, to dress them wholesomely, and so that they may have a relish."

A very succulent image. The next sentence which our eye falls upon is pretty, and we willingly extract it:—

"Leaves are light, and useless, and idle, and wavering, and changeable; they even dance: yet God has made them part of the oak. In so doing, he has given us a lesson not to deny the stout-heartedness within, because we see the lightsomeness without."

The following truism we should have hardly thought deserving of a place amidst Guesses at Truth; but, being admitted, the section devoted to it might surely have been preserved from obscurity to the close:—

"Time is no agent, as some people appear to think, that it should accomplish any thing of itself. Looking at a heap of stones for a thousand years will do no more toward building a house of them, than looking at them for a moment. For time, when applied to works of any kind, being only a succession of relevant acts, each furthering the work, it is clear that even an infinite succession of irrelevant and therefore inefficient acts would no more achieve or forward the completion, than an infinite number of jumps on the same spot would advance a man toward his journey's end. There is a motion, without progress in time as well as in space; where a thing often remains stationary, which appears to us to recede, while we are leaving it behind."

Plain sailing enough till we come to the last sentence. We dare not say that "we do not understand this"—these writers tell us so often that the critic fails in understanding simply from his own want of apprehension—but we may venture to hint that whatever meaning it contains might have been more clearly expressed. The hapless critic, by the way, is severely dealt with by this school of philosophers. He is told that "Coleridge's golden rule—Until you understand an author's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding—should be borne in mind by all writers who feel an itching in their forefinger and thumb to be carping at their wisers and betters." (P. 161) Our wisers should have informed the critic how he is to fathom an author's ignorance except by examining the accuracy and intelligibility of the positive statements he makes. "A Reviewer's business," we are assured in another part, "is to have positive opinions upon all subjects, without need of steadfast principles or thoroughgoing knowledge upon any: and he belongs to the hornet class, unproductive of any thing useful or sweet, but ever ready to sally forth and sting." Hard measure this. But we must not be judges in our own cause.

Meanwhile nothing pleases our amiable writers so much as to gird at the times in which they live, and find error in every general belief.

"Another form of the same materialism, which cannot comprehend or conceive any thing, except as the product of some external cause, is the spirit so general in[708] these times, which attaches an inordinate importance to mechanical inventions, and accounts them the great agents in the history of mankind. It is a common opinion with these exoteric philosophers that the invention of printing was the chief cause of the Reformation—that the invention of the compass brought about the discovery of America—and that the vast changes in the military and political state of Europe since the middle ages have been wrought by the invention of gunpowder. It would be almost as rational to say that the cock's crowing, makes the sun rise. U." (P. 85.)

Now it is not the common opinion that the invention of printing was the chief cause of the Reformation, but that it afforded to the reformers a great and very opportune assistance. It is not the common opinion that the invention of the compass brought about of itself the discovery of America, but it is a very general belief that Columbus would have hardly sailed due west over the broad ocean without a compass. It is not the common opinion that the vast changes, meaning thereby all the changes that have taken place in the military and political affairs of Europe since the middle ages, have been the result of the invention of gunpowder; but it is a conviction generally entertained that the use of fire-arms has had something more to do with certain changes in our military and political condition than the crowing of the cock with the rising of the sun.

Having in this candid manner exposed the popular errors upon this subject, he substitutes in their stead this very luminous proposition, that "the utility of an invention depends upon our making use of it!"

"These very inventions had existed, the greatest of them for many centuries, in China, without producing any result. For why? Because the utility of an invention depends on our making use of it. There is no power, none at least for good [why this qualification?] in any instrument or weapon, except so far as there is power in him who wields it: nor does the sword guide or move the hand, but the hand the sword. Nay," he adds in a tone of triumphant discovery, "it is the hand that fashions the sword."

"Or," continues the writer, starting afresh, "we may look at the matter in another light. We may conceive that, whenever any of the great changes ordained by God's providence in the destinies of mankind are about to take place, the means requisite for the effecting of those changes are likewise prepared by the same Providence."

What is this but the general opinion of mankind? which, however, as entertained in the minds of others, is a vulgar materialism. What are all the world saying, but simply this, that the inventions of the printing press, of the compass, and of gunpowder, are great means ordained by God's providence for the advancement of human affairs?

The beauties of inanimate nature have their turn to be descanted on; and here our selecter spirits have a double task to perform: first, to throw contempt on those who do not feel them; and, secondly, on those who do. For, explain it how you will, they and their few friends are evidently the only people who have an accurate perception of beauty as well as of truth.

"It is an uncharitable error to ascribe the delight with which unpoetical persons often speak of a mountain-tour, to affectation. The delight is as real as mutton and beef, with which it has a closer connexion than the travellers themselves suspect; arising, in great measure, from the good effects of mountain air, regular exercise, and wholesome diet, upon the spirits. This is sensual, indeed, though not improperly so; but it is no concession to the materialist. I do not deny that my neighbour has a soul, by referring a particular pleasure in him to the body." (P. 35.)

So much for the unpoetic traveller with staff and knapsack, glorying, it may be, in his feats of pedestrianism. He is permitted, in spite of his grossness, to have a soul within his body. But the more poetic fraternity are not therefore to pass scatheless.

"The noisiest streams are the shallowest. It is an old saying, but never out of season, least of all in an age the fit symbol of which would not be, like the Ephesian personification of nature, multimamma—for it neither brings forth nor nourishes—but multilingua. Your amateur will talk by the ell, or, if you wish it, by the mile, about the inexpressible charms of nature; but I never heard that his love had caused him the slightest uneasiness.

"It is only," continues the writer, in a style which becomes suddenly overclouded with a strange metaphysical obscurity,—"it[709] is only by the perception of some contrast that we become conscious of our feelings. The feelings, however, may exist for centuries, without the consciousness; and still, when they are mighty, they will overpower consciousness; when they are deep, it will be unable to fathom them. Love has been called 'loquacious as a vernal bird,' and with truth; but his loquacity comes on him mostly in the absence of his beloved. Here too the same illustration holds: the deep stream is not heard until some obstacle opposes it. But can anybody, when floating down the Rhine, believe that the builders and dwellers in those castles, with which every rock is crested, were blind to all the beauties around them? Is it quite impossible that they should have felt almost as much as the sentimental tourist, who returns to his parlour in some metropolis, and puffs out the fumes of his admiration through his quill? Has the moon no existence independent of the halo about her? [sic] or does the halo even flow from her? Is it not produced by the dimness and density of the atmosphere through which she has to shine? Give me the love of the bird that broods over her own nest, rather than of one who lays her eggs in the nest of another, albeit she warble about parental affection as loudly as Rousseau or Lord Byron." (P. 50.)

Nevertheless, we should not adopt the present writer, with all his two-fold fastidiousness, as our guide to enlighten us upon the highest sort of pleasure which scenery produces. He lays far more stress than to us seems due on the pictorial art as a means of cultivating a taste for the beauties of nature. It is quite true that a person familiar with the art of painting will see in an ordinary landscape points of interest which another would overlook. But as the sublimer objects in nature cannot be represented in pictures, so as to convey an impression of sublimity, it is not here that we can learn how to appreciate them. You paint a river and all the amenities of the landscape through which it flows; you cannot paint the sea and its grandeur. On no canvass can you transfer a mountain so as to bring with it the true impression of its sublimity.

That which we call the love of nature must exist in very different forms in minds of different habits and culture. The professional artist notes the various forms, the various colours, how they blend and contrast; he likes to see the whole field of vision richly and harmoniously filled. The poet, after spending a whole day in rapture amongst the mountains, could scarcely give you the exact outline of a single peak; he cannot fill you a solitary canvass; he has grouped all that his memory retains by the law only of his own feelings; he can describe the scene only by the emotions it has called forth.

There is also, no doubt, a simpler love of natural objects that never seeks to express itself either with the pencil or the pen. And this may, as our writer suggests, form a component part of that love of their country for which mountaineers are particularly distinguished. Yet, having ourselves had occasion to notice how very destitute of what is called sentiment, the peasantry of the noblest country are found to be, we should rather attribute the passionate love of home that is remarkable in the Swiss or the Norwegian to this,—that the causes which make home dear to all men are aggravated in their case by the mountainous seclusion in which they live. One who has resided in the same valley all his life, knows every one in that valley, and knows no one beyond it. The whole of the inhabitants form, as it were, one family. And though the sublimity of the mountains around him affects his mind but little, yet their lofty summits present to him (merely as so much matter and form) great physical objects to which he gets familiarised and attached. Each time he raises his eyes, he sees them there eternal in the heavens he can go no where to escape them; and they enclose for him whatever he possesses in common with all other countrymen—his own field, its hedge, its stile,—the village church,—the bridge over the torrent stream on which he played when a boy, and stood and gossipped when a man.

"When I was in the lake of Zug," says our author, "which lies bosomed among such grand mountains, the boatman, after telling some stories about Suwarrow's march through the neighbourhood, asked me,—Is it true that he came from a country where there is not a mountain to be seen? Yes, I replied; you may go hundreds of miles without coming to a hillock. That must be beautiful! he exclaimed:[710] das muss schön seyn.... This very man, however, had he been transported to the plains he sighed for,—even though they had been as flat as Burnet's Paradise, or the tabula rasa which Locke supposed to be the paradisiacal state of the human mind—(why is this piece of folly introduced? or what wit or sense can there be in attributing this childish absurdity to Locke?) would probably have been seized with the homesickness which is so common among his countrymen, as it is also among the Swedes and Norwegians, but which I believe is hardly found, except in the natives of a mountainous and beautiful country."[13]

We have said that the prevailing characteristic of these semi-philosophers is the love of contradicting whatever to the majority of men seems a simple and intelligible truth. We will give two very short instances of this spirit of contradiction. We need not say that they are religious men, or that the want of piety in the world is their frequent subject of animadversion. "I was surprised just now," says one of the brothers, "to see a cobweb round a knocker: for it was not on the gate of heaven." You would suppose, therefore, that a man could not be too earnest in knocking at this gate that it might be opened to him. But this is what all the religious world is saying, and to float with the stream would be intolerable. It is discovered, therefore, that the religious world make of salvation, of the entrance into heaven, a matter of too much personal interest. "Catholic religion has wellnigh been split up into personal, so that the very idea of the former has almost been lost; and it is the avowed principle of what is called the Religious World that every body's paramount, engrossing duty is to take care his own soul." (P. 194.) What is called the Religious World world be a little surprised to hear itself censured by the archdeacon on such a ground as this.

Our next, which is very brief, is a still more striking instance of this contradictious and exclusive spirit. "The glories of their country,"—he is speaking of the ancient Greeks,—"inspired them with enthusiastic patriotism; and an aristocratical religion—(which, until it was supplanted by a vulgar philosophy, was revered in spite of all its errors)—gave them," &c. It was a "vulgar philosophy" that doubted of the truth of Paganism! It is, at all events, a very commonplace philosophy at the present day which discredits the gods of Olympus, and is therefore to be spoken of with due contempt.

Instead of being intelligible and vulgar, how much better to wrap up our Christian philosophy in a style as rare and curious, and undecipherable, as the hieroglyphic cerements of an Egyptian mummy!

"The precepts of Christianity are holy and imperative; its mysteries vast, undiscoverable, unimaginable; and, what is still worthier of consideration, these two limbs of our religion are not severed, or even laxly joined, but, after the workmanship of the God of nature, so 'lock in with and over-wrap one another' that they cannot be torn asunder without rude force. Every mystery is the germ of a duty: every duty has its motive in a mystery. So that if I may speak of these things in the symbolical language of ancient wisdom, every thing divine being circular, every right thing human straight—the life of the Christian may be compared to a chord, each end of which is supported by the arc it proceeds from and terminates in." (P. 214.)

[711]Literary criticism occupies a portion of these pages. Here also there is a singular air of pretension, but nothing done. A vague indefinite claim is made to very superior taste, and an exclusive appreciation of the great poets, but nothing is ever attempted to support this claim. The solitary criticism on a passage in Milton, where the poet says of the great palace of Pandemonium, that it "rose like an exhalation," is the only instance we remember where these authors have put forth any positive criticism; and this example does not appear to evince any very delicate or refined appreciation of poetic imagery. A comparison is drawn (where there is very little room for one) between this passage and the expression νυκτι εοικως, which Homer uses in describing the coming of Apollo,—and the ηυτ' ομιχλη, which he employs when speaking of Thetis rising from the sea. "How inferior," says the writer, "in grandeur, in simplicity, in beauty and grace, to the Homeric! which moreover has better caught the spirit and sentiment of the natural appearances. For Apollo does come with the power and majesty, and with the terrors of night; and the soft waviness of an exhalation is a much fitter image for the rising of the goddess, than for the massiness and hard stiff outline of a building." It is the hard stiff outline which the very image of Milton conceals from us, as the angel-built structure rises gradually, continuously, like an exhalation from the earth.

Of Shakspeare we are, of course, told that neither we, nor any other Englishmen, understand him.

"How many Englishmen admire Shakspeare? Doubtless all who understand him, and, it is to be hoped, a few more; for how many Englishmen understand Shakspeare? Were Diogenes to set out on his search through the land, I trust he would bring home many hundreds, not to say thousands, for every one I should put up. To judge from what has been written about him, the Englishmen who understand Shakspeare are little more numerous than those who understand the language spoken in Paradise. You will now and then meet with ingenious remarks on particular passages, and even in particular characters, or rather in particular features in them. But these remarks are mostly as incomplete and unsatisfactory as the description of a hand or foot would be, unless received with reference to the whole body. He who wishes to trace the march and to scan the operations of this most marvellous genius, and to discern the mysterious organisation of his wonderful works, will find little help but what comes from beyond the German Ocean." (P. 267.)

We are very much disposed to think that the age which follows ours, though still admiring Shakspeare as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of poets, will look upon this present age as eminently distinguished for having talked a marvellous deal of nonsense about that great man—whether with or without help from beyond the German Ocean. There is, however, confessedly some light to be got from another quarter, though still a very remote one. We are rather affectedly told in the preceding page:—

"Were nothing else to be learnt from the rhetoric and ethics of Aristotle, they should be studied by every educated Englishman as the best of commentaries on Shakspeare."

To Coleridge, indeed, whose snatches of literary criticism are admirable, (when he is not evidently led away by some capricious paradoxical spirit,) we have a debt to acknowledge on this subject. He first taught us, if we mistake not, to appreciate the structure of Shakspeare's plays, and vindicated them from that charge of rudeness and irregularity which had been so frequently made that it had passed for an admitted truth. He showed that there was a harmony in his intricate plots of a far higher order than the disciples of the unities had ever dreamed of.

Whatever may be their critical appreciation of the poetic language of others, these writers display very little taste themselves in the use of imagery, or illustration, or metaphor. What is intended for wit or pleasantry proves to be a cumbrous allegory or unwieldy simile; we feel that we are to smile, but we do not smile. Instances of this may be found at page 111, in a sort of fable about "leather" and "stockings;" and at page 133 about "four-sided and five-sided fields." The examples are too long to quote.[712] At page 260, great men are compared to mountains. The simile is not new, but the manner of dealing with it has more of novelty than of grace.—"Mountains never shake hands," &c.—like great men, they stand alone. "But if mountains do not shake hands, neither do they kick each other." And here, at page 259, is an instance, not too long to quote entire, which shows how little tact and delicacy these writers have in dealing with metaphorical language.

"It is a mistake to suppose the poet does not know truth by sight quite as well as the philosopher. He must; for he is ever seeing her in the mirror of nature. The difference between them is, that the poet is satisfied with worshipping her reflected image, while the philosopher traces her out, and follows her to her remote abode between cause and consequence, and there impregnates her."

Frequently the illustration, standing alone, brief and obscure, becomes a mere riddle, a conundrum, to which you can either attach no meaning, or any meaning you please.

"Instead of watching the bird as it flies above our heads, we chase the shadow along the ground, and finding we cannot grasp it, we conclude it to be nothing.

"I hate to see trees pollarded—or nations.

"What way of circumventing a man can be so easy and suitable as a period? The name should be enough to put us on our guard; the experience of every age is not."

The oracular wisdom which these and the like sentences contain, we must confess ourselves unable to expound. We would not undertake to act as interpreter of such aphorisms; and we feel persuaded that if three of the most friendly commentators were to sit down before them, they would each give a different explanation.

In quitting our somewhat ungracious task, we would not leave the impression behind that there is absolutely nothing in this volume to reward perusal. There are some sparkling sayings, and some sound reflections, which, if the book had now appeared for the first time, we should think it our duty to hunt out and bring together. But the work has been long before the public, and our present object was merely to point out some of the weaknesses of a very dogmatical class of writers. The following guess, for instance, is very significant, and extremely apposite, moreover, to our own times. That we may leave our readers something to meditate upon, we will conclude by quoting it:—

"When the pit seats itself in the boxes, the gallery will soon drive out both, and occupy the whole of the house."—A.

[713]

LIFE IN THE "FAR WEST."

PART I.—CHAP. I.

Away to the head waters of the Platte, where several small streams run into the south fork of that river, and head in the broken ridges of the "Divide" which separates the valleys of the Platte and Arkansa, were camped a band of trappers on a creek called Bijou. It was the month of October, when the early frosts of the coming winter had crisped and dyed with sober brown the leaves of the cherry and quaking asp, which belted the little brook; and the ridges and peaks of the Rocky Mountains were already covered with a glittering mantle of snow, which sparkled in the still powerful rays of the autumn sun.

The camp had all the appearance of being a permanent one; for not only did one or two unusually comfortable shanties form a very conspicuous object, but the numerous stages on which huge strips of buffalo meat were hanging in process of cure, showed that the party had settled themselves here in order to lay in a store of provisions, or, as it is termed in the language of the mountains, "make meat." Round the camp were feeding some twelve or fifteen mules and horses, having their fore-legs confined by hobbles of raw hide, and, guarding these animals, two men paced backwards and forwards, driving in the stragglers; and ever and anon ascending the bluffs which overhung the river, and, leaning on their long rifles, would sweep with their eyes the surrounding prairie. Three or four fires were burning in the encampment, on some of which Indian women were carefully tending sundry steaming pots; whilst round one, which was in the centre of it, four or five stalwart hunters, clad in buckskin, sat cross-legged, pipe in mouth.

They were a trapping party from the north fork of Platte, on their way to wintering-ground in the more southern valley of the Arkansa; some, indeed, meditating a more extended trip, even to the distant settlements of New Mexico, the paradise of mountaineers. The elder of the company was a tall gaunt man, with a face browned by a twenty years' exposure to the extreme climate of the mountains; his long black hair, as yet scarcely tinged with gray, hung almost to his shoulders, but his cheeks and chin were cleanly shaved, after the fashion of the mountain men. His dress was the usual hunting-frock of buckskin, with long fringes down the seams, with pantaloons similarly ornamented, and mocassins of Indian make. As his companions puffed their pipes in silence, he was narrating a few of his former experiences of western life; and whilst the buffalo "hump-ribs" and "tender loin" are singing away in the pot, preparing for the hunters' supper, we will note down the yarn as it spins from his lips, giving it in the language spoken in the "far west:"—

"'Twas about 'calf-time,' maybe a little later, and not a hunderd year ago, by a long chalk, that the biggest kind of rendezvous was held 'to' Independence, a mighty handsome little location away up on old Missoura. A pretty smart lot of boys was camp'd thar, about a quarter from the town, and the way the whisky flowed that time was 'some' now, I can tell you. Thar was old Sam Owins—him as got 'rubbed out'[14] by the Spaniards at Sacramenty, or Chihuahuy, this hos doesn't know which, but he 'went under'[14] any how. Well, Sam had his train along, ready to hitch up for the Mexican country—twenty thunderin big Pittsburg waggons; and the way his Santa Fé boys took in the liquor beat all—eh, Bill?"

"Well, it did."

"Bill Bent—his boys camped the other side the trail, and they was all mountain men, wagh!—and Bill Williams, and Bill Tharpe (the Pawnees took his hair on Pawnee Fork last spring:) three Bills, and them three's all 'gone under.' Surely Hatcher went out that time; and wasn't Bill Garey along, too? Didn't him and Chabonard sit in camp for twenty hours at a deck of Euker? Them was[714] Bent's Indian traders up on Arkansa. Poor Bill Bent! them Spaniards made meat of him. He lost his topknot to Taos. A 'clever' man was Bill Bent as I ever know'd trade a robe or 'throw' a bufler in his tracks. Old St Vrain could knock the hind-sight off him though, when it come to shootin, and old silver heels spoke true, she did: 'plum-center' she was, eh?"

"Well, she was'nt nothin else.'"

"The Greasers[15] payed for Bent's scalp, they tell me. Old St Vrain went out of Santa Fé with a company of mountain men, and the way they made 'em sing out was 'slick as shootin'. He 'counted a coup' did St Vrain. He throwed a Pueblo as had on poor Bent's shirt. I guess he tickled that niggur's hump-ribs. Fort William[16] aint the lodge it was, an' never will be agin, now he's gone under; but St Vrain's 'pretty much of a gentleman,' too; if he aint, I'll be dog-gone, eh, Bill?"

"He is so-o."

"Chavez had his waggons along. He was only a Spaniard any how, and some of his teamsters put a ball into him his next trip, and made a raise of his dollars, wagh! Uncle Sam hung 'em for it, I heard, but can't b'lieve it, no-how. If them Spaniards wasn't born for shootin', why was beaver made? You was with us that spree, Jemmy?"

"No sirre-e; I went out when Spiers lost his animals on Cimmaron: a hunderd and forty mules and oxen was froze that night, wagh!"

"Surely Black Harris was thar; and the darndest liar was Black Harris—for lies tumbled out of his mouth like boudins out of a bufler's stomach. He was the child as saw the putrefied forest in the Black Hills. Black Harris come in from Laramie; he'd been trapping three year an' more on Platte and the 'other side;' and, when he got into Liberty, he fixed himself right off like a Saint Louiy dandy. Well, he sat to dinner one day in the tavern, and a lady says to him:—

"'Well, Mister Harris, I hear you're a great travler.'

"'Travler, marm,' says Black Harris, 'this niggur's no travler; I ar' a trapper, marm, a mountain-man, wagh!"

"'Well, Mister Harris, trappers are great travlers, and you goes over a sight of ground in your perishinations, I'll be bound to say.'

"'A sight, marm, this coon's gone over, if that's the way your 'stick floats.'[17] I've trapped beaver on Platte and Arkansa, and away up on Missoura and Yaller Stone; I've trapped on Columbia, on Lewis Fork, and Green River; I've trapped, marm, on Grand River and the Heely (Gila.) I've fout the 'Blackfoot' (and d——d bad Injuns they ar;) I've 'raised the hair'[18] of more than one Apach, and made a Rapaho 'come' afore now; I've trapped in heav'n, in airth, and h——, and scalp my old head, marm, but I've seen a putrefied forest.'

"'La, Mister Harris, a what?'

"'A putrefied forest, marm, as sure as my rifle's got hind-sights, and she shoots center. I was out on the Black Hills, Bill Sublette knows the time—the year it rained fire—and every body knows when that was. If thar wasn't cold doin's about that time, this child wouldn't say so. The snow was about fifty foot deep, and the bufler lay dead on the ground like bees after a beein'; not whar we was tho', for thar was no bufler, and no meat, and me and my band had been livin' on our mocassins, (leastwise the parflesh,[19]) for six weeks; and poor doin's that feedin' is, marm, as you'll never know. One day we crossed a 'cañon' and over a 'divide,' and got into a peraira, whar was green grass, and green trees, and green leaves on the trees, and birds singing in the green leaves, and this in Febrary, wagh! Our[715] animals was like to die when they see the green grass, and we all sung out, 'hurraw for summer doin's.'

"'Hyar goes for meat,' says I, and I jest ups old Ginger at one of them singing birds, and down come the crittur elegant; its darned head spinning away from the body, but never stops singing, and when I takes up the meat, I finds it stone, wagh! 'Hyar's damp powder and no fire to dry it,' I says, quite skeared.'

"'Fire be dogged,' says old Rube. 'Hyar's a hos as'll make fire come;' and with that he takes his axe and lets drive at a cotton wood. Schr-u-k—goes the axe agin the tree, and out comes a bit of the blade as big as my hand. We looks at the animals, and thar they stood shaking over the grass, which I'm dog-gone if it wasn't stone, too. Young Sublette comes up, and he'd been clerking down to the fort on Platte, so he know'd something. He looks and looks, and scrapes the trees with his butcher knife, and snaps the grass like pipe stems, and breaks the leaves a-snappin' like Californy shells.'

"'What's all this, boy?' I asks.

"'Putrefactions,' says he, looking smart, 'putrefactions, or I'm a niggur.'

"'La, Mister Harris,' says the lady; 'putrefactions, why, did the leaves, and the trees, and the grass smell badly?'

"'Smell badly, marm,' says Black Harris, 'would a skunk stink if he was froze to stone? No, marm, this child didn't know what putrefactions was, and young Sublette's varsion wouldn't 'shine' nohow, so I chips a piece out of a tree and puts it in my trap-sack, and carries it in safe to Laramie. Well, old Captain Stewart, (a clever man was that, though he was an Englishman,) he comes along next spring, and a Dutch doctor chap was along too. I shows him the piece I chipped out of the tree, and he called it a putrefaction too; and so, marm, if that wasn't a putrefied peraira, what was it? For this hos doesn't know, and he knows 'fat cow' from 'poor bull,' anyhow.'

"Well, old Black Harris is gone under too, I believe. He went to the 'Parks' trapping with a Vide Pôche Frenchman, who shot him for his bacca and traps. Darn them Frenchmen, they're no account any way you lays your sight. (Any 'bacca in your bag, Bill?' this beaver feels like chawing.)

"Well, any how, thar was the camp, and they was goin to put out the next morning; and the last as come out of Independence was that ar Englishman. He'd a nor-west[20] capôte on, and a two-shoot gun rifled. Well, them English are darned fools; they can't fix a rifle any ways; but that one did shoot 'some;' leastwise he made it throw plum-center. He made the bufler 'come,' he did, and fout well at Pawnee Fork too. What was his name? All the boys called him Cap'en, and he got his fixings from old Choteau; but what he wanted out thar in the mountains, I never jest rightly know'd. He was no trader, nor a trapper, and flung about his dollars right smart. Thar was old grit in him, too, and a hair of the black b'ar at that.[21] They say he took the bark of the Shians when he cleared out of the village with old Beaver Tail's squaw. He'd been on Yaller Stone afore that: Leclerc know'd him in the Blackfoot, and up in the Chippeway country; and he had the best powder as ever I flashed through life, and his gun was handsome, that's a fact. Them thar locks was grand; and old Jake Hawken's nephey, (him as trapped on Heely that time,) told me, the other day, as he saw an English gun on Arkansa last winter as beat all off hand.

"Nigh upon two hundred dollars I had in my possibles, when I went to that camp to see the boys afore they put out; and you know, Bill, as I sat to 'Euker' and 'seven up'[22] till every cent was gone.

"'Take back twenty, old coon,' says Big John.

"'H——'s full of such takes back,' says[716] I; and I puts back to town and fetches the rifle and the old mule, puts my traps into the sack, gets credit for a couple of pounds of powder at Owin's store, and hyar I ar on Bijou, with half a pack of beaver, and running meat yet, old hos: so put a log on, and let's have a smoke.

"Hurraw, Jake, old coon, bear a hand, and let the squaw put them tails in the pot; for sun's down, and we'll have to put out pretty early to reach 'Black Tail' by this time to-morrow. Who's fust guard, boys: them cussed 'Rapahos' will be after the animals to-night, or I'm no judge of Injun sign. How many did you see, Maurice?"

"Enfant de Gârce, me see bout honderd, when I pass Squirrel Creek, one dam war-party, parce-que, they no hosses, and have de lariats for steal des animaux. May be de Yutes in Bayou Salade."

"We'll be having trouble to-night, I'm thinking, if the devils are about. Whose band was it, Maurice?"

"Slim-Face—I see him ver close—is out; mais I think it White Wolf's."

"White Wolf, maybe, will lose his hair if he and his band knock round here too often. That Injun put me afoot when we was out on 'Sandy' that fall. This niggur owes him one, any how."

"H——'s full of White Wolves: go ahead, and roll out some of your doins across the plains that time."

"You seed sights that spree, eh, boy?"

"Well, we did. Some of em got their flints fixed this side of Pawnee Fork, and a heap of mule-meat went wolfing. Just by Little Arkansa we saw the first Injun. Me and young Somes was ahead for meat, and I had hobbled the old mule and was 'approaching' some goats,[23] when I see the critturs turn back their heads and jump right away for me. 'Hurraw, Dick!' I shouts, 'hyars brown-skin acomin,' and off I makes for the mule. The young greenhorn sees the goats runnin up to him, and not being up to Injun ways, blazes at the first and knocks him over. Jest then seven darned red heads top the bluff, and seven Pawnees come a-screechin upon us. I cuts the hobbles and jumps on the mule, and, when I looks back, there was Dick Somes ramming a ball down his gun like mad, and the Injuns flinging their arrows at him pretty smart, I tell you. 'Hurraw, Dick, mind your hair,' and I ups old Greaser and let one Injun 'have it,' as was going plum into the boy with his lance. He turned on his back handsome, and Dick gets the ball down at last, blazes away, and drops another. Then we charged on em, and they clears off like runnin cows; and I takes the hair off the heads of the two we made meat of; and I do b'lieve thar's some of them scalps on my old leggings yet.

"Well, Dick was as full of arrows as a porkypine: one was sticking right through his cheek, one in his meat-bag, and two more 'bout his hump ribs. I tuk 'em all out slick, and away we go to camp, (for they was jost a-campin' when we went ahead) and carryin' the goat too. Thar' was a hurroo when we rode in with the scalps at the end of our guns. 'Injuns! Injuns!' was the cry from the green-horns; 'we'll be 'tacked to-night, that's certain.'

"''Tacked be ——' says old Bill; 'aint we men too, and white at that. Look to your guns, boys; send out a strong hos'-guard with the animals, and keep your eyes skinned.'

"Well, as soon as the animals were unhitched from the waggons, the guvner sends out a strong guard, seven boys, and old hands at that. It was pretty nigh upon sundown, and Bill had just sung out to 'corral.' The boys were drivin' in the animals, and we were all standin' round to get 'em in slick, when, 'howgh-owgh-owgh-owgh,' we hears right behind the bluff, and 'bout a minute and a perfect crowd of Injuns gallops down upon the animals. Wagh! war'nt thor hoopin'! We jump for the guns, but before we get to the fires, the Injuns were among the cavayard. I saw Ned Collyer and his brother, who were in the hos'-guard, let drive at 'em; but twenty Pawnees were round 'em before the smoke cleared from their rifles, and when the crowd broke the two boys[717] were on the ground, and their hair gone. Well, that ar Englishman just saved the cavayard. He had his horse, a reglar buffalo-runner, picketed round the fire quite handy, and as soon as he sees the fix, he jumps upon her and rides right into the thick of the mules, and passes through 'em, firing his two-shoot gun at the Injuns, and by Gor, he made two come. The mules, which was a snortin' with funk and running before the Injuns, as soon as they see the Englishman's mare (mules 'ill go to h—— after a horse, you all know,) followed her right into the corral, and thar they was safe. Fifty Pawnees come screechin' after 'em, but we was ready that time, and the way we throw'd 'em was something handsome, I tell you. But three of the hos'-guard got skeared—leastwise their mules did, and carried 'em off into the peraira, and the Injuns having enough of us, dashed after 'em right away. Them poor devils looked back miserable now, with about a hundred red varmints tearin' after their hair, and whooping like mad. Young Jem Bulcher was the last; and when he seed it was no use, and his time was nigh, he throw'd himself off the mule, and standing as upright as a hickory wiping stick, he waves his hand to us, and blazes away at the first Injun as come up, and dropped him slick; but the moment after, you may guess, he died.

"We could do nothin', for, before our guns were loaded, all three were dead and their scalps gone. Five of our boys got rubbed out that time, and seven Injuns lay wolf's meat, while a many more went away gut-shot, I'll lay. How'sever, seven of us went under, and the Pawnees made a raise of a dozen mules, wagh!"

Thus far, in his own words, we have accompanied the old hunter in his tale; and probably he would have taken us, by the time that the Squaw Chili-pat had pronounced the beaver tails cooked, safely across the grand prairies—fording Cotton Wood, Turkey Creek, Little Arkansa, Walnut Creek, and Pawnee Fork—passed the fireless route of the Coon Creeks; through a sea of fat buffalo meat, without fuel to cook it; have struck the big river, and, leaving at the "Crossing" the waggons destined for Santa Fé, have trailed us up the Arkansa to Bent's Fort; thence up Boiling Spring, across the divide over to the southern fork of the Platte, away up to the Black Hills, and finally camped us, with hair still preserved, in the beaver-abounding valleys of the Sweet Water, and Câche la Poudre, under the rugged shadow of the Wind River mountains, if it had not so befell, that at this juncture, as all our mountaineers sat cross-legged round the fire, pipe in mouth, and with Indian gravity listened to the yarn of the old trapper, interrupting him only with an occasional wagh! or the assured exclamations of some participator in the events then under narration, who would every now and then put in a corroborative,—"This child remembers that fix," or, "hyar's a niggur lifted hair that spree," &c.—that a whizzing noise was heard to whistle through the air, followed by a sharp but suppressed cry from one of the hunters.

CHAPTER II.

In an instant the mountaineers had sprung from their seats, and, seizing the ever-ready rifle, each one had thrown himself on the ground a few paces beyond the light of the fire, (for it was now nightfall;) but not a word escaped them, as, lying close, with their keen eyes directed towards the gloom of the thicket, near which the camp was placed, with rifles cocked, they waited a renewal of the attack. Presently the leader of the band, no other than Killbuck, who had so lately been recounting some of his experiences across the plains, and than whom no more crafty woodsman or more expert trapper ever tracked a deer or grained a beaverskin, raised his tall, leather-clad form, and, placing his hand over his mouth, made the prairie ring with the wild protracted note of an Indian war-whoop. This was instantly repeated from the direction where the animals belonging to the camp were grazing, under the charge of the horse-guard, and three[718] shrill whoops answered the warning of the leader, and showed that the guard was on the alert, and understood the signal. However, with this manifestation of their presence, the Indians appeared to be satisfied; or, what is more probable, the act of aggression had been committed by some daring young warrior, who, being out on his first expedition, desired to strike the first coup, and thus signalise himself at the outset of the campaign. After waiting some few minutes, expecting a renewal of the attack, the mountaineers in a body rose from the ground and made towards the animals, with which they presently returned to the camp; and, after carefully hobbling and securing them to pickets firmly driven into the ground, and mounting an additional guard, they once more assembled round the fire, after examining the neighbouring thicket, relit their pipes, and puffed away the cheering weed as composedly as if no such being as a Redskin, thirsting for their lives, was within a thousand miles of their perilous encampment.

"If ever thar was bad Injuns on these plains," at last growled Killbuck, biting hard the pipe-stem between his teeth, "it's these Rapahos, and the meanest kind at that."

"Can't beat the Blackfeet any how," chimed in one La Bonté, from the Yellow Stone country, and a fine, handsome specimen of a mountaineer. "However, one of you quit this arrow out of my hump," he continued, bending forwards to the fire, and exhibiting an arrow sticking out under his right shoulder-blade, and a stream of blood trickling down his buckskin coat from the wound.

This his nearest neighbour essayed to do; but finding, after a tug, that it "would not come," expressed his opinion that the offending weapon would have to be "butchered" out. This was accordingly effected with the ready blade of a scalp-knife; and a handful of beaver-fur being placed on the wound, and secured by a strap of buckskin round the body, the wounded man donned his hunting-shirt once more, and coolly set about lighting his pipe, his rifle lying across his lap, cocked and ready for use.

It was now near midnight—dark and misty; and the clouds, rolling away to the eastward from the lofty ridges of the Rocky Mountains, were gradually obscuring the little light which was afforded by the dim stars. As the lighter vapours faded from the mountains, a thick black cloud succeeded them, and settled over the loftier peaks of the chain, which were faintly visible through the gloom of night, whilst a mass of fleecy scud soon overspread the whole sky. A hollow moaning sound crept through the valley, and the upper branches of the cotton woods, with their withered leaves, began to rustle with the first breath of the coming storm. Huge drops of rain fell at intervals, hissing as they fell on the blazing fires, and pattered on the skins which the hunters were hurriedly laying on their exposed baggage. The mules near the camp cropped the grass with quick and greedy bites round the circuit of their pickets, as if conscious that the storm would soon prevent their feeding, and were already humping their backs as the chilling rain fell upon their flanks. The prairie wolves crept closer to the camp, and in the confusion that ensued from the hurry of the trappers to cover the perishable portions of their equipment, contrived more than once to dart off with a piece of meat, when their peculiar and mournful chiding would be heard as they fought for the possession of the ravished morsel.

As soon as every thing was duly protected, the men set to work to spread their beds, those who had not troubled themselves to erect a shelter getting under the lee of the piles of packs and saddles; while Killbuck, disdaining even such care of his carcass, threw his buffalo robe on the bare ground, declaring his intention to "take" what was coming at all hazards, and "any how." Selecting a high spot, he drew his knife and proceeded to cut drains round it, to prevent the water running into him as he lay; then taking a single robe he carefully spread it, placing under the end farthest from the fire a large stone brought from the creek. Having satisfactorily adjusted this pillow, he adds another robe to the one already laid, and places over all a Navajo blanket, supposed to be impervious to rain. Then he divests himself of his pouch and powder-horn,[719] which, with his rifle, he places inside his bed, and quickly covers up lest the wet reach them. Having performed these operations to his satisfaction, he lighted his pipe by the hissing embers of the half-extinguished fire (for by this time the rain was pouring in torrents,) and going the rounds of the picketed animals, and cautioning the guard round the camp to keep their "eyes skinned, for there would be 'powder burned' before morning," he returned to the fire, and kicking with his mocassined foot the slumbering ashes, squats down before it, and thus soliloquises:—

"Thirty year have I been knocking about these mountains from Missoura's head as far sothe as the starving Gila. I've trapped a 'heap,'[24] and many a hundred pack of beaver I've traded in my time, wagh! What has come of it, and whar's the dollars as ought to be in my possibles? Whar's the ind of this, I say? Is a man to be hunted by Injuns all his days? Many's the time I've said I'd strike for Taos, and trap a squaw, for this child's getting old, and feels like wanting a woman's face about his lodge for the balance of his days; but when it comes to caching of the old traps, I've the smallest kind of heart, I have. Certain, the old state comes across my mind now and again, but who's thar to remember my old body? But them diggings gets too over crowded now-a-days, and its hard to fetch breath amongst them big bands of corncrackers to Missoura. Beside, it goes against natur to leave bufler meat and feed on hog; and them white gals are too much like picturs, and a deal too 'fofarraw' (fanfaron.) No; darn the settlements, I say. It won't shine, and whar's the dollars? Howsever, beaver's 'bound to rise;' human natur can't go on selling beaver a dollar a pound; no, no, that arn't a going to shine much longer, I know. Them was the times when this child first went to the mountains: six dollars the plew—old 'un or kitten. Wagh! but it's bound to rise, I says agin; and hyar's a coon knows whar to lay his hand on a dozen pack right handy, and then he'll take the Taos trail, wagh!"

Thus soliloquising, Killbuck knocked the ashes from his pipe, and placed it in the gaily ornamented case which hung round his neck, drew his knife-belt a couple of holes tighter, and once more donned his pouch and powder-horn, took his rifle, which he carefully covered with the folds of his Navajo blanket, and striding into the darkness, cautiously reconnoitred the vicinity of the camp. When he returned to the fire he sat himself down as before, but this time with his rifle across his lap; and at intervals his keen gray eye glanced piercingly around, particularly towards an old, weatherbeaten, and grizzled mule, who now, old stager as she was, having filled her belly, was standing lazily over her picket pin, with head bent down and her long ears flapping over her face, her limbs gathered under her, and with back arched to throw off the rain, tottering from side to side as she rests and sleeps.

"Yep, old gal!" cried Killbuck to the animal, at the same time picking a piece of burnt wood from the fire and throwing it at her, at which the mule gathered itself up and cocked her ears as she recognised her master's voice. "Yep, old gal! and keep your nose open; thar's brown skin about, I'm thinkin', and maybe you'll get 'roped' (lasso'd) by a Rapaho afore mornin." Again the old trapper settled himself before the fire; and soon his head began to nod, as drowsiness stole over him. Already he was in the land of dreams; revelling amongst bands of "fat cow," or hunting along a stream well peopled with beaver; with no Indian "sign" to disturb him, and the merry rendezvous in close perspective, and his peltry selling briskly at six dollars the plew, and galore of alcohol to ratify the trade. Or, perhaps, threading the back trail of his memory, he passed rapidly through the perilous vicissitudes of his hard, hard life—starving one day, revelling in abundance the next; now beset by whooping savages thirsting for his blood, baying his enemies like the hunted deer, but with the unflinching courage of a man; now, all care thrown aside, secure and[720] forgetful of the past, a welcome guest in the hospitable trading fort; or back, as the trail gets fainter, to his childhood's home in the brown forests of old Kentuck, tended and cared for—no thought his, but to enjoy the homminy and johnny cakes of his thrifty mother. Once more, in warm and well remembered homespun, he sits on the snake fence round the old clearing, and munching his hoe-cake at set of sun, listens to the mournful note of the whip-poor-will, or the harsh cry of the noisy catbird, or watches the agile gambols of the squirrels as they chase each other, chattering the while, from branch to branch of the lofty tameracks, wondering how long it will be before he will be able to lift his father's heavy rifle, and use it against the tempting game. Sleep, however, sat lightly on the eyes of the wary mountaineer, and a snort from the old mule in an instant stretched his every nerve; and, without a movement of his body, the keen eye fixed itself upon the mule, which now was standing with head bent round, and eyes and ears pointed in one direction, snuffing the night air and snorting with apparent fear. A low sound from the wakeful hunter roused the others from their sleep; and raising their bodies from their well-soaked beds, a single word apprised them of their danger.

"Injuns!"

Scarcely was the word out of Killbuck's lips, when, above the howling of the furious wind, and the pattering of the rain, a hundred savage yells broke suddenly upon their ears from all directions round the camp; a score of rifle-shots rattled from the thicket, and a cloud of arrows whistled through the air, at the same time that a crowd of Indians charged upon the picketed animals. "Owgh, owgh—owgh—owgh—g-h-h." "A foot, by gor!" shouted Killbuck, "and the old mule gone at that. On 'em, boys, for old Kentuck!" and rushed towards his mule, which was jumping and snorting mad with fright, as a naked Indian strove to fasten a lariat round her nose, having already cut the rope which fastened her to the plcket-pin.

"Quit that, you cussed devil!" roared the trapper, as he jumped upon the savage, and without raising his rifle to his shoulder, made a deliberate thrust with the muzzle at his naked breast, striking him full, and at the same time pulling the trigger, actually driving the Indian two paces backwards with the shock, when he fell in a heap and dead. But at the same moment, an Indian, sweeping his club round his head, brought it with fatal force down upon Killbuck's skull, and staggering for a moment, he threw out his arms wildly into the air, and fell headlong to the ground.

"Owgh! owgh, owgh-h-h!" cried the Rapaho as the white fell, and, striding over the prostrate body, seized with his left hand the middle lock of the trapper's long hair, and drew his knife round the head to separate the scalp from the skull. As he bent over to his work, the trapper named La Bonté caught sight of the strait his companion was in, and quick as thought rushed at the Indian, burying his knife to the hilt between his shoulders, and with a gasping shudder, the Rapaho fell dead upon the prostrate body of his foe.

The attack, however, lasted but a few seconds. The dash at the animals had been entirely successful, and, driving them before them, with loud cries, the Indians disappeared quickly in the darkness. Without waiting for daylight, two of the three trappers who alone were to be seen, and who had been within the shanties at the time of attack, without a moment's delay commenced packing two horses, which having been fastened to the shanties had escaped the Indians, and placing their squaws upon them, showering curses and imprecations on their enemies, left the camp, fearful of another onset, and resolved to retreat and câche themselves until the danger was over. Not so La Bonté, who, stout and true, had done his best in the fight, and now sought the body of his old comrade, from which, before he could examine the wounds, he had first to remove the corpse of the Indian he had slain. Killbuck still breathed. He had been stunned; but, revived by the cold rain beating upon his face, he soon opened his eyes, recognising his trusty friend, who, sitting down, lifted his head into his lap, and wiped away the blood which streamed from the wounded scalp.

[721]"Is the top-knot gone, boy?" asked Killbuck; "for my head feels queersome, I tell you."

"Thar's the Injun as felt like lifting it," answered the other, kicking the dead body with his foot.

"Wagh! boy, you've struck a coup; so scalp the nigger right off, and then fetch me a drink."

The morning broke clear and cold. With the exception of a light cloud which hung over Pike's Peak, the sky was spotless; and a perfect calm had succeeded the boisterous winds of the previous night. The creek was swollen and turbid with the rains; and as La Bonté proceeded a little distance down the bank to find a passage to the water, he suddenly stopped short, and an involuntary cry escaped him. Within a few feet of the bank lay the body of one of his companions who had formed the guard at the time of the Indians' attack. It was lying on the face, pierced through the chest with an arrow which was buried to the very feathers, and the scalp torn from the bloody skull. Beyond, and all within a hundred yards, lay the three others, dead and similarly mutilated. So certain had been the aim, and so close the enemy, that each had died without a struggle, and consequently had been unable to alarm the camp. La Bonté, with a glance at the bank, saw at once that the wily Indians had crept along the creek, the noise of the storm facilitating their approach undiscovered, and crawling up the bank, had watched their opportunity to shoot simultaneously the four hunters who were standing guard.

Returning to Killbuck, he apprised him of the melancholy fate of their companions, and held a council of war as to their proceedings. The old hunter's mind was soon made up. "First," said he, "I get back my old mule; she's carried me and my traps these twelve years, and I aint a goin' to lose her yet. Second, I feel like taking hair, and some Rapahós has to 'go under' for this night's work. Third, We have got to câche the beaver. Fourth, We take the Injun trail, wharever it leads."

No more daring mountaineer than La Bonté ever trapped a beaver, and no counsel could have more exactly tallied with his own inclination than the law laid down by old Killbuck.

"Agreed," was his answer, and forthwith he set about forming a câche. In this instance they had not sufficient time to construct a regular one, so contented themselves with securing their packs of beaver in buffalo robes, and tying them in the forks of several cotton-woods, under which the camp had been made. This done, they lit a fire, and cooked some buffalo meat; and, whilst smoking a pipe, carefully cleaned their rifles, and filled their horns and pouches with good store of ammunition.

A prominent feature in the character of the hunters of the far west is their quick determination and resolve in cases of extreme difficulty and peril, and their fixedness of purpose, when any plan of operations has been laid requiring bold and instant action in carrying out. It is here that they so infinitely surpass the savage Indian, in bringing to a successful issue their numerous hostile expeditions against the natural foe of the white man in the wild and barbarous regions of the west. Ready to resolve as they are prompt to execute, and with the advantage of far greater dash and daring with equal subtlety and caution, they possess great advantage over the vacillating Indian, whose superstitious mind in a great degree paralyses the physical energy of his active body; and in waiting for propitious signs and seasons before he undertakes an enterprise, he loses the opportunity which his white and more civilised enemy knows so well to profit by.

Killbuck and La Bonté were no exceptions to this characteristic rule, and, before the sun was a hand's-breadth above the eastern horizon, the two hunters were running on the trail of the victorious Indians. Striking from the creek where the night attack was made, they crossed to another known as Kioway, running parallel to Bijou, a few hours' journey westward, and likewise heading in the "divide." Following this to its forks, they struck into the upland prairies lying at the foot of the mountains; and crossing to the numerous water-courses which feed the creek called "Vermillion" or "Cherry," they pursued the trail over[722] the mountain-spurs until it reached a fork of the Boiling Spring. Here the war-party had halted and held a consultation, for from this point the trail turned at a tangent to the westward, and entered the rugged gorges of the mountains. It was now evident to the two trappers that their destination was the Bayou Salade,—a mountain valley which is a favourite resort of the buffalo in the winter season, and also, and for this reason, often frequented by the Yuta Indians as their wintering ground. That the Rapahos were on a war expedition against the Yutas, there was little doubt; and Killbuck, who knew every inch of the ground, saw at once, by the direction the trail had taken, that they were making for the Bayou in order to surprise their enemies, and, therefore, were not following the usual Indian trail up the cañon of the Boiling Spring River. Having made up his mind to this, he at once struck across the broken ground lying at the foot of the mountains, steering a course a little to the eastward of north, or almost in the direction whence he had come: and then, pointing westward, about noon he crossed a mountain chain, and descending into a ravine through which a little rivulet tumbled over its rocky bed, he at once proved the correctness of his judgment by striking the Indian trail, now quite fresh, as it wound through the cañon along the bank of the stream. The route he had followed, which would have been impracticable to pack animals, had saved at least half-a-day's journey, and brought them within a short distance of the object of their pursuit; for, at the head of the gorge, a lofty bluff presenting itself, the hunters ascended to the summit, and, looking down, descried at their very feet the Indian camp, with their own stolen cavallada feeding quietly round.

"Wagh!" exclaimed both the hunters in a breath. "And thar's the old ga'l at that," chuckled Killbuck, as he recognised his old grizzled mule making good play at the rich buffalo grass with which these mountain valleys abound.

"If we don't make 'a raise' afore long, I wouldn't say so. Thar plans is plain to this child as beaver sign. They're after Yute hair, as certain as this gun has got hind-sights; but they ar'nt agoin' to pack them animals after 'em, and have crawled like 'rattlers' along this bottom to câche 'em, till they come back from the Bayou,—and maybe they'll leave half a dozen 'soldiers'[25] with 'em."

How right the wily trapper was in his conjectures will be shortly proved. Meanwhile, with his companion, he descended the bluff, and pushing his way into a thicket of dwarf pine and cedar, sat down on a log, and drew from an end of the blanket, which was strapped on his shoulder, a portion of a buffalo's liver, which they both discussed with infinite relish—and raw; eating in lieu of bread (an unknown luxury in these parts) sundry strips of dried fat. To have kindled a fire would have been dangerous, since it was not impossible that some of the Indians might leave their camp to hunt, when the smoke would at once have discovered the presence of enemies. A light was struck, however, for their pipes, and after enjoying this true consolation for some time, they laid a blanket on the ground, and, side by side, soon fell asleep.

If Killbuck had been a prophet, or the most prescient of "medicine men," he could not have more exactly predicted the movements in the Indian camp. About three hours before "sun-down," he rose and shook himself, which movement was sufficient to awaken his companion. Telling La Bonté to lie down again and rest, he gave him to understand that he was about to reconnoitre the enemy's camp; and after examining carefully his rifle, and drawing his knife-belt a hole or two tighter, he proceeded on his dangerous errand. Ascending the same bluff from whence he had first discovered the Indian camp, he glanced rapidly round, and made himself master of the features of the ground—choosing a ravine by which he might approach the camp more closely, and without danger of being discovered. This was soon effected; and in half an hour the trapper was[723] lying on his belly on the summit of a pine-covered bluff, which overlooked the Indians within easy rifle-shot, and so perfectly concealed by the low spreading branches of the cedar and arbor-vitæ, that not a particle of his person could be detected; unless, indeed, his sharp, twinkling gray eye contrasted too strongly with the green boughs that covered the rest of his face. Moreover, there was no danger of their hitting upon his trail, for he had been careful to pick his steps on the rock-covered ground, so that not a track of his mocassin was visible. Here he lay, still as a carcagien in wait for a deer, only now and then shaking the boughs as his body quivered with a suppressed chuckle, when any movement in the Indian camp caused him to laugh inwardly at his (if they had known it) unwelcome propinquity. He was not a little surprised, however, to discover that the party was much smaller than he had imagined, counting only forty warriors; and this assured him that the band had divided, one half taking the Yute trail by the Boiling Spring, the other (the one before him) taking a longer circuit in order to reach the Bayou, and make the attack on the Yutas, in a different direction.

At this moment the Indians were in deliberation. Seated in a large circle round a very small fire,[26] the smoke from which ascended in a thin straight column, they each in turn puffed a huge cloud of smoke from three or four long cherry-stemmed pipes, which went the round of the party; each warrior touching the ground with the heel of the pipe-bowl, and turning the stem upwards and away from him, as "medicine" to the Great Spirit, before he himself inhaled the fragrant kinnik-kinnik. The council, however, was not general, for no more than fifteen of the older warriors took part in it, the others sitting outside and at some little distance from the circle. Behind each were his arms—bow and quiver, and shield hanging from a spear stuck in the ground, and a few guns in ornamented covers of buckskin were added to some of the equipments.

Near the fire, and in the centre of the inner circle, a spear was fixed upright in the ground, and on this dangled the four scalps of the trappers killed the preceding night; and underneath them, affixed to the same spear, was the mystic "medicine bag," by which Killbuck knew that the band before him was under the command of the head chief of the tribe.

Towards the grim trophies on the spear, the warriors, who in turn addressed the council, frequently pointed—more than one, as he did so, making the gyratory motion of the right hand and arm, which the Indians use in describing that they have gained an advantage by skill or cunning. Then pointing westward, the speaker would thrust out his arm, extending his fingers at the same time, and closing and reopening them several times, meaning, that although four scalps already ornamented the "medicine" pole, they were as nothing compared to the numerous trophies they would bring from the Salt Valley, where they expected to find their hereditary enemies the Yutes. "That now was not the time to count their coups," (for at this moment one of the warriors rose from his seat, and, swelling with pride, advanced towards the spear, pointing to one of the scalps, and then striking his open hand on his naked breast, jumped into the air, as if about to go through the ceremony.) "That before many suns all their spears together would not hold the scalps they had taken, and that then they would return to their village, and spend a moon in relating their achievements, and counting coups."

All this Killbuck learned: thanks to his knowledge of the language of signs—a master of which, if even he have no ears or tongue, never fails to understand, and be understood by, any of the hundred tribes whose languages are perfectly distinct and different. He learned, moreover, that at[724] sundown the greater part of the band would resume the trail, in order to reach the Bayou by the earliest dawn; and also, that no more than four or five of the younger warriors would remain with the captured animals. Still the hunter remained in his position until the sun had disappeared behind the ridge; when, taking up their arms, and throwing their buffalo robes on their shoulders, the war party of Rapahos, one behind the other, with noiseless step, and silent as the dumb, moved away from the camp; and, when the last dusky form had disappeared behind a point of rocks which shut in the northern end of the little valley or ravine, Killbuck withdrew his head from its screen, crawled backwards on his stomach from the edge of the bluff, and, rising from the ground, shook and stretched himself; then gave one cautious look around, and immediately proceeded to rejoin his companion.

"Lave, (get up,) boy," said Killbuck, as soon as he reached him. "Hyar's grainin' to do afore long,—and sun's about down, I'm thinking."

"Ready, old hos," answered La Bonté, giving himself a shake. "What's the sign like, and how many's the lodge?"

"Fresh, and five, boy. How do you feel?"

"Half froze for hair. Wagh!"

"We'll have moon to-night, and as soon as she gets up, we'll make 'em 'come.'"

Killbuck then described to his companion what he had seen, and detailed his plan—which was simply to wait until the moon afforded sufficient light, approach the Indian camp and charge into it,—"lift" as much "hair" as they could, recover their animals, and start at once to the Bayou and join the friendly Yutes, warning them of the coming danger. The risk of falling in with either of the Rapaho bands was hardly considered; to avoid this, they trusted to their own foresight, and the legs of their mules, should they encounter them.

Between sundown and the rising of the moon, they had leisure to eat their supper, which, as before, consisted of raw buffalo-liver; after discussing which, Killbuck pronounced himself "a 'heap' better," and ready for "huggin."

In the short interval of almost perfect darkness which preceded the moonlight, and taking advantage of one of the frequent squalls of wind which howl down the narrow gorges of the mountains, these two determined men, with footsteps noiseless as the panther's, crawled to the edge of the little plateau of some hundred yards' square, where the five Indians in charge of the animals were seated round the fire, perfectly unconscious of the vicinity of danger. Several clumps of cedar bushes dotted the small prairie, and amongst these the well-hobbled mules and horses were feeding. These animals, accustomed to the presence of whites, would not notice the two hunters as they crept from clump to clump nearer to the fire, and also served, even if the Indians should be on the watch, to conceal their movements from them.

This the two men at once perceived; but old Killbuck knew that if he passed within sight or smell of his mule, he would be received with a hinny of recognition, which would at once alarm the enemy. He therefore first ascertained where his own animal was feeding, which luckily was at the farther side of the prairie, and would not interfere with his proceedings.

Threading their way amongst the feeding mules, they approached a clump of bushes about forty yards from the spot where the unconscious savages were seated smoking round the fire; and here they awaited, scarcely drawing breath the while, the moment when the moon rose above the mountain into the clear cold sky, and gave them light sufficient to make sure their work of bloody retribution. Not a pulsation in the hearts of these stern determined men beat higher than its wont; not the tremour of a nerve disturbed their frame. With lips compressed, they stood with ready rifles, the pistols loosened in their belts, and scalp-knives handy to their gripe. The lurid glow of the coming moon already shot into the sky above the ridge, which stood out in bolder relief against the light; and the luminary herself was just peering over the mountain, illuminating its pine-clad[725] summit, and throwing its beams on an opposite peak, when Killbuck touched his companion's arm, and whispered, "Wait for the full light, boy."

At this moment, however, unseen by the trapper, the old and grizzled mule had gradually approached, as it fed along the plateau; and, when within a few paces of their retreat, a gleam of moonshine revealed to the animal the erect forms of the two whites. Suddenly she stood still and pricked her ears, and stretching out her neck and nose, snuffed the air. Well she knew her old master.

Killbuck, with eyes fixed upon the Indians, was on the point of giving the signal of attack to his comrade, when the shrill hinny of his mule reverberated through the gorge. The next instant the Indians were jumping to their feet and seizing their arms, when, with a loud shout, Killbuck, crying, "At 'em boy; give the niggurs h——!" rushed from his concealment, and with La Bonté by his side, yelling a fierce war-whoop, sprang upon the startled savages.

Panic-struck with the suddenness of the attack, the Indians scarcely knew where to run, and for a moment stood huddled together like sheep. Down dropped Killbuck on his knee, and stretching out his wiping stick, planted it on the ground to the extreme length of his arm. As methodically and as coolly as if about to aim at a deer, he raised his rifle to this rest and pulled the trigger. At the report an Indian fell forward on his face, at the same moment that La Bonté, with equal certainty of aim and like effect, discharged his own rifle.

The three surviving Indians, seeing that their assailants were but two, and knowing that their guns were empty, came on with loud yells. With the left hand grasping a bunch of arrows, and holding the bow already bent and arrow fixed, they steadily advanced, bending low to the ground to get their objects between them and the light, and thus render their aim more certain. The trappers, however, did not care to wait for them. Drawing their pistols, they charged at once; and although the bows twanged, and the three arrows struck their mark, on they rushed, discharging their pistols at close quarters; La Bonté throwing his empty one at the head of an Indian who was pulling his second arrow to its head at a yard distance, and drawing his knife at the same moment, made at him.

But the Indian broke and ran, followed by his living companion; and as soon as Killbuck could ram home another ball, he sent a shot flying after them as they scrambled up the mountain side, leaving in their fright and hurry their bows and shields on the ground.

The fight was over, and the two trappers confronted each other: "We've given 'em h—!" laughed Killbuck.

"Well, we have," answered the other, pulling an arrow out of his arm.—"Wagh!"

"We'll lift the hair, any how," continued the first, "afore the scalp's cold."

Taking his whetstone from the little sheath on his knife-belt, the trapper proceeded to "edge" his knife, and then stepping to the first prostrate body, he turned it over to examine if any symptom of vitality remained. "Thrown cold," he exclaimed, as he dropped the lifeless arm he had lifted. "I sighted him about the long ribs, but the light was bad, and I could'nt get a 'bead' 'off hand,' any how."

Seizing with his left hand the long and braided lock on the centre of the Indian's head, he passed the point edge of his keen butcher-knife round the parting, turning it at the same time under the skin to separate the scalp from the skull; then, with a quick and sudden jerk of his hand, he removed it entirely from the head, and giving the reeking trophy a wring upon the grass to free it from the blood, he coolly hitched it under his belt, and proceeded to the next; but seeing La Bonté operating upon this, he sought the third, who lay some little distance from the others. This one was still alive, a pistol-ball having passed through his body, without touching a vital spot.

"Gut-shot is this niggur," exclaimed the trapper; "them pistols never throws 'em in their tracks;" and thrusting his knife, for mercy's sake, into the bosom of the Indian, he likewise tore the scalp-lock from his head, and placed it with the other.

La Bonté had received two trivial[726] wounds, and Killbuck till now had been walking about with an arrow sticking through the fleshy part of his thigh, the point being perceptible near the surface of the other side. To free his leg from the painful encumbrance, he thrust the weapon completely through, and then, cutting off the arrow-head below the barb, he drew it out, the blood flowing freely from the wound. A tourniquet of buckskin soon stopped this, and, heedless of the pain, the hardy mountaineer sought for his old mule, and quickly brought it to the fire (which La Bonté had rekindled,) lavishing many a caress, and most comical terms of endearment, upon the faithful companion of his wanderings. They found all the animals safe and well, and after eating heartily of some venison which the Indians had been cooking at the moment of the attack, made instant preparations to quit the scene of their exploit, not wishing to trust to the chance of the Rapahos being too frightened to again molest them.

Having no saddles, they secured buffalo robes on the backs of two mules—Killbuck, of course, riding his own—and lost no time in proceeding on their way. They followed the course of the Indians up the stream, and found that it kept the cañons and gorges of the mountains where the road was better; but it was with no little difficulty that they made their way, the ground being much broken and covered with rocks. Killbuck's wound became very painful, and his leg stiffened and swelled distressingly, but he still pushed on all night, and, at daybreak, recognising their position, he left the Indian trail, and followed a little creek which rose in a mountain chain of moderate elevation, and above which, and to the south, Pike's Peak towered high into the clouds. With great difficulty they crossed this ridge, and ascending and descending several smaller ones which gradually smoothed away as they met the valley, about three hours after sunrise they found themselves in the south-east corner of the Bayou Salade.

The Bayou Salade, or Salt Valley, is the most southern of three very extensive valleys, forming a series of table-lands in the very centre of the main chain of the Rocky Mountains, known to the trappers by the name of the "Parks". The numerous streams by which they are watered abound in the valuable fur-bearing beaver, whilst every species of game common to the west is found here in great abundance. The Bayou Salade especially, owing to the salitrose nature of the soil and springs, is the favourite resort of all the larger animals common to the mountains; and, in the sheltered prairies of the Bayou, the buffalo, forsaking the barren and inclement regions of the exposed plains, frequent these upland valleys in the winter months; and feeding upon the rich and nutritious buffalo grass which, on the bare prairies, at that season, is either dry and rotten or entirely exhausted, not only are enabled to sustain life, but retain a great portion of the "condition" that the abundant fall and summer pasture of the lowlands has laid upon their bones. Therefore is this valley sought by the Indians as a wintering ground; and its occupancy has been disputed by most of the mountain tribes, and long and bloody wars have been waged to make good the claims set forth by Yuta, Rapaho, Sioux, and Shians. However, to the first of these it may be said now to belong, since their "big village" has wintered there for many successive years; whilst the Rapahos seldom visit it unless on war expeditions, against the Yutas.

Judging, from the direction the Rapahos were taking, that the friendly tribe of Yutas were there already, the trappers had resolved to join them as soon as possible; and therefore, without resting, pushed on through the uplands, and, towards the middle of the day, had the satisfaction of descrying the conical lodges of the village, situated on a large level plateau, through which ran a mountain stream. A numerous band of mules and horses was scattered over the pasture, and round them several mounted Indians were keeping guard. As the trappers descended the bluffs into the plain, some straggling Indians caught sight of them; and instantly one of them, lassoing a horse from the herd, mounted it, barebacked, and flew like wind to the village to spread the news. Soon the lodges disgorged their inmates; first the women and children rushed to that side where the strangers[727] were approaching; then the younger Indians, hardly able to restrain their curiosity, mounted their horses, and some galloped forth to meet them. The old chiefs, enveloped in buffalo robes, (soft and delicately dressed as the Yutes alone know how,) and with tomahawk held in one hand and resting in hollow of the other arm, sallied last of all from their lodges, and, squatting in a row on a sunny bank outside the village, awaited, with dignified composure, the arrival of the whites. Killbuck was well known to most of them, having trapped in their country and traded with them years before at Roubideau's fort at the head waters of the Rio Grande. After shaking hands with all who presented themselves, he at once gave them to understand that their enemies, the Rapahos, were at hand, with a hundred warriors at least, elated by the coup they had just struck the whites, bringing, moreover, four white scalps to incite them to brave deeds.

At this news the whole village was speedily in commotion: the war-shout was taken up from lodge to lodge; the squaws began to lament and tear their hair; the warriors to paint and arm themselves. The elder chiefs immediately met in council, and, over the medicine-pipe, debated as to the best course to pursue,—whether to wait the attack, or sally out and meet the enemy. In the meantime, the braves were collected together by the chiefs of their respective bands, and scouts, mounted on the fastest horses, despatched in every direction to procure intelligence of the enemy.

The two whites, after watering their mules and picketing them in some good grass near the village, drew near the council fire, without, however, joining in the "talk," until they were invited to take their seats by the eldest chief. Then Killbuck was called upon to give his opinion as to the direction in which he judged the Rapahos to be approaching, which he delivered in their own language, with which he was well acquainted. In a short time the council broke up, and, without noise or confusion, a band of one hundred chosen warriors left the village, immediately after one of the scouts had galloped in and communicated some intelligence to the chiefs. Killbuck and La Bonté volunteered to accompany the war-party, weak and exhausted as they were; but this was negatived by the chiefs, who left their white brothers to the care of the women, who tended their wounds, now stiff and painful; and spreading their buffalo robes in a warm and roomy lodge, left them to the repose they so much needed.

The next morning, Killbuck's leg was greatly inflamed, and he was unable to leave the lodge; but he made his companion bring the old mule to the door, when he gave her a couple of ears of Indian corn, the last remains of the slender store brought by the Indians from the Navajo country. The day passed, and with sundown came no tidings of the war-party, which caused no little wailing on the part of the squaws, but which the whites interpreted as a favourable augury. A little after sunrise, on the second morning, the long line of the returning warriors was discerned winding over the prairie, and a scout having galloped in to bring the news of a great victory, the whole village was soon in a ferment of paint and drumming. A short distance from the lodges, the warriors halted to await the approach of the people. Old men, children, and squaws, sitting astride their horses, sallied out to escort the victorious party in triumph to the village. With loud shouts and, songs, and drums beating the monotonous Indian time, they advanced and encircled the returning braves, one of whom, with his face covered with black paint, carried a pole on which dangled thirteen scalps, the trophies of the expedition. As he lifted these on high, they were saluted with deafening whoops and cries of exultation and savage joy. In this manner they entered the village, almost before the friends of those fallen in the fight had ascertained their losses. Then the shouts of delight were converted into yells of grief; the mothers and wives of those braves who had been killed, (and seven had "gone under,") presently returned with their faces, necks, and hands blackened, and danced and howled round the scalp pole, which had been deposited in the centre of the village,[728] in front of the lodge of the great chief.

Killbuck now learned that a scout having brought intelligence that the two bands of Rapahos were hastening to form a junction, as soon as they learned that their approach was discovered, the Yutas had successfully prevented it; and attacking one party, had entirely defeated it, killing thirteen of the Rapaho braves. The other party had fled on seeing the issue of the fight, and a few of the Yuta warriors were now pursuing them.

To celebrate so signal a victory great preparations sounded their notes through the village. Paints,—vermilion and ochres—red and yellow,—were in great request; whilst the scrapings of charred wood, mixed with gunpowder, were used as substitute for black, the medicine colour.

The lodges of the village, numbering some two hundred or more, were erected in parallel lines, and covered a large space of the level prairie in shape of a parallelogram. In the centre, however, the space which half a dozen lodges in length would have taken up was left unoccupied, save by one large one, of red-painted buffalo skins, tatooed with the mystic totems of the "medicine" peculiar to the nation. In front of this stood the grim scalp-pole, like a decayed tree trunk, its bloody fruit tossing in the wind; and on another, at a few feet distance, was hung the "bag" with its mysterious contents. Before each lodge a tripod of spears supported the arms and shields of the Yuta chivalry, and on many of them, smoke-dried scalps rattled in the wind, former trophies of the dusky knights who were arming themselves within. Heraldic devices were not wanting,—not, however, graved upon the shield, but hanging from the spear-head, the actual "totem" of the warrior it distinguished. The rattlesnake, the otter, the carcagien, the mountain badger, the war-eagle, the kon-qua-kish, the porcupine, the fox, &c., dangled their well-stuffed skins, and displayed the guardian "medicine" of the warrior it pertained to, and represented the mental and corporeal qualities which were supposed to characterise the brave to whom it belonged.

From the centre lodge, two or three "medicine men," fantastically attired in the skins of wolves and bears, and bearing long peeled wands of cherry in their hands, occasionally emerged to tend a very small fire which they had kindled in the centre of the open space; and, when a thin column of smoke rose from it, one of them transferred the scalp-pole, planting it obliquely across the fire. Squaws in robes of whitely dressed buckskins, garnished with beads and porcupines' quills, and their faces painted bright red and black, then appeared. These ranged themselves round the outside of the square, the boys and children of all ages, mounted on bare-backed horses, galloping and screaming round and round, with all the eagerness of excitement and curiosity.

Presently the braves and warriors made their appearance, and squatted round the fire in two circles, those who had been engaged on the expedition being in the first or smaller one. One medicine man sat under the scalp-pole, having a drum between his knees, which he tapped at intervals with his hand, eliciting from the instrument a hollow monotonous sound. A bevy of women, shoulder to shoulder, then advanced from the four sides of the square, and some shaking a rattle-drum in time with their steps, commenced a jumping jerking dance, now lifting one foot from the ground, and now rising with both, accompanying the dance with a low chant, which swelled from a low whisper to the utmost extent of their voices—now dying away, and again bursting into vociferous measure. Thus they advanced to the centre and retreated to their former positions; when six squaws, with their faces painted a deadened black, made their appearance from the crowd, and, in a soft and sweet measure, chanted a lament for the braves the nation had lost in the late battle: but soon as they drew near the scalp-pole, their melancholy note changed to the music (to them) of gratified revenge. In a succession of jumps, raising the feet alternately but a little distance from the ground, they made their way, through an interval left in the circle of warriors, to the grim pole, and encircling it, danced in perfect silence round it for a few[729] moments. Then they burst forth with an extemporary song, laudatory of the achievements of their victorious braves. They addressed the scalps as "sisters," (to be called a squaw is the greatest insult that can be offered to an Indian,) and, spitting at them, upbraided them with their rashness in leaving their lodges to seek for Yuta husbands; "that the Yuta warriors and young men despised them, and chastised them for their forwardness and presumption, bringing back their scalps to their own women."

After sufficiently proving that they had any thing but lost the use of their tongues, but possessed as fair a length of that formidable weapon as any of their sex, they withdrew, and left the field in undisputed possession of the men: who, accompanied by taps of the drum, and the noise of many rattles, broke out into a war-song, in which the valour of themselves was not hidden in a bushel, nor modestly refused the light of day. After this came the more interesting ceremony of a warrior "counting his coups."

A young brave, with his face painted black, mounted on a white horse mysteriously marked with red clay, and naked to the breech clout, holding in his hand a long taper lance, rode into the circle, and paced slowly round it; then, flourishing his spear on high, he darted to the scalp-pole, round which the warriors were now sitting in a semicircle; and in a loud voice, and with furious gesticulations, related his exploits, the drums tapping at the conclusion of each. On his spear hung seven scalps, and holding it vertically above his head, and commencing with the top one, he narrated the feats in which he had raised the trophy hair. When he had run through these, the drums tapped loudly, and several of the old chiefs shook their rattles, in corroboration of the truth of his achievements. The brave, swelling with pride, then pointed to the fresh and bloody scalps hanging on the pole. Two of these had been torn from the heads of Rapahos struck by his own hand, and this feat, the exploit of the day, had entitled him to the honour of counting his coups. Then, sticking his spear into the ground by the side of the pole, he struck his hand twice on his brawny and naked chest, turned short round, and, swift as the antelope, galloped into the plain: as if overcome by the shock his modesty had received in being obliged to recount his own high-sounding deeds.

"Wagh!" exclaimed old Killbuck, as he left the circle, and pointed his pipe-stem towards the fast-fading figure of the brave, "that Injun's heart's about as big as ever it will be, I'm thinking."

With the Yutes, Killbuck and La Bonté remained during the winter; and when the spring sun had opened the ice-bound creeks, and melted the snow on the mountains; and its genial warmth had expanded the earth and permitted the roots of the grass to "live" once more, and throw out green and tender shoots, the two trappers bade adieu to the hospitable Indians, who were breaking up their village in order to start for the valleys of the Del Norte. As they followed the trail from the bayou, at sundown, just as they were thinking of camping, they observed ahead of them a solitary horseman riding along, followed by three mules. His hunting-frock of fringed buckskin, and rifle resting across the horn of his saddle, at once proclaimed him white; but as he saw the mountaineers winding through the cañon, driving before them half a dozen horses, he judged they might possibly be Indians and enemies, the more so as their dress was not the usual costume of the whites. The trappers, therefore, saw the stranger raise the rifle in the hollow of his arm, and, gathering up his horse, ride steadily to meet them, as soon as he observed they were but two; and two to one in mountain calculation are scarcely considered odds, if red skin to white.

However, on nearing them, the stranger discovered his mistake; and, throwing his rifle across the saddle once more, reined in his horse and waited their approach; for the spot where he then stood presented an excellent camping-ground, with abundance of dry wood and convenient water.

"Where from, stranger?"

"The divide, and to the bayou for meat; and you are from there, I see. Any buffalo come in yet?"

[730]"Heap, and seal-fat at that. What's the sign out on the plains?"

"War-party of Rapahos passed Squirrel at sundown yesterday, and nearly raised my animals. Sign, too, of more on left fork of Boiling Spring. No buffalo between this and Bijou. Do you feel like camping?"

"Well, we do. But whar's your companyeros?"

"I'm alone."

"Alone! Wagh! how do you get your animals along?"

"I go ahead, and they follow the horse."

"Well, that beats all! That's a smart-looking hos now; and runs some, I'm thinking."

"Well, it does."

"Whar's them mules from? They look like Californy."

"Mexican country—away down south."

"H——! Whar's yourself from?"

"There away, too."

"What's beaver worth in Taos?"

"Dollar."

"In Saint Louiy?"

"Same."

"H——! Any call for buckskin?"

"A heap! The soldiers in Santa Fé are half froze for leather; and mocassins fetch two dollars, easy."

"Wagh! How's trade on Arkansa, and what's doin to the Fort?"

"Shians at Big Timber, and Bent's people trading smart. On North Fork, Jim Waters got a hundred pack right off, and Sioux making more."

"Whar's Bill Williams?"

"Gone under they say: the Diggers took his hair."

"How's powder goin?"

"Two dollars a pint."

"Bacca?"

"A plew a plug."

"Got any about you?"

"Have so."

"Give us a chaw; and now let's camp."

Whilst unpacking their own animals, the two trappers could not refrain from glancing, every now and then, with no little astonishment, at the solitary stranger they had so unexpectedly encountered. If truth be told, his appearance not a little perplexed them. His hunting frock of buckskin, shining with grease, and fringed pantaloons, over which the well-greased butcher-knife had evidently been often wiped after cutting his food, or butchering the carcass of deer and buffalo, were of genuine mountain make. His face, clean shaved, exhibited in its well-tanned and weather-beaten complexion, the effects of such natural cosmetics as sun and wind; and under the mountain hat of felt which covered his head, long uncut hair hung in Indian fashion on his shoulders. All this would have passed muster, had it not been for the most extraordinary equipment of a double-barrelled rifle; which, when it had attracted the eyes of the mountaineers, elicited no little astonishment, not to say derision. But, perhaps, nothing excited their admiration so much as the perfect docility of the stranger's animals; which, almost like dogs, obeyed his voice and call; and albeit that one, in a small sharp head and pointed ears, expanded nostrils, and eye twinkling and malicious, exhibited the personification of a "lurking devil," yet they could not but admire the perfect ease which this one even, in common with the rest, permitted herself to be handled.

Dismounting from his horse, and unhitching from the horn of his saddle the coil of skin rope, one end of which was secured round the neck of the horse, he proceeded to unsaddle; and whilst so engaged, the three mules, two of which were packed, one with the unbutchered carcass of a deer, the other with a pack of skins, &c., followed leisurely into the space chosen for the camp, and, cropping the grass at their ease, waited until a whistle called them to be unpacked.

The horse was a strong square-built bay; and, although the severities of a prolonged winter, with scanty pasture and long and trying travel, had robbed his bones of fat and flesh, tucked up his flank, and "ewed" his neck; still his clean and well-set legs, oblique shoulder, and withers fine as a deer's, in spite of his gaunt half-starved appearance, bore ample testimony as to what he had been; while his clear cheerful eye, and the hearty appetite with which he fell to work on the coarse grass of the bottom, proved that he had something in him still, and was game as[731] ever. His tail, ate by the mules in days of strait, attracted the observant mountaineers.

"Hard doins when it come to that," remarked La Bonté.

Between the horse and two of the mules a mutual and great affection appeared to subsist, which was no more than natural, when their master observed to his companions that they had travelled together upwards of two thousand miles.

One of these mules was a short, thick-set, stumpy animal, with an enormous head surmounted by proportionable ears, and a pair of unusually large eyes, beaming the most perfect good temper and docility (most uncommon qualities in a mule.) Her neck was thick, and rendered more so in appearance by reason of her mane not being roached, (or in English, hogged,) which privilege she alone enjoyed of the trio; and her short, strong legs, ending in small, round, cat-like hoofs, were feathered with profusion of dark brown hair.

As she stood stock-still, while the stranger removed the awkwardly packed deer from her back, she flapped backward and forward her huge ears, occasionally turning her head, and laying her cold nose against her master's cheek. When the pack was removed, he advanced to her head, and, resting it on his shoulder, rubbed her broad and grizzled cheeks with both his hands for several minutes, the old mule laying her ears, like a rabbit, back upon her neck, and with half-closed eyes enjoyed mightily the manipulation. Then, giving her a smack upon the haunch, and a "hep-a" well-known to mule kind, the old favourite threw up her heels and cantered off to the horse, who was busily cropping the buffalo grass on the bluff above the stream.

Great was the contrast between the one just described and the next which came up to be divested of her pack. She, a tall beautifully shaped Mexican mule, of a light mouse colour, with a head like a deer's, and long springy legs, trotted up obedient to the call, but with ears bent back and curled up nose, and tail compressed between her legs. As her pack was being removed, she groaned and whined like a dog, as a thong or loosened strap touched her ticklish body, lifting her hind-quarters in a succession of jumps or preparatory kicks, and looking wicked as a panther. When nothing but the fore pack-saddle remained, she had worked herself into the last stage; and as the stranger cast loose the girth of buffalo hide, and was about to lift the saddle and draw the crupper from the tail, she drew her hind legs under her, more tightly compressed her tail, and almost shrieked with rage.

"Stand clear," he roared, (knowing what was coming,) and raised the saddle, when out went her hind legs, up went the pack into the air, and, with it dangling at her heels, away she tore, kicking the offending saddle as she ran. Her master, however, took this as matter of course, followed her and brought back the saddle, which he piled on the others to windward of the fire one of the trappers was kindling. Fire-making is a simple process with the mountaineers. Their bullet-pouches always contain a flint and steel, and sundry pieces of "punk"[27] or tinder; and pulling a handful of dry grass, which they screw into a nest, they place the lighted punk in this, and, closing the grass over it, wave it in the air, when it soon ignites, and readily kindles the dry sticks forming the foundation of the fire.

The tit-bits of the deer the stranger had brought in were soon roasting over the fire; whilst, as soon as the burning logs had deposited a sufficiency of ashes, a hole was raked in them, and the head of the deer, skin, hair, and all, placed in this primitive oven, and carefully covered with the hot ashes.

A "heap" of "fat meat" in perspective, our mountaineers enjoyed their ante-prandial pipes, recounting the news of the respective regions whence they came; and so well did they like each other's company, so sweet the "honey-dew" tobacco of which the strange hunter had good store, so plentiful the game about the creek, and so abundant the pasture[732] for their winter-starved animals, that before the carcass of the "two-year" buck had been more than four-fifths consumed; and, although rib after rib had been picked and chucked over their shoulders to the wolves, and one fore leg, and the "bit" of all, the head, still cooked before them, the three had come to the resolution to join company and hunt in their present locality for a few days at least,—the owner of the "two-shoot" gun volunteering to fill their horns with powder, and find tobacco for their pipes.

Here, on plenty of meat, of venison, bear, and antelope, they merrily luxuriated; returning after their daily hunts to the brightly burning camp-fire, where one always remained to guard the animals, and unloading their packs of meat,—all choicest portions, ate late into the night, and, smoking, wiled away the time in narrating scenes in their hard-spent lives, and fighting their battles o'er again.

The younger of the trappers, he who has figured under the name of La Bonté, in scraps and patches from his history, had excited no little curiosity in the stranger's mind to learn the ups and downs of his career; and one night, when they assembled earlier than usual at the fire, he prevailed upon the modest trapper to "unpack" some passages in his wild adventurous life.

"Maybe," commenced the mountaineer, "you both remember when old Ashley went out with the biggest kind of band to trap the Columbia, and head-waters of Missoura and Yellow Stone. Well, that was the time this niggur first felt like taking to the mountains."

This brings us back to the year of our Lord 1825; and perhaps it will be as well, to render La Bonté's mountain language intelligible, to translate it at once to tolerable English, and tell in the third person, but from his lips, the scrapes which him befell in a sojourn of more than twenty years in the Far West, and the causes which impelled him to quit the comfort and civilisation of his home, and seek the perilous but engaging life of a trapper of the Rocky Mountains.

La Bonté was raised in the state of Mississippi, not far from Memphis, on the left bank of that huge and snag-filled river. His father was a Saint Louis Frenchman, his mother a native of Tennessee. When a boy, our trapper was "some," he said, with the rifle, and always had a hankering for the west; particularly when, on accompanying his father to Saint Louis every spring, he saw the different bands of traders and hunters start upon their annual expeditions to the mountains; and envied the independent, insouciant trappers, as, in all the glory of beads and buckskin, they shouldered their rifles at Jake Hawkin's door, (the rifle-maker of St Louis,) and bade adieu to the cares and trammels of civilised life.

However, like a thoughtless beaver-kitten, he put his foot into a trap one fine day, set by Mary Brand, a neighbour's daughter, and esteemed "some punkins," or in other words toasted as the beauty of Memphis County, by the susceptible Mississippians. From that moment he was "gone beaver;" "he felt queer," he said, "all over, like a buffalo shot in the lights; he had no relish for mush and molasses; homminy and johnny cakes failed to excite his appetite. Deer and turkeys ran by him unscathed; he didn't know, he said, whether his rifle had hind-sights or not. He felt bad, that was a fact; but what ailed him he didn't know."

Mary Brand—Mary Brand—Mary Brand! the old Dutch clock ticked it. Mary Brand! his head throbbed it when he lay down to sleep. Mary Brand! his rifle-lock spoke it plainly when he cocked it, to raise a shaking sight at a deer. Mary Brand, Mary Brand! the whip-poor-will sung it, instead of her own well-known note; the bull-frogs croaked it in the swamp, and mosquitos droned it in his ear as he tossed about his bed at night, wakeful, and striving to think what ailed him.

Who could that strapping young fellow, who passed the door just now, be going to see? Mary Brand: Mary Brand. And who can Big Pete Herring be dressing that silver fox-skin so carefully for? For whom but Mary Brand? And who is it that jokes, and laughs, and dances with all the 'boys' but him; and why?

Who but Mary Brand: and because the love-sick booby carefully avoids her.

[733]

LOMBARDY AND THE ITALIAN WAR.

To what is the difference of national character due? Is it to climate? Is the Negro a barbarian by a law of nature? Do his fiery sunshine and his luxuriant soil, his magnificent forest shades, or his mighty rivers, hiding their heads in inaccessible solitudes, and winding for thousands of miles through fields of the plantain and the sugar-cane, condemn him to perpetual inferiority of intellect? Was the brilliancy of the ancient Greek only an emanation from the land of bright skies and balmy airs?—was it the spirit of the sounding cataracts, and the impulse of the vine-covered hills? Was the northern tempest the creator of the northern character? and the perpetual dash of the ocean on the Scandinavian shore, or the roar of the thunder and the sweep of the whirlwind over the Tartar steppe, the training of the tribes which burst in upon the iron frontier of the Great Empire, and left it clay?

The controversy has never yet been settled. Yet, on the whole, we are strongly inclined to think that the mightier impression is due to the operation of man on the mind of man. To our idea, "the globe, with all that it inherits," is but a vast school-room, with its scholars. The nations may enter with different propensities and capacities, but the purpose of the discipline is, to train all in the use of their original powers, to modify the rougher faculties, to invigorate the weaker; and perhaps, in some remoter period of the world and its completion, to educate a universal mind for the duties of a universal family.

What education is to the individual, institutions are to the nation. Why was it that the ancient Roman was the conqueror, the legislator, the man of stern determination, and the example of patriot virtue? Why was he the man of an ambition to be satisfied with nothing narrower than the supremacy of the globe—the defier of the desert, the master of the ocean, the ruler of all the diadems of all mankind?

Yet what is the contrast in the history of his successors,—millions living under the same sky, with the same landscape of hill and dale before them—even with the bold recollections of their ancestry to inspire them, and with frames as athletic, and intellects as vivid as those of the days when every nation brought tribute to the feet of the Cæsars? Why is it that the man of Thermopylæ and Platæa has now no representative but the "cunning Greek," and the land, once covered with trophies, is now only the soil of the trafficker and the tomb? Why has even our own island, so memorable and so admirable, exhibited a contrast to the early terrors and capricious bravery of the Briton in the time of the Roman? For the charioteers and spearmen who fought Cæsar on the shore were chiefly foreigners from Gaul and Germany, defending their own beeves and merchandise, while the natives fled into the forest, and submitted, wherever they were pursued. Why was Russia, for a thousand years, the constant prey of the "riders of the wilderness," who now offer so feeble a resistance to her firm sovereignty? Or, to come to the immediate instance, why have the fiercest tribe of Scandinavia, perhaps the most warlike of mankind in their day, sunk into the feeble flexibility of the Italian, in whom resistance is scarcely more than the work of exasperation, and the boldest hostilities probably deserve no more than the name of a paroxysm?

The name of the Lombards was famous as far back as the sixth century and the reign of Justinian. The camp of Attila had collected the chieftains of the barbarian tribes on the northern bank of the Danube, and his death had left them to divide the vast inheritance which had been won in the briefest period, and by the most remorseless slaughter, in the memory of the world. Hungary and Transylvania were seized by the roving warriors of the Gepidæ. The fears or the policy of Justinian contracted the boundaries of the empire; and whether despising the power, or relying on the indolence, of the barbarians,[734] he stripped the southern bank of its garrisons, for the defence of Italy. The Gepidæ were instantly in arms, the river was crossed in contempt or defiance of the imperial revenge; and this daring act was not less daringly followed by a message to Constantinople, that "as the emperor possessed territories more than he knew how to govern, or could desire to retain, his faithful allies merely anticipated his bounty in taking their share." The emperor suffered the insult in silence, but resolved on revenge. With the artificial policy which always increases the evils of an unprepared government, he invited a new race of barbarians to act as the antagonists of the invader.

In the country between the Elbe and the Oder, about the time of Augustus, a tribe had settled, of a singularly savage aspect, and, by the exaggerations of national terror, described as having the "heads of dogs," as lapping the blood of the slain in battle, and exhibiting at once the ferocity of the animal and the daring of the man. On the summons of Justinian, they instantly plucked up their spears and standards from the graves of the Heruli, whom they had slaughtered in Poland, crossed the Danube with the whole force of their warriors, and finally, after a long and bloody war, extinguished the Gepidæ in a battle in which forty thousand of the enemy were slain round their king. The conqueror, with characteristic savageness, made a drinking-cup of the skull of the fallen monarch, and in it pledged his chieftains to their future fame.

This victory at last had taught the imperial court the hazards of its policy; but the deed was done, and Italy lay open to a race whose strange aspect, ferocity of habit, and invincible courage, had already wrought the Italians to the highest pitch of terror.

Among the effeminacies of Italy, the classic arrangement of the hair and beard seem to have held a foremost place. But, in their new invaders, the nation saw a host of athletic warriors, indifferent to every thing but arms, wearing their locks wild as nature had made them, and with visages and manners which almost justified the popular report, that they had the heads of dogs, and lapped up the blood of their enemies. From this length and looseness of hair they had their name. Savage as they were, they exhibited something of that spirit which from time to time tinges barbarism with romance. Alboin, the prince of the Longobards, young, handsome, and a hero, resolved to possess at once the two great objects of the passions, love and glory. To accomplish the first, he seized on Rosamunda, the beautiful daughter of the fallen monarch; and for the second he made a royal banquet, and, covering the tables with the fruits and wines of Italy, demanded of his chieftains whether the land which produced such things was not worth their swords? We may justly conceive that he was answered with acclamation. Their trumpets were heard through every tribe of the North, and the multitude were instantly in arms under a leader whose name was a pledge of possession. His vanguard scaled the Julian Alps. All the roving warriors of Gaul and Germany, with a column of twenty thousand Saxons, instantly joined the Lombard banner. Italy, exhausted by a long continuance of disease and famine, and now accustomed to yield, had lain at the mercy of the first invader, and Alboin, with his sword in the sheath, marched through a fugitive population, and finished his bloodless triumph within the impregnable ramparts and patrician palaces of Verona. From the Trentine hills to the gates of Ravenna and Rome, all was the easy prize of Lombard victory.

It is singular to hear, at the interval of more than a thousand years, the same names of the cities which then became the possession of the invaders, and to see the warlike movements of the present hour following the track of the warriors of the sixth century. Alboin conquered Milan by fear, and Pavia by famine; but the bold barbarian disdained to reside in a city, however splendid, which had yielded without a battle, and he fixed the Lombard throne in Pavia, which had earned his respect by a siege of three years.

It is a striking illustration of the superiority of institutions to climate, that the Lombard, even in Italy, continued[735] the same bold, restless, and resistless man of iron, which he had been in the barren plains of Prussia, or on the stormy shores of the Baltic. With all the luxuries of Italy to soften him, and even with all the fervours of an Italian sun to subdue him into indolence, he was still the warrior, the hunter, and the falconer. Leaving tillage to the degraded caste of the Italian, he trained horses for war and the chase, in the famous pastures bordering the Adriatic. He sent to his native Scandinavia for the most powerful falcons; he trained the hound, that could tear down alike the stag and the wolf; and prepared himself hourly by the chase through the forests, which were now rapidly covering the depopulated plains of Italy, for the hardships and enterprises of actual war. The favourite distinctions of the Lombard noble were the hawk on the wrist and the falchion by the side.

We now give a rapid sketch of the subsequent periods.

From the tenth century, when Germany assumed the form of a settled state, its connexion with Italy was always exhibited in the shape of mastery. The modern Italian character is evidently not made for eminence in war. The hardships of German life, contrasted with the easy indolence of Italy, have always given the Northern ploughman the superiority over the vine-dresser of the South; and from the time when Charlemagne first moved his men of mail over the Alps, Italy has been a fair and feeble prize for German vigour and German intrepidity.

On the general dissolution of the empire of Charlemagne, Italy naturally followed the fate of all vassal kingdoms. At the close of the ninth century its provinces had been made a common field of battle to the multitude of dukes, counts, and captains of banditti, who suddenly started into a brief celebrity as spoilers of the great German empire. A terrible period of almost a century of intestine war followed, which covered the land with corpses, and made Northern Italy but one capacious scene of blood and desolation. At length, a German conqueror, Otho of Saxony, fortunately came, as of old, crushed all rivalry, drove the peasantry from the field, commanded the nobles to do him homage, and by the combined operation of the sceptre and the sword, partially compelled his fierce feudatories to learn the arts of peace. Still, perhaps, there was not upon the earth a more disturbed district than Lombardy. In the lapse of centuries, it had grown opulent, notwithstanding its spoilers. The native talent of the Italian, his commercial connexion with Egypt and the East, and his literary intercourse with the fugitives from Constantinople, and the eagerness of the Western nations, even at that early period, to obtain the produce of Italian looms and pencils, gave the nation wealth, and with it constitutional power. This power resulted in the formation of small commonwealths, which, though frequently at war with each other, often exhibited a lustre and spirit worthy of the vivid days of antique Italy.

The feudal system, the natural product of barbarian victory, by which the land had been divided among the conquerors, was strongly opposed by the commercial cities; and the most successful of all resistance, that of popular interests, rapidly broke down the system. The first struggle was by the class of the inferior nobles against the great proprietors. The close of the eleventh century found the principle of resistance advancing, and the populace now mingled in the contest.

The dissension was increased by the papal violences against the married clergy in the middle of the century. This dispute gave rise to one of the most important changes in the Romish discipline, and one of the longest contests between the Pope and the people. The Church of Milan, dating its liturgy from the times of the memorable Bishop Ambrose, had continued almost wholly independent of the discipline and the authority of Rome. By its especial rule, the priest who was married before his ordination retained his wife; but, if unmarried, he was not suffered to marry afterwards. This unfortunate compromise with superstition naturally produced the loss of the original right. The Jewish priesthood had been married under the direct sanction of a code confessedly[736] divine. Peter, and apparently others of the apostles, were married; and there is no mention of any remonstrance on the part of our Lord against this most essential of all relationships. St Paul's wish "that the disciples should remain unmarried" in the time of a threatened persecution, was evidently limited to the persecution; and instead of denying the common right of the Christian clergy to marry, he expressly insists on his personal right to marry if he should so please, as well as any other of the brethren. The recommendation not to marry at the time was also addressed not to the peculiar teachers of Christianity, but to the whole body of the Christians—a generalisation which of itself shows that it was merely for the period; as it must be wholly irrational to suppose that the gospel desired the final extinction of marriage among all mankind.

The contest continued with great violence until the accession of the well-known Gregory VII., who, finding it impossible to overcome the resistance of the clergy, while they were sustained by their archbishop, dexterously dismantled the See, by annexing its suffragans gradually to Rome. The power of the archbishops of Milan thus sank, until they condescended to receive investiture from the Bishop of Rome. The See lost its independence; and the law of celibacy—one of the most corrupting to the morals of the priesthood, but one of the most effective to establish the domination of the papacy throughout Europe—became the law of Christendom.

The history of the Italian republics is an unhappy record for the advocates of republicanism. It was a history of perpetual feuds among the higher ranks, and perpetual misery among the people. The mediæval annals of Italy, with all their activity and lustre, might be wisely exchanged by any nation on earth for the quiet obscurity of a German marsh, or the remote safety of an island in the heart of the ocean. The only palliation was in the stimulus which all republics give to human energy, by relaxing all impediments to the exertion of the individual. But this good is strangely counteracted by the habitual uncertainty of republics. No man's fortune can be safe while it remains under a popular government. A decree of the party in power may strip him of his property in a day. The general object of the rule of the rabble is the seizure of property, and the man of wealth to-day may be the beggar to-morrow. The most despotic monarchy seldom preys on the individual, and still seldomer takes him by surprise. For the long period of five hundred years, Lombardy was one of the most unfortunate countries in the world, from its republican propensities. Factions, of every degree of tyranny and vice, tore it asunder. The names of the Torriani, the Visconti, and the Sforze, are seen successively floating on the tide of blood and misery which covered this noblest of the Italian provinces; and each faction, at its sinking, left little more than a new evidence of the guilt of profligate governments, each exceeding the other in professions of public virtue. A single, vigorous sceptre—a settled constitution, however stern—a dynasty even of despots, which had the simple merit of stability, would have rescued Lombardy from a condition scarcely to be envied by a galley-slave. The historians of Italy recur to this period in words of horror. The romancers find in it an exhaustless fund of their darkest scenes. The poets revert to it for their deepest-coloured images of national destruction. What must be the condition of a country, when a military despotism, and that too the despotism of a foreign power, was a desirable change?

In the middle of the sixteenth century this change occurred, in the transfer of Lombardy to Charles V. After a century and a half of subjection to the Spanish dynasty, it again passed, by the failure of the line, into the hands of Austria. But at length, under the well-intentioned government of the Empress Maria Theresa, property became secure, the factions were suppressed by the strong hand of authority, commerce felt new confidence, and the natural advantages of climate, soil, and talent suddenly raised the country into a new and vigorous prosperity; within a quarter of a century, its population rose from less than a million to nearly a million and a[737] quarter; and the produce of the soil not only fed its population, but was largely exported.

The French Revolution of 1789, which startled every kingdom of Europe, shook Italy to its centre. The religion of Rome, while it fills the eye with ceremonies, and the ear with dogmas, makes but little impression on the heart, and none on the understanding. The boundless profligacy of Italian manners had long corrupted public life. The opera and the billiard-table were the only resources of an overgrown nobility, pauperised by their numbers, and despised for their pauperism. The facility of dispensing with oaths, in a religion which gives absolution for every crime, and repeats it on every repetition of the crime, practically extinguishes all sense of allegiance; and, at the first offer of what the French pronounced liberty, every province was ready to rush into republicanism.

The campaigns of Napoleon, in 1796 and 1797, incomparably conducted by the genius of the French general, and wretchedly mismanaged by the inveterate somnolency of the councils of Austria, gave a new stimulus to the frenzy of revolution. Lombardy, already resolved on self-government, was constituted a republic by the treaty of Campo Formio in 1797—Austria receiving Venice as a compensation for Milan, Mantua, and Belgium. The Venetian outcry against this compact was bitter, but it was helpless. Napoleon had the sword which settled all diplomatic difficulties; and she had good reason to rejoice in her release from the perpetual robbery of her republican masters. The coronation of Napoleon in 1804, followed by the memorable Austrian campaign, which ended with the fatal fight of Austerlitz, again changed the destinies of the north of Italy. By the treaty of Vienna, Venice and Lombardy were united under France, and Napoleon assumed the crown of Charlemagne, as King of Italy!

On the exile of Napoleon to Elba, the Austrian Emperor again became master of Milan, Mantua, and Venice, combined under the name of the Lombardo-Veneto kingdom, which was annexed to the imperial crown—the whole being divided into nine Lombard provinces, and eight Venetian; and the population of the entire, by the census of 1833, being somewhat more than four millions and a half.

It cannot now be necessary to enter into the detail of the national government; but it was of a much more popular order than might be conceived from the formalities of Austria. Each of the great provinces—Lombardy and Venice—had a species of administrative council, consisting of deputies from the minor provinces, each returning two, the one a noble and the other a plebeian, with a deputy from each of the royal towns, the whole being elected for six years. Those bodies, though not entitled to make laws, had yet important functions. They settled the proportion of the taxes, superintended the disbursements for roads, and had the especial care of the charitable establishments. Nor were these all. In every chief town there was a local administration, especially superintending the finance of their respective districts; and the general taxation seemed to have been light, and but little felt, and scarcely complained of.

Burke, in one of his prophetic anticipations, pronounced that the first ruin of Europe would be in its finance, and that every kingdom was, even in his day, wading into a boundless ocean of debt. Austria, of course, had felt its share; and after the desperate wars of 1805 and 1809, nothing is more wonderful in the history of finance, or more honourable to the great statesman who for forty years presided over her fate, than that she should have escaped bankruptcy.

But her liberality to her Italian provinces never failed. Some of the details, which have already reached the public, give an extraordinary conception of the almost prodigality with which Austria has lavished her means upon the bridges, roads, and general public communications of Lombardy.

We give those items in francs.

Five millions spent in repairing and constructing dikes in the Mantuan province.

Four millions in completing the canal of the Naviglio.

A million and a half for roads in the mountains of the Bergamesque.

[738]A million and a half for the great commercial road of the Splugen.

Two millions and a half for the road over the Hiffer Jock.

Three millions for continuing it along the shore of the lake Como.

Three millions and a quarter for completing the cathedral of Milan.

A million for improvements in the city.

Half a million for the fine bridge over the Ticino.

Twenty-four millions for cross-roads, between 1814 and 1831, besides miscellaneous expenditure;—the whole being not less than sixty-six millions in the fifteen years preceding 1834, in the mere matter of keeping up the means of intercourse in a country where, half a century ago, the cross-roads were little more than goat-tracks; besides the annual expense of about a million and a quarter on the repair of the roads since. And this munificent liberality was expended in Lombardy alone. The expenditure in Venice in the latter period of its possession has been nearly equal. The first French conquest had given it the name of a constitution, and nothing else. The famous republic was plundered to the last coin. On its second seizure its treasury was again emptied by its French emancipators; and when it was restored to Austria in 1814, its population presented a pauper list of fifty-four thousand individuals. Its commerce was in a state of ruin; its palaces and public buildings were in a state of decay; its charitable establishments were without funds; and a few years more must have filled its canals with the wrecks of its houses. Within the next twenty years the reparations cost the Austrian treasury not less than fifty-three millions of francs! Thus Venice rose from a condition which all our travellers, immediately after the peace of 1815, pronounced to be irreparable ruin, and is now one of the first commercial cities of Italy.

But the Austrian government had not been contented with a mere improvement of the soil or of the modes of communication—it had employed extraordinary efforts in giving education to the people. We are to remember the difficulties which impede all such efforts in Romish countries. Where the priest regulates the faith, he must always be jealous of the education. But the German habits of the government predominated over the superstition of Rome, and a species of military discipline was introduced, to compel the young Italians to learn the use of their indolent understandings. Within a few years after the peace of 1815 a national school system was put in action in Lombardy. Within a few more years it had spread over the whole country, with such effect, that there was scarcely a commune without its public place of education. The schools for boys amounted to upwards of two thousand three hundred, and for girls to upwards of twelve hundred. Nearly a hundred of the schools for boys taught a very extensive course of practical knowledge. The higher classes learned architecture, mechanics, geography, drawing, and natural history, in the vigorous, useful way for which German education is distinguished. Still higher schools, or portions of the former, were placed in the chief towns, for the practical acquirement of the known ledge most important for servants of public offices. There the chief studies were history, commerce, mathematics, chemistry, and French, German, and Italian. Under this system, it is evident that very solid and valuable acquirements might be made; and those were solely the work of the Austrian sovereignty.

We give a slight abstract of the plan of education in the female schools, because it is on this point that England is still most deficient.

The female elementary schools had three classes.

In the youngest were taught spelling and writing, mental and written arithmetic, needlework, and the Catechism.

In the second were taught the elements of grammar, the four rules of arithmetic, and needlework, consisting of marking and embroidery, with religious instruction.

In the third were taught religion, sacred history, geography, Italian grammar, letter-writing, weights and measures, and the nature and history of coin.

All those acquirements were, of[739] course, dictated by the necessities and habits of native life; but they compose a scale of practical knowledge which, while useful in their humblest capacity, would form an admirable ground-work for every attainment of the female mind. It is probably from some sense of hazard that we do not observe music among the objects of education: for doubtless singing must have been one of the habits of schools taught by a German system. We should also have desired to see some knowledge of domestic arrangements, of the culinary arts, and of making their own dress. However, it is probable that these obvious advantages, especially for the life of the peasantry, may have been added subsequently to the period from which our information is derived.

We should rejoice to see in England national institutions of this order established for the education of young females of every rank, thus withdrawing the daughters of the peasantry from those coarse drudgeries of the field which were never intended for them, relieving the female population of the manufacturing towns alike from the factory labour and the town habits, and training for the labouring population honest, useful, and moral partners of their lives. In the higher ranks, the activity, regularity, and practical use of all their occupations would be scarcely less essential; and we should see in the rising generation a race of accomplished women who had learned every thing that was of importance to make them the intellectual associates of the intelligent world, while they had acquired those domestic habits, and were entitled to avail themselves of those graceful and useful arts, which make home pleasing without feeble indulgence, hospitality cheerful without extravagance, and even time itself pass without leaving behind a regret for wasted hours.

The Lombard system had been subsequently applied to the Venetian provinces; where, twenty years ago, the number of schools had risen to between fourteen and fifteen hundred. The number of boys then attending the schools was upwards of sixty thousand. Higher still, there were eighty-six gymnasia or colleges, with three hundred professors, and attended by upwards of seven thousand students, with thirty-four colleges for females. Higher still were the twelve Lyceums, for philosophical studies; and, at the summit of all, the two universities of Padua and Pavia. The whole system being superintended by the general boards at Milan and Venice.

Whether all those regulations are applicable to our own country, may be a matter of question. But the grand difficulty experienced here, the power of making the parents avail themselves of those admirable opportunities, is easily solved by the German discipline. A register is kept in every commune, of all the children from six to twelve years old; and they are all compelled to attend the schools, except in case of illness, or some other sufficient cause. But the tuition is gratuitous, the expense and the schoolmaster being paid by the commune. Corporal punishment is wholly forbidden.

Such were the benefits lavished by Austria upon her Italian subjects; benefits which they never would have dreamed of if left to themselves; and which, in all probability, the pauperised exchequer of the revolt will never be able to sustain. Under this government, too, Lombardy had become the most fertile province of Italy, the most densely peopled, and the most opulent, of the south of Europe. Venice, too, which had been crushed almost into ruins by the French, rose again into a resemblance of that commercial power, and civil splendour, which once made her famous throughout the Mediterranean; and Milan, though characterised in the Italian annals as the most luckless of all the cities of earth, having been besieged forty times, taken twenty times, and almost levelled with the ground by the conqueror four times,—yet, when the late Emperor Francis visited her about twenty years ago, exhibited a pomp of private wealth, and a magnificence of public festivity, which astonished Europe, and was the most eloquent refutation of the declamatory ravings of the mob of patriotism.

That Austria should be unwilling to give up so fine a possession is[740] perfectly natural; constituting, as it does, the noblest portion of the Italian peninsula; or, in the striking language of the historian Alison,—

"A plain, three hundred miles in length, by a hundred and twenty in breadth, and in the greatest portion of its length exhibiting an alluvial soil watered by the Ticino, the Adda, the Adige, the Tagliamento, and the Piave, falling from the Alps, with the Taro and other streams falling from the Apennines, and the whole plain traversed through its centre by the Po, affording the amplest means of irrigation, the only requisite in this favoured region for the production of the richest pastures and the most luxuriant harvests."

"On the west," says this master of picturesque description, "it is sheltered by a vast semicircle of mountains, which there unite the Alps and the Apennines, and are surmounted by glittering piles of ice and snow, forming the majestic barrier between France and Italy. In those inexhaustible reservoirs, which the heat of summer converts into perennial fountains of living water, the Po takes its rise; and that classic stream, rapidly fed by the confluence of the torrents which descend through every cleft and valley in the vast circumference, is already a great river when it sweeps under the ramparts of Turin."

The description of its agriculture is equally glowing with that of its mountain boundaries. "A system of agriculture, from which every nation in Europe might take a lesson, has been long established over its whole surface, and two, sometimes three, successive crops annually reward the labours of the husbandman. Indian corn is produced in abundance, and by its return, quadruple that of wheat, affords subsistence for a numerous and dense population. An incomparable system of irrigation, diffused over the whole, conveys the waters of the Alps into a series of little canals, like the veins and arteries in the human body, to every field, and in some places to every ridge, in the grass lands. The vine and the olive thrive on the sunny slopes which ascend from this plain to the ridges of the Alps, and a woody zone of never-failing beauty lies between the desolation of the mountain and the fertility of the plain. The produce of this region, which most intimately combines its interests with those of the great European marts, is silk. Italy now settles the market of silk over all Europe. Since the beginning of the present century, it has grown into an annual produce of the value of ten millions sterling! Within the last twenty years the export from the Lombardo-Venetian States has trebled." All those details give an impression of the security of property, which is the first effect of a paternal government. They fully answer all the absurd charges of impoverishment by Austria, of barbarism in its laws, or of severity in its institutions. Lombardy, independent, will soon have reason to lament the change from Austrian protection.

We come to other things. Italy is now in the condition of a man who thinks to get rid of all his troubles by committing suicide. Every kingdom, princedom, duchy, and village has successively rebelled, and proclaimed a constitution; and before that constitution was a month old, has forgotten what it was. A flying duke, a plundered palace, a barricade, and a national guard, are all that the philosopher can detect, or the historian has to record, in the Revolution of Italy. How could it be otherwise? Can the man who bows down to an image, and listens to the fictions of a priest, exercise a rational understanding upon any other subject? Can the slave of superstition be the champion of true freedom? or can the man, forced to doubt the virtue of his wife and the parentage of his children, which is the notorious condition of all the higher circles of Italian society, ever find fortitude enough to make the sacrifices essential to the purchase of true liberty? If all Italy were republicanised to-day, there would be nothing in its character to make liberty worth an effort,—nothing to prevent its putting its neck under the feet of the first despot who condescended to demand its vassalage.

The war of Piedmont and Austria is another chapter, written in another[741] language than the feeble squabbles of the little sovereignties. There, steel and gunpowder will be the elements; here, the convulsion finishes in a harangue and the coffee-house. Charles Albert has passed the Mincio, but shall he ever repass it? Certainly not, if the Austrian general knows his trade. If ever king was in a military trap, if ever army was in a pitfall, the Piedmontese passage of the Mincio has done the deed. But, this must lie in the book of casualties. Austria is renowned for military blunders. In the Italian campaigns of Napoleon, her reinforcements came up only in time to see the ruin of the army in the field. Successive generals followed, only to relieve each other's reputation by sharing a common defeat; until Italy was torn by 50,000 Frenchmen from the hands of 100,000 Austrians. Yet the Germans have been always brave; their national calamity was tardiness. It clings to them still. They have now been gazing for a month at the army of Charles Albert; they ought to have driven it into the Mincio within twenty-four hours.

The Italian spirit of hatred to the German has exhibited itself in a thousand forms for a thousand years. It has murmured, conspired, and made vows of vengeance, since the days of Charlemagne. It has sentenced the "Teuton" in remorseless sonnets, has fought him in sinfonias, and slaughtered him in ballets and burlesques. But the German returned, chained the poets to the wall of a cell, and sent the writers to row in the galleys. For the last hundred years, Italy has implored all the furies in operas, and paid homage to Nemesis by the help of the orchestra—all in vain. At length, the French Revolution, by sweeping the Austrian armies out of Italy, gave the chance of realising the long dream. The "Cisalpine Republic" flourished on paper, and every Italian talked of Brutus, and the revival of the Consulate, and the Capitol. But the French price of liberty was too high for Italian purchase; the liberators robbed the liberated of every coin in their possession, and shot them when they refused to give it up. Even the "Teuton" was welcome, after this experience of the Gaul; and Italy found the advantage of a government which, though it exhibited neither triumphal chariots nor civic festivities, yet suffered the land to give its harvests to the right owners.

But even this feeling was to have a new temptation. About fifteen years ago, one of the chaplains of the King of Sardinia was struck off the court list, for uttering opinions which, touched with the old romance of Italian liberation, struck the whole court of Turin with horror. Charles Albert was then at the head of the Jesuits, and the Jesuits demanded the criminal Gioberti. Italy was no longer safe for him: he fled across the Alps, and took refuge in Belgium. There he wrote, through necessity. But he had something to revenge, and he wrote with the vigour of revenge. But he was an enthusiast, and he indulged in the reveries of enthusiasm. The double charm was irresistible to the dreamy spirit of a nation which loves to imagine impossible retribution, and achieve heroism in the clouds. His writings crossed the Alps. No obstacle could stop them; they wound their way through douanes; they insinuated themselves through the backstairs of palaces; they even penetrated into the cells of monks;—and his treatise "Del Primato Civile e Morale degl' Italiani," which appeared in 1843, was hailed with universal rapture. The literature of modern Italy seldom rises into that region of publicity which carries a work beyond seas and mountains. She has not yet attained the great art of common sense—the only art which furnishes the works of man with wings. Her poetry is local and trifling: her prose is loose, feeble, and rambling. Her best writers seem to the European eye what the wanderers through Soirees and Conversaziones are to the well-informed ear,—men of words living on borrowed notions, and, after the first half-dozen sentences, intolerably tiresome.

But the work of Gioberti was a panegyric on Italy, a universal laudation of the Italian genius, the Italian spirit, the Italian language, every thing that bore the name of Italian! Its very title, "The Pre-eminence, Civil and Moral, of the Italians," was irresistible.

[742]The monster-folly of all foreigners is a passion for praise; and the unpopularity of the Englishman on the Continent chiefly arises from his tardiness in gorging this rapacious appetite. Gioberti, with evident consciousness of the offence, labours to justify the assumption. "Individuals may be modest, but modesty degrades nations," is his preliminary maxim. "A nation to have claims must have merits; and who is to believe in her merits, unless she believes in them herself?" This curious logic, which would make vanity only the more ridiculous by the openness of its display, is the grand argument of the book. It has made Italy suddenly imagine herself a nation of heroes.

"When a nation," says Gioberti, "has fallen into social degradation, the attempt to revive its courage must be by praise; possibly dangerous at other times, but now a generous art." It is admitted, however, "that the facts ought to be true, and the arguments forcible; and that no good can come from adulation." And in consequence of this wise precaution, the patriotic monk proceeds to inaugurate his country with the precedency in the grand procession of all the kingdoms of the earth! But another striking feature of this work was, that all those changes must emanate from a centre, and that centre the Pope, that Pope being a professor of liberalism, and having for his pupils all the princes of Italy. Whether Gioberti saw futurity with the eye of prophet, or only in the conjecture of a charlatan, there can be no doubt that the coincidence between his theory and the facts is sufficiently curious. We are to remember that book was published in the reign of Gregory XVI.—a genuine monk, hardened in all the old habits of the cell, who thought that a railroad would be the overthrow of the tiara, and the expression of a political opinion would call up the shades of all the past Holinesses from their purgatorial thrones.

The book declared that the Deity being the source of all influence on the civilisation of man, the country which approached nearest to general influence over the world must be the leading nation. It contends that Italy fulfils this condition in three ways. First, that it has created the civilisation of all other nations; second, that it preserves in its bosom, for general use, all the principles of that civilisation; and third, that it has repeatedly shown the power of restoring that civilisation. He further contends that the true principle of Italian power is federation, and the true centre of that federation must be the Pope. He declares that the whole light of Italy, in the eyes of the world, has flashed from the papal throne—that the Roman States are to the rest of Italy what the site of the Temple was to the Jewish people—and seems to regard the whole Italian nation, in reference to Europe, as like the Chosen Land to the rest of the world. Even then, he marked the Piedmontese throne as the chief support of the federation, and Charles Albert as the champion of the great pontifical revolution which, expelling all strangers, and uniting all princes, was to place Italy in secure sovereignty over all the mental and moral influences of the world.

The work is obviously a romance; but it is a romance of genius; it is obviously unsuited to the realities of any nation under the moon, but it touches every weak point of the national character with a new colouring, and persuades the loose and lazy Italian that he has only to start on his feet to be a model for mankind. With him the church of Rome is no longer an antiquated building of the dark ages, full of obscure passages and airless chambers, with modern cobwebs covering its ancient gilding, and, with the very crevices which let in light, exhibiting only its irreparable decay. It is on the contrary a temple full of splendour, and spreading its light through the world, crowded with oracular shrines, and uttering voices of sanctity that are yet destined to give wisdom to the world.

It must be wholly unnecessary for Protestantism to expose the superficial glitter of those views, and the feeble foundations of this visionary empire. The true respondent is the actual condition of Europe. Every Protestant nation has left Italy behind. Even the Romish nations, which have borrowed their vigour from intercourse with Protestantism, have left her behind.[743] Of what great invention for the benefit of man has Italy been the parent during the last three hundred years? What command has she given us over nature? what territory has she added to the civilised world in an age of perpetual discovery? what enlargement of the human mind has she exhibited in her philosophy? what advance in the amelioration of the popular condition signalises her intelligent benevolence? what manly inquiry into any one of the means by which governments or individuals distinguish themselves as benefactors to posterity, and live in the memory of mankind?

It is painful to answer queries like these with a direct negation; but that negation would be truth. Italy has nothing to show for her intellectual products during centuries, but the carnival and the opera; for her gallantry, but the sufferings of French and German invasions; for her political progress, but the indolent submission to generations of petty kings, themselves living in vassalage to France, Austria, and Spain; and for her religion, but the worship of saints, of whom no living man knows any thing—miracles so absurd as to make even the sacristans who narrate them laugh; new legends of every conceivable nonsense, and leases of purgatory shortened according to the pence dropped into the purse of the confessional.

Italy has two evils, either of which would be enough to break down the most vigorous nation—if a vigorous nation would not have broken down both, ages ago. These two are the nobles and the priesthood—both ruinously numberless, both contemptibly idle, and both interested in resisting every useful change, which might shake their supremacy. Every period of Italian convulsion has left a class of men calling themselves nobles, and perpetuating the title to their sons. The Gothic, the Norman, the papal, the "nouveaux riches," every man who buys an estate—in fact, nearly every man who desires a title—all swell the lists of the nobility to an intolerable size. Of course, a noble can never do any thing—his dignity stands in the way.

The ecclesiastics, though a busier race, are still more exhausting. The kingdom of Naples alone has eighty-five prelates, with nearly one hundred thousand priests and persons of religious orders, the monks forming about a fourth of the whole! In this number the priesthood of Sicily is not included, which has to its own share no less than three archbishops and eleven bishops. Even the barren isle of Sardinia has one hundred and seventeen convents! Can any rational mind wonder at the profligacy, the idleness, and the dependence of the Italian peninsula, with such examples before it? The Pope daily has between two and three thousand monks loitering through the streets of Rome. Besides these, he has on his ecclesiastical staff twenty cardinals, four archbishops, ninety-eight bishops, and a clergy amounting to nearly five per cent of his population. With those two millstones round her neck, Italy must remain at the bottom. She may be shaken and tossed by the political surges which roll above her head, but she never can be buoyant. She must cast both away before she can rise. Italy priest-ridden, and noble-ridden, and prince-ridden, must be content with her fate. Her only chance is in the shock, which will break away her encumbrances.

We now come to the Avatar, in which liberty is looked for by all the romancers in Italy. On the 1st of June 1846, Pope Gregory XVI. died, at the age of 81. He was a man of feeble mind, but of rigid habits, willing to live after the manner of his fathers, and, above all things, dreading Italian change. The occasional attempts at introducing European improvements into the Roman territory struck him with undisguised alarm; and even his old age did not prevent his leaving six thousand state prisoners in the Roman dungeons. On the 16th of the same month the Bishop of Imola was chosen Pope. He was of an Italian family, which had occasionally held considerable offices; was a man of intelligence, though tinged with liberalism; and was one of the youngest of the Popes since Innocent III., who took the tiara at the age of 37. The Bishop of Imola was 54.

Adopting the name of Pius IX., his first act was one of clemency. He[744] published an amnesty for political offences, and threw open the prison doors. An act of this order is usual on the accession of a Pope. But the fears of the population had been so much heightened by the singular stubbornness of his predecessor, that the discovery of their having a merciful master produced a universal burst of rejoicing.

But the popular excitement was not to be satisfied with the trumpetings and parades of the returning exiles—it demanded a new tariff, which was granted, of course. Then followed fêtes and illuminations, until the Pope himself grew tired of being blinded by fireworks and deafened by shouts. A succession of acts of civility passed between his Holiness and his people. He talked of railroads, canals, and commerce. He formed a council, which, so far as any practical effect has been produced by the measure, seems to have died in its birth. He cultivated popularity, walked through the streets, occasionally served the mass for a parish priest, and fully gained his object, of astonishing the populace by the condescension of a pontiff. To all this we make no imaginable objection. Pius IX. did but a duty that seldom enters into the contemplation of the prelacy, and which it would be well for their security, and not unwise in their calling, to practise in every province of Christendom.

But it is to be observed that, in all this pageantry of parliaments, and all those provinces of renovation, nothing has been done—that none of the real machinery of the popedom has been broken up—that the monk is still a living being, and the Jesuit, though a little plundered, is still in the world—that every spiritual law which made Rome a terror to the thinking part of mankind is in full vigour at this moment, and that whatever may be thought of the enlightenment of his Holiness, every weapon of spiritual severity remains still bright and burnished, and hung up in the old armoury of faith, ready for the first hand, and for the first occasion.

Lord Brougham, in his late memorable cosmopolite speech, has charged the popedom with being the origin of the European convulsions. There can be no doubt that the popedom, if it did not give birth to the movement, at least set the example. The first actual struggle with Austria was its quarrel about the possession of Ferrara, which was, after all, but a straw thrown up to show the direction of the wind. The call to the Italian states, though not loud, was deep; and an Italian army, for the purpose of forming an Italian confederation, made a part of every dream between the Alps and the sea.

Then came still more showy scenes of the great drama. France had looked on the Ferrarese struggle with the eager interest which inspires that busy nation on every opportunity of European disturbance. But the Parisian revolution suddenly threw the complimentary warfare of German and Italian heroism into burlesque. The extinction of the throne, the flight of a dynasty, the sovereignty of the mob, and the universal frenzy of a nation, were bold sports, of which Italian souls knew nothing. But their effect was soon perilously felt; the populace of Milan determined to rival the populace of Paris—had an emeute of their own, built barricades, fought the Austrian garrison, and made themselves masters of the capital of Lombardy.

But the Italian is essentially a dramatist without the power of tragedy; he turns by nature to farce, and in his boldest affairs does nothing without burlesque. Could it be conceived that a people, resolving on a revolution, should have begun it by a revolt of cigars! In England "sixty years ago," a noble duke exhibited his hostility to the government of Pitt, by ordering his footman to comb the powder out of his locks—this deficiency in the powder tax being regarded by the noble duke as a decisive instrument in the overthrowing the national policy. It must however be said, for the honour of England and the apology of the duke, that he was a Whig,—which accounts for any imbecility in this world.

The Milanese began by a desperate self-denying ordinance against tobacco. No patriot was thenceforward to smoke! What the Italian did with his hands, mouth, or thoughts, when the cigar no longer employed the whole[745] three, is beyond our imagination. His next act of patriotic sacrifice was the theatre—the Austrian government receiving some rent as tax on the performances. The theatre was deserted, and even Fanny Ellsler's pirouettes could not win the rabble back. Even the public promenade, which happened to have some connexion with Austrian memories, was abandoned, and no Italian, man, woman, or child, would exhibit on the Austrian Corso. To our northern fancies, all this seems intolerably infantine; but it is not the less Italian—and it might have gone on in the style of children raising a nursery rebellion to this hour, but for the intervention of another character.

The history of the Sardinian states is as old as the Punic wars. But the glance which we shall give looks only to the events of the last century—excepting the slight mention, that from the period when Italy was separated from the fallen empire of Charlemagne in the ninth century, the command of the passes of Mont Cenis and Mont Genevre, with the countries at the foot of the Cottian and Graian Alps, was put in charge of some distinguished military noble, as the key of Italy, that noble bearing the title of Marquis or Lord of the Marches.

We come, leaving nine centuries of feud and ferocity behind, to the eighteenth century, when the house of Savoy became allied with the royal succession of England, by the marriage of Victor Amadeus with Anne Marie of Orleans, daughter of Philip, brother of Louis XIV., by Henrietta, daughter of Charles I. of England.

There are few historical facts more striking than the effect of position on the character of the princes of Savoy. The life of the Italian sovereigns has generally been proverbial for the feebleness of their capacities, or the waste of their powers; but Savoy exhibited an almost unbroken line of sovereigns remarkable for political sagacity, and for gallantry in the field. This was the result of their location. They were to Italy what the Lords Wardens of the Border were to England and Scotland; forced to be perpetually in the saddle—constantly preparing to repel invasion—their authority dependent from year to year on an outburst from France, or a grasp from the restless ambition and vast power of the German emperors. It is not less remarkable, that from the middle of the century, when the hazards of Savoy were diminished by the general amelioration of European policy, the vigour of the Savoyard princes decayed; and the court of Turin, instead of being a school of diplomacy and war, sank into the feebleness of Italian thrones, and retained its rivalry only in the opera.

But the French Revolution came, sent to try the infirmities of all thrones. It found Victor Amadeus the Third sitting calmly in the seat of his forefathers, and wholly unsuspicious of the barbarian storm which was to sweep through his valleys. The French burst on Nice in 1792, then on Oniglia, and stripped Savoy of all its outworks to the Alps.

But Napoleon came, another shape of evil. While the king was preparing to defend the passes of the mountains, the young French general turned the line of defence by the sea, and poured his army into Piedmont. A succession of rapid battles carried him to the walls of Turin; and the astonished king, in 1796, signed a treaty which left his dominions at the mercy of Republicanism.

On the death of the king in this year of troubles, his son, Charles Emanuel IV., succeeded him. But he was now a vassal of France; he saw his country dismembered, his armies ruined, and his people groaning under the cruel insults and intolerable exactions which have always characterised French conquest. Unable to endure this torture, he retired to Sardinia, and from Sardinia finally went to Rome, and there abdicated in favour of his brother, Victor Emanuel.

The new monarch, whose states were undergoing from year to year all the capricious and agonising vicissitudes of Italian revolution, at length shared in the general European triumph over Napoleon, and at the peace of 1814 returned to his dominions, augmented, by the treaty of Vienna, by the important addition of Genoa.

But his return was scarcely hailed with triumph by his subjects, when the example of Spain was followed in an insurrection demanding a new constitution.[746] The king, wearied of political disturbance, and being without offspring, now determined to follow the example of his predecessor, and gave up the crown to his brother, Charles Felix, appointing, as provisional regent, Prince Charles Albert of Savoy Carignano, a descendant of Victor Amadeus I.

After a reign of ten years, undistinguished by either vices or virtues, but employed in the harmless occupations of making roads and building schools, the king died in 1831, and was succeeded by the Prince of Carignano.

Charles Albert has now been seventeen years upon the throne; yet, to this hour, his character, his policy, and his purposes, are the problems of Italy. His whole course strongly resembles those biographies of studied mystery and sleepless ambition—those serpent obliquities and serpent trails—which marked the career of the mediæval princes of Italy; but which demanded not only a keen head, but a bold resolve,—Castruccio, with a Machiavel, for the twin image of the perfection of an Italian king.

The object of universal outcry for his original abandonment of "Young Italy,"—an abandonment which may find its natural excuse in the discovery that Young Italy was digging up the foundations of the throne, on whose first step his foot was already placed, and to which within a few years he actually ascended;—from that period he has fixed the eyes of all Italy upon his movements, as those of the only possible antagonist who can shake the power of Austria. He has at least the externals of a power to which Italy can show no rival: 50,000 of the best troops south of the Alps, which a blast of the trumpet from Turin can raise to 100,000; a country which is almost a continued fortress, and a position which, being in the command of the passes of Italy, can meet invasion with the singular probability of making his mountains the grave of the invader, or open Italy to the march of an auxiliary force, which would at once turn the scale. His government has exhibited that cool calculation of popular impulse and royal rights, by which, without a total prohibition of change, he has contrived to keep the whole power of government in his hands. Long watched by Austria, he had never given it an opportunity of direct offence; and if he has at length declared war, his whole past conduct justifies the belief, that he has either been driven to the conflict by some imperious necessity, or that he has assured himself, on deliberate grounds, of the triumph of his enterprise.

He has now taken the first step, and he has taken it with a daring which must either make him the master of Italy, or make him a beggar and an exile. By rushing into war with Austria, he has begun the game in which he must gain all or lose all. Yet we doubt that, for final success, far as he has gone, he has gone far enough. On the day when he unfurled the standard against Austria, he should have proclaimed Italian independence. We look upon the aggression on Austria as a violation of alliance which must bring evil. But that violation being once resolved on, the scabbard should have been thrown away, and the determination published to the world, that the foreign soldier should no longer tread the Italian soil. This declaration would have had the boldness which adds enthusiasm to interest. It would have had the clearness which suffers no equivocation; and it would have had the comprehensiveness which would include every man of Italian birth, and not a few in other countries, to whom unlicensed boldness is the first of virtues.

The private habits of this prince are said to be singularly adapted to the leader of a national war. His frame is hardy, his manner of living is abstemious, and his few recreations are manly and active. He has already seen war, and commanded a column of the French army in the campaign of 1823, which broke up the Spanish liberals, and reinstated the king upon the throne. But, with all those daring qualities, he never forgets that the Italian is by nature a superstitious being; that he is, at best, a compound of the mime and the monk—with the monk three-fourths predominating; and that no man can hope to be master of the national mind who does not take his share in the priestly slavery of the people. This accounts for the[747] extraordinary reverence which from time to time he displays in the ceremonials of the church, for his sufferance of the monkish thousands which blacken the soil of his dominions, and for his tolerance of the Jesuits, whom he, as well as probably every other sovereign of Europe, dreads, and whom every other sovereign of Europe seems, by common consent, to be fixed on expelling from his dominions.

What the ulterior views of the King may be, of course, it would require a prophet to tell. Whether the crown of Lombardy is among the dreams of his ambition, whether the Italian hatred of Austria stimulates his councils, or whether the mere Italian passion for freedom urges him to stake his own diadem on the chances of the field for the liberation of the peninsula, are questions which can be answered only by the event; but he has at last advanced,—has menaced the Austrian possession of Italy; has pressed upon the Austrian army in its retreat; has reduced it to the defensive; and has brought the great question of Austrian dominion to the simple arbitration of the sword.

The history of the Sardinian campaign has been hitherto a history of skirmishes. The Piedmontese troops have advanced, and Radetski has retired. The Austrian position is memorable for its strength, and has been successively adopted by every defender of the Austro-Italian provinces. Peschiera, Verona, and Mantua form the three angles of an irregular triangle, of which the line of the Mincio forms the base. Charles Albert, by crossing the Mincio at Goito, is now within the triangle. The three fortresses are strong, and he has already made some attempts on Peschiera, which commands the head of the Lake of Garda. Those attempts have failed, and Verona is now his object; and there too he appears to have already undergone some failures. The true wonder is, that he has been suffered to remain a moment making these experiments, and that Austria, with 300,000 men under arms, should allow an Italian army, of 50,000 men at the most, to shut up her general, and lord it over half of her Italian territory. All this is an enigma. It is equally an enigma, that the Austrian commander-in-chief should have allowed himself to be driven out of the capital of Lombardy by the rabble of the streets, and have marched out with a garrison of 15,000 men, before a mob of half their number. He ought to have fought in Milan to his last battalion. If he had been embarrassed by orders from home, he ought to have resigned at once. A heavy blow at the insurrection in Milan would have extinguished Italian rebellion.

He has now a position in which he might fight with perfect security for his flanks and rear; with the strongest fortress in Italy, Mantua, for his place of refuge, if defeated; and, if successful, with the certainty of ruin to his adversary;—yet he stands still. It was by a brilliant movement in this position that the Austrian Kray gave the French that tremendous defeat which ultimately drove them over the Alps.

The surrounding country is of the most intricate kind—a perpetual intersection of large rivers, guarded at every passage by têtes de pont, and all the means known to military science. A war of this order may be carried on for years; and, unless the Italian population shall rise en masse, it must be a mere waste of blood and time.

The true tactique of an Italian invasion is a succession of rapid, daring, and hazardous attacks. This is the dictate of experience in every example of Italian conquest. A bold rush into the interior, leaving all fortresses behind, despising the obstacles of rivers, lakes, and mountains, and only hurrying on to meet the enemy in line, has been the principle of success from the first days of the French assaults on Italy to the last. Their war was an incursion, their marches were a headlong charge, their battles were outbursts of furious force; and, if their triumphs were transient, they failed merely from the national caprice which tires of every thing, and from the exhaustion of an ill-regulated finance. The French, even under the old Bourbons, never descended the Alps without sweeping all resistance before them. The campaigns of Napoleon in 1796, and the following year, were on the same principle. He plunged into Italy at the head of 50,000 troops, ragged, hungry, and in beggary, but[748] the first robbers in Europe. He told them that, by beating the Italians, they should get clothes, food, and money. As a strategist, he probably committed a thousand faults, but he did not commit the grand fault of all, that of giving the enemy time to recover his senses. He fought every day,—he fought by night as well as by day. At Montenotte, he fought for twelve hours, and was beaten; he again mounted his horse at midnight, attacked the victor in his first sleep, and, before morning, was master of the mountains, with the Austrian army in full flight, and the gates of Turin open before him. The Russian campaign in Italy was on the same principle. "When you are not fighting, march; when you are not marching, fight." When the Austrian generals advised Suwarrow to manœuvre, he laughed, and told them that tactics were only trifling. "Make reconnoissances," said the greybeard pupils of the Aulic Council. "My reconnoissances," said the great Russian, "are of 10,000 men. Form column, charge bayonet, plunge into the enemy's centre. These are my only reconnoissances." In three months he drove the French, under their two best officers, Macdonald and Moreau, across the Alps, and cleared Italy. A lingering Italian campaign is always a campaign thrown away, or a country lost. It is the work of a military gambler. Napoleon's invasion of Italy, in his consulate, was one of the most desperate hazards ever ventured in war. He might have been defeated, and, if defeated, he must have been utterly ruined. But he attacked the Austrians, was repulsed, renewed the attack in desperation, repulsed the enemy in turn, and next day saw all Italy capitulate to him.

What a month may bring forth is beyond our calculation; but while we were writing those pages, there had been a general movement of the Piedmontese troops on Verona, probably with the intention of aiding some insurrectionary movement in the city. The Piedmontese artillery speedily demolished the field-works in the approaches to the city. A general advance was ordered, and the Austrian troops continued to retreat, still turning on the advancing line, and fighting, through a country the greater part of which is a low shrubby forest. At length, however, a Piedmontese division was vigorously attacked, taken by surprise, and broken with a loss so heavy, as to determine the retreat of the army to its position of the morning. Still, this was but an affair of posts; and, in the mean time, General Nugent, with an army of 30,000 men, is putting down the insurgents in the Venetian provinces, and is marching towards the flank of the Piedmontese.

One fact is evident, that Italy has not risen in a body, and that, with all the harangues of her revolutionary orators, and all the promises of what those orators call "her heroic youth, burning to extinguish the abomination of the Teutons," very few of them have stirred from their coffee-houses. Italy, with her twenty millions of men, has probably not furnished to the field twenty thousand volunteers. Yet this is the time for which they have been all panting in all kinds of sonnets; when the "new spirit of political regeneration" has full range for its flight, when the Austrian police are a dead letter, and when Spielberg and its bastions are a bugbear no more.

But the movements of the Roman populace are matters of more rapid execution. What the Pope was a month since, every one knows;—Pius the powerful, Pius the popular, Pius the restorer of liberty to all the aggrieved nations of Italy, with a slight appendix, including the aggrieved nations of Europe. But the populace, which gave him his titles, have now changed them, and he is "Pius the Monk."

In a year whose every week produces a revolution, who can predict the events of a month? In the middle of this month of May, Pope Pius is virtually a prisoner in his palace; within a week he may be transferred to the castle of St Angelo; within a fortnight he may be an exile, an outlaw, or a refugee in England.

The intelligence from Rome at the commencement of the month was simply, that he was a cipher. The people, in their eagerness for Austrian overthrow, demanded a declaration of war. But the German bishops are[749] said to have informed the Court of Cardinals, that a measure of that order would instantly produce a renouncement of their allegiance to the Roman See. A council of cardinals was now summoned, before whom the Pope laid a recapitulation of his policy, which may be considered in the light of a penitential speech. In the mean time, all his ministers tendered their resignations, probably hoping to lay the onus of things on the shoulders of Pius himself, and glad to escape from being massacred by the mob, or hanged by the Austrians.

But the Pope wisely determined, that whatever happened to one, should happen to all, and refused to let them resign. The general staff then held a "sitting," and the municipality marched in procession, to give their opinion at the Vatican on matters of government, and recommend "abdication!" Such are the benefits of telling the rabble that they are the true depositaries of the national wisdom. In other and better days, the Pope would have sent those volunteer privy-councillors to the galleys, as their impudence richly deserved. But he may now thank his own political visions.

The affair was not yet over. The civic guard, that darling creation of regenerate freedom, took up its muskets, planted themselves at the gates, and declared that no one, priest, bishop, or pope, should stir from Rome. A kind of rabble proclamation was next made, that "no ecclesiastic should hold any civil office." If this be persisted in, there is an end of "Our Sovereign Lord the Pope." He may possibly be allowed to say mass, hear confessions, and work miracles in the old monkish fashion. But his tiara must pass away, his sceptre will be a staff, and his toe will be kissed no more. The mob say that as they do not wish to take him by surprise, they have allowed him some days to settle the question of private life with himself. But the declaration of war is the sine quâ non, and if he refuses, there is to be a "provisional government."

"By six o'clock, on the 1st instant, no answer had been received." Such is the new punctuality of popular dealings with princes and popes; and such was the announcement of the mob leaders to all those political reformers, the loungers of Rome. But at last the old expedient of startled sovereignty has been adopted. The ministry, by intelligence on the 5th, had been suffered to retire, and their successors, more liberal than ever, were received with popular acclamation.

The senate of Rome, probably to soften this measure to the Papal feelings, presented Pius with a long address, which, however, contains a repetition of the demand for war at any price. It says, "The people do not expect you, a messenger of peace, to declare war. But they only desire that you should not prevent those to whom you have confided the direction of temporal affairs to undertake and conduct it." Thus the division is complete. The Pope is to be two distinct personages—the messenger of peace, and the maker of war; unless, in the latter instance, he is to be responsible for acts which he does not guide, and to acknowledge his ministers to be "viceroys over him." Of all the acts of sovereignty, the most inalienable is the making of peace and war. But the sovereign of Rome is to have nothing of the kind. He is to be a puppet in the hands of a Board. We may well believe the accounts which represent him as "in deep dejection" at these manifestations of popular dealings with princes and popes. If his "Holiness" is not expeditious in his decision to obey his Sansculotte statesmen, the conclusion will be as rapid as the conception.

In all this chapter of change, whatever may be the coolness of our respect for the Papacy, we feel for the Pope, as we should feel for any man intolerably insulted by a conspiracy of wretches pampered into gross arrogance by sudden power. His personal character is unimpeachable; and if his vanity has met with a sudden and bitter reproof, it is only the vanity of an Italian.

Even of the people of Italy we speak only with regret. If these pages contain contemptuous expressions, wrung from us by the truth of things, we are not the less ready to acknowledge the original merits of a people spoiled[750] only by their institutions. We admit every instance which their panegyrists adduce of their natural ability, of their kindliness of disposition, of their ancient intrepidity in the field, and of their brilliancy in the arts. We impute all their waste of those gifts to the fiction which they call their religion. We lament over the hopelessness of Italian restoration while the nation sees the melting of St Januarius's blood as a work of heaven; expects the remission of sins from looking at the napkin of St Veronica; bows down to an image of the Virgin as the worker of miracles, and as an object of divine worship. While this lasts, the mind of Italy must remain in the darkness of that of its fathers, it may have wars, but it will have no advance in liberty; it may have revolutions, but it will have no national vigour; it may have a thousand depositions of sovereigns, but it will only be a change of masters, and every change only leaving it the more a slave. Italy can have but one charter—the Bible.

But now the world is in confusion. War in the north—war in the south—war gathering in the east of Europe. Russia, with 120,000 men, marching on Poland, to be followed by 300,000 more. France, with half a million of men in arms, waiting but the blast of the revolutionary trumpet to pour down on Italy. Can these things be by accident? Universal convulsion after a tranquillity of thirty years! And are these but the beginning of sorrows?

THE INCA AND HIS BRIDE.—A MEDLEY.

CHAPTER I.

ASTLEY'S.

"Most votes carry the point, as a matter of course," said the Doctor, carefully distilling the last few drops of an incomparable Badmington into his glass. "I must say I am strongly in favour of the Surrey Zoo. They have got up Rome there in a style that is absolutely perfect; and the whole thing puts one remarkably in mind of Tacitus."

"Very likely," replied our friend the Spaniard; "but it so happens that my classical reminiscences are the reverse of agreeable. I don't believe there was a single oak in the whole grove of Dodona; at least my instinctive impression is towards the fact, that in the days of Agricola the world was a wilderness of birch. No; I declare for the opera. Pauline Viardot——"

"Bah!" said the Doctor. "These are no times to encourage foreigners. What say you, Fred?"

"I pronounce decidedly against the opera. In the first place, I am for the encouragement of native talent, especially in these revolutionary days; and in the second, I am remarkably hard up for cash. I agree with the Spaniard that Rome is rot. Suppose we go down to Astley's, and indulge ourselves with the death of Shaw?"

"I rather think that Shaw is used up," replied the Doctor. "Gomersal was the last of his race. However, Widdicomb survives, and there is still a chance of fun. So Astley's be it."

Accordingly, we soon found ourselves at that notable place of hippodramatic entertainment. In former years, Astley's was by far the most national of all the metropolitan theatres. It afforded the best practical exposition of the military history of Europe. One by one the fiery fights of the Peninsula and of Flanders were reproduced with an almost unnecessary amount of carnage. Real cannon—or at least cylinders which had every appearance of being bored—rumbled nightly across the stage. Squadrons of dragoons, mounted upon piebald, cream-coloured, and flea-bitten chargers, used to dash desperately through groves of canvass in pursuit of despairing fugitives; and terrific were the thunders of applause as the chivalry assailed a bridge, or overleaped the battlements of a fortification. No feat[751] was too impracticable for these centaurs—no chasm too enormous for their vault; and it really was a touching thing to observe that, whenever a trooper fell, his horse invariably knelt down beside him, and seemed to beseech him to arise by pathetically nibbling at his buttons. The entertainments usually concluded with a series of single combats, a transparency of Britannia seated on a garden roller, and a most prodigal distribution of laurel. They were not only blameless, but highly praiseworthy and patriotic exhibitions; and it is deeply to be regretted that they are rapidly falling into desuetude.

There is no denying the fact that Astley's has undergone a change. There may be as much good riding as ever, and as fearless bounding on the tight-rope—the courier of St Petersburg may still pursue the uneven tenor of his way along the backs of six simultaneous geldings—and the lover may regain his bride by passing through the terrific ordeal of the blazing hoop as of yore. But the British feeling—the indomitable spirit—the strong, burly, independent patriotism of the ring has departed, and the Union Jack no longer floats triumphant over a sea of sawdust. This is matter of painful thought, for it is a marked sign of the decadence of the national drama.

We were just in time to witness the last act of an entertaining spectacle, which argued on the part of the author a particular intimacy with natural history, and with the customs of the Oriental nations. The scene was laid in some village of Hindostan; and it appeared that sundry British subjects, male and female, had by accident been caught trespassing within the confines of a grove sacred to Bramah. No Highland thane in the act of detecting a stray geologist on his territory could have exhibited more unbounded wrath than the high-priest, whose white beard and coffee-coloured arms vibrated and quivered with indignation. Regardless of the laws of nations, and insensible to the duties of hospitality, the hoary heathen summoned the captives before him, and offered them the fearful alternative of embracing the worship of Bramah, or of undergoing the sentence of Daniel, with the certainty of a worse catastrophe. It is hardly necessary to add, that the whole party, even down to a deboshed sergeant, whose religious scruples could hardly have been very strong, spurned at the idea of repudiating their faith, and unanimously demanded to be led on the instant to the menagerie. One young lieutenant of the Irregulars, indeed, was liberal in his offers to die for a certain lady, who had very unwisely followed him into the jungle without a bonnet, and in a gauze dress of singular tenuity: but as the old hierophant had made no offers whatever of a partial amnesty, it did not exactly appear that such generous devotion could in any way be carried into effect. The audience, accordingly, were led to prepare for a scene of indiscriminate bone-crushing, when a new turn was given to the posture of affairs by the appearance of a tall gentleman arrayed in flesh-coloured tights, who demanded the priority of sacrifice. The precise persuasion of this individual, and his claims to such invidious distinction, were not accurately set forward; but as he rejoiced in the appellation of Morok the Beast-tamer, it appeared evident to us that at some period of his existence he had been admitted to the privilege of an intimacy of M. Eugene Sue. After some consideration, and an appeal to an invisible oracle, the high-priest of Bramah, influenced probably by the distinguished literary position of his prisoner, consented to the request; and a solemn festival, to begin with the disparition of the European captives at the banquet of the beasts, and to end with the incremation of about twenty young native widows on the funeral pile, was decreed accordingly. This announcement seemed to fill the hearts of the aforesaid widows with unbounded rapture, for they incontinently advanced to the front of the stage, where they executed an extempore mazourka.

The next scene exhibited a cave, divided into two compartments, each of them stocked with a very fair supply of decrepid-looking lions and attenuated leopards. There was some slight squalling from the pit on the part of the female audience; for the interposed grating appeared to be needlessly slight, and one of the lions,[752] though possibly from the mere ennui of existence, had a habit of yawning, which might have struck terror into the heart of Androcles. The clown, however, though not properly a protagonist in the drama, was kind enough to restore confidence to the spectators, by walking several times upon his hands before the bars, and exposing his motley person in divers tempting attitudes to the wild beasts, without apparently exciting their appetite. The yawning animal took no further notice of the invitation than to raise himself on his hind legs, and rested his four paws upon the cross-bar; after which he remained sitting like an enormous terrier supplicating for a fragment of muffin. A sickly tiger in the other compartment began to cough unpleasantly, as though the air of the circus was too pungent or too loaded for his delicate lungs.

Presently the procession entered, singing a hymn, which must have been highly gratifying to Bramah. In this ditty the widows joined with a fortitude worthy of so many Iphigenias; and we were not a little shocked to observe that some of the European captives were participators in that heathen psalmody. However, for the credit of our country, it should be stated, that neither the lieutenant of Irregulars, nor Amelia Darlingcourt, the young lady in whose affections he had a decided interest, took part in any such apostasy—indeed the mind of the latter was wholly occupied by other feelings, as she presently took occasion to assure us; for, the priest of Bramah having proclaimed silence, she advanced to the foot lamps, and warbled out an appropriate declaration that her heart was at that moment in the Highlands. This over, she threw herself into her lover's arms; and they both contemplated the menagerie with a calmness which testified the triumph of affection over death.

At a given signal, Morok the Beast-tamer stepped undauntedly into the den. We are ashamed to say that our friend the Doctor gloated upon this part of the spectacle with evident interest—it being a favourite theory of his that, on some occasion when the digestive organs of the animals were more than ordinarily active, Morok was sure to go the way of all flesh. Zumalacarregui was more indifferent,—pronounced the whole exhibition a humbug, and contrasted it disparagingly with the bull-fights in which, according to his own account, he was wont to take an active share at Salamanca. For my own part, it did not strike me that Mr Morok ran any particular danger. Either the animals were gorged, or their native ferocity had been long ago subdued by a system of judicious training. The lions submitted with perfect resignation to have their jaws wrenched open, and showed no symptoms of any desire to imitate the example of nutcrackers, even when the beast-tamer was inspecting the structure of their throats. The panthers were as pacific as though they had formed part of the body-guard of Bacchus; and the leopards ran up the shoulders of the man, and even allowed themselves to be twisted up into neckcloths, with a docility which was positively engaging.

The denoûment of the drama was, of course, simple. The high-priest of Bramah, and indeed the deity himself, were taken thoroughly aback. The oracle declared itself satisfied. The European captives were set free without the slightest stain upon their honour. Morok was discovered to be an eminent rajah—perhaps Tippoo Saib or Hyder Ali in disguise; the elderly individual with the coffee-coloured arms gave his benediction to the lovers—and the widows, sharing in the general amnesty, and relieved from the statutory duty of performing as suttee, testified their entire satisfaction with the whole proceedings by another mazy dance; after which the curtain fell upon a highly appropriate tableau.

"Well!" said the Doctor, "upon my honour, I must say that we should have been quite as well off at the Surrey. In this hot weather, the ammoniacal odour of the stables may be salubrious, but it is very far from refreshing; and I question whether it is improved by an intermixture of carnivorous exhalations."

"Were it not for that pretty face in the next box, I would have been off before now," observed he of Salamanca; "this lion and tiger stuff is enough to try the patience of Job."

[753]"But the horsemanship, my dear fellow," said I.

"Psha! what do they know of real horsemanship here?" interrupted the Spaniard. "When I was in the Christino cavalry."

"There! I knew it!" said the Doctor. "Once set him off on that yarn, and we shall have the whole history of his campaigns, without the slightest remorse or mitigation. Do, my dear Fred, be cautious! You don't know what I endured yesterday at supper."

"You be shot!" replied the Iberian. "Was I not compelled to substitute some rational topic of conversation for your interminable harangue upon the symptoms of pulmonary complaint? It was enough to have emptied an hospital. But see! they are bringing in the horses. By Jove, how fresh Widdicomb looks! I wonder whether he was really master of the ring at Trajan's amphitheatre. Not a bad brute, that one striped like a Zebra. How on earth do they manage the colours?"

"It is a chemical process," said the Doctor. "Perhaps you are not aware that the hyper-iodate of ——"

"Oh yes! we know all about it: very queer stuff too, I daresay. Hallo—look here! what kind of character is this fellow intended to personify?"

The question was not easily answered. The individual who provoked the remark was attired in most parsimonious silk drawers, with a sort of diminutive kilt around his waist. His head was decorated with a circle of particoloured feathers springing from a spangled circlet, not altogether unlike a highly decorated library-duster. On the whole, his costume was such as might have suited a Peruvian climate; but it was manifestly unfitted for the temperature of any untropical locality. By his side was a young lady similarly attired, only with a more liberal allowance of drapery, and rather more spangles upon her sleeves. The clown proceeded to chalk their soles with an expression of devout humility.

"These, I presume," said the Doctor, consulting the playbill, "are intended to represent the Inca and his bride; though what Incas had to do with horses, is utterly beyond my comprehension."

"They might have got them from the Spaniards, you know. Pizarro, is said to have been a liberal fellow in his way. I know a descendant of his at Cordova—"

"There they go—now for it!" said the Doctor. "I wonder if people ever galloped across a prairie in that way, holding one another by the hands, and standing each upon the point of one particular toe?"

"No more than Mercury ever chose to light upon the summit of a jet d'eau," said I. "But you are very prosaical and matter-of-fact to-night. See! up goes the lady on the Inca's knee. Do you call that attitude nothing? Why, even the master of the ring is so lost in admiration that he is forgetting to use his whip."

Here come the pole and ribbons. Yoicks! Capitally leaped! That young lady bounds over the cords as light and playfully as a panther. Surely the Inca is not going to disgrace himself by tumbling through a hoop? Yes, by the powers he is!—and a very fair somersault he has made of it! Now, then, put on the steam! Round they go like a whirlwind, attitudinising as if in agony. She looks behind her—starts—points; he turns his head—some imaginary foe must be in pursuit! Onwards—onwards, loving pair! One leap now, and ye are safe! It is a rasper, though—being nothing more nor less than a five-barred gate, speaking volumes in favour of early Peruvian agriculture. Over it they go both together; and Mr Merryman, in token of satisfaction, refreshes himself with a swim upon the sawdust!

"That course alone is worth the money," said I. "Now, Chief, unless you are bent upon prosecuting your conquest to the left, we may go. I feel a strong craving in my inner man for a draught of Barclay and Perkins."

"After all," remarked the Doctor, as we wended our way homewards, "there is something remarkably refreshing in the utter extravagance of the fictions which are presented at Astley's. They must keep in pay some author of very extraordinary genius. He never seems for a moment at a loss; and I doubt not that, at an hour's notice, he could get up a spectacle as brilliant as Aladdin's, in the Arabian Nights."

[754]"I wish some of our friends would profit by the example," said I. "There is a fearful dearth of invention just now, especially in the fictional department; and if no speedy improvement takes place, I confess I do not know what is to become of the periodicals."

"I quite agree with you," remarked the Spaniard. "Some people are rather given to hunt an idea to death. For example, I am acquainted with a certain gentleman who can write about nothing except the railways. Every story of his has some connexion with scrip or shares, and the interest of the plot invariably turns upon a panic."

"Allow me to remark, Mr Zumalacarregui," said I, considerably nettled at the allusion, which seemed excessively uncalled for, "that any subject of domestic interest is much better than an incessant repetition of low Peninsular skirmishes. You may probably think that the public are interested in the exploits of Herrera the dragoon, in the forcible strangulation of gipsies, attacks upon convents, and the other wares in which you usually deal; but my opinion is very different."

"No doubt of it!" exclaimed the Doctor, who was delighted at the prospect of a literary row. "Every body is sick with the eternal sameness of these señoras. I wonder, Chief, you don't change your ground, and let us have something better."

"Better than what?" said the Spaniard. "Better than rigmarole stories about surveyors, and gradients, and old gentlemen with pigtails that dabble in stock. I rather suspect that, at all events, my bitterest enemy cannot accuse me of having put out any thing worse."

"Nay, that's true, enough!" chimed in the Doctor: "I by no means vindicate our friend. He is sufficiently tiresome upon occasion, I allow."

"It is very easy for those who never wrote a line to pass criticisms upon the works of others," said I.

"Works? railway works, you mean," said the Spaniard.

"Allow me to tell you, my fine fellow," replied I, "that I will back myself for any given sum to write a tale against you on any possible subject; and you may lay the locality, if you please, in your favourite Spain, though I know no more about it than I do of Timbuctoo."

"And I," said Zumala, "will knock under to no man, not even Alexander Dumas, for invention. So the sooner we begin the better."

"Well, then, fix your subject. Shall it be at the siege of Salamanca?"

"In order that you may pilfer right and left from military memoirs, I suppose. Thank you—I am not quite so foolish!"

"Take your own ground, then. Where shall it be? Asia, Africa, America, or New Zealand, if you like it better."

"By no means let us interfere with G. P. R. James. He has taken the convicts under his own especial charge. Let us say America, North or South, and I leave it to you to select the century."

"I won't have any thing to do with Fenimore Cooper's Redskins," said I. "Your gipsy practice would give you a decided advantage in portraying the fiery eyes of a Crow or a Delaware Indian, glaring through a sumach bush. Besides, I hate all that rubbish about wampum and moccassins. But if you like to try your hand at a Patagonian tale, or even a touch at the Snapping Turtle or Cypress Swamp, though that is more in your line, I assure you I have no objection."

"Let me mediate," said the Doctor. "The whole of this discussion seems to have arisen out of to-night's performances at Astley's, and I don't see why you should not avail yourselves of a ready-made hint. There is the Inca and his bride,—a capital suggestive subject. Take that as the groundwork of your tales and pitch them in the days of Pizarro."

"Very well," said I—"only let us start in a mutual state of ignorance. It is many years since I have read a word about the Incas, and I do not mean to refresh my knowledge. What is your amount of preparation, Hidalgo?"

"Precisely the same as yours."

"So far good. But—harkye—who is to decide between us?"

"The public, of course."

"But then, reflect—two tales upon the same subject! Why, nobody will have patience to read them!"

[755]"Couldn't you try chapter about?" suggested the Doctor.

"A capital idea!" cried the Spaniard. "I am going down to Greenwich to-morrow for a white-bait party, so you have a clear day to begin with. We shall write it alternately, after the manner of the Virgilian eclogues."

"Arcades ambo," quoth the Doctor. "Well, good-night, lads, and see that you work out one another's ideas handsomely. I shall step into the club for half an hour, and have a glass of cold brandy and water."

"I say, Zumala," said I, as I walked home with my rival, "I am afraid the villain the Doctor is making game of us. Had we not better give the idea up?"

"Not a whit of it," replied the Spaniard. "I really want to see how the thing will do: and if you like to drag in the Doctor as a character, I shall be happy to keep it up. I presume there were plenty Caledonians wandering about the world even so far back as Pizarro's time?"

"There is always plenty of that stock in the market," I replied, with a groan. "Well, good-night. The MS. of the first chapter shall be sent you to-morrow evening; and recollect that we are both upon honour to avoid all kind of reference."

CHAPTER II.

THE RUBICON OF PERU.

It was the sunny dawn of a tropical morning. The sea had just ebbed, leaving a vast expanse of white sand studded with strange particoloured shells, between the primeval forest which formed the boundary of the ocean verge, and the heavy line of breakers which plashed sullenly along the shore. One vessel, partially dismasted, and bearing tokens of the recent storm, was riding at anchor beyond the outer ridge; another lay in hopeless wreck, a black and broken hulk, upon the beach. Her timbers were stove in, her bulwarks swept away; the once stately Estremadura would never more walk the waters like a thing instinct with beauty and with life.

Upwards of three hundred hardy and bronzed veterans occupied the beach. In the countenances of some might be traced that sullen expression which is the result of absolute despair. Others used vehement gesticulations, attempting apparently to convince their comrades of the propriety of adopting some strong and dangerous resolution. Others, who were either more used to peril, or more indifferent to consequences, were playing at games of chance, as composedly as if, instead of being outcasts on a foreign shore, they were wiling away the tedium of an hour in their dear but distant Spain.

Two men, who seemed by their garb and bearing to be the leaders, were walking apart from the others. The eldest, a tall gaunt man, whose forehead was seamed with the furrows of many years, appeared to be dissuading his companion from some enterprise which the younger eagerly urged. Ever and anon he stopped, pointed with his finger to the gigantic, woods which stretched inward as far as the eye could see, and shook his head in token of dissent and discouragement.

"I tell thee, Pizarro, it is madness, sheer madness!" said he. "The foot of man has never yet penetrated that howling wilderness, from which all last night there issued sounds that might have chilled the bravest heart with terror. Even could we hope to penetrate alive through its zone, what thinkest thou lies beyond? I see in the distance a chain of dark and gloomy mountains, upon whose summits the sun never shines, so thick are the clouds that obscure them; and I fear me that, could we reach their top, we should but look down upon the frightful abyss that is the uttermost boundary of the world!"

"Pshaw, Don Gonsalez! I did not think thou hadst been so weak as to believe in such fables. Be the end of the world where it may, never let it be said that, so long as one rood of land remains unexplored, the bold Spanish Buccaneers shrank from their[756] appointed task. But I know that it is not so. Beyond yon dusky ridge there are valleys as rich as ever basked in the glory of the sun—fields more fertile than any in Spain—cities that are paved with silver and with gold. I have seen them, old man, many and many a time in my dreams; and, by Santiago, I will not forego their conquest!"

"Thou hast said the truth unwittingly, Pizarro," replied the other. "These are indeed dreams, the coinage of a visionary brain, and they will lure thee on to ruin. Bethink thee—even were it as thou supposest—were El Dorado separated from us only by yon colossal barriers of nature, how could we achieve its conquest with a handful of broken men? Those valleys thou speakest of, if they do exist, must be peopled—the cities will be strong and garrisoned. Men build not that which they are utterly unable to defend; and our force, heaven help us! is scarce strong enough to capture a village."

"Listen!" said Pizarro, and he laid his hand on the arm of the other. "I am not a learned man, as thou knowest, but something have I seen and heard. I have seen thirty determined men hold their own at point of pike against an army. I have seen thirty horsemen scatter thousands of the barbarians like chaff; and have we not more than thirty here? Nay, listen further. I have heard that in the old time, when a land called Greece was assailed—it might have been by the Saracens—three hundred stalwart cavaliers, under the leadership of one Don Leonidas, did, trusting in the might of Our Lady and Saint Nicolas, hold at bay many thousands of the infidel scum; for which good service to this day there are masses sung for their souls. And trow ye that we, with the same number, cannot hold our own against heathen who never yet saw lance glitter, axe smite, nor listened to the rattle of a corslet? Out upon thee, old man! thy blood is thin and chill, or thou wouldst speak less like a shaveling, and more like a belted Castilian!"

"Son of a swineherd!" cried the old man, drawing himself up to his full height, whilst the red spot of passion rose upon his faded cheek—"Son of a swineherd and a caitiff! is it for thee to insult the blood of a hundred ancestors? Now, by the bones of those who lie within the vaults of the Alhambra, had I no better cause of quarrel, this speech should separate us for ever! Remain, then, if thou wilt—nay, thou shalt remain; but recollect this, that not one man who calls me captain shall bear thee company. There lies thy black and stranded hulk. Make the most of her that thou canst; for never again shalt thou tread a Spanish deck where I, at least, have the authority!"

During this insulting speech, the brow of Pizarro grew livid, and his hand clutched instinctively at the dagger. But the man, though desperate, had learned by times the necessity of habitual control; he thrust the half-naked weapon back again into its sheath, and proudly confronted his commander.

"It is well for thee, Don Gonsalez," he said, "that thine years are wellnigh spent, else, for all thy nobility, I had laid thee as low as those who are rotting beneath the marble. Hearken, then—I take thee at thy word, so far that thou and I never more shall tread the quarter-deck together. Thy vessel is safe. Mine is lost—well, then, take thine own and be gone! But mark me! Over the men here thou hast no power. In this land there is no fealty due to the flag of Spain. No man owes allegiance save to the leader of his adoption, to the strong heart and stout arm of him whom he selects to be his chief. If there be but one among them willing to cast his lot with mine, I will dare the issue. Do not, as thou regardest thy life, attempt to gainsay me in this. I am armed and resolved, and thou knowest that I am not wont to dally."

So saying, he strode towards the place where the sailors were congregated, and, with his sheathed rapier, drew a deep line along the sand. All gazed in silence, wondering what his meaning might be; for the brow of Pizarro was now bent with that resolute frown which it seldom wore except on the eve of battle, his lips were compressed, and his eyes flashing as if with an inward fire.

[757]"Spaniards!" he said, "the hour for action has arrived. There lies the ship, ready-winged to transport you back again to Spain, not as conquerors of the New World, but as beggars returning to the old. Go, then—plough the seas, greet the friends of your childhood, and when they ask you for the treasures that were to be gathered in this distant land, tell them that you have surrendered all at the moment when victory was secure. If they ask for your leader, tell them that you abandoned him on a foreign shore—that he only remained steadfast to his purpose and his oath—that he is resolved to win a crown, or to perish nobly in the attempt!"

"No, by the blessed scallop-shell of Compostella!" cried a burly soldier, pressing forward: "come what will of it, Pizarro, there is one at least who will not flinch from thy side! Here stand I, Herrera the dragoon, ready to follow thee to the death. It shall never be said that I crossed the salt sea twice without striking one blow for Spain, or that I left my captain in his extremity!"

"Therein I recognise my ancient comrade!" cried Pizarro, pressing his hand. "Gallant Herrera! stalwart brother! I knew that I might count on thee."

"And I," said another soldier, "would have small objection to do the same; because, d'ye see, it has always struck me that Don Pizarro had the root of the matter in him—"

"Ha, my tall Scot! sayest thou?" cried Pizarro: "wilt thou too cast thy lot with us? I know thee for a hardy blade that loves hard knocks better than oily words. See—I have drawn this line upon the sand: let those come over who will follow fortune and Pizarro!"

"Hooly and fairly!" replied the other, whose high cheek-bones and sandy hair bore unequivocal testimony to his race. "There's some small matters to be settled first; for it seems to me that this is verra like the taking of a new service. Now, we have a proverb in the North that short accounts make long freends; and I would fain speer of your valour, in the event of my biding here, what wad become of the arrearages to whilk I am righteously entitled?"

"Base fellow!" cried Herrera, "wouldst thou barter thy honour for gold?"

"By your leave, sergeant," replied the Scot drily, "maist men barter baith their life and honour for little else. But I cannot allow that this is a case of barter. I hold it to be a distinct contract of service, or rather of location and hire, anent which it is written in the book of Regiam Majestatem, that no new contracts shall be held effectual until all previous conditions are purged and liquidated. Wherefore, touching these arrears, which amount for service of man and horse to nine doubloons, four maravedis, excluding interest and penalty as accords—"

"Hearken!" said Pizarro; "if a man owed thee a handful of dollars, and offered, as the condition of his release, to show thee a mine of diamonds, wouldst thou reject his proposal?"

"Assuredly not," replied the Scot; "I wad indubitably accept of the same, reserving always my right of diligence and recourse, until the furthcoming and valuation of the aforesaid jewellery."

"Well, then, the matter stands thus," continued Pizarro: "Gold have I none to pay thee; but if thou wilt follow me across yonder mountains, I will lead thee to a land richer far than any of your native valleys—"

"That's impossible," interrupted the Scot. "It's clear ye never saw Dalnacardoch!"

"A land which we will win and hold for ourselves and our heirs for ever!"

"Blench, doubtless, or for a mere nominal reddendo," remarked the Scot. "There's some sense in that; and since ye say that the arrears are scantly recoverable, by any form of process, I care not if I sist procedure thereanent, and take service under my freend the sergeant, whose acquaintance with the Pandects is somewhat less than his dexterity in the handling of a halbert."

So saying, the Scot stepped across the line, and was warmly greeted by Herrera. His example, however, was by no means contagious. Gonsalez, though not absolutely popular with his men, had nevertheless commanded their[758] respect, and was well known to be a judicious and experienced leader. His strong opposition to the rash project of Pizarro had materially shaken the confidence of many who would otherwise have been forward in any enterprise which promised a favourable termination. Besides, their position was such, that the hardiest adventurer might well have been excused for hesitating to expose himself to further danger. Only one ship remained, and with the departure of that, all chance of returning to Spain seemed at an end. The aspect of the country was sterile and uninviting. No inhabitants had flocked down to welcome the Europeans to their shore—none of the happy omens which hailed the advent of Columbus had been visible to them. It seemed as if nature, revolting at the cruelties which had already been exercised by the invading Spaniards on the denizens of the infant world, had closed her gates against this marauding band, and absorbed her treasures into her womb. Of the three hundred Spaniards, only twenty-five crossed the boundary line, and declared themselves ready to take part in the desperate fortunes of Pizarro.

"Farewell, then!" said that haughty chieftain, addressing himself to the others. "I need you not; for what is a strong arm without a resolute and determined heart? Farewell! I have pointed out to you the path, and ye will not tread it!—I have held up the banner, and ye will not rally under it!—I have sounded the trumpet, and your ears are deaf to the call! Henceforward there is nothing for us in common. Go, cravens as ye are! back to Spain—work for hire—dig—sweat—labour at the oar! It is your portion, because ye know not what valour and glory are! But for you, gentlemen—who, superior to the vulgar ties of country and of home, have sunk the name of Spaniard in the glorious title of buccaneer—let us be up and doing! Our march may be toilsome, the danger great; but before us lies the new world which it is our glorious destiny to subdue. Mount, gentlemen cavaliers! Herrera, do thou display the standard! One last look at the ocean, and then forward for victory or death!"

"One word, Pizarro, before thou goest," said Gonsalez. "Amidst all thy rashness, I cannot but discern the flashing of a noble spirit. I would fain not part with thee in anger. It may be I have wronged thee, and—"

"Old man, what art thou and thy wronging to me?" replied Pizarro. "But yesterday I was thy subaltern—now, I am a chief. The soul of a conqueror is swelling in my bosom, and thou and such as thou have no power to do me wrong. I have no time to waste. Set on, I say! Another hour has struck in the mighty destiny of the world!"

A few moments afterwards, the watchers on the beach heard the last note of Pizarro's trumpet dying away in the depths of the Peruvian forest.

"A very fair chapter," said I, folding up the MS. "Strong, terse, spirited, and a good deal in the Waverley style. It is a pity I could not manage to foist in the Doctor, but this other sort of character will do remarkably well. Not a word about the Inca as yet. Well—that's the hidalgo's look-out. I wonder what kind of work he will make of the next chapter!"

CHAPTER III.

THE CHILDREN OF THE SUN.

"Oneiza!"

"My love—my lord!"

"Look upon me with thy lustrous eyes till I see my image dancing in them. O my beautiful, my beloved! Tell me, Oneiza! when the song of the nightingale warbles across the lake, what dost thou think of then?"

"Of thee—of thee, my adored one!"

"And when the stars are glittering in heaven like sapphires in thine ebon hair—what then, Oneiza?"

"Of thee—still of thee!"

"When the humming-bird is stooping o'er the chalice of the flower,—when the sweet azalea blossom bursts brightly from the bower,—when the very breeze is loaded with odour and perfume, and the murmur of the hidden[759] brook comes singing through the gloom,—when the fire-flies light the thicket like spangles struck from gold,—when all the buds that love the morn their tiny cups unfold,—when the dew is falling warmest on blade, and leaf, and tree—where is thy soul, Oneiza?"

"With thee, my love! with thee!"

Never, surely, since the first blight fell upon Eden, did the virgin moon look down upon a lovelier or a more innocent pair!! Manco Capl was of the race of the Incas, whom tradition asserted to be the direct offspring of the sun. But a shrewd physiological observer would have had no difficulty in recognising the traces of a descent more human but not less illustrious. The clustering curls, the dark eye, the aquiline nose, and the full underlip, of the young Inca, bore a striking resemblance to that ideal of beauty which far transcends the product of the Grecian chisel. They were the features of a prince of the Captivity—of a leader of the most ancient race that ever issued from the defiles of the Caucasus. For it is not to Assyria, or even to Thibet, that we must look for a solution of the great mystery attendant upon the departure of the Ten Tribes; They were not destined to remain by the streams of Babylon, hewers of wood and drawers of water in an unkind and alien country. The Israelitish spirit, which in former times had expanded to the strength of a Sampson, would not brook such a degradation, and the second mighty pilgrimage of the nation was even more prolonged than the first. At length they reached a land of rest and refuge;—Dan took possession of Mexico, and Zebulon was located in Peru.

Manco Capl had long loved Oneiza, the daughter of the Peruvian high-priest, with that ardour and entire devotion which is unknown to the callous nations of the north, whose affections are as cold as the climate in which they shiver and exist. She, in return, had surrendered to him that treasure than which the world contains nothing of more estimable and priceless value—a perfect trusting heart. Child of a paradise in which the trail of the serpent was hardly visible, she knew none of the coy arts which are practised by European maidens for the sake of concealing those emotions which, in reality, constitute the highest excellence of our being. She loved—warmly, keenly, passionately; and she felt that to conceal the expression of that love, was to defraud her betrothed of his due. Oh! if women only knew what they sacrifice through fictitious delicacy—if they had but once experienced the delight of an unrestricted communion of soul—they would throw restraint to the winds, and worship with the ardour of Herodias!

"Oneiza, dearest!"

"Say on, my soul hears thee!"

"Look up, love, into the starry firmament. See'st thou that glittering zone, light as the girdle beneath which beats the heart of my Oneiza? Is it not very beautiful?"

"It is—it is!"

"Would'st thou think there was danger there?"

"How! thou makest me tremble."

"Little shrinking one! did I say that it boded danger to thee? Am not I here to ward away any thunderbolt that might threaten the breast of my Oneiza?"

"Oh, peace! tell me of the stars. Canst thou read them, then, my Manco?"

"Listen, dearest. Thou knowest the traditions of our race. Long, long ago, before the seed from which these hoary trees are sprung had ripened,—before a stone of yonder pyramid was hewn from its native rock—our fathers dwelt in a land that was named Chaldea. It is far away from this, Oneiza, across the salt and briny sea; and I know not how they had power to traverse the wilderness of waters. It was a land, too, not like ours, sweet and pleasant, but very, very dreary; with no placid pools and running streams, but a huge tract of sand, which the sun always glared upon in his wrath."

"Oh Manco—that is terrible! But the stars?"

"Ay—the stars—the stars, Oneiza! They, too, were there, large and lustrous as thine own eyes; and our fathers, as they lay at night by the margin of some lonely well, watched them in their courses, until they learned to read the mysterious symbol-book of heaven, and drew strange knowledge[760] front the aspect of the sidereal junctions."

"And thou, too, hast this knowledge Manco?"

"Little foolish one! Wouldst thou have me more ignorant than my ancestry? It was taught me by one who had watched the heavens for a whole year from the flaming top of Atlpacaca; and long ago he foretold that danger for Peru which I now see depending in the midst of yonder constellation."

"Danger for Peru? Oh Manco!"

"Ay, love, but not for thee. Look a little lower. See that star, sometimes hidden for a moment by the waving branch of the cactus. How mild and clear it is, like the eye of a happy spirit! Mark how bright it sparkles, in the ether far; that, my own Oneiza, is thy natal star!"

"And which is thine, dearest?"

"The stars," replied Manco, proudly, "have no influence over the destiny of the children of the sun! He that would read our fate, must gaze steadfastly upon the orb of the great luminary of the heavens, and not shrink, although the rays pierce hot and dazzlingly through his brain. But enough of this, beloved! Let us to our rest. The dew is falling heavily upon my plume, and thy tresses too are damp."

"Oh Manco!—I would fain tell thee something—"

"Speak, darling."

"I had a dream last night, and yet—wouldst thou believe it?—it was not of thee!"

"And yet thou canst remember it, Oneiza?"

"Ay, for it was so very terrible. Let me rest my head upon thy bosom, and I will tell thee all. Methought I was lying yonder, under the broad palm-trees by the lake, watching the young alligators as they chased each other in innocent sport among the reeds, and scared from their resting-place swarms of the golden butterfly. All of a sudden there came a hush, as though the great heart of nature were thrilled to its centre. The scaly creatures of the lake sank noiselessly into its silver depths, and disappeared. A fawn that had come out of the thicket to drink, gazed round in terror and retired. The lizard crept into the hollow trunk, and the voices of the birds were silenced. I looked towards the city, and, behold, a dark cloud had gathered over it! Its spires and domes no longer flashed in fervent radiance to the sun: the face of heaven was obscured with a cold and leaden hue. I looked to the colossal statue of our mighty deity, the sun. Its face no longer wore that deep smile of unearthly beauty, but was distorted with an expression of unutterable and agonising woe. Presently, methought, the figure was endowed with superhuman life. I saw it rise from its pedestal, Manco,—I saw it stretch out its arm towards the east, and a dismal voice proclaimed these words—'Peru is given to the stranger!' But thou dost not speak, Manco!"

"Go on, Oneiza! I listen."

"I looked towards the mountains, and lo! Ilaxlipacpl, from its stupendous peak, was vomiting forth flames to the sky. Huge seams of liquid lava were bursting through its sides. The solid rocks seemed to be bursting every where; and, as I gazed in awe and terror on the hideous sight, the glowing element took shape and form, and I could read, in characters of fire, that awful sentence—'Peru is given to the stranger!'"

"Was this all, Oneiza?"

"Oh, not all! for while I looked, methought the earth began to tremble, and strange noises, as of brazen instruments and the clash of iron, arose. I heard shouting and the voices of men, but they spoke in a language which I understood not, and it sounded harsh and uncouth to my ear. And by-and-by there passed such terrible forms, Manco, towards the city! Surely they could not be human. The upper part resembled the shape of man, but they were covered with bright steel, and carried long javelins in their hands. The rest of their figure was that of a strong beast, its hoofs armed with metal, and the ground shook as they came on. Methought one of them stooped to seize me, and I uttered a scream and awoke, and, behold, thou wert lying by my side, and the moonbeam was shining upon thy brow."

"Hast thou spoken of this to thy father, Oneiza?"

[761]"Not yet. Are not the earliest of my thoughts for thee?"

"Dear one! This is a warning from the gods. Let us hasten to the city, and warn the Emperor ere it be too late. Thy dream, combined with the aspect of the heavens, may well make the bravest tremble."

They arose and hastened together, hand in hand, along the margin of the lake towards the town. But, ere they reached it, it became evident that some unexpected events had occurred. Torches were glittering through the streets, a vast pyre sent up its column of flame from the mighty altar of the sun, and the clanging of the cymbals was heard.

"What is this, Ilazopli?" cried Manco Capl to a young Peruvian, whose countenance bore token of strong excitement; "what means this sudden uproar?"

"The gods have descended in a human shape, and the Emperor has asked them to a banquet!"

"Peace, impious!" said Manco sternly. "Art thou beside thyself?"

"It is a fact, and there's no denying it!" replied the other. "I have seen them myself. Such grand heroic figures, all clothed in shining steel, with beards like the tail of a llama! By Beersheba!" exclaimed the young man—for the Peruvians had not yet altogether forgotten the traditions of their ancestors,—"by Beersheba! you should see the creatures that brought them hither! their snorting is like that of a he-alligator: when they toss their heads the foam flies out like flakes of the cotton-tree in autumn, and the smite of their iron hoofs is heavy as the fall of a stone from heaven! Huzza for the new deities!"

"Blasphemer!" cried Manco, "what knowest thou of the gods? are there not demons who can take their form?"

"I never saw any," replied Ilazopli. "I am no priest, Inca, but I can tell you that Axtloxcl is quite delighted with them, and says that they have come down from the sun on purpose."

"Axtloxcl! my father!" cried Oneiza.

"Hush, dearest!" said her husband. "Let us hope the best. It may be that he has received a revelation from above, and that the omens and thy dreams were false."

"Oh never—never!" said Oneiza. "The sun and the stars do not lie. Are not these the very shapes, the same terrible phantoms I beheld in slumber, when the voice from the unknown world proclaimed the downfall of Peru? Hast not thou, too, read the signs of its downfall in the heavens? and can the coming of those new deities—if deities they are—bring us good?"

"Well!" said Ilazopli, "tastes differ. For my own part I prefer deities who can walk about, and talk, to our old images of the sun, who never say so much as thank ye in return for all our offerings. But I must away—there is a great feast going on at the palace, and the Emperor expects all the Incas. You, Manco Capl, will be looked for."

"Away, then!" said the young Inea, "I will follow betimes. Insensate fool!" continued he, as he watched the departing footsteps of the other, "thou art like all thy race, who welcome destruction when it comes beneath a glittering guise! But why should I blame thee more than the rest, when wiser and older men have yielded to the fatal lure? Hearken, my Oneiza; my soul is sad within me, but it is for thee chiefly that I fear. Thou hast not been long with me, Oneiza, but were I to lose thee, the light of my life were gone. Promise me, then, that whatever may befall our unhappy country, we never shall be separated—that in death as in life we may be together—and sweet, oh unutterably sweet, would that death which should find me clasped in thy arms!"

"Oh Manco, Manco! canst thou doubt?"

"No; I never doubted. But my heart misgives me as to the issue. See, Oneiza,—this plain is not all the world. Beyond these mountains are valleys and broad savannahs where the foot of the invader can never come. I have seen them as I hunted the fierce jaguar on the hills; and even amidst all the magnificence of our own stately city, I have sighed for a hut by the side of some lonely stream, with thee for my sole companion. If the day should come when ruin bursts[762] upon us, wouldst thou, Oneiza, tender nurtured as thou art, be prepared to leave all, and follow thy husband into the depths of the unknown wilderness? There are dangers, Oneiza, but love will watch over us!"

"Were this Eden, my husband, and the valley of Hinnom lay beyond, I am thine—thine—thine for ever!"

"Oh say no more, my darling, my love, my own, my sweet! Were all the world my kingdom, I'd lay it at thy feet. What treasure could I offer to buy a heart like thine? My soul is strong within me like a giant's stirred with wine! I boast the blood of him who met and smote the Philistine! Come on then, dearest—dearest, come! together let us go. The lights are flashing from the towers, the evening star is low!"

Along with the foregoing MS. I received the following note from the Spaniard. "I don't relish your chapter much. It is palpable cribbage in many parts, and those absurd patriotic prejudices of yours have brought you into a scrape. I've met with a character very much like your mercenary Scot before. I should have brought him into this chapter, only I don't comprehend the northern gibberish, and you have forgotten to nominate your heathen. I shall say nothing about mine, except this, that it is eminently touching, pathetic, and original. Match it if you can."

"Original, indeed!" said I. "Does he think I never read the Wondrous Tale of Alroy? Tender! What can be easier than to write a dialogue of unmitigated maudlin? Touching! Why, it is half rhyme, and very skimble-skamble versification too. I wish he would give his Peruvians pronounceable names, for never in my life before have I seen such a ruthless dislocation of the alphabet! However, I must follow the lead. The next chapter, I calculate, will be a stunner."

CHAPTER IV.

THE HALL OF FIRE.

That night there was a scene of revelry in the imperial palace of Caxamalca. Innocent and confiding as an infant, the chief Inca, Atahualpa, had welcomed the coming of the Spaniards as messengers of the gods, if not as actual deities; and, with true barbaric vanity, had set forth a display of his costliest treasures. Atahualpa himself was in the prime of life, beautiful as a pard, and with a native port of majesty which well might have been envied by the haughtiest monarch of Christendom. And indeed his costume, borrowed, though but remotely, from the Oriental model, was far more noble and magnificent than that which European habit has rigorously assigned to our modern kings. Over his clustering hair he wore a carcanet of diamonds, surmounted by the precious plumage of the bird of Paradise. His surcoat and vest were curiously inlaid with the brilliant feathers of the humming bird, alternating with rows of the rarest gems, and the triple necklace of rubies around his neck was worth the ransom of Hindostan. At his feet lay a tamed jaguar, which fawned like a dog upon its master; and in his right hand he held an ivory sceptre, surmounted by a single pearl, of which the world did not contain the equal. Such was Atahualpa, the supreme autocrat of Peru.

Around him were gathered his princely Incas, scarce inferior in magnificence to their sovereign. The table was heaped with vessels and flagons of the purest gold, which gave a still richer colour to the sparkling juice of the grape—for the art of manufacturing wine had still been retained by the undoubted descendants of Noah. The strangers, as they sate at the feast, gazed around them with greedy eyes, astonished at the amount of plunder which was so speedily to become their own.

"Ye have gold enough here, Inca," said Pizarro, who was seated at the right hand of Atahualpa; "ye have gold enough and to spare. By the bones of Christopher Columbus! it is a shame to see this red metal so vilely used!"

"Ye may say that," cried the Scot,[763] whose head was half-buried in a flagon; "it is downright wastrife in thae bodies to make pats and pans out of as gude gold as was ever coined into bonnet-pieces. We could not afford that at the Leadhills, though the district there is no far short o' Ophir."

"Run me through the body," muttered Herrera the dragoon, "if the temptation of handling those dear delightful platters is not too much for the patience of any Christian cavalier. I wonder when our general will give the order to begin the sack?"

"Peace, son!" said the famous monk, Vincent Valverde, who was opposite to the sergeant. "Why shouldst thou seek to hasten the work? Are they not given unto us utterly for a spoil? Wherefore, tarry thou in patience."

"Yon's no a bad-looking lass!" cried the Scot, as Manco Capl led Oneiza into the hall; "though, certes, if she had nae mair tocher than her claes, she is like to bring bare eneuch luck to her gudeman."

"Och, by the powers!" said an Irish trooper, of the name of O'Rafferty, "but she's a jewel! I wonder if that spalpeen keeps her company. He's mighty like a young Jew that diddled me at the fair of Limerick!"

"Ho, Inca!" cried Pizarro, "why art thou silent? Hearest thou not what I ask? Hast more such gear as this?"

"Doth my lord inquire after the household stuff?" replied Atahualpa. "We reck not of it. Let him take whatever pleaseth him."

"That's eneuch for me!" cried the Scot, appropriating an enormous flagon; "fient ane o' me ever yet looked a gift-horse in the mouth!"

"And the diamonds, Inca—the diamonds?" said Pizarro, casting a covetous glance at the superb garniture of his host; "are they, too, offerings to the guests whom the gods have sent hither?"

"They are the heir-looms of the sun," replied the Inca, "and they may not be gifted away. But what seekest thou, noble stranger? Is it hospitality? Our palaces are open to you. Are you hungry? We will feed you. Would you till the land? We can give you valleys. Tarry with us, and become the adopted children of the sun."

"Ha! wretched infidel!" shouted Valverde; "wouldst thou tempt us to deny our faith? Noble Pizarro! it needed but this to complete the measure of their iniquity. Up! and let the sword of the true Church attest the might of her crozier."

"Patience, holy father!" cried Pizarro. "Know, Inca, that we have a direct mission from heaven; and I am sent to reclaim from thee those jewels which thou and thine ancestors have worn."

"Let the gods, then, who gave them, come and take them," said the Inca, calmly.

"Thou wilt not yield them?" said Pizarro; "then, by Santiago! I will seize on them as my lawful prey."

So saying, the ruffian snatched at the chain of rubies which encircled the neck of the Inca. But ere the subordinate Peruvian chiefs, who hardly understood the import of the scene, could interfere, a powerful defender rose before Atahualpa. No sooner had the hand of the Spaniard been laid upon the sacred person of his master, than the jaguar leaped up with a tremendous roar, and sprang at the throat of Pizarro. Well was it for the marauder that on that day he was sheathed in the tempered armour of Castile, else the fangs of the wild beast would have avenged this atrocious insult. As it was, the buccaneer was borne backwards upon the floor, where he lay struggling in the gripe of the infuriated monster.

Herrera the dragoon unsheathed his broadsword.

"Let me get a blow at the brute!" he cried. "I will sliver it in twain like a kitten."

But Manco Capl stepped before him.

"Robber!" he said, "wouldst thou slay the animal for defending faithfully the person of its master? Down with thy weapon, or, by the might of Moses! I will smite thee dead with my mace!"

"A Jew!—a Jew!" roared Valverde; "a palpable, self-acknowledged Jew! Down with him, cavaliers!—hew the circumcised villain to pieces!—trample him under foot, as ye would tread on the forehead of an asp!"

[764]But the sanguinary orders of the monk were not so easily obeyed. Quick as lightning, Manco Capl had grappled with the gigantic trooper, and for once the Peruvian agility proved a match for the European strength. Encumbered with his armour, Herrera staggered and fell, dragging his antagonist with him, who, however, kept the upper hold.

"In the name of the fiend!" shouted Pizarro, "rid me of this monster! Juan! Diego! O'Rafferty!—will you see me murdered before your eyes?"

"Hold!" cried the Inca to the soldiers; "no violence! I will call the creature off. Come hither, Bicerta!" and the jaguar quitted its hold of Pizarro, and came crawling to the feet of its master.

"Ye are trusty knaves indeed!" said Pizarro, when he had risen from the earth; "had it depended upon your succour, I might have been torn limb from limb."

"Troth, ye're no that far wrang," observed the Scot; "it's an unchancy beast to deal wi', and far waur nor a wull-cat!"

"But what is this?" cried Pizarro. "Herrera down? By Heaven! the best and bravest of my soldiers has been slain!"

And so it was. Unable to shake off the superincumbent weight of the young Inca, Herrera had felt for his poniard, and aimed a desperate stroke at the bosom of Manco Capl. But the active youth caught him by the wrist, and with a dexterous turn forced the steel from his hand. The clutch of the dragoon was by this time fastened in his hair, and no means of extrication were left save to use the weapon. The steel flashed thrice, and each time it was buried in the throat of Herrera. Gradually he relaxed his hold, his huge frame quivered strongly, a film gathered over his eyes, and he lay a senseless corpse. The black blood flowed lazily from his wounds—the jaguar crept forwards, and purred as he licked it up.

Meanwhile, where was Oneiza? Pale as death, she had been clinging to her father while the conflict lasted; but now, when her husband was victorious, and standing, brave and beautiful, over his prostrate foe, his large eye flashing with indignation, and his nostril dilating with triumph, she sprang forward, and threw her arms around him.

"Back!—back, Oneiza!" cried the Inca; "this is no place for women! To the temple all of you, save those who have strength to fight for their Emperor and their homes! These are no gods, but bloody, desperate villains, whom it is ours to punish. See!—one of them is already smitten down, and his blood is sinking into the floor. Gods do not bleed thus. O my friends! be true to yourselves, and we may yet save our country! Away—away, Oneiza, if thou lovest me! Axtloxcl, carry her hence! To the temple; and if we join you not there, fire dome and shrine, and leave nothing but ashes to the invader!"

The women and the priests obeyed, and none save the combatants remained in the palace. The Peruvians, though numerically superior to their opponents, were yet at a great disadvantage in point of arms. Unaccustomed to warfare, they carried such weapons only as were more useful for show than for defence, whilst every one of the Spaniards was armed from head to heel. At one end of the hall stood Atahualpa, surrounded by his native chivalry, each eager to shed his lifeblood in defence of his beloved monarch; at the other was gathered the small phalanx of the Spaniards, to whom retreat was impossible, and remorse or pity unknown.

"Why wait we further?" cried Pizarro: "the blood of Herrera calls out for vengeance. Be firm, men—unsling your hackbuts—fire!" and the first deadly discharge of musketry thundered through the Peruvian hall.

Several of the Peruvians fell, but their fall was of less moment than the terror which seized the survivors on witnessing the effect of these unknown engines of destruction.

"The gods! the gods are wroth with us! We have seen them in the smoke and the fire!" cried several, and they fell unwounded on their faces, in fear and consternation, among the dead.

Manco Capl alone stood unappalled.

"Be they gods or no!" he cried, "they are our foemen, and the enemies of Peru! Can those be of the sun, who come hither to massacre his[765] children? Let us meet fire with fire—kindle the palace—and try how these strangers will breathe amidst the roar of the devouring elements!"

So saying, the intrepid young man, as if actuated by the spirit of his great ancestor, the indomitable Judge of Israel, caught up a torch, and applied it to the hangings of the wall. Quick as thought, the flames ran up—their fiery tongues licked the ceiling—the beams began to crackle and to blaze—the smoke descended in thick spiral wreaths throughout the room. Once again, and but once, sped the volley of the Spaniards: next moment they were engaged hand to hand with Manco Capl, and a body of the young Incas, whom his words had roused to desperation. The struggle was terrible, but not long. The Europeans, trained to the use of arms from their infancy, made wild havoc among their slender assailants. One by one they fell, vainly defending their king, who was soon within the grasp of Pizarro.

Soon the flickering of the flames, and the rolling columns of smoke which issued from the burning hall, announced to those who had taken refuge in the adjacent temple the nature of the awful catastrophe.

"O Axtloxcl—O my father! let me go!" cried Oneiza. "My husband is perishing in the fire! Oh, let me go and die with him, if I cannot hope to save him!"

At this moment a door of the palace burst open, and Manco Capl, his vesture bloody, and his long plumes broken, rushed through the intervening space. The jaguar followed at his heels.

"My bride—my Oneiza! where art thou!" he cried; and, with a loud scream of joy, his wife tore herself from the grasp of her father, and leaped into the young man's arms.

"Thou art safe! thou art safe!" she cried.

"Hush, Oneiza! The Great Spirit has been very merciful, but there is danger yet. Canst fly, beloved?"

"With thee, my love?—to the boundary of the solid earth."

"Then away with me, for death is near at hand!"

The horses of Pizarro and his followers had been picketed close to the gates of the temple. Whether from negligence, or the conviction that the fear which the Peruvians had already manifested at the sight of these strange animals would be their safeguard, or from the impossibility of sparing one single soldier of the scanty band, these had been left without a sentry. Actuated by an impulse, which perhaps in a calmer moment he would scarcely have felt, Manco Capl snatched the reins of one of them, a splendid piebald charger, which indeed was Pizarro's own, lifted Oneiza upon a second, sprang into the saddle, and in an instant was galloping away.

"Fire upon the dog!" cried Pizarro, who was just then rushing out, sword in hand. "Fire upon him, I say! I would not lose Onagra for his weight in virgin gold!"

Three shots were fired, but none of them struck the fugitives. Onward they rushed towards the lake with the jaguar bounding by their side.

"Mount and after them!" shouted Pizarro.

O'Rafferty and the Scot obeyed—threw themselves hastily on horseback, and gave spur in pursuit.

We throw a veil over the deeds of atrocity which were that night perpetrated in Caxamalca.

Short and sweet, said I, as I laid down my pen: I question whether Dumas ever turned out any thing more dramatic. At all events, I have done a material service to the public, by exterminating Herrera the dragoon. I hardly suppose that, after this, the hidalgo will venture to bring him forward again. Peace to his manes! It was a tough job to kill him, but I think I have effected it at last, rather neatly than otherwise.

CHAPTER V.

THE CATARACT OF THE ROCKS.

"Huzza, huzza! along the shore, across the desert wild, none meet the Inca and his bride, the free, the undefiled! Huzza, huzza! our steeds are fleet, the moon shines broad and clear; at every stride a tree goes by,[766] we pass them like the deer! Hold up, hold up, my only love! the desert paths are near. I know the ways that skirt the rocks where foemen cannot ride. Nay, never wring thy hands and weep, my own devoted bride. We leave behind a ruined home, but freedom lies before; and hostile bands and savage arms shall never vex thee more. Why dost thou start so wildly, love? Why look in terror back? Fear'st thou the mailed enemies that follow in our track?"

"Oh, my husband! there are two!"

"Were there twenty, love, I fear not! Give thy willing steed the rein. Ho, Bicerta! noble creature, how he bounds along the plain! See, his eager eye is glowing with a fierce and sullen fire! Let the caitiffs dare to harm us, he will rend them in his ire. Onward, onward, love! the mazes of the forest now are past. Hark! I hear the hollow roaring of the mountain stream at last."

They were nearing a gloomy crevice of the rocks, through which a rapid river found its way. The chasm was a fearful one. More than a hundred feet below, the torrent boiled and whirled. The precipices on either side were sheer—a fall was inevitable death. The Inca saw and felt the danger, but there was no retreat. Grasping with one hand the reins of Oneiza's horse, he smote with the other the flank of his own. The dagger of Herrera, which the Peruvian still held, did service as a spur—both animals cleared the gulf, and alighted panting on the farther side.

"Deil's in your beast, O'Rafferty!" shouted the Scot, "pu' up hard, man, or ye're intil a hole as deep as the cauldron at the Yetts o' Muckart!"

The warning came too late. The young Irish horse upon which the foremost trooper was mounted went steadily at the chasm, gathered itself like a cat for the leap, and very nearly succeeded in achieving it. But the weight of the rider, sheathed as he was in heavy armour, was too much for its strength. It alighted, indeed, with its forefeet on the turf, made one convulsive struggle, and then fell heavily down the precipice. There was a sullen plunge, but no cry arose from the abyss.

"Weel," said the Scot, as he dismounted and peered over the edge of the rock, "that was a maist fearsome loup! Puir O'Rafferty! I aye tellt him he was a fule, and noo the fact has become maist veesible to ocular demonstration. I maun hae a shot, tho', at that lang chield wi' the feathers."

So saying, he unbuckled his carabine, and took deliberate aim over his saddle. But the villanous purpose was frustrated. No sooner had the fugitives halted, than the jaguar returned, creeping stealthily to the brink, and measuring the distance for its spring. The eyes of the Scot was intent upon his victim, his finger was placed upon the trigger, when, with a tremendous roar, the panther cleared the gulf, and seized the trooper by the throat. He spoke one sentence, and nothing more.

"Wha will tell this in Dysart, that I suld hae lived to be worried by a wull-cat?"

Next evening, in a cool grotto of the mountains, on a couch of the softest moss, far away from ravage and misery, and the armed grasp of the assassin, Manco Capl and Oneiza sung their bridal hymn.

"Oh, dearer than the evening star, art thou to me, my love! It gleams in glory from afar in yonder heaven above. But thou art in my arms, my sweet, nor nearer canst thou be! Where is thy soul, Oneiza?"

"With thee, my lord, with thee!"

"My humble opinion," said the Doctor, after listening to the foregoing pages—"my humble opinion is, that they manage matters better at Astley's."

[767]

SENTIMENTS AND SYMBOLS OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC.

When Lamartine, in the face of a mob still excited with battle and bloodshed, still drunken with the intoxication of victory, demanding, of those whom the chances of a destiny-fraught hour had placed at their head in the perilous post of command, they scarce knew what, and yet ready to recommence destruction and death were it not granted—when Lamartine tore aside the blood-red banner of terror, that had been seized on as the symbol of the newly proclaimed French Republic, and lifted aloft the tricolor flag as the true standard of the Republic of peace and order which he hoped to found, he did not only an act of personal courage—one to be mentioned among the great traits of heroism in the annals of history—but he consummated a deed upon which the destiny of France, perhaps of the whole world, for the moment depended. To those far away, who know not the strange compound that forms the character of the French, the mere change of one flag for another may appear a matter of but little moment: but in truth it was one of almost inestimable importance, for the destiny of the country depended on it. And this Lamartine knew. He knew his people too—he knew how easily they are led away by the outward show, how completely their sentiments would be engaged in the outward symbols; and he reared the symbol of order against the banner of violence and blood; though he raised it aloft at the hazard of his life. At that moment the poet-statesman stood forth a man ready to die for his convictions: at that moment, guns, pikes, swords, daggers, every instrument of death was directed at his head by a furious mob, screaming for that ideal, the Republic, from which it had been taught by demagogues to expect some vague, supernatural, at least wholly visionary good, as if it were a talisman to raise up a golden age by the mere power of its name; a mob, senseless, enraged, and deaf to reason, flushed with the acquisition of sudden and sovereign power, and yet goaded by the idea that treachery was at hand to snatch it from their grasp. In the face of such an assemblage, before the historical old building of the Hôtel de Ville of Paris,—upon those steps on which so many scenes of history had already passed, and none, perhaps, more important in its results than this,—he stood forth, pale, but erect and resolute: a single word from the crowd, the cry "he is a traitor! he deceives us!" might have been the signal for his massacre: a gesture might have done the deed: the wag of one nerve of a finger on the lock of the gun might have levelled him, and with him France, at once: and he knew it. He knew, too, that Fate was in his hands; he knew that in that seemingly senseless change of colours on a flag-staff lay the destiny of Paris; and he was prepared to fall a victim or to rise a hero. To the red flag popular fancy attached the idea of violence, war, revenge; it was the bloody pirate flag of propagandism by force of arms, by the terror of the scaffold. The tricolor flag, although it had waved over many a ruin, many a deed of horror, in the dreadful history of the past, had led on the nation to glory and military renown; for the last eighteen years it had typified the national watchwords of that time, "Liberty and Public Order;" and it was set forth once more, under a more democratic rule, but not a rule of anarchy—liberty, public order, peace. To each symbol was attached a sentiment. On the one symbol, on the one sentiment, Lamartine had staked the future destinies of France, as he had staked the hazard of his life. Unsupported he stood before those yelling, suspicious, infuriated thousands. He was the man of the moment. A powerful appeal to the feelings of such a mob—one of those appeals, one of those words of history that are carried down to all posterity—one of those electric touches of simultaneous sentiment, which often suddenly pervade great crowds, seemingly thrilling through all frames at once alike, coming as it were from some supernatural influence, but which few mortal men know how to direct, when, and far less as they would—such an[768] appeal was to be made—such a word to be spoken—such a blow given. Again we repeat, he was the man of the moment—for he was the man of high poetic sentiment. Thence alone could come the electric stroke; and it was struck. The simple eloquence of the poet's heartfelt convictions fell over the crowd. He raised the tricolor banner; guns, swords, and pikes were lowered: "Vive Lamartine!" burst from every mouth: the cause of humanity was gained—for the time at least. That symbol stamped the sentiment of the future French Republic.

Spite of the frivolous, sceptical, denying, and, in latter years, positive and anti-poetical character of the French people, there is no nation more easily led away by a word, however incomprehensible—an idea, however vague; but when that word, that idea, is embodied in an outward symbol, it is remarkable with what blind tenacity the French will cling to it, hoist it on high, worship it. What the deism of the Encyclopedists could not effect in the revolution of the last century; what even the frantic political atheism of the sect that followed in their footsteps could not accomplish over the masses; what the persecution of the priesthood could not establish over the minds of the people, was wrought by the personification of atheism in the embodiment of the Goddess of Reason. When the reason that denied a Godhead stood before them in a living and material form, the people fell down and worshipped; the orgies of atheism in the face of that half-naked bacchante form became universal.

This spirit arises, probably, from the theatrical nature of the people. Individually each Frenchman seems to consider that he is born to act a part, not only in the stage of life in general, but in his own individual sphere, act a part as a comedian, a part he assumes, not the part that Providence has destined for him; in fact, to use a French expression, he must always poser et faire de l'effet. Louis XIV. acted the comedy of royalty, not as if he had a conviction of his real kingship, but as if he was "making believe;" he throned it always like a tragedy king—he posa on his throne. Even to the lower classes—and perhaps they more than any other—the Frenchman of this day, however quiet and estimable in private life, will poser as an actor, as soon as he has an audience, and shows himself "before the face of men," be it in the salon, or the tribune, or at the street corner. So strong is the desire for theatrical effect, especially among the lower classes, that each homme du peuple seems ever to be striving to set up for a hero on his own little stage of existence, even if that hero be a villain. Among the more reckless of them in latter years, the mania de faire parler de soi has frequently gone as far as committing suicide or atrocious crime, in order to die with eclat or a coup de théâtre. The opportunities afforded to the people by successive revolutions, of showing themselves off in characters that have been applauded "to the echo" as noble and sublime, have contributed to foster that craving for notoriety and part-acting in the eyes of the world, which an overweening vanity of character, and the desire for effect, have made a portion of their habitual life. It may be a question even, whether, in scenes of popular convulsion, the reckless courage of the French—unquestionable as is that courage—does not arise from a sort of fancy that the whole drama of contention they are acting is, in a manner, unreal—that they are but actors on a living stage—that the whole, in fact, is a theatrical part. To see them attitudinising on a barricade, with flag and sabre raised aloft, flinging up their arms in picture-like gesture, and sweeping back their hair to give effect to their tableau, it might be natural to suppose so. With this theatrical mania, then, so prevalent in all classes, it follows very naturally that the outward show, the embodied sentiment, the symbol, in fact, should assert such a powerful sway over their excitable minds.

Those, consequently, who know the character of the nation cannot but be aware of the importance, in the guidance of the people, of the symbol in which the sentiment is to be embodied. Those who do not even reason upon this fact, feel it instinctively; and the importance attached by both parties, the moderates and ultra-violent republicans, to the symbols which each[769] party strives to make predominate, is visible in many of their acts. The one party is constantly endeavouring to remove all such as recall to mind the recollection of a bloody and destructive past; the other is as constantly using all its efforts to renew and adopt them, and to make them the rallying banner of the faction. The Republic, forced upon all France by the active violence of a small minority in the capital alone, has been accepted by the majority, partly from that feeling of resignation with which most meet a fait accompli—partly from the desire to maintain a statu quo, whatever it may be, for the sake of peace and order—partly from the conviction that, under the circumstances, when a dynasty so hastily fled in alarm before an insurrection, and left the country to its fate, no other form of government was possible for the moment. But let a symbol of the past be raised, of that past to which so many look back with horror, and, as yet at least, indignation and scorn will be shown by the better-thinking majority, by whom the importance of the act, slight as it may appear in our eyes, is instinctively felt and understood.

When Paris was, for many days and almost weeks, given up to the fanciful caprices of a mob, that pocketed the public money and repaid it by the fantastic diversions of its idleness—when it streamed about the streets with banners, and flags, and ribbons and music, carrying about bedizened may-poles, and grubbing holes on every Place, before every public monument, in every street, in almost every hole and corner of all Paris, in which to plant them, it was not the yelling of the crowd, it was not the incessant firing of guns and letting off of crackers by night as well as day, it was not the compulsory subscription à domicile for the expenses of a mob's fête of every moment, it was not the threatening cry of "des lampions—illuminate in our honour, or we break your windows," it was not the tumult, the constraint, the menace that cast a vague terror over the public mind;—it was the feeling that scenes of a terrible memory were about to be acted over again;—it was the knowledge that such had been in gone-by times the gay, green, laughing prologue to a hideous tragedy;—it was the consciousness that the so-called trees of liberty were symbols in the minds of a mob of an era of license, and riot, and carnage—that the pike, and the sabre, and the axe were the accessories of the gay picture, although still in the dimness of a dark background—that the leaves those bare stems might bear were to sprout, perchance, with spots of blood upon their young verdure. Men looked askance: the symbol of a people's drunkenness in power was waving before their windows: how far, they asked, was the sentiment that thus darkly arose in their minds, predominant also in the minds of the mob, when it raised that symbol? It was in vain they reasoned, that the France of the nineteenth century was no longer the France of the eighteenth—that the bloodthirstiness and the reckless cruelty had passed away from the character of a people advanced in civilisation—that the present had no analogy with the past: it was in vain they sought a reassurance in the fact that the pale priest was dragged from the church to bestow his blessing, with all the pomp of Catholic ecclesiastical ceremony, upon the symbol, and give a seemingly religious sanction to a people's fantastic rite of patriotism—that there was consequently a feeling of holiness in the people's mind in the accomplishment of that ceremony. On the contrary, the very mockery alarmed: the very compulsory attendance of the clergy seemed to prove that there was rather a desire in the mob to show its power than to attach a sanctity, which it needed not otherwise in common life, to the deeds it did: a terror, vague, ill-defined, unreasoned, but none the less real, floated over every mind. The symbol flaunted abroad the sentiment of the past. It was not until the authorities too late issued decrees, to prohibit the further practice of these fantastic allegorical popular manifestations, that confidence, or rather forgetfulness of the uneasiness that such demonstrations of popular sentiment had instinctively conveyed, began slowly to return to the public mind. The trees of liberty stand, it is true, and flourish, and put forth leaves, amid the flags, and ribbons, and withered wreaths,[770] and tricolor streamers, which flaunt, and twine, and flutter around them; but it was not the fact—it was the sentiment that caused alarm. As a symbol, however, they remain: and may yet re-evoke the sentiment that for a while has been forgotten, and still act a part in the future troubled chronicles of the streets of Paris.

There is one object, above all, that is accepted and recognised as a symbol of the past—as a symbol, in fact, of terror and violence: it is the Phrygian cap of liberty. So dear does this symbol appear to the would-be Roman heart of the violent republican, that he seems not to be able to perform any act, not only of his political but of his social existence, without its evidence before his eyes. This graceless head-dress—graceless, inasmuch as, instead of being allowed to fall into a natural curve, and rounded knob above, as is even the fashion to the present day of its offspring the lazzaroni cap of Naples, it is cut into a stiff, constrained, and badly imitated form of natural folds—this graceless head-dress seems the idol of his day-dreams, the bodily presence of the deity he falls down and worships, the ecstatical and rhapsodical apparition of the visions of his sleep. It figures in his allegorical pictures, surrounded by the rays of a sun of glory, like an emblem of the Godhead or the Trinity: it must be placed upon its sanctuary in his room like the crucifix in the oratory of the Catholic: it must be stamped upon his coins like the Mother of God upon the kreutzer pieces of Catholic Austria. When it is placed upon his head, all his very self seems changed—he dreams but of violence, he raves but of blood: it seems like a talisman that, once it touches his skull, disturbs his intellects, heats his brains, causes his mouth to open to vomit forth destruction and death to all his fancied enemies: it is the cap of the fairy-tale that renders not invisible but brings into reality and action all that is reckless, cruel, arbitrary, hateful in his nature. He may be in private life the mild and gentle man, full of suavity and affection, the loving husband, and the kind father; let him don the Phrygian cap of liberty, and he thinks it necessary to put on the face and wear the heart of a demon—he is tyrannical, brutal, implacable; all that lends not a hand to his sweeping designs, in furtherance of his exalted opinions, must be mown down, or torn up like the tares amidst the wheat, and flung into the pit of destruction; and, in his mind, the good grain is rare; but, when the tares are rooted out of the land, the good grain will flourish and multiply, he thinks: and the raising of this symbol, of the Phrygian cap of liberty, on high, he fancies, will cause the dazzled eyes of those he calls reactionary counter-revolutionists to blink and close, if it cast them not utterly to the earth with the force of an African coup de soleil by the mere brilliancy of those rays of glory his imagination has shed around it. No less, on the contrary, is this symbol of the past history of the old republic a hateful eyesore to the vast majority, composed of the better-thinking mass of the citizens of France in their new republic: the attempt at its second deification fills them with an instinctive disgust: and, as yet—alas! this as yet must be ever repeated with foreboding emphasis by those who stand looking on as spectators of the dangerous game which a country is playing,—who see an active and violent minority engaged in flogging and goading it on in the fatal path, already traced in blood, and a passive majority looking on and holding forth its hand, too feeble to stop it in its mad career, much less to tear, with vigour, the frantic drivers from their seat;—as yet, then, France rejects the Phrygian cap of liberty from among its republican symbols, as the harbinger of a sentiment that it would gladly repudiate, as it would throw a veil over the past. Frantic republicans, then, may worship it: a few of the men of the people, proud of their violent opinions, prompted by party rulers, and eager to make an effect, may publicly place it on their heads, and swagger with it through the streets of Paris or of Lyons: a few loose women, still more reckless, may stick it jauntily over their brows, and fancy themselves new goddesses of reason: citizen Louis Blanc, as one of the members of the ultra-minority of the provisional government, may have it engraved upon his visiting-cards, flaming with the above-mentioned[771] rays of glory, amidst banners and joined hands, and other such allegorical emblems of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity;" but the sentiment of the country at large rejects the evil symbol, and looks upon it with aversion. A striking instance of this horror was exhibited in the French colony of Algeria. There also, as in the greater part of France, the establishment of the republic was received as a fait accompli, against which resistance was useless, and as a necessity, under the circumstances of the hour. The republic was accepted unwillingly, and without the enthusiasm of which French papers have lied to us; but with resignation—by some, perhaps, with hope: and Algeria saw the prince, who had been sent to rule its destinies, and his brother, both there honoured and beloved, depart from its shores with regret and tears, and marks of the deepest sympathy and honour. The population of Algeria then looked on and waited. When the liberty-tree-planting mania reached the distant shores of Africa, it saw a band of men erecting the tree upon a public square, and still looked on in indifference. But when upon the summit was placed the Phrygian cap of liberty, popular indignation at once broke forth; the liberty-tree gardeners were attacked; a riot broke out, and it was not until the obnoxious symbol was removed, by order of the authorities, that this effervescence, that had nigh led to bloodshed, for the maintenance on one hand of a symbol, for its overthrow on the other, could be appeased. The population of Algeria felt how deeply the sentiment was connected with this symbol in French minds; and that, where facts of such vital importance had not produced resistance, the symbol brought it forth at once, even to death, for the triumph of the principles of each party. When once the blood-red cap of liberty shall be lifted aloft in France, "to be seen of the eyes of men," and call for the bowed head and the bended knee, it will be time for all honest men to take sword in hand, or quit the country, as the plague-smitten land that soon will be a desert, blood-stained waste.

The red colour, the colour of blood, in fact—the colour of that flag which Lamartine rejected, is in and by itself adopted as the symbol of the ultra-republican sentiment. Tacitly it is adopted as the banner of the party of violence and terror; instinctively it is avoided by the advocates for moderate republican progress. The fellow that flares along the boulevards with a red cravat may be recognised at once as one of those who call themselves the only true and pure democrats: his symbol will not belie him; and see how his brow is knit! see how his eyes roll! see how furiously he sticks out his black beard! He considers it necessary, lest his symbol should not sufficiently declare his character, to look as extravagantly uncompromising as possible, and tell the world at large, by the wag of the beard, the roll of the eye, and the knit of the brow, that he is one of those enemies of tyranny who would grasp it all in their own hands; one of those friends of liberty who claim it only for themselves, and would crush it in those whose opinions may be a thought milder; one of those redressers of the wrongs of the oppressed, who would advocate the strongest oppression, despotism, dictatorship,—no matter what,—provided that strong enough it be, against that "foul and infamous majority of the country," that dares to say "nay" when he says "ay." This republican Sir Jupiter Tonans wears a red cockade, in defiance of the government, or rather with the knowledge how he is supported by its factious minority; and if he smear not his face with red like the Indian, scarcely less savage than himself, he hopes to smear his hands of that colour soon, and of the purest and most natural blood-red tint. Already he follows the cry of his leading ultra journals, "aux armes! aux armes!" He declares that the country is betrayed, and the republic in danger; because, in the universal suffrage that has been given it, the nation has proclaimed the triumph of moderate opinions and the defeat of his party, because the minority has not worked its evil will, because a faction has been condemned by the judgment of the nation. He hopes, however, to compensate himself by shortly imbruing his hands in the blood of his countrymen, to the greater glory of his favourite colour.[772] He tosses his head proudly as he walks; his brow, his beard, his eyes, as well as his cravat, all cry "aux armes!" See how he sneers upon the tricolor banner as he passes. Let him alone, and he will declare the tricolor suspect: his symbol, the red, is alone to be acknowledged: those who recognise it not shall amply be taxed with their life's blood to supply its dye. Awful is this symbol; but it is the general symbol of the sentiment of the soi-disant "pure democratic," ever-revolutionising party of violence and force: it is the symbol of that party which, were you to ask them what was meant by a republic, would seriously inform you, a constant state of convulsive revolution, to lop off, break down, and destroy; the rebuilding on the ruins is with them but a matter of very secondary consideration.

When, in the disastrous insurrection of Rouen, the ultra party used all its instruments, and excited a few misguided artisans to take up arms for the purpose of annulling the "universal suffrage" elections, that had turned out in favour of the moderate majority, the "red" was hoisted as the symbol of the party sentiment. Whatever may have since been written by the party journals, there was no doubt, at this time, of the republican opinions of both parties; the violent faction took upon itself the denomination of the "red republic," and thought to stigmatise the moderates by the title of the "blue republic." Red and blue were the rallying symbols,—the red, of anarchy and violence; the blue, of order and moderation. Throughout the country, during the many insurrections that burst out on account of the triumph of the moderate party in the elections, the symbol was ever the same: that of the party of order varied, but that of the ultra faction was invariably the same. In the many strange and curious episodes that followed the revolution in Paris of February,—it is necessary to distinguish by dates, since, before these lines are printed, none can tell but that another may have already taken place,—that of those strange gangs, who constituted themselves the soi-disant guardians of the Tuileries, or the defenders of the cannon of the Hôtel de Ville, was one of the most extraordinary, and by these men the same colour was adopted as their symbol: they bound red cravats about their necks, and tied red scarfs around their waists. The band of brigands that had assumed the governorship of the palace of the Tuileries, was with difficulty ejected from it, after much weak parleying and truckling on the part of the government, and was at length reduced by a threat of famine; but that of the Hôtel de Ville maintained its power. It was thought necessary to come to a compromise with it, by legally instituting it as the "Republican Guard" of the seat of government; but nothing could persuade the self-organised troop to remove its ill-omened, blood-red, ultra-republican symbols from neck or body: the point was yielded, and the republican guard is still looked upon with apprehension, as it scours the streets on horseback, or frowns on quiet citizens on foot, flaunting its red scarfs abroad. Among the other anomalous circumstances that were born of a state of things consecutive upon a republican revolution, was also the mysterious existence of that editor of a violent ultra journal, who instituted, on his own authority, a comité de salut public, and sent a band of myrmidons into the streets of Paris to arrest, upon the warrant of his autocratic will, all unfortunate citizens who might be detected in the groups, upon public places, discoursing moderation, and who were consequently to be treated as reactionnaires and contre-revolutionnaires—or, in other words, as the suspects of this new self-appointed montagnard régime.

These myrmidons were all decorated with the fatal symbol, in neckcloth and scarf, around their blouses. Who were they? who connived at their illegal proceedings? how came it that the editor of the Commune de Paris was permitted to have a body-guard at his service, employed to arrest the inhabitants of Paris at his will? For a long time all was mystery: no one could tell, or could do more than hint at the solution of these questions. With difficulty the truth was learnt. As connected with the red symbol of violence and terror, and the history of the parties formed in the new French republic, the story of Citizen Sobrier, the self-instituted[773] president of a comité de salut public, unrecognised by any authority, edict or decree, the self-appointed Prefêt de Police, No. 2, as he was called by a people that jokes of things the most serious, is a curious and not uninteresting one. When, in a moment of insurrection and disorder, an armed and tumultuous handful of republicans in the Chamber of Deputies changed the destinies of a country, and hastily consented to the appointment of those few men, whose names came uppermost, as the Provisional Government of the country, and then declared them elected by the general voice of the "sovereign people," a certain Caussidière posted off to the Prefêcture de Police, established himself in its bureau, and, when questioned what he did there, declared that he was as much elected Prefêt de Police by the voice of the sovereign people, as the other good gentlemen members of the government. This argument was a clinching one; and it prevailed. But, lo and behold! a little later arrived another Prefêt de Police, equally elected upon the same principles by the voice of the sovereign people: and Citizen Sobrier declared himself equally authorised to wield the authority of the Parisian police. The two divine missionaries—divine by that "voix du peuple qui est la voix de Dieu," agreed for a time to share the power as double delegates; but two wild tiger-cats live seldom amicably in the same cage according to the laws of nature, even be it that of republican fraternity.[28] After much snarling and showing of teeth, Citizen Sobrier was fairly driven out by his brother tiger-cat, and retreated back to his editorial den, vowing vengeance against the elected of the voice of the sovereign people. Citizen Sobrier, however, was the friend of the minister of the interior, the chief of the ultra violent minority in the government; and by the connivance of Citizen Ledru-Rollin, a sop was thrown to Cerberus: the money he demanded was lavished upon him for the support of his ultra journal, above all for the support of the body-guard, supplied him from the ranks of the republican guard of the Hotel de Ville, and incorporated by him under the title of his "Montagnards:" and his authority, thus connived at and protected, was used, as before stated, to harass and arrest the suspects of modern days among the citizens of Paris, until they rose to protest by petition and remonstrance against this monstrous illegal abuse. Since then the lustre of the red banner of Citizen Sobrier has been dimmed for a season; and Parisians can talk peace and moderation upon the boulevards without being bodily arrested by living agents of the hated symbol. Another proof of the abhorrence in which this fatal symbol, the red colour, is held by the better-thinking French republicans, may be deduced from circumstances that attended the dispersion of a Jacobin club in the first days of the revolution. When the club was declared dissolved, and the would-be president was turned out of the room by the indignant majority of the inhabitants of the district of Paris in which it was attempted to establish it, the cry "à bas les Jacobins" was but little heard; the general indignation was excited by the red symbols worn by the baffled institutor of the club—the general cry was "Down with the red cravat! down with the red scarf! down with the blood of the guillotine!" Those who cried this were workmen, men of the people,—at most small shopkeepers: but they felt instinctively the force of the symbol; they dreaded its influence; they feared its propagation of the sentiment connected with it; they attached themselves to its downfall. The visible symbol had more importance in their minds than the sentiment itself; and perhaps no expression of sentiments, however violent, would have excited an outburst of indignation so general and strong as did the blood-red symbol.

Although they cannot, of course, find their place as "symbols," inasmuch as music cannot be said to assume an outward and bodily form, yet the "patriotic hymns," as they are called, which are to be heard[774] upon all occasions, by day and by night, screamed discordantly in chorus by a people that vaunts its musical capabilities, but invariably sings out of tune,—shouted by groups of workmen, assuming the nature of a very inharmonious glee in knots,—yelled at the top of voices in quartets, duos, and trios of wandering gamins,—screeched in ear-rending solos,—whistled by workmen,—bawled by little children, hummed by women, or played on hand-organs on the boulevards, and hunting-horns at the street corners,—may be also taken as expressions of sentiments. The "Marseillaise" is accepted as a traditionary musical accompaniment of all liberal, and especially republican revolutionary movements in France. As the revolutionary movement is incontestible, and as the establishment of the republic is looked upon as a fait accompli, nothing can be said upon its being chorussed incessantly,—much as, internally, many a musical ear may flinch from the torture committed upon it by the hideous disharmony of its executors,—much as the words may be repulsive to many feelings, and appear senseless in the mouths of the citizens of a republic established upon a basis of peace and order—much as many a heart may beat painfully, the flesh creep with a shudder upon many a body, and the hair stand on an end on many a head, on hearing that fearful melody, however finely it may be composed, which recalls to so many a mind the horrors of past days—scenes of pikes supporting bleeding heads, a parent dead upon the scaffold, or a narrow personal escape from death. But the Marseillaise has in general been accepted as the symbolical hymn of the republic, and people "make up their minds to it." The newly-composed hymn of the Girondins, as it is called, affords little cause for horror and dismay, more especially as it has been taken from a drama, in which the terrors of the first revolution have been placed upon the stage with a truth and force of nature sufficient to cause every soul that witnesses them to shudder with apprehension, at the barest thought of their possible return. The eternal recurrence at all times to the ear of the words, "Mourir pour la patrie, c'est le sort le plus digne d'envie," may raise a smile when heard from such mouths as often chorus it about, or may again appear an anomaly in the character officially assumed by the present republic—but the Girondin hymn is connected with no thought of past evil or of living terror. Both these melodies, then, are accepted without any repugnance, except the repugnance that the wearied ear must feel at hearing the same notes dinned into it at all times, in all places, and with every species of disharmony. But there are other melodies, from which the better-thinking mass draws back with horror and disgust—they are looked upon as symbolical of terror, violence, and bloodshed—they turn the soul "sick with fear." If a body of workmen—and, for the character of the French republic be it said, that this is of rare occurrence—or a mob, formed of those fearful hordes that come rushing down upon the city from the distant faubourgs, or seem to spring out of the earth one knows not whence, at all times of tumult or disorderly movement—be heard shouting the Carmagnole or the "Ca ira," of terrific memory, men turn aside; for such fellows who can sing such songs cannot be otherwise than ruffians of the lowest description, or, at best, men led astray by the violence of the party rancour instilled into them by evil-thinking exaltés, or too young and foolish, or too reckless and headstrong, to know the fearful importance of the words they sing, and the terror they inspire. Let it be hoped that in truth they know not what words they use, when they howl, "Les aristocrates à la lanterne—les aristocrates on les tuera," and the inflammatory consequences the repetition of such words may bring forth. As yet the "Ca ira" is heard but seldom, and but partially. When this symbolical chaunt of destruction and death shall be chorussed aloud by a populace in general mass, then most assuredly will the sentiment also have been spread abroad, and widely—the sentiment of envy, rancour, intolerance, and bloodshed—the sentiment of 1793; and then may France be assured that she is lost—that she has fallen into the very slough and mire of blood and terror. Heaven protect her from the "Ca ira!" One of the[775] first acts of a legally-constituted authority should be to punish every wretch who dared even to hum it under his breath.

For the same reason a protest should be made against the singing of the "Marseillaise" by the far-famed actress, Mademoiselle Rachel, at the first theatre of France, and more especially since this terrific exhibition is given also upon the occasions when the theatre is gratuitously opened to the public. The terrible vigour of this actress in the delineation of the worst and fiercest passions of the human breast—anger, rage, scorn, malice—is well known to the world. The singing of the "Marseillaise" has excited a tumult of enthusiasm. At a time when all the theatres in Paris languished, and pined away to the bare benches, and even died—some of them from inanition, poor things!—the Théâtre Français was nightly crammed to its throat in the very upper galleries, to gaze upon this strange spectacle. Before witnessing this feat of Mademoiselle Rachel, it was natural to suppose that she would assume the part of an inspired Joan of Arc, leading on a people to combat and victory. Bitter was the disappointment of those who indulged this poetic fancy. Her gestures, while singing the patriotic hymn, are energetic, if not grand, her attitudes fine, her poses plastiques picture-like; but what is the whole character of her delivery—what the expression she bestows? Those of hatred, malice, revenge, bloodthirstiness. She calls "to arms" as Satan may have summoned the accursed angels. She is not for a moment the inspired guardian angel of a suffering country, heaven-sent to avenge its wrongs: she is the demon of darkness scattering destruction and death from the sheer love of death and destruction. Her flatterers have called her "a Muse"—then she must needs be the Muse of Vengeance! the Muse of Malice! the Muse of Blood! She sinks her voice to sing the words, "Amour sacré de la patrie;" but with what a spirit of concentrated bitterness does she pronounce them! There is not a breath of love in the least inflexion of her voice: every tone breathes "hate—hate—hate," with all the bitterness of hatred. What a look of fury, malice, scorn, and reckless revenge possesses her face during her whole delivery! One would suppose that she must have some private wrongs of her own to avenge upon society, or upon the denounced aristocracy of society, so spontaneous appears the flood of blood-mixed bile that flows from her lips. A shudder pervades your whole frame, your hair stands on end; and willingly would you turn away your head with horror and disgust, did she not fascinate you by the power of her energy, and cast an evil spell upon you by the charm of the sculptured beauty of her forcible attitudes. Ay! would a sculptor study a true model of a demon of revenge, he could not study a better one than Mademoiselle Rachel, as she delivers the Marseillaise. But it is this very fascination that is dangerous. Hundreds of spectators, who applaud with frenzy, leave the theatre instinctively connecting in their minds the Marseillaise with all the most fearful and deadly passions of the human breast. The bitterness of bitterness pervades their recollection of it—a vision of the demon-like actress floats before their eyes; they murmur the melody themselves involuntarily, with the same feelings of hatred, revenge, and bloodthirstiness. Oh! anathema on the actress who would inspire the citizens of France with feelings so vile—who knows her power over the masses, and so fearfully misuses it—who, when she might modify, exaggerates, and goads on to fury! The evil that this representation may produce is incalculable. Who can tell how far the leaven of gall that she infuses into the popular melody, that is in every body's mouth, and rings in every body's ear, may not leaven the whole sentiment connected with it? Yes! woe and anathema to the actress! The more terrible sentiment connected with the symbol had faded from men's minds, and she would again connect the symbol with sentiments of terror and revenge.

All tendencies to return upon the bloody track of the past are equally condemnable: every symbolical reminiscence of that past is equally to be avoided. It ought to be scouted by the good sense of the better-thinking citizens of France, and put down by all the moral force that public[776] remonstrance, reasoning, satire, and ridicule may command in the public prints. There was a time when a new-born French republic, in the heyday folly of its early youth, and with all the silly fancies of silly puerile years—and who of us, as a youngster, has not had such?—sought for its models, and emblems, and symbols, in the most ancient republics of Europe; and weened that, if it assumed the outward forms, and wore the names of those old times, it must necessarily inherit the supposed virtues of the days of Greece and Rome: those virtues which, to its fancy, consisted chiefly in uncompromising sternness, and soi-disant patriotic hard-heartedness. And, like a silly boy, the first French republic rendered itself ridiculous by its extravagant absurdities. Like a stage-struck hero of the same age, it exaggerated and overacted its part: it fancied that it had but to put on the robe, and take the name, and strut and swagger; and that it would act the part, if not to the life, at least with wonderful effect. Unlike the silly boy, however, it went beyond the contemptible,—it became frantic, furious, bloodyminded—it became terrible: its hot young brains were turned, and dreamt bad dreams of cruelty and carnage. Those were the days when men unbaptised themselves of their old names, and called themselves "Brutus," and "Aristides," and "Scevola," and "Leonidas," and deemed themselves great and doughty patriots, with all the virtues of the antique, because they had so put their names down among the dramatis personæ in the bill of the play. Those were the days when women wore Grecian tunics, and exposed their naked charms to the inclemencies of a foggy northern sky; and happy would the results of all this nonsense have been, had the republic only caught a cold, or a sore throat, or a toothach: unfortunately, it caught a fever, a sore soul, and a heartach. Those were the days when fasces were carried abroad in public fêtes, as emblems of liberty,—fasces! those true emblems of constraint and tyranny—of constraint by the stick, of tyranny by the axe,—fasces! such as lictors carried before Nero; and the fasces were stamped upon the coins of the republic, surmounted by a cap of liberty! Those were the days when Greece and Rome were soi-disant models, greedily swallowed, ill digested, and producing nausea, loathing, and sickness. The Grecian and the Roman symbols, therefore, were symbols to be avoided and repulsed. They remind of the past; they prepare people's minds for its return; they bring with them visions of blood. In the very heart's core of the people, with the Grecian allegories, and the Spartan virtues, and the fasces, are intimately connected comités de salut public, and denunciations unto death, and the guillotine. Away with them then! refer not to them again! repel them, second French republic, from your fêtes, and your public ceremonies, and your coins! They are all so many prickly whips to drive men's minds back to the bloody past, and urge them again along the self-same blood-stained road. Surely, too, the day of such worn-out theatrical humbug is past: the world has grown more civilised and more sensible: the age of allegorical absurdities is gone by. True! the world has also lost much of its poetry and romance; and there may be those who regret it, and would be foolish still; but all this Greco-Franco republican romance and poetry, borrowed of the ancients, is now sadly out of place. What do I say?—is to be shunned as the plague-fraught garment from the East, that, when thrown upon your shoulders, may extend a fatal disease far and wide among the land, that may become another robe of Nessus to burn and consume you to the bones; and when once thrown on, not to be torn away again without tearing with it the healthful flesh, and the very blood of life. And yet there are those who would seem determined ever to refer back to the past days, ever to spur along the old road, and who appear to dream that they can never produce the effect they want, but by spreading the poisoned garment over the back of France. There has been a reckless Minister of the Interior, who, hand-in-hand with a strong-minded but ill-judging woman, full of strange subversive fancies, which she proclaims with a masculine voice, and in a nominal masculine garb, seems to forget the importance of such symbols[777] over the easily exciteable imaginations of the French, or perhaps even—may God forgive him, if so it be!—adopts the symbols of the past, in order to prepare the way for its return, and for the return to his own hands of the tyranny of democratic despotism. It is he who has declared it his high will, that the spirit of the country should be travaillé—i. e. tortured—to his own furious sense: and, in truth, the maintenance of such symbols is a pretty and convenient manner to travailler the public spirit with all the taking gaudiness of outward show. As Minister of the Interior, he is supreme institutor and instigator of popular fêtes, and public republican ceremonies: and, whether of his own fancy, or under the influence of the promptings of minor masters of ceremonies, or of those who would be such, he appears determined that modern republican shows, festivities, and ceremonials, should bring back as many reminiscences of those of a fatal time as possible. In the funeral ceremony of the interment of those who fell in the days of February,—which, in its very nature, as well as from the immense masses it called forth of men of all classes, all corporations, all bodies of the state, citizen troops, and military, with music, and banners, and streaming ribands, was sufficiently imposing,—in this ceremony Paris was again bid to delight itself with the aspect of modern lictors preceding the members of the Provisional Government, with antique fasces—those eternal emblematical fasces,—that had been borrowed from the boards of the ci-devant Théâtre Francais, where they had been used, poor dirty old things, to be paraded by knock-kneed bearers before all the bloody tyrants of the classic drama of France: they were "freshened up," it is true, and made smart, to meet the time and circumstance, by being bound with new tri-color ribands: but they were no less foolish symbols, and worse than foolish, from the effect they might have on sentiments. But this was but the caviare to the feast. A new republican fête is prepared by the same minister of the interior, and that, too, at a time when the public treasury is empty, and a national bankruptcy stares the country in the face—a fête that has no purpose as an anniversary, unless it be some anniversary of a time to be forgotten—an uncalled-for fête, that is to be symbolical of a republican word called "Fraternity," the sense of which no one in France seems, by any effort, to be able to understand,—in fact, to be the vague vain emblem of a vague vain word. What does the programme of this fête set forth? Antique cars, bearing Grecian allegorical personifications of the new-old deities of the day, drawn by huge oxen with gilded horns, borrowed of the Eleusinian mysteries!—and little Lacedemonian girls in white Grecian tunics, singing French patriotic hymns on the boulevards under Grecian pavilions,—hear it, shade of Coleman's Mr Sterling, and rejoice!—and Grecian tripods with burning flames at street-corners—and painted Grecian statues, allegorical of all sorts of fancied Grecian virtues, under the trees of the Champs Elysées—and nonsense only knows how many other Grecian attributes of canvass and pasteboard, and carpentry-work, and stage decoration in all manner of high places. Out upon them all! Were we to turn to some edict of the past, issued for the celebration of the pure and mighty virtues of the days of the Convention, we should find exactly the same programme of some fête of fraternity in those fraternal times, ordained and arranged by the famous artist, Citizen David, the pure taste of whose classic pictures all amateurs, who have visited Paris, may have had the happiness of admiring in the galleries of the ci-devant Louvre.

No less to be condemned, for similar reasons, as uselessly and even deleteriously calling into life the past, was the edict of the Provisional Government, enacting that the representatives of the people in the national assembly should have a uniform costume, similar to that worn by the heroes of the Convention. This idea emanated, doubtless, from the same violent and misdirected source as the Greco-republican programme de fête: but why, it may be asked, did the more sensible and moderate majority of that government lend its hand to sign such a decree? The immense, majority, however, of the representatives of the people, who are unwilling, at the same time, to be the[778] representatives of the ideas of '93, have, in their good sense, done justice to this edict, by their disdain of its ordinances, and their refusal to wear the costume imposed upon them. They felt the full force of the symbol they were told to adopt; they felt the dangerous importance of the sentiment that would be attached to it: they rejected the symbol; and they disavowed the sentiment. And they did well. The cocked hat with its gold-lace border, such as may be seen, in pictures, on the head or in the hand of Danton or St Just, was declared simply absurd, if nothing more: the tri-color scarf, to be bound round their waists, with its gold fringe, was thought puerile; but the celebrated white waistcoat, the fatal white waistcoat, with its broad lappels flung back upon the shoulders—that waistcoat known only under the popular names of the "gilet à la Robespierre,"—or the "gilet à la guillotine"—the new representatives of the people of a new republic, founded upon other principles, flung aside with indignation. The "gilet à la Robespierre!"—the very name was sufficient to excite feelings of abhorrence; and the edict, although it of course withheld the name, raised a storm of angry remonstrance and refusal. The whole affair,—the edict as the indignation,—may be considered as puerile, frivolous, and unworthy of strong feeling. But, again it must be repeated, the men who were told to don this costume knew what the sentiment would be that such a display of symbolical attire would excite; and a great importance was attached to it, which men in other countries may not understand, but which those who know the French, and their facility to be led away by the outward symbol, will entirely appreciate. It may seem ridiculous to say—and yet it may not be far off the truth—that many a representative of the people, who may now talk sage and sensible moderation, might have thundered forth the excess of democratic violence, had his bosom borne across it the "gilet à la Robespierre."

There are other symbols of the great watchwords of the day; those ill understood and oft misconstrued words,—those words which are so constantly put forward by the violent to mean the very contrary of what they are intended to express,—the words "Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!" and these symbols men think it necessary to exhibit on all occasions. So be it. They are the rallying cry of the new republic; let them be symbolised. But let men take care how, and in what manner, it be done. In the new coins of the republic, upon which the three mystic words shine, they are strangely enough typified—the old die of the old coin of the old republic has been used; and perhaps the allegorical personages that figure on them had then another signification. As it is, the Hercules in the midst, with the two ladies by his side, may be interpreted in various ways. Curious speculators in allegories would in vain endeavour to affix each of these three personages to each of the abstractions they are supposed to represent: there are many, at all events, who decline the task. Which does Hercules typify? Liberty perchance—the liberty, then, of force. Or, if the ladies alone represent the qualities that are of the feminine gender in the French language, which of the three is absent? which of the three is excluded from being symbolised on the coins of the French republic? This would be, again, a difficult task to investigate. All the three are so constantly called in question, so continually menaced, above all, so little comprehended in general in the first steps of the French republic, that it would be hard to say which is the least recognised, although many may give their votes in favour of the first of the three good dames. But it is not alone upon the coins that the three deities find their emblems. Lithographic prints, of every species of good or bad drawing, display them in a bodily form to admiring eyes at every print-shop. Led away by pictures, as by all other outward and visible emblems, the French are easily inflamed by such productions. And, again, a protest should be entered against the character commonly given to the republican deities—against that of goddess Liberty more especially. She is almost invariably represented in an attitude of demoniacal vengeance, worthy of Mademoiselle Rachel. She has the so-called cap of liberty, of course, upon her head, but her hand always grasps a sabre, or a pike, or some such deadly weapon; her countenance[779] is furious, angry, vengeful. Why should Liberty be represented thus, then, as a bloodthirsty angel of wrath? why should she be an object to be dreaded and not loved? Rulers of France, ye should have a care how the divinity ye proclaim is symbolised to the eyes of the people! the effect produced, in the fostering of the sentiment, may be more important than ye choose to think or to acknowledge. The same reprehension should be cast upon the greater part of those models and pictures which are exhibited in the Ecole des beaux arts, for the prize to be given for the best personification of the French Republic. The great majority of these models represent, once more, a perfect fury of wrath, in all the extravagance of frantic theatrical gesture. But, my good artists, this is a representation of a French Republic such as it was in the worst moments of its last reign—not of the French Republic proclaimed as the living exemplification, not only of liberty, equality, and fraternity, but of peace, and order, and love! Could you do nothing better than make bad imitations of a detestable past? It will be for the famous Minister of the Interior, probably, to decide which of these personifications is to be raised on high as the symbol of the republic. He who offered the prize will probably award it: Paris, then, will soon see what sentiment is to be taught, in the name of all France, to attach to the symbol.

There is another little trait connected with a people's sentiments that, slight as it is, may be of more influence in the direction which the violence of popular commotion may take. This little trait, although born of an evil and violent feeling, may have a tendency that not only will not be a harmful one, but may protect from harm. At the commencement of the revolution,—upon every greater or lesser demonstration of popular feeling,—the first cry, to the rich or the supposed rich, was to illuminate their houses in honour of the sovereign people, or rather of those who assumed the rank and title of sovereignty wholly to themselves. Above the cries, "à bas les riches! à bas les aristocrats!" prevailed the cry "des lampions! des lampions!" So often, and for so long a time, was this cry heard in the streets of Paris, that it has now taken the distinct form of one of those popular shouts used upon all occasions. Is the mob angry, or is it merry, it cries "des lampions!" Is it angry only, this cry often changes its wrath to merriment: is it impatient, it cries "des lampions!" is it witty, "des lampions!" By day as well as night, on all popular occasions, the cry is heard, and now never fails to excite a laugh. In the theatres, is a piece to be damned?—the pit and the galleries cry, "des lampions!" Does a declaimer in a street crowd displease the multitude?—it cries again, "des lampions!" The words, then, have become a popular demonstrative cry; and who can tell how much in the future this habit may efface the hideous cry of "à la lanterne?"—how much the cry for light may cause the people to forget the cry for the darkness of death upon the lamp-post—how much, in truth, popular sentiment may be hereafter influenced by a trait of popular habit so slight, so frivolous, so ridiculous, and yet, perhaps, so important in its results. Should it have this working, there are many who have lost their temper at the ear-rending, monotonous, irritating cry of "des lampions," who may bless the day when the fancy of the mob adopted this popular and almost historical cry. Who can tell, indeed, upon what a trifle may depend the direction given to a people's outbreak, to the course of a revolution, to the destinies of a country?

Since the courageous action of Lamartine gave a first stamp to the character of the revolution, by putting down a dangerous sentiment in its bloody symbol, the violent party has in vain again endeavoured, as yet, to assume its lost supremacy. The horizon is dark with its menace, it is true, and its thunder growls, its lightnings flash, from time to time: the storm may be dispersed, or it may break forth, and then pass away. This is for the future. But whatever men may rule the destinies of France, they should, like Lamartine, be well aware that if the French people must be amused with constant displays of symbols, those symbols must be chosen with care, as the direct, and leading, and active instigators of their sentiments.

[780]

AMERICAN FEELING TOWARDS ENGLAND.

We believe it to be impossible to overrate the importance of the triumph of order on the 10th of April in London, either as to its effects on Great Britain or on the world. The complete and signal success, and at the same time the calm working of the machinery by which the end was accomplished,—the impression of a vast power felt throughout, though purposely kept in the background, ready to act if necessary, but only in the case of necessity; the proof which it afforded of the perfect soundness of the English mind, extending even to the masses of the capital amidst the revolutionary contagion; and the contrast which it exhibited between the well-balanced and elastic strength of the English constitution, and the unsubstantial systems or crumbling governments of the Continent, formed a spectacle which no one could witness without pride, or remember without a feeling of gratitude and of increased security. It has tranquillised for many a year the fears of those who had begun to doubt whether even the strong anchor of our constitution could continue to hold fast against the strain of the revolutionary current. It has proved, if that indeed were doubtful, how essentially different are the elements of the British character from those of the fickle populations of Southern Europe, among whom revolution had found its adherents; and how deep-seated in that character is the love of order, respect for property, deference to established authority, calm and practical good sense, and that solid groundwork of moral and religious feeling, on which alone any stable form of government can ever be reared. If, since that memorable 10th of April, the Continent has begun to obtain a little truce and breathing time; and even in France the possessors of property and the friends of order are beginning to be alive at once to their own danger, and their own strength, and to the necessity of exerting the forces, moral and physical, which are at their disposal to put down the approach of anarchy in its most undisguised and hideous form—it is to the peaceful and majestic triumph of order in England that these results are to be ascribed.

It cannot but be matter of deep interest to us to learn with what feelings the danger and the escape of Great Britain were contemplated in America; a country where the experiment of a republic had been tried, and where—if the same spirit of propagandism existed which appears to be the curse of France—it might have been supposed that the chance of a democratic constitution being established in England, would have been a subject of congratulation and anticipated triumph. In Paris, upon the morning of the 12th April, nothing, we are told, but disappointment was experienced, when the peaceful, and, as they deemed it, ignominous termination of the proceedings at Kennington Common was made known. How were the news received by our Transatlantic brethren? A short extract from the letter of a valued friend in New York, and one or two from the American papers, will be interesting, we think, to our readers, as illustrating the state of feeling on the subject in America.

The tone of the American press on this question has on the whole been most creditable to the periodical literature of that country. It proves that, though many points of difference may and must exist between the two countries,—though the elder may not always have borne her faculties in the meekest way, and the younger may have often announced her pretensions with more of petulance than discretion,—nations sprung of the same lineage, speaking the same language, cherishing the same literature, cannot be so alienated from each other by difference of political institutions, or opposition of commercial interests, as not to feel a warm and cordial interest in each other's welfare; and to lament, not from mere selfish considerations of interest, but from higher and more generous sympathies, every calamity which threatens a kindred nation, with which it feels itself united by the ties of moral and intellectual relationship.

Our correspondent thus writes:—

[781] "New York, May 1st, 1848.

... "The arrival of the steam-ship America at this port on Saturday last, bringing the good news of the complete triumph of law, liberty, and order in our Fatherland, was hailed with a degree of joy that well became true-born descendants of British ancestors. That arrival terminated a week which, to myself as well as to thousands of others, had been one of intense and painful anxiety; for although I never dreamed of the probability of a revolution, and never doubted the power of government to quell the threatened insurrection of the Chartists, I did greatly fear that a conflict was inevitable; and I trembled at the possible results that might follow, were only a single man in the procession to parliament to fall before the bayonets of the soldiery. How universal was this fear the newspapers which I send you clearly tell; and you will smile at hearing that even bets were made that the revolution was complete, and England a republic.

"The course pursued by government, in trusting to a voluntary police rather than to the military, exhibited their usual wisdom, and has greatly added to the moral dignity of their triumph. And the result has fully verified the remark in your letter to me in March, that 'the upper and middle classes, as also the respectable operatives, are most determined to maintain order and the law, irrespective of all political differences;' and proves beyond a doubt the truth of the proud declaration, in the last number of your Magazine, that 'the unbought loyalty of men—the cheap defence of nations—still, thank God, subsists among you.'

"Notwithstanding all the extreme excitement aroused throughout our land by the Revolution in France, and its astounding progress on the Continent, and the confident predictions of many that England could not unshaken meet the shock of Chartist rebellion,—the instant it was known that she had met it and was unmoved—that it had passed harmlessly by as a summer cloud, without awakening from its slumbers the giant strength it had threatened to overcome,—a sensation of relief, a thrill of gladness, a feeling of thankfulness, of security, and of admiration, seemed to be almost universal, and men greeted each other in the streets as those might who had together feared and together escaped a great personal calamity.

"That much of this rejoicing arose from selfishness is very true, for so closely connected are the social and commercial relations of the two countries, that no blow struck at the prosperity of England could be long unfelt in these United States. But the fact is scarcely on that account the less striking, nor will it, I venture to hope, deprive it of its intense significance with those who, like yourselves, exercise so great an influence upon the opinions and the sympathies of two great nations."

The effect produced upon the commercial affairs of America by the apprehension of a revolutionary movement in Great Britain, and the restoration of confidence when the news of the peaceful termination of the demonstration of the 10th arrived, are thus given in the Weekly Herald of New York:—

Sunday, April 30—6 p.m.

"The week just closed has been one of the most intense excitement. The most gloomy anticipations had been formed relative to the expected news from England; and we have never before seen such a panic growing out of a probable event, as that which had taken possession of the public mind. The whole thing turned upon the result of the Chartist movement in London; and such were the hopes and fears of those connected in any way with Great Britain, that it was difficult to escape the general depression. Vessels freighted for ports in England were not permitted to depart until after the arrival of the steamer. Drawers of exchange refused to sell any more bills on their agents; prices for cotton were steadily drooping in anticipation of a complete overthrow of the British government; and a thorough derangement existed in every department of industry, and, in fact, the greatest consternation prevailed. As soon as it was announced that the steamer America was telegraphed, the public mind was at once relieved, and stocks advanced, even before the news became known. The fact that the steamer was coming, that she had sailed on her regular day, satisfied all that there had been no change in the government—that the Chartist movement[782] had not succeeded, and that, so far as political affairs in Great Britain were concerned, every thing was quiet. This gave a buoyancy to the market, and the reaction upon the public mind was tremendous. When the news was read from an Extra Herald to the crowd in Wall Street, many men shed tears, and almost a universal shaking of hands took place. Many, who imagined they were ruined, found their fears groundless; and the long, anxious faces which met us at every turn in the business portion of the city during the past week, were suddenly changed to those of joy. Vessels which have been under an embargo, will now resume their voyages; and produce which has been held back, will go forward more rapidly. Trade will again move on in the usual channels, and renewed confidence will give an impetus to commercial transactions generally. The news by the America is of vast importance, inasmuch as it has removed the immense weight pressing upon the minds of mercantile men, and given great relief to all classes; otherwise the news does not amount to much, in a commercial point of view. The advance in consols was the result more of the reaction in the public mind, caused by the manner in which the Chartist demonstration passed off, than any thing else, as the position of affairs on the Continent kept the market very sensitive."

The following article is from the Morning Express; and it is valuable for the justice of its remarks upon the anomalies which pervade the democratic American constitution, as well as our own, and which must exist under every form of government which deserves the name:—

"The Attempted Insurrection in England.—The public mind was gratefully relieved on Saturday, by the intelligence, flying like wild-fire upon the arrival of the America, that the Chartist demonstration on Kennington Common failed of its main object—viz., that of creating an insurrection among the two millions of London, like that which had been created among the million of Paris. If England had swung from her moorings, as France has, and Italy and Germany have, no one could have foreseen the consequences, or ventured to predict upon the probable results. Certain it is, however, that almost every British business-doing house in the United States would have been crushed, and the commerce of the world would have been annihilated for a season.

"The 'six points' of the Chartists of England are no doubt known to our readers. The petitioners pray (1) for annual parliaments, (2) universal suffrage, (3) vote by ballot, (4) equal electoral districts, (5) no property qualification, and (6) the payment of members. Now, at the first blush, all these seem reasonable enough, if the people want them—although there is no proof that they do, but rather proof to the contrary,—but when we remember that, in this country, not one of these points, save the payment of members of Congress, is universally recognised as the law of the land, it is not for us to say a word in favour of the Chartists of England, at least until we make their theoretical 'points' our 'points' in practice. We have no annual Congress. Members of the House are elected for two years, and members of the Senate for six years. We have no universal suffrage. The three millions of slaves do not vote. The negroes in the Free States do not vote (two or three States excepted) without a property qualification. In democratic Virginia, a man must be a freeholder to vote. In some of the other States there are also rigid restrictions. The vote by ballot is known nowhere in the Slave States. The viva voce is the only mode of voting, and it is not certain that it is not the best way. Equal electoral districts do not exist in this country. Six hundred white men in South Carolina or Louisiana elect as many members of Congress as six thousand in New York. The little State of Delaware, entitled to but one member of Congress, elects as many Senators as New York, entitled to her thirty-six members in the Lower House. Thus, whatever evils the Chartists groan under, if any, we groan under here in these, their beau-ideal, United States. But, if we are misgoverned here, or if misgovernment exists in England, it is vain to deny that it is our own fault. No revolution, no exertion of physical force, can better our condition. The cause of order is the cause of liberty; tyrants and thieves alone thrive by confusion. The progress of popular power is founded on knowledge, and the best fruit of knowledge is peace. It is kings and autocrats whose trust is in the bayonet, and whose only faith is in the rifle and parks of artillery. Let the people show they are worthy to be free by practising the virtues of freemen—by a reliance on the power of reason, on the march of intelligence, on the force of public opinion, on the justice of their cause, and the certain triumph of truth and right, naked and unarmed, except in the panoply of virtue and the majestic spirit of humanity.

[783]"But the demonstration in London is not to be without its effect on the map of the world. It is the first check that the revolutionary ball has met with since it started in Paris, and ran like a meteoric storm over continental Europe. The British empire, at all events, is safe. Whatever is to be achieved for Liberty and Progress there, has got to be achieved, as such victories have been for two hundred years past, viz., by changing the law of the land through the constitutional action of the ballot box. It is very true that the British government, for the first time for many years, has manifested symptoms of alarm over a seditious meeting,—and there was reason for it, so sudden had been the revolutions in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Venice, Munich, Wirtemberg, and indeed throughout nearly all the cities in continental Europe,—and it is very true, also, that London, in the excitement, lost her trade and forgot business for nearly a week, while the actual cost of the demonstration in behalf of law and order is estimated to be full half a million of dollars; but, as the London Times well says:—

"'It is worth at least £1,000,000 in the additional value it will give to British securities now and for good all over the world.'

"The British character, British reverence for law and order, British public opinion, now stand higher than ever. No spectacle can be more beautiful than that of 200,000 special constables qualifying from all classes of society, and taking oath to obey the officers of the law in preserving property and protecting the city. The Chartist multitude of some ten, or twenty, or it may be, fifty thousand—for authorities differ in their estimation of the number on Kennington Common,—naturally enough quailed before such a moral demonstration. Their courage all oozed out of their fingers' ends, and their leaders evaporated on the trial day, as well enough they might. The whole thing turned out a farce, or an abortion; and the 'six points' of the Charter, well enough in the main, now stand about as high, in London, under such auspices, as the 'five points' in New York.

"Rejoicing, however, as we do in this suppression of a mob demonstration in our Fatherland, we do not shut our eyes to the fact that the British ministry must keep up with the spirit and the intelligence of the age, in all possible or rational meliorations of the aristocratic features of the British constitution. There is, however, the greatest pledge that this will be done in the very form itself of the constitution,—for there can be scarcely a doubt, we think, that there is now as near an approximation to universal suffrage in the House of Commons as in our own House of Representatives,—remembering, as we must, in the latter body, the numbers and colours of its differing constituency. The Senate of the United States is no more based upon 'equal representation,' as all know, than the House of Peers."

"Wall Street on Saturday last.—If there are any among us who doubt the close union, social, intellectual, and commercial, which binds in sympathy our people with those of Great Britain,—if there are any who deemed Americans mere passive, disinterested spectators of the revolutionary crisis, which, previous accounts would have it, was to provoke a civil war in England, and to submerge all the then existing law and order there, beneath the turbulent whirlpool of mob violence—we wish they had been in Wall Street, or, indeed, in any of the other business thoroughfares in the lower part of the city, on Saturday last, about noon. We are perfectly sure that the result of the intended-to-be belligerent demonstration in the English metropolis, on the eventful 10th of April, was not more anxiously awaited in Liverpool, in Edinburgh, or Glasgow, than it was here in Transatlantic New York, albeit three thousand miles and more away from the theatre of action. Early in the morning, as soon as it was proclaimed on the newspaper bulletins that the steamer was telegraphed off Sandy Hook, men began to gather in knots at the corners of the streets, discussing the probable character of the news at hand,—and, for the time being, all business of importance was at a pause. Speculation in Ohio 6's, Pennsylvania 5's, Reading Bonds and railroad shares, was laid aside for speculation in an anticipated fresh batch of revolutions and dynasties overthrown. Cotton, flour, and grain were all forgotten, and the only article thought of in the provision line was a Provisional Government in the realms of Queen Victoria. Hanover Street, at the corner of Wall,—that well-known rendezvous for street operations,—was in a state of terrible suspense; and even the stoic who superintends the dog-market in the neighbourhood of the Custom House, concluded to suspend all transactions in his quadrupedal profession, till the character of the news should be divulged. The excitement on all hands was intense; but the suspense was of short duration, for soon the booming of cannon across the bay announced that the New America had reached her[784] wharf at Jersey City. An hardly had the echoes died in the distance, ere a 'Wilmer,' or one of the innumerable 'Extras' that now deluged the streets, was in the hands of every body who could read. By this time the various newspaper establishments were in a state of actual beleaguerment. Into some, the rush was so unceremonious and indiscriminate, that, as the speediest means to get rid of the crowd, an individual was delegated to ascend the desk and read aloud the details of the intelligence. Englishman, Irishman, German, and Frenchman, were among the eager listeners; and according as from the reader's lips would fall some sentence congenial to the feelings of one or the other, it amused us to hear the involuntary ejaculations of applause that would now and then break out. All, indeed, were patient listeners,—the American hardly less so than the European. And now that the Chartist bugbear had eventuated in a contemptible abortion, many were the congratulations exchanged—though some expressions of disappointed hope here and there met our ear. The internal peace of England had been undisturbed—the government had wisely allowed the 'demonstration' to take place,—it had 'all ended in smoke,'—Parliament hadn't even been menaced with those awful pikes,—the vast financial and commercial concerns of the nation were not seriously affected,—in short, because every thing now gave good assurance that the mighty conflagration which has irresistibly swept over all continental Europe, consuming many a regal edifice in its march, has left unscathed the governmental fabric of Britain, and therefore preserved all the mighty interests which, falling with it in the general ruin, would have immersed half the world in bankruptcy and distress—people returned to their homes and to their places of business with better heart. The cloud of gloom that hung over the business world, the week past, in anticipation of sad tidings from abroad, at once evaporated, and in the twinkling of an eye, all was sunshine and hope again. Such was Saturday in Wall Street."

To the sentiments expressed in these passages every British heart must respond; and we feel the more called upon to lay them before our readers from having seen some absurd and foolish ravings reprinted in this country as the verdict of the American Press upon the events which have been and are passing around us.

We do not much wonder at such passages as we allude to being quoted here, for, like many of those transatlantic extravagances which have now attained the distinctive name of "Americanisms," they certainly form rather amusing reading; but it requires only a very superficial inspection of these tirades, to see that they no more reflect the real tone of American opinions or American sympathies, than the harangues of the United Irishmen or of Conciliation Hall represent the feelings, judgments, or wishes of the Irish nation. Doubtless, among the less intelligent classes of the community, and the "Suisses" of the Press, on both sides of the Atlantic, there is abundance of rancour and bad feeling, in some cases the offspring of mere ignorance, in others of bad faith, disguised under the cloak of nationality and patriotism: but among the educated and the thoughtful portion of the public, and among the higher organs of periodical literature in both countries, a very different spirit is evidently gaining ground. A feeling of mutual respect, a spirit of cordiality is every day becoming more apparent, as the conviction of the common interest of the two countries becomes more palpable; and a union is gradually in the course of formation, which the storms that are agitating the rest of Europe will only tend, we trust, to cement and confirm. How, indeed, should it be otherwise? How, at least, should it long continue to be otherwise? For what country but Great Britain has ever sent forth from its bosom such a colony as now forms the United States of America? What colony could ever look back upon a loftier lineage than America, when, comparing her own wide and thriving domains with many of the sinking empires of Europe, she remembers her British descent, and feels, in a thousand traces of blood and thoughts and habits and morals, her connexion with "the inviolate island of the sage and free."

[785]

INDEX TO VOL. LXIII.

Abercrombie, general, 430.

Aberdeen, kidnapping in, 612.

Ackland, colonel, 335, 336,
—his death, 339.

Ackland, lady Harriet, 336, et seq.

Acre, defence of, by Sir Sidney Smith, 323.

Aids to Reflection, criticism on the, 702.

Agricultural produce, importation of, 11
—classes, present state of, 655.

Alaimo de Sentini, 592
—defence of Messina by, 595
—his death, 602.

Alba, battle of, 450.

Alexander, emperor of Russia, sketch of career of, 133, 135, et seq.

Alfred, improvement of the English law under, 463.

Allen, Ethan, exploits of, 430.

America, periodical literature of, 106
—copyright in, 127
—feeling in, towards England, 780.

Angler's Companion, Stoddart's, review of, 73.

Armstrong, Johnny, execution of, 305.

Army, &c., Cobden on the, 261.

Arnold, Benedict, exploits of, 332, 336, 430.

Athole, earl of, murder of, 300.

Atterbury, bishop, 471.

Austria, the revolutionary movement in, 639, et seq. 650
—its government of Lombardy and Venice, 736, 737
—the war with Sardinia, 746.

Autobiography of a German headsman, the, 148.


Ballantyne's Hudson's Bay, review of, 369.

Bank restriction act, passing of the, and its effects, 1
—Peel's, 720.

Baring, Mr, on the income-tax, 386.

Barrow's life of Sir Sidney Smith, review of, 309.

Beatification, the, 290.

Benevento, battle of, 444.

Blackwood and copyright in America, 127.

Blairs and Drummonds, feud between, 306.

Blanc, Louis, 399.

Bolingbroke, lord, 472.

Brazil, present state of, 236.

Brest, exploit of Sir Sidney Smith at, 319.

Brougham, lord, on the present state of France, 642.

Budget the, 383.

Buffalo-hunting, sketches of, 374.

Buonaparte, Napoleon, at Toulon, 318
—defeat of, at Acre, 323.

Burgoyne, general, 331
—history of his enterprise, 333.

Buxton on the increase of the slave-trade, 7.

Byng, admiral, 482.

Bysset, Sir Walter, 300.


Canada, my route into, part. I., 328
—part II., 425.

Cannibalism, prevalence of, among the American Indians, 375.

Cara Vita, the, a scene at Rome, 287.

Carleton, Sir Guy, 332.

Carlos, Don, son of Philip II., 70.

Catechism in the Minerva, a scene at Rome, 281.

Catherine of Russia, 132, 133, 134.

Caxtons, the, a family picture; chap. I. 513
—chap. II., 514
—chap. III., 516
—chap. IV., 518
—chap. V., 522
—chap. VI., 523
—chap. VII., 525
—chap. VIII., 527
—chap. IX., 531
—chap. X., 537.
—Book II., chap. I., 685
—chap. II., My uncle Roland's discourse upon honour, 687
—chap. III., 688
—chap. IV., 691
—chap. V., 694
—chap. VI., 696
—chap. VII., My Uncle Roland's tale, 697
—chap. VIII., 700.

Cervantes, Miguel, 72.

Champlain, lake, 425.

Charles of Anjou, conquest of Naples by, 436
—revolt of Sicily from him, and his further history, 589
—his death, 603.

Charles Albert, King of Sardinia, 746, et seq.

Charles Edward, prince, notices of, 475, et seq.

Chartist movements in Great Britain, the, 650
—feeling in America regarding, 780.

Chartists, how to disarm the, 653.

Clermont assizes, Flechier's chronicle of, 47.

Cobden on the national defences, 261
—movement of, for extended suffrage, 655.

Coercion bill, the, and its necessity in Ireland, 3, 4
—character of Sir George Grey's, 115.

Coleridge, the philosophy of, 702.

Commerce, present condition of, 10.

Conciliation, effect of, toward Ireland 113.

Conquest of Naples, the, 436.

[786]Conradin, sketch of the career of, 446, et seq.

Constance, Queen of Arragon, 600.

Constantine, the grand-duke, 141.

Constantinople, early attacks of the Russians on, 130.

Corlaer, tradition regarding, 423.

Country house, building, &c., of a, 28.

Cree Indians, the, 376.

Crémieux, M., 401.

Crimes and remarkable trials in Scotland; incidents of the earlier reigns; an inquiry into the character of Macbeth, 293
—kidnapping, Peter Williamson's case, 607.

Criticism, characteristics requisite for, 107.

Cromwell, advancement of the navy under, 309.

Crown Point, fortress of, 431.

Cuba, cost of producing sugar in, and its increased production, 229, 231, 234.

Currency system, change in the, by the bank restriction act, 1
—effects of Peel's system, 7, 20, 661.


Defences, the national, Cobden on, 261
—a military discussion regarding, 362.

Demerara, depreciation of property in, 231.

Democratic Review, the, 106, 111.

Direct taxation, evils of, 384.

Don John of Austria, 70.

Downie, captain, defeat and death of, 432.

Drummonds and Blairs, feud between the, 306.

Duncan, investigation into the alleged murder of, 294.

Durie, Lord, abduction of, 609.


Edinburgh after Flodden, 165.

Education in Wales, 540.

Edward the Confessor, improvement of the law under, 463.

Elizabeth, progress of the British navy under, 309.

Emancipation, increase of the slave-trade from, 220.

Emigration, proposed government system of, 668
—statistics of, 669.

Employment, present want of, 655.

England, American feeling toward, 780.

Escovedo, secretary to Don John of Austria, 75
—murder of, 77.

Europe, the revolutions in, 638.

Eusebius, letter to, on subjects for pictures, 176.

Evenings at sea. No. III. The Surgeon, 33.


Fall of the throne of the barricades, the, 393.

Finances of Britain, the, 383.

Finances of France, state of, since the Revolution, 404.

Flechier's chronicle of Clermont assizes, 47.

Fletcher of Salton, curious scheme of, 610.

Flodden, Edinburgh after, 165.

Forbes, the master of, conspiracy of, 303.

France, the present revolution in, 395, 638
—its symbols, 767.

Frazer, general, death of, 335.

Frederick the Hohenstauffe, notices of, 438, et seq.

Frederick III. of Sicily, 605.

Frederick, fort, 431.

Free-trade, results of Peel's system of, 8, 21, 662.

French republic, sentiments and symbols of the, 767.

Fur-trade, sketches of, 374.


Gates, general, 329.

George II., character of, 470, 483.

German ditty, a, 419.

German Headsman, autobiography of a, 148.

Gioberti's work on Italy, influence, &c., of, 741, et seq.

Glammis, lady, execution of, 303.

Glasgow, unemployed in, 655.

Gordon, George Huntly, two sonnets by, 420.

Green mountains, the, 431.

Greenwich time, 354.

Grey, Sir George, on the state of Ireland, 4
—character of his coercion bill, 115.

Griffiths, Mr, on education in Wales, 548.

Guesses at Truth, review of, 701.

Guiana, decline in produce of, 225.

Gustavus of Sweden, sketch of the career of, 313.


Hardwicke, lord, life and times of, 463.

Harris's life of Lord Hardwicke, review of, 463.

Havre, capture of Sir Sidney Smith at, 321.

Headsman, autobiography of a, 148.

Heigho! 572.

Herqui, exploit of Sir Sidney Smith at, 320.

Herring, archbishop of York, 477.

Hood, lord, at Toulon, 318.

How to disarm the Chartists, 653.

How we got possession of the Tuileries, chap. I. Heads or Tails? 484
—chap. II. The Ides of March, 489
—chap. III. The Barricades, 493
—chap. IV. The Tuileries, 497
—chap. V. Two provisional governments, 502
—chap. VI. A republican wedding, 506
—chap. VII. Adieu, sweet France, 511.

Howe, lord, death of, 430.

Hudson's Bay, sketches of, 369.

Huskisson, introduction of the reciprocity system by, 2.


Inca and his Bride, the, a medley, chap. I. Astley's, 751.
—chap. II. The Rubicon of Peru, 755.
—chap. III. The Children of the Sun, 758.
—chap. IV. The Hall of Fire, 762.
—chap. V. The Cataract of the Rocks, 765.

[787] Income tax, imposition, evils, &c., of the, 384, 385.

Infant schools, remarks on, 284.

Intercepted letters, the, a tale of the bivouac, 340.

Ireland, change in the system of government of, and its effects, 3
—the famine in, and its effects, 19
—and the ministerial measures, 113
—exemption of, from the income tax, 389
—sketch illustrating the results of repeal to it, 627.

Iroquois, contests of, with the French, 426.

Italy, present state and prospects of, 101
—the revolutionary movement in, 638
—the movement and war in, 733.

Ivan, the first Czar of Russia, 131.


Jamaica, decline in the produce of, from the effects of the emancipation act, 6, 225
—depreciation of property in, 232, 233.

James I. of Scotland, murder of, 303.

Jerusalem, by W. Sinclair, 192.

John of Austria, sketch of the life of, 70.

Johnson, Mr, on education in Wales, 548, 550, 554.


Kenneth III., tradition of the death of, 294.

Kidnapping, sketch of the history of, in Britain, and especially in Aberdeen, 607.

Koch, Ernest, the Silver Cross, a campaigning sketch by, 564.


La Cara Vita, an Italian sketch, 287.

Lamartine, the works of, 399.

Laprairie, town of, 434.

Last Walk, the, by B. Simmons, 629.

Lauria, Ruggiero de, 598, 599.

Law of England, sketch of the history of, 463.

Lepanto, battle of, 71.

Letter to Eusebius, a, on subjects for pictures, 176.

Liberal Legislation, thirty years of, 1.

Life and Times of Lord Hardwicke, 463.

Life in the Far West, Part I. chap. I. 713
—chap. II. 717.

Longen, Mr, on Education in Wales, 546, 549, 551, 553, 555.

Lombardy and the Italian war, 733.

London, the Chartist movement in, 650.

Louis Philippe, fall of, 395
—his pusillanimity, 405, 406.

Lucera, the town and Saracens of, 439, et seq.

Lunfanan, the death-scene of Macbeth, 297.


Macbeth, inquiry into the character and crime of, 293.

Macclesfield, the Earl of, trial of, 472.

M'Crea, Miss, murder of, 331, 334.

Macdonough, Commodore, 432.

Magna Charta, promulgation of, 465.

Mainfroy, prince of Tarento, 438, et seq.
—his death, 445.

Man is a Featherless Biped, a tale, 631.

Manchester, unemployed in, 655.

Mansfield, Lord, character of Hardwicke by, 482.

Manufactures, depressed condition of the, 10.

Messina, city of, 590
—its revolt against the French, 594, 595.

Metternich, Prince, 137.

Military discussion, a, touching our coast defences, 362.

Mont Blanc, a sonnet, 420.

Montgomery, General, death of, 332.

Moscow, city of, 146.

Murillo, account of the battle of Lepanto by, 73.

My English Acquaintance, 194.

My route into Canada,—Part I. 328
—Part II. 425.


Naples, conquest of, by Charles of Anjou, 436.

National defences, Cobden on the, 261.

Navigation laws, threatened repeal of the, 2, 3.

Navy of England, attention paid to, by successive sovereigns, 309.

Nicholas the emperor of Russia, 134, 142, et seq.

Night's peril, a, 83.

Norman conquest, effect of, on the law of England, 464.

Novgorod, foundation of kingdom of, 130.

Now and Then, review of, 239.


Ossian, supposed burial-place of, 299.

Our West Indian colonies, 219.


Palermo, city of, 590
—its revolt against Charles of Anjou, 594.

Paris, state of, as republican, 402, 573.

Paul, the emperor of Russia, 133.

Pedro of Arragon, conquest of Sicily by, 589.

Peel, Sir Robert, results of his banking act, 7, 20
—his administration toward Ireland, 114
—imposition of the income tax by, 384.

Peel Bog, the, 298.

Perez, Antonio, 73, 77.

Peril of a night, a, 83.

Periodical Literature of America, the, 106.

Peter the Great of Russia, 129, 132.

Philip II. of Spain, notices of, 70, et seq.

Pictures, subjects for, a letter to Eusebius, 176.

Piedmont, the war of, with Austria, 740, et seq.

Pius IX., the movement headed by, 101.

Plattsburg, battle of, 432.

Poetry: Edinburgh after Flodden, 165
—Jerusalem, 192
—A German ditty, 419
—Two Sonnets by George Huntly Gordon, 420
—Heigho! 572
—The Last Walk, by B. Simmons, 629.

Poland, the partitions of, 133.

Political Economists, effects of the supremacy of, 663.

Prussia, the revolutionary movement in, 638, et seq. 649.


Radetsky, General, 747.

[788]Railways, general stoppage of works on, 9.

Rebellion of 1745, the, 475.

Reciprocity system, introduction of, by Huskisson, 2.

Reform Bill, effects of the passing of, 4, 663.

Reformation, influence of the, on English law, 465.

Reidesel, the Baroness, 337, et seq.

Repealer's wish granted, the, an Irish tale, 627.

Republican Paris, 573.

Revenue, state of the, 383.

Revolution in Europe, the, 638.

Romanism in Rome: Catechism in the Minerva, 281
—La Cara Vita, 287
—the Beatification, 290.

Ruric, kingdom of, bounded, 130.

Russell, Lord John, financial statements, schemes, &c., of, 383.

Russian empire, sketch of the recent history of the, 129.


St Domingo, effects of slave emancipation on, 6.

St Jean d'Acre, siege of, 323.

St Louis, sketches of, 442.

St Priest's history of the conquest of Naples, Part I., 436
—Part II., 589.

Saratoga, battle of, 330, 335.

Sardinia, revolutionary movements in, 101.

Savings' banks, the French, effects of the revolution on, 408.

Saxon law, characteristics of, 463.

Schools, state of, in Wales, 540.

Schnitzler's secret history of Russia, review of, 129.

Schuyler, General, 329.

Scottish crimes and trials, remarkable: those of the earlier reigns, 293
—Kidnapping, and the case of Williamson, 607.

Shipping, British and Foreign, effect of the reciprocity system on, 2.

Sentiments and symbols of the French republic, 767.

Sicilian Vespers, the, 436, 493.

Sicily, conquest of, by the Spaniards, 589.

Simmons, B., the Last Walk by, 629.

Sir Sidney Smith, 309.

Silver Cross, the, a campaigning sketch, from the German of Ernest Koch: night-quarters, 564
—In the mountains, 565
—Hidden treasure, 567
—The wine skin, 570
—The hospital, ib.

Sinclair, William, Jerusalem, a poem by, 192.

Slave-trade, abolition of, and the subsequent emancipation of the slaves, effects of, 5, 220, 235.

Smith, Adam, on the Navigation Laws, 2.

Smith, Sir Sidney, sketch of the life, &c., of, 309.

Something like a country house, 28.

Soto, Juan, 74.

Spaniard in Sicily, the, 589.

Stoddart and Angling, 673.

Subjects for pictures, a letter to Eusebius, 176.

Suffrage, movement for extending the, 655.

Sugar, comparative cost of free and slave grown, 229.

Sugar Act, the, and its effects, 221.

Surgeon's tale, the, 33.

Sweden, history of, under Gustavus, 313.

Switzerland and Italy, 98.

Symbols of the French republic, 767.

Symons, Mr, on education in Wales, 547, 550.


Tagliacozzo, battle of, 450.

Tenant right in Ireland, question of, 119.

Thirty years of liberal legislation, 1.

Ticonderoga, fort, 428, 429.

Timour, invasion of Russia by, 131.

To ——, a sonnet, 420.

Tocqueville on republicanism in France, 416.

Toulon, services of Sir Sidney Smith at, 317.

Toushi the Tartar, invasion of Russia by, 130.

Travelling in Taffyland, 455.

Tuileries, How we got possession of the, 484.

Tuscany, the grand-duke of, 101.

Two Sonnets, by George Huntly Gordon, 420.


Unemployed, statistics connected with the, 655.

United States, periodical literature of, 106
—copyright in, 127
—feeling in, towards England, 780.


Valery, Erard, de, 450.

Venice, the government of, by Austria, 742.

Vices, the prevalent, in Wales, 556.


Wales, travelling in, 455
—education in, 540.

Walpole, Sir Robert, 473, 475.

Warren's Now and Then, review of, 239.

Wellington, Lacretelle's character of, 144
—on the national defences, 263, 268.

West Indian colonies, the, 219
—the policy toward, 5, 659.

Whitehall, town of, 427.

Williamson, Peter, sketch of the history of, 607.


York factory, life at, 371, et seq.

Printed by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh.