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Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845

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Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845

Author: Various


        
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE, VOLUME 57, NO. 356, JUNE, 1845 ***




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https://www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images
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BLACKWOOD'S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

NO. CCCLVI. JUNE, 1845. VOL. LVII.


Transcriber's note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved
to the end of the article. The index for Volume 57 is included at the
end of this issue.


CONTENTS.


PUSHKIN, THE RUSSIAN POET. No. I.,                             657

THE NOVEL AND THE DRAMA,                                       679

MARSTON; OR, THE MEMOIRS OF A STATESMAN. PART XVII.,           688

LEBRUN'S LAWSUIT,                                              705

CENNINO CENNINI ON PAINTING,                                   717

AESTHETICS OF DRESS. NO. IV.,                                   731

SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS: BEING A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS
OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER,                                     739

HANNIBAL,                                                      752

STANZAS WRITTEN AFTER THE FUNERAL OF ADMIRAL SIR DAVID
MILNE, C.G.B.,                                                 766

STANZAS TO THE MEMORY OF THOMAS HOOD,                          768

NORTH'S SPECIMENS OF THE BRITISH CRITICS. NO. V.--DRYDEN
ON CHAUCER--CONCLUDED,                                         771

INDEX,                                                         794


EDINBURGH: WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET; AND 22,
PALL-MALL, LONDON.

_To whom all Communications (post paid) must be addressed._

SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.

PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE AND HUGHES, EDINBURGH.




BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

NO. CCCLVI. JUNE, 1845. VOL. LVII.




PUSHKIN, THE RUSSIAN POET.

NO. I.

SKETCH OF PUSHKIN'S LIFE AND WORKS, BY THOMAS B. SHAW, B.A. OF
CAMBRIDGE, ADJUNCT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE IMPERIAL
ALEXANDER LYCEUM, TRANSLATOR OF "THE HERETIC," &C. &C.


Among the many striking analogies which exist between the physical and
intellectual creations, and exhibit the uniform method adopted by
Supreme Wisdom in the production of what is most immortal and most
precious in the world of thought, as well as of what is most useful and
beautiful in the world of matter, there is one which cannot fail to
arise before the most actual and commonplace imagination. This is, the
great apparent care exhibited by nature in the preparation of the
_nidus_--or matrix, if we may so style it--in which the genius of the
great man is to be perfected and elaborated. Nature creates nothing in
sport; and as much foresight--possibly even more--is displayed in the
often complicated and intricate machinery of concurrent causes which
prepare the development of great literary genius, as in the elaborate
in-foldings which protect from injury the germ of the future oak, or the
deep-laid and mysterious bed, and the unimaginable ages of growth and
hardening, necessary to the water of the diamond, or to the purity of
the gold.

Pushkin is undoubtedly one of that small number of names, which have
become incorporated and identified with the literature of their country;
at once the type and the expression of that country's nationality--one
of that small but illustrious bard, whose writings have become part of
the very household language of their native land--whose lightest words
may be incessantly heard from the lips of all classes; and whose
expressions may be said, like those of Shakspeare, of Moliere, and of
Cervantes, to have become the natural forms embodying the ideas which
they have expressed, and in expressing, consecrated. In a word, Pushkin
is undeniably and essentially the great national poet of Russia.

In tracing, therefore, this author's double existence, and in essaying
to give some account of his external as well as his interior life--in
sketching the poet and the man--we cannot fail to remark a striking
exemplification of the principle to which we have alluded; and as we
accompany, in respectful admiration, his short but brilliant career, we
shall have incessant occasion to remember the laws which regulated its
march--laws ever-acting and eternal, and no less apparent to the eye of
enlightened criticism, than are the mighty physical influences which
guide the planets in their course, to the abstract reason of the
astronomer.

Alexander Pushkin was born (as if destiny had intended, in assigning
his birth-place--the ancient capital of Russia, and still the
dwelling-place of all that is most intense in Russian nationality--to
predict all the stuff and groundwork of his character) at Moscow, on the
26th of May 1799. His family, by the paternal side, was one of the most
ancient and distinguished in the empire, and was descended from Ratcha,
a German--probably a Teutonic knight--who settled in Muscovy in the
thirteenth century, and took service under Alexander Nevskii,
(1252-1262,) and who is the parent root from which spring many of the
most illustrious houses in Russia--those of Pushkin, of Buturlin, of
Kamenskii, and of Meteloff. Nor was the paternal line of Pushkin's house
undistinguished for other triumphs than those recorded in the annals of
war; his grandfather, Vassilii Lvovitch Pushkin, was a poet of
considerable reputation, and was honoured, no less than Alexander's
father, with the intimacy of the most illustrious literary men of his
age--of Dmitrieff, Karamzin, and Jukovskii.

But perhaps the most remarkable circumstance connected with Pushkin's
origin--a circumstance of peculiar significance to those who, like
ourselves, are believers in the influence, on human character, of
_race_, or _blood_, is the fact of his having been the grandson, by the
mother's side, of an African. The cold blood of the north, transmitted
to his veins from the rude warrior of Germany, was thus mingled with
that liquid lightning which circles through the fervid bosom of the
children of the desert; and this crossing of the race (to use the
language of the course) produced an undeniable modification in our
poet's character. His maternal grandfather was a negro, brought to
Russia when a child by Peter the Great, and whose subsequent career was
one of the most romantic that can be imagined. The wonderful Tsar gave
his sable protege, whose name was Annibal, a good education, and
admitted him into the marine service of the empire--a service in which
he reached (in the reign of Catharine) the rank of admiral. He took part
in the attack upon Navarin under Orloff, and died after a long and
distinguished career of service, having founded, in his new country, the
family of Annibaloff, of which Pushkin was the most distinguished
ornament, and of whose African origin the poet, both in personal
appearance and in mental physiognomy, bore the most unequivocal marks.
To the memory of this singular progenitor, Pushkin has consecrated more
than one of his smaller works, and has frequently alluded to the African
blood which he inherited from the admiral.

In 1811, Pushkin obtained (through the interest of Turgenieff, to whom
Russia is thus, in some sort, indebted for her great poet) admission
into the Imperial Lyceum of Tsarskoe Selo, where he was to receive the
education, and to form the friendships, which so strongly coloured, not
only the literary productions of his whole career, but undoubtedly
modified, to a considerable extent, the personal character of the poet.
This institution, then recently established by the Emperor Alexander,
and always honoured by the peculiar favour and protection of its
illustrious founder, was modelled on the plan of those _lycees_ which
France owed to the genius of Napoleon; and was intended to confer upon
its pupils the advantage of a complete encyclopedic education, and, not
only embracing the preparatory or school course, but also the academic
_curriculum_ of a university, was calculated to dismiss the students, at
the end of their course of training, immediately into active life. The
Lyceum must be undoubtedly considered as having nursed in its bosom a
greater number of distinguished men than any other educational
institution in the country; and our readers may judge of the peculiar
privileges enjoyed by this establishment, (the primary object of whose
foundation was, that of furnishing to the higher civil departments in
the government, and to the ministry of foreign affairs in particular, a
supply of able and accomplished _employes_,) from the fact of its having
been located by the emperor in a wing of the palace of Tsarskoe
Selo--the favourite summer residence of the Tsars of Russia since the
time of Catharine II. It is to the last-named sovereign, as is well
known to travellers, that this celebrated spot is indebted for its
splendid palace and magnificent gardens, forming, perhaps, the most
striking object which gratifies the stranger's curiosity in the environs
of St Petersburg.

The students of the Lyceum are almost always youths of the most
distinguished families among the Russian nobility, and are themselves
selected from among the most promising in point of intellect. The system
of education pursued within its walls is of the most complete nature,
partaking, as may be concluded from what we have said, of both a
scientific and literary character; and a single glance at a list of the
first course (of which Pushkin was a member) will suffice to show, that
it counted, among its numbers, many names destined to high distinction.
Among the comrades and intimate friends of Pushkin at the Lyceum, must
be mentioned the elegant poet, the Baron Delvig, whose early death was
so irreparable a loss to Russian literature, and must be considered as
the severest personal bereavement suffered by Pushkin--"his brother," as
he affectionately calls him, in the muse as in their fate. Nor must we
forget Admiral Matiushkin, a distinguished seaman now living, and
commanding the Russian squadron in the Black Sea. We could specify a
number of other names, all of more or less note in their own country,
though the reputation of many of them has not succeeded, for various
reasons, in passing the frontiers.

From the system of study, no less than from the peculiar social
character, if we may so express it, which has always prevailed in the
Lyceum of Tsarskoe Selo, we must deduce the cause of the peculiar
intensity and durability of the friendships contracted within its
bosom--a circumstance which still continues to distinguish it to a
higher degree than can be predicated of any other institution with which
we are acquainted; and we allude to this more pointedly from the
conviction, that it would be absolutely impossible to form a true idea
of Pushkin--not only as man, but even as a poet--were we to leave out of
our portrait the immense influence exerted on the whole of his career,
both in the world of reality and in the regions of art, by the close and
intimate friendships he formed in the Lyceum, particularly that with
Delvig. Few portions of poetical biography contain a purer or more
touching interest than the chapter describing the school or college
friendships of illustrious men; and the innumerable allusions to Lyceum
comrades and Lyceum happiness, scattered so profusely over the pages of
Pushkin, have an indescribable charm to the imagination, not less
delightful than the recital of Byron's almost feminine affection for
"little Harness," or the oft-recalled image of the Noble Childe's boyish
meditation in the elm-shadowed churchyard of Harrow.

During the six years which Pushkin passed at the Lyceum, (from 1811 to
1817,) the intellect and the affections of the young poet were rapidly
and steadily developing themselves. He could not, it is true, be
considered as a diligent scholar, by those who looked at the progress
made by him in the regular and ostensible occupations of the
institution; but it is undeniable, that the activity of his powerful,
accurate, and penetrating mind found solid and unremitting occupation in
a wide circle of general reading. His own account of the acquirements he
had made at this period, and of the various branches of study which he
had cultivated with more or less assiduity, proves that, however
desultory may have been the nature of his reading, and however unformed
or incoherent were his literary projects, he possessed, in ample
measure, even at this period, the great elements of future fame; viz.
the habit of vigorous industry, and the power of sustained abstraction
and contemplation.

His personal appearance, at this time, was a plain index of his
character, intellectual as well as moral. The closely-curled and wiry
hair, the mobile and irregular features, the darkness of the complexion,
all betrayed his African descent; and served as an appropriate outside
to a character which was early formed in all its individuality, and
which remained unchanged in its principal features during the whole of
the poet's too short existence. Long will the youthful traditions of the
Lyceum recall the outlines of Pushkin's character; long will the
unbiassed judgment of boyhood do justice to the manliness, the honour,
the straightforwardness of the great poet's nature, and hand down, from
one young generation to another, numberless traits exemplifying the
passionate warmth of his heart, the gaiety of his temper, and the
vastness of his memory. In all cases where circumstances come fairly
under their observation, the young are the best judges of internal
character, as well as the most unerring physiognomists of the outward
lineaments of the face. Pushkin was extremely popular among his
comrades--the generosity of his character had peculiar charms for the
unsophisticated minds of the young; and the vigour of a body never
enfeebled in infancy by luxurious indulgence, enabled him to obtain, by
sharing in their sports, no less consideration among them than he
derived from the play of his penetrating and sarcastic humour. His
poetical existence was now already begun: to the Lyceum period of
Pushkin's life we must ascribe not only a considerable number of short
pieces of verse--those first flutterings of the bird before it has
strength to leave the nest--but even the conception of many poetical
projects which time and study were hereafter to mature into
masterpieces. The short and fugitive essays in poetry to which we have
just alluded, appeared in a literary journal at various periods, and
under anonymous signatures--a circumstance to be deplored, as it has
deprived us of the means of examining how far these slight attempts,
composed in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth years of his age,
gave promise of future excellence. In themselves, they were probably so
crude and _unlicked_ as to justify the poet in the indifference which
prevented him from claiming these early compositions, and allowing them
to be incorporated in the collections of his writings. During his
residence at the Lyceum, however, he undoubtedly meditated the plan of
his charming romantic poem, "Ruslan and Liudmila," and probably even
composed the opening of the work. To this period, too, are to be
assigned some stanzas of great merit, entitled "Recollections of
Tsarskoe Selo," and an "Epistle to Licinius"--both works exhibiting
considerable skill and mastery in versification, but by far too much
tinged (as might indeed be expected) with the light reflected from the
youthful poet's reading to deserve a place among his original
productions. For the amusement of his comrades, also, he wrote a number
of ludicrous and humorous pieces, which derived their chief merit from
the circumstances which suggested them; and were calculated rather to
excite a moment's laughter in the merry circle of schoolfellows, than to
be cited as specimens of the author's comic powers, particularly when we
reflect, that the broadly humorous was never Pushkin's favourite or even
successful manner of writing: in the delicate, subdued, Cervantes tone
of humour, however, he was destined to become perhaps the most
distinguished writer of his country--but let us not anticipate. One
production, connected with the Lyceum, is, however, too important (not
perhaps in itself, so much as in the circumstances accompanying it) to
be passed over in a biography of our poet. This is a didactic poem
entitled "Infidelity," which Pushkin composed and read at the public
examination at the Lyceum, at the solemn _Act_, (a ceremony resembling
that which bears the same name at Oxford and Cambridge, and which takes
place at the conferring of the academical degree.) It was on this
occasion that Pushkin was publicly saluted _Poet_, in the presence of
the Emperor, by the aged Derjavin--the greatest Russian poet then
living, and whose glory was so soon to be eclipsed by the young student
whom he prophetically applauded. It is impossible not to be affected by
the sight of the sunset of that genius whose brightest splendour is
worthily reflected in the sublime ode, "God"--one of the noblest lyrics
in the Russian, or, indeed, in any language--thus heralding, as it were,
the dawning of a more brilliant and enduring daybreak; even as in the
northern summer the vapoury evening glow melts imperceptibly into the
dawn, and leaves no night between.

This event, so calculated to impress the vivid and ardent imagination of
the young poet, has been most exquisitely described by himself in the
literary journal, "Sovremennik," (The Contemporary,) vol. viii. p. 241.

On quitting the Lyceum, in October 1817, Pushkin entered the civil
service, and was immediately attached to the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs. Young, noble, cultivated, possessed in the highest degree of
those talents which are certain to enchant society, he plunged, as might
naturally have been expected, with all the ardour of his African blood,
into the pleasures and amusements of the capital. His success in
society, and the eagerness with which he was welcomed every where, might
easily have been foreseen, particularly when we keep in mind the
universal hospitality which distinguishes the higher classes of Russian
society, and the comparative rarity in this country of literary
celebrity, which tends to render merit of that nature certain of a
respectful, if not exaggerated appreciation. "The three years," to quote
the words of one--himself a personal friend of the poet's--who has
succeeded in seizing with admirable fidelity the principal features of
Pushkin's intellectual physiognomy, "the three years which he passed in
St Petersburg, after quitting the Lyceum, were devoted to the amusements
of the fashionable world, and to the irresistible enchantments of
society. From the splendid drawing-room of the great noble down to the
most unceremonious supper-table of a party of young officers, every
where Pushkin was received with exultation, and every where did he
become the idol of the young, who gratified both his vanity and their
own by the glory which accompanied his every step."

The eagerness with which the young poet plunged into the glittering
stream of fashionable life, must not be attributed only to the natural
thirst for pleasure in a young man just released from the bonds of a
school life, and to the first vivid sense of liberty excited in the mind
of a youth, who had been passing six years of his life in a spot which,
however beautiful, was still but a beautiful seclusion. We must keep in
mind the different constitution of society in Russia, and particularly
the fact, that the absence (at least for social purposes) of a middle
class in that country, renders the upper ranks the only section of the
social system in which intellectual pleasure can be sought, or
intellectual supremacy appreciated. Pushkin himself always attached no
inconsiderable importance to his success in the _beau monde_; and it is
incontestably to his friction (if we may so style it) with that _beau
monde_ that he owed some of the more attractive, if not the more solid,
qualities of his genius, and much of the refinement and good taste which
distinguish his style. Like all men of the higher order of
intellect--like Scott, like Cervantes, and Michael Angelo--Pushkin was
endowed by nature with a vigorous and mighty organization, bodily as
well as mental: and though he may appear to have been losing much
valuable time in the elegant frivolities of the drawing-room, he was not
less industrious at this period of his career in amassing a store of
observation derived from a practical study of human character, than
successful in filling up--in the short intervals of ball and
festival--the poetical outlines which he had roughly sketched at the
Lyceum. He worked in the morning at his poem, and passed the greater
part of his nights in society; very short intervals of repose sufficing
to repair, in so vigorously constituted a being, the loss of energetic
vitality caused by the quick succession of intense intellectual labour,
and equally intense social enjoyment. It was at this period that the
enchanting creations of Wieland and Ariosto were first presented to his
young and glowing imagination. These poets are emphatically and
essentially the poets of the young: the "_white soul_" of youth, as yet
untinged with the colouring reflected from its own peculiar fantasy, or
the results of reading, mirrors faithfully the fairy splendour of their
magic style, even as the Alpine snow the rosy light of dawn: and
Pushkin, with the natural desire of imitating what he so well knew how
to admire, conceived the happy thought of transporting Armida and Oberon
to a scenery admirably adapted for their reproduction--to the world of
ancient Russia. The popular superstitions of the Sclavonic races, though
naturally possessing a tone and local colouring of their own, and
modified by the nature which they reflect, are neither less graceful nor
less fertile in poetry than the delicate mythology so exquisitely
embodied by the great German or the yet greater Italian: and the poem of
"Ruslan and Liudmila"--the result of Pushkin's bold and happy
experiment--may be said to have been the very first embodiment of
Russian fancy, at least the first such embodiment exhibited under a form
sufficiently European to enable readers who were not Russians to
appreciate and admire. The cantos which compose this charming work were
read by Pushkin, as fast as they were completed, at the house of his
friend and brother poet, Jukovskii, where were assembled the most
distinguished men of Russian literary society. In 1820 the poem of
"Ruslan and Liudmila" was completed, and its appearance must be
considered as giving the finishing blow to the worn-out classicism which
characterizes all the poetical language of the eighteenth century. This
revolution was begun by Jukovskii himself, to whom Russian literature
owes so much; and he hailed with delight the new and beautiful
production of the young poet--the "conquering scholar," as Jukovskii
affectionately calls Pushkin--which established for ever the new order
of things originating in the good taste of the "conquered master," as he
designates himself.

The ever timid spirit of criticism was, as usual, exemplified in the
judgments passed by the literary journals upon this elegant innovation.
Some were alarmed at the novelty of the language, others shocked at the
irregularity of the versification, and others again at the occasional
comic passages introduced into the poem: but all forgot, or all dared
not confess, that this was the first Russian poetry which had ever been
greedily and universally _read_; and that, until the appearance of
"Ruslan and Liudmila," poetry and tiresomeness had been, in Russia,
convertible terms.

Immediately on the publication of "Ruslan and Liudmila," the poet,
becoming in all probability somewhat weary of a life of incessant and
labouring pleasure, left the capital and retired to Kishenev; he took
service in the chancery (or office) of Lieutenant-General Inzoff,
substitute in the province of Bessarabia. From this epoch begins the
wandering and unsettled period of the poet's life, which occupies a
space of five years, and concludes with his return to his father's
village of Mikhailovskoe, in the government of Pskoff. The effect upon
the character and genius of Pushkin, of this pilgrim-like existence,
must be considered as in the highest degree favourable: he stored up, in
these wanderings, we may be sure, effects of scenery and traits of human
nature--in fact the rough materials of future poetry. Fortunately for
him, the theatre of his travels was vast enough to enable him to lay in
an ample stock not only of recollections of the external beauties in the
physical world, but also a rich supply of the various characteristics of
national manners. He traversed the whole south of Russia--a district
admirably calculated to strike and to impress the warm and vivid
imagination of our poet; and "he took genial tribute from the wandering
tribes of Bessarabia, and from the merchant inhabitants of Odessa, and
from the classic ruins of the Tauride, and from the dark-blue waves of
the Euxine, and from the wild peaks of the Caucasus."

It was at this epoch of Pushkin's career that the mighty star of Byron
first rose, like some glittering, but irregular comet, above the
literary horizon of Europe. The genius of the Russian poet had far too
many points of resemblance, in many of its most characteristic
peculiarities, with the Muse of the Noble Childe, for us to be surprised
at the circumstance that the new and brilliant productions of Byron
should have a powerful influence on so congenial a mind as was that of
Pushkin. When we allow, therefore, the existence of this influence, nay
more, when we endeavour to appreciate and measure the extent of that
influence; when we essay to express the degree of _aberration_ (to use
the language of the astronomer) produced in the orbit of the great
poetic planet of the North by the approach in the literary hemisphere of
the yet greater luminary of England--we give the strongest possible
denial to a fallacious opinion, useless to the glory of one great man
and injurious to the just fame of the other, viz. that Pushkin can be
called in any sense an _imitator_ of Lord Byron. In many respects, it is
true, there was a strange and surprising analogy between the personal
character, the peculiar tone of thought, nay, even the nature of the
subjects treated by the two poets: and to those who content themselves
with a superficial examination of the question--those "who have not
attayned," as Sir Thomas Browne quaintly phrases it, "to the
deuteroscophie or second sight of thinges"--these analogies may appear
conclusive; but we trust to be able to show, that between these two
great men there exists a difference wide and marked enough to satisfy
the most critical stickler for originality.

The next production of Pushkin's pen was a brilliant "Epilogue" to the
poem of "Ruslan and Liudmila"--in which he replies to the strictures
which had appeared in the various literary journals. This piece was
immediately followed (in 1822) by his "Prisoner of the Caucasus," a
romantic poem, which breathes the very freshness of the mountain breeze,
and must be considered as the perfect embodiment, in verse, of the
sublime region from whence it takes its title. So deep was the
impression produced by this splendid and passionate poem, that it was
reprinted four times before it was incorporated into the edition of the
author's collected works;--the impressions having been exhausted in
1822, 24, 28, and 35. The reader, in order to appreciate the avidity
with which the poem was read, must bear in mind the small amount of
literary activity in Russia, as compared with England, with Germany, or
with France. We shall not attempt to give, in this place, any analysis
of this, or the other works of Pushkin, as it is our conviction that
short and meagre fragments--all that our space would admit of--are very
unsatisfactory and insufficient grounds on which to judge a work of
fiction, and particularly a work of poetry in a language absolutely
unknown to almost all our readers, many of the chief peculiarities
depending too upon the nationality of which that language is the
expression and vehicle. It is, however, our intention, should the
specimens of lyric poetry presented in the translations accompanying
this notice be favourably received in England, to extend the sphere of
our humble labours, and to endeavour to Daguerreotype, by faithful
versions, portions of the longer poems (and in particular the narrative
pieces) of the great writer whose portrait we are attempting to trace.
We shall, we trust, by so doing succeed in giving our countrymen a more
just idea of the merit and peculiar manner of our poet, than we could
hope to do by exhibiting to the reader the bare anatomy--the mere dry
bones of his works, to which would be wanting the lively play of
versification, the life-blood of fancy, and the ever-varying graces of
expression.

Between the first of these two remarkable poems ("Ruslan and Liudmila")
and the second--"The Prisoner of the Caucasus," the mind of Pushkin had
undergone a most remarkable transformation; "there is hardly any thing,"
to use the words of the elegant critic whom we have already quoted,
"common to the two poems, except the beauty of the verses." There is not
a greater difference between an early and a late picture of Raphael; and
what is interesting and curious to remark, is the circumstance, that
poet and painter (in their gradual advance towards consummate excellence
in their respective arts) seemed to have passed through the same stages
of development. In the earlier work all is studied, elaborated,
carefully and scientifically _composed_; worked out from the quarry of
memory, chiselled by the imagination, and polished by a studious and
somewhat pedantic taste: while the imagery, the passion, and the
characters of the later production are modelled immediately from Nature
herself. The reader perceives that the young artist has now reached the
first phase of his development, and has thrown aside the rule and
compass of precedents and books, and feels himself sufficiently strong
of hand and steady of eye to look face to face upon the unveiled goddess
herself, and with reverent skill to copy her sublime lineaments. We
cannot better express our meaning, than by allowing Pushkin himself to
give his own opinion of this poem. In the latter part of his life, he
writes as follows--"At Lars I found a dirtied and dog's-eared copy of
'The Prisoner of the Caucasus,' and I confess that I read it through
with much gratification. All this is weak, boyish, incomplete; but
there is much happily guessed at and faithfully expressed."

The indomitable activity which we have mentioned as forming a marked
feature in Pushkin's intellect, though exhibited most strikingly
throughout his whole career, was never more forcibly displayed than at
the present period. Although the first fervour of his passions was now
in sole degree moderated by indulgence, and by that satiety which is the
inevitable attendant on such indulgence, it is not to be imagined that
the poet, in retiring from the capital, intended by this to seclude
himself from the gayer pleasures of society. We know, too, how absorbing
of time is the wandering life which he led--and many have learned from
experience, how difficult it is for a traveller to find leisure for
intellectual pursuits. Some idea, therefore, of Pushkin's activity may
be formed from a knowledge of the circumstance, that during this roving
period he had not only been storing his memory with images of the
beauties of nature, taking tribute of grandeur and loveliness from every
scene through which he wandered, but found time to pursue what would
appear, even for an otherwise unoccupied student, a very steady and
incessant course of labour. During the whole of his life, he made it his
practice to read almost every remarkable work which appeared in the
various languages he had acquired. That this was no easy task, and that
the quantity of intellectual food which he unceasingly consumed, must
have required a powerful and rapid digestion to assimilate it, we may
conclude from his own statement of his occupations and acquirements. On
quitting the Lyceum, he was acquainted with the English, Latin, German,
and French languages; to this list he managed to add, during his
wanderings, a complete knowledge of the Italian, and a competent
proficiency in Spanish.

But let us hear his own account of these studies, extracted from a poem
written in Bessarabia--

    "In solitude my soul, my wayward inspiration
    I've school'd to quiet toil, to fervent meditation.
    I'm master of my days; order is reason's friend;
    On graver thoughts I've learn'd my spirit's powers to bend;
    I seek to compensate, in freedom's calm embraces,
    For the warm years of youth, its joys and vanish'd graces;
    And to keep equal step with an enlighten'd age."

We cannot refrain from quoting in this place a passage from another
poem, written at this period; our readers will be pleased, we think,
with so graceful a tribute to the glory of the great exile-bard of Rome,
whose fate and character had so much in common with those of Pushkin
himself--

    "Sweet Ovid! Love's own bard! I dwell by that still shore
    Whither thine exiled gods thou broughtest--where of yore
    Thou pour'dst thy plaints in life, and left thine ashes dying;
    With deathless, fruitless tears these places glorifying.

       *   *   *   *   *   *

    Here, with a northern lyre the wilderness awaking,
    I wander'd in those days, when liberty was breaking--
    Roused by the gallant Greek--her sleep, by Danube's tide;
    And not one friend would stand, a brother, by my side;
    And the far hills alone, and woods in silence dreaming,
    And the calm muses then would list with kindly seeming."

The influence exerted upon our poet's mind and productions by the
Byronian spirit, to which we alluded a few pages back, may be traced, in
very perceptible degree, in the next poem which he gave to the public,
"The Fountain of Bakhtchisarai," a work in which is reflected, as
vividly as it is in the storied waters of the fount from which it takes
its name, all the wealth, the profuse and abounding loveliness, of the
luxurious clime of the Tauric Chersonese. The scene of the poem is one
of the most romantic spots in that divine land; and the ruined palace
and "gardens of delight" which once made the joy and pride of the mighty
khans--the rulers of the Golden Horde--is perhaps not inferior, as a
source of wild legend and picturesque fairy lore--certainly not
inferior in the eyes of a Russian reader--to the painted halls and
fretted colonnades of the Alhambra. The success instantly obtained and
permanently enjoyed by this exquisite poem must be attributed to
something more than the profusion and beauty of the descriptive
passages, so thickly and artfully interwoven with the action of the
tale--a species of wealth and profusion, it may be remarked, which suits
well with the oriental character of the story, and with the abounding
loveliness of the scenery amid which that action is supposed to take
place. In this poem, too, we may remark the first decided essay made by
the poet towards delineating and contrasting, in an artistic manner, the
characters of human personages. The dramatic opposition between the two
principal characters of the tale, Maria and Zarema, is well conceived
and most skilfully executed. This poem first appeared in 1824, and was
reprinted in 1827, 1830, 1835. The powers of dramatic delineation which
may be seen, as it were, in embryo in this work, were to be still
further developed in Pushkin's next production, which was begun in the
same year, (1824,) and appeared in 1827. Those powers, too, were
destined to be exhibited in their full splendour in a historical
tragedy--perhaps the finest which the Russian literature can be said to
possess. The work to which we have alluded as being the second trial of
his wings in the arduous regions of dramatic creation, was the short but
exquisite tale entitled "The Gipsies." This tale, which is esteemed by
the Russians a masterpiece of grace and simplicity, is a poem in
dialogue; the persons being only four in number, and the action a wild
yet simple catastrophe of love, jealousy, and revenge. The _dramatis
personae_ are gipsies; and it is difficult to select what is most
admirable in this exquisite little work--the completeness and
distinctness of the descriptions of external nature--the artful
introduction of various allusions, (particularly in one most charming
passage, indicating Ovid's exile in the beautiful country which is the
scene of the drama,) or the intense interest which the poet has known
how to infuse into what would appear at first sight a subject simple
even to meagreness. Poets of many nations have endeavoured, with various
qualifications, and with no less various degrees of success, to
represent the picturesque and striking features of the nomad life and
wild superstitions of the gipsy race: none however, it may be safely
asserted, have ever produced a picture more true or more poetical than
is to be found in the production of Pushkin. He had ample opportunities
of studying their peculiar manners in the green oceans of the southern
steppes. It is at this period that Pushkin began the composition of his
poem entitled "Evgenii Oniegin," a production which has become, it may
be said, part of the ordinary language of the poet's countrymen. The
first canto appeared in 1825, 1829. This work, in its outline, its plan,
in the general tone of thought pervading it, and in certain other
_external_ circumstances, bears a kind of fallacious resemblance to the
inimitable production of Lord Byron; a circumstance which leads
superficial readers into the error (unjust in the highest degree to
Pushkin's originality) of considering it as an imitation of the Don. It
is a species of satire upon society, (and Russian fashionable society in
particular,) embodied in an easy wandering verse something like that of
Byron; and so far, perhaps, the comparison between the two poems holds
good. Pushkin's _plot_ has the advantage of being (though sufficiently
slight in construction, it must be confessed) considerably more compact
and interesting than the irregular narration which serves Byron to
string together the bitter beads of his satirical rosary; but, at the
same time, the aim and scope of the English satirist is infinitely more
vast and comprehensive. The Russian has also none of the terrible and
deeply-thrilling pictures of passion and of war which so strangely and
powerfully contrast with the bitter sneer and gay irony forming the
basis of the Don; but, on the other hand, the interest of the reader
(scattered, in Byron's work, upon the various, unconnected, and somewhat
monotonous outlines of female characters in Julia, Haidee, Gulbeyas,
&c.,) is in "Evgenii Oniegin" most powerfully concentrated upon the
heroine, Tatiana--one of the most exquisite tributes that poetry has
ever paid to the nobility of woman. To show the difficulty of judging of
this work, we need only mention, that while many compare it to "Don
Juan," others consider is as rather resembling "Childe Harold;" while
the author himself professed that it was rather to be placed in the
category of "Beppo."

On leaving Odessa, (in 1824,) Pushkin, who appears to have loved the sea
with all the fervour of Shelley himself, bade farewell to the waves with
which he had communed so earnestly, and whose deep voices his verse so
nobly echoed, in some grand stanzas "To the Sea," of which a translation
will be given in a subsequent part.

It is to this epoch that we must ascribe the first outline of the
historical tragedy to which we have alluded; but which did not appear
till a much later period. We shall recur to this work when we reach the
date of its completion.

As the composition of "Evgenii Oniegin" extended over a considerable
space of time, our readers may not be displeased at our reverting
occasionally to the progress of this work and to the character of its
merits. This production must be considered as the fullest and most
complete embodiment that exists in Russian literature, of the
nationality of the country. It will be found to be the expression of
those apparently discordant elements the union of which composes that
hard riddle--the Russian character. A passage of Pushkin's dedication
will not incorrectly exhibit the variety of its tone:--

    "Accept this heap of motley traits,
    Half gay, half sad, half false, half real,
    Half every-day, yet half ideal,
    The careless fruit of idle days,
    Of sleepless nights; slight inspirations
    Of unripe years, of wasted art--
    The reason's frigid observations,
    And sad conclusions of the heart."

During the most tranquil and laborious portion of Pushkin's life, which
passed principally at Mikhailovskoe, and which occupies the period from
his leaving Odessa at the end of the year 1824 to 1826, he continued to
labour upon his tragedy, and to produce the second and third cantos of
"Evgenii Oniegin," in addition to which, our indefatigable poet found
means to collect and publish a number of smaller poems, some of which
will be found among the translations which we are about to offer; and to
aid his friend and brother-poet Delvig in an annual volume of prose and
verse (illustrated after the manner of our Keepsakes, &c.) entitled
"Northern Flowers." This publication was commenced in 1826, and
continued to appear, always enriched with something by Pushkin, till its
existence closed at the early and lamented death of the projector and
editor.

Pushkin's life at this period was characterized by intense industry, and
an uniformity of exertion modified and compensated by variety of
occupation. He has left a minute description of the manner in which his
time was distributed between labour and repose; and even if we did not
possess his letters, it is described with sufficient accuracy in the
fourth canto of "Evgenii Oniegin," to enable us to transcribe it here.
He was in the habit of rising early, and of devoting the morning and
forenoon to those parts of his literary occupation which demanded the
exercise of the intellectual or reasoning powers, the memory, &c. &c.
Before dinner (whatever was the state of the weather) he took somewhat
violent walking exercise; he then dined, (it should be remarked that the
dinner-hour is earlier in Russia than is usual in England,) and having
passed the evening in society either at home or at some neighbouring
country-house, he returned to his poetical labours, which he sometimes
continued far into the night.[1] He has frequently repeated that he
found himself more perfectly disposed to composition in the season of
autumn; and that his poetical vein flowed most generously and
abundantly on a dark and stormy night. To those who are acquainted with
the climate of Russia (particularly of that part of the Empire where
Pushkin now resided) this will not be surprising; and the abundance and
splendour of the descriptions of the autumnal season introduced into his
various works, will show that his mind and imagination had something in
harmony with that which is, in our opinion, the most poetical portion of
the year. Like many persons of a highly nervous organization, the
brilliant sunshine of spring-tide produced in Pushkin's temperament an
impression of melancholy, which he explained by a natural tendency to
consumption.

In autumn 1826, Pushkin re-entered the government service in his
original department, viz., that of the foreign affairs; and in 1827 he
printed, besides the third canto of "Evgenii Oniegin," the "Gypsies," a
new poem of inferior merit entitled the "Robber-Brothers," and a comic
tale, also in verse, which, though slight in construction, is a
masterpiece of graceful and elegant satire. It is entitled "Count
Nulin," and describes the signal discomfiture of certain designs
meditated by the count (a most delightful specimen of a young Russian
coxcomb) against the virtue of his hostess, a fair chatelaine, at whose
country-house the said count passes a night in consequence of a disabled
travelling-carriage.

To this period, too, must be assigned the composition of "Poltava," a
work, the proper title of which would be "Mazepa," but which received
its name in order that the public might not confound it with Byron's
tale, the hero of both being the same historical personage. It is almost
unnecessary to state that there is no resemblance whatever between these
two remarkable works. While the production of Byron is rather an
admirable development of certain incidents, either entirely invented by
the poet, or only slightly suggested by passages of the old Kazak
Hetman's biography, the _Mazepa_ of Pushkin is a most spirited and
faithful version of the real history of the romantic life of the hero;
the actual events adopted by the Russian poet as the groundwork of his
tale, being certainly not inferior in strangeness, novelty, and romantic
incident, to the short fiery tale, dawning rosily in mutual love, and
finishing with the wild gallop on the desert steed, which thrills us so
deeply in the pages of Byron.

In 1829 was given to the world an edition of Pushkin's collected works,
arranged in chronological order; and the author had another opportunity
of visiting the East--those climes whence he had drawn, and was to draw
again, so much of his inspiration. He once more crossed the Caucasus,
and leaving in his rear his beloved Georgia, he followed the movements
of the Russian army in its campaign, and accompanied it as far as
Arzeram, receiving, during this journey, the most flattering attentions
from Marshal Paskevitch, the commander-in-chief of the expedition. We
may judge of the delight with which he seized this opportunity of
indulging his taste for travelling, and of the vast store of
recollections and images which he garnered up during this pilgrimage--so
peculiarly attractive to a poet, as combining the pleasure of travelling
with the splendour and picturesque novelties of a military march--by the
letters in which he has described his impressions during this
interesting period. These letters are models of simplicity, grace, and
interest, and have become classical in the Russian language.

In 1830, Baron Delvig commenced the publication of the _Literary
Gazette_, an undertaking in which Pushkin took as active and zealous an
interest as he had done in the _Northern Flowers_, edited by his friend
and schoolfellow. He not only contributed many beautiful poems to this
periodical, but also several striking prose tales and other papers, in
which, by the elegance and brilliancy of the style, and the acuteness
and originality of the thoughts, the public found no difficulty in
identifying Pushkin, though they appeared anonymously. He now visited
Moscow, in order to superintend the printing of his _Boris Godunoff_,
the tragedy which he had been so long engaged in polishing and
completing, and respecting the success of which he appears to have been
more anxious than usual, as he determined to write himself the preface
to this work. The subject of this tragedy is the well-known episode of
Russian history which placed Boris upon the throne of the Tsar; and
writers have taken various views of the character of the hero of this
scene, Pushkin representing Boris as the assassin of the son of Ivan
IV., while the ancient chroniclers, and the modern historians in
general, as Ustrialoff, Pogodin, Kraevskii, &c. &c., concur in asserting
that that prince was elected by the clergy and the people. Whatever may
be the historical truth of the design, Pushkin has given us in this
tragedy a dramatic picture full of spirit, of passion, of character, and
of life; and some of the personages, particularly those of the pretender
Dimitri, and the heroine Marina, are sketched with a vigorous and
flowing pencil. The _form_ of this play is ostensibly Shakspearian; but
it appears to us to resemble less the works of Shakspeare himself, than
some of the more successful imitations of the great dramatist's
manner--as, for instance, some parts of the Wallenstein. As to the
language and versification, it is in blank verse, and the style is
considered by Russians as admirable for ease and flexibility. At this
time Pushkin's life was about to undergo a great change; he was engaged
to a young lady whom he afterwards married, and retired, in the spring
of this year, to the village of Boldino, in the province of Nijegorod,
in order to make preparations for his new existence as a married man,
and in this spot he remained, in consequence of the cholera breaking out
in Moscow, until the winter. In spite of the engrossing nature of these
occupations, he seems never to have been more industriously employed
than during this autumn. "I must tell you," he writes, "(but between you
and me!) that I have been working at Boldino as I have not done for a
long time. Listen then! I brought with me hither the two last cantos of
'Oniegin,' ready for the press, a tale in octaves, (the _Little House in
the Kolomora_,) number of dramatic scenes--'The Stingy Knight,' 'Mozart
and Salieri,' 'The Feast in the Time of the Plague,' and 'Don Juan.'
Besides this, I have written about thirty small pieces of poetry. I have
not done yet; I have written in prose (this is a great secret) five
tales," (Ivan Bielkin's Stories.) The year 1831 began afflictingly for
Pushkin. On the 14th of January Baron Delvig died. All Pushkin's letters
in which he makes any allusion to this loss, breathe a sentiment of the
most deep and permanent sorrow. The following is extracted from a letter
to a friend, dated the 31st of this month:--"I knew him (Delvig) at the
Lyceum. I watched the first unnoted unfolding of his poetic mind--the
early development of a talent which we then gave not its just value. We
read together Deljavin and Jukovskii; we talked of all _that swelleth
the spirit, that melteth the heart_. His life was rich and full--rich,
not in romantic adventures, but in the most noble feelings, the most
brilliant and the purest intellect, and the fairest hopes."

But the grief caused by this great and irreparable loss--a grief which
threw its dark cold shadow over the whole of Pushkin's subsequent
existence--was not unrelieved by feelings of a brighter tone: the void
caused by friendship was filled up with love. In February of this year
he was married, at Moscow, to the lady to whom (as we have mentioned
above) he had been some time engaged. Mlle. Gontchareff was of an
ancient Russian family, and a person of singular beauty. "I am married,"
(writes the poet to one of his friends, in a letter dated February 24.)
"I have now but one desire in the world, and that is, that nothing in my
present life be changed. This existence is so new to me, that I feel as
if I had been born again. The death of Delvig is the only shadow in my
bright existence." Pushkin was desirous of editing a volume of the
"Northern Flowers," in the following year, for the benefit of the family
of his departed friend, for which he now began assiduously to collect
materials. This labour detained him until the month of May in Moscow;
and, before his migration to St Petersburg, the tragedy of Boris
Godunoff was printed. Among all the works of Pushkin there is not one
which exhibits so high a degree of artistic skill, or so vigorous and
powerful a genius, as this drama, in which every word, every dialogue,
seems to unite the certainty of study and meditation with the fire and
naturalness of a happy improvisation, and in which there is not a
character nor an allusion which destroys the truth and vigour of the
composition, viewed as a faithful mirror of Russian nationality, Russian
history, and Russian character. The remainder of Pushkin's short, alas!
but laborious life, however filled with the silent activity of
intellectual occupation, offers but few materials for the biographer: it
was passed principally at St Petersburg, varied by occasional journeys
to Moscow, and the usual _autumnal_ retirements, which we have mentioned
as having been so favourable for the execution of the poet's literary
tasks. We shall content ourselves with giving a slight account of the
principal works in which Pushkin employed his great powers--powers which
had now reached their highest point of vigour, retaining all the
freshness and vivacity of youth, while they had acquired the maturity
and solidity of manhood. The subjects of these works, however, being for
the most part historical, are of a nature which renders them less
susceptible of analysis in our pages--and indeed their local nature
would cause such analysis to be devoid, in a great measure, of interest
to the English reader. There is, however, one episode in the poet's
life, which must possess peculiar interest to those who delight to watch
that fond fidelity with which genius returns to the scenes where it was
first developed, and which brought back Shakspeare, loaded with glory,
to pass the calm evening of his life amid the native shades of
Stratford. On quitting Moscow for St Petersburg, Pushkin passed a winter
at Tsarskoe Selo. "This was a most blessed thought," he says, in a
letter of 26th March; "I can thus pass my summer and _autumn_ in a most
enchanting and inspiring seclusion; close to the capital, in the circle
of my dearest recollections. I shall be able to see you every week, and
Jukovskii also. Petersburg is within an hour's drive. Living is cheap
here. I shall not want an equipage. What can be better?" And, in fact,
it is certain that he never was so perfectly happy in his society and
his occupations, and in himself, as in these summer and autumn months
which he passed, as he says:--

    "In those bright days when yet all ignorant of fame,
    And knowing neither care, system, nor art, nor aim,
    Thy tutelary shades, O Tsarskoe! were flinging
    Gay echoes to _his_ voice, the praise of Idlesse singing."

The beautiful retirement of Tsarskoe Selo was at this period dignified
by the presence of two great poets, each producing works worthy of the
imperial groves under whose shade they were meditated. Pushkin and
Jukovskii were not only residing here together, but they were engaged in
a friendly rivalry, and each writing so industriously as though
determined never to meet without some new poetic novelty. The deep
impression produced by Jukovskii's patriotic stanzas, written at this
period, entitled "Russian Glory," was worthily responded to by the noble
poems written by Pushkin, "To the Slanderers of Russia!" and "The
Anniversary of Borodino,"--all these works being spirited and majestic
embodiments of national triumph and exultation.

It is curious and delightful to remark, too, that the poets of Tsarskoe
Selo were occupied, at this period, with the composition of two similar
works of another and no less national character. These were "tales" or
legends in the popular taste of the Russian people, that of Jukovskii
was entitled "The Lay of the Tsar Berendei," and Pushkin's, "The Lay of
the Tsar Saltan."

In this year, too, was printed Pushkin's small collection of prose
tales, under the assumed name of Ivan Bielkin, which appeared with a
biographical preface, describing the life and character of the supposed
author. The tales are of extraordinary merit, remarkable for the
simplicity and natural grace of the style, and the preface is a specimen
of consummate excellence in point of quiet Addisonian humour.

In the year 1831, Pushkin girded up his loins to enter upon the great
historical task; which had so long attracted his imagination, and
which, difficult and arduous as was the undertaking, he was probably
better calculated than any literary man whom Russia has yet seen, to
execute in a manner worthy of the sublime nature of its subject. This
was the history of Peter the Great. He now began to set seriously about
preparing himself for approaching this gigantic subject, and passed the
greater part of his time in the archives, collecting the necessary
materials for the work. In his hours of relaxation he produced the third
volume of his smaller poems, and superintended the publication of
another volume of the "Northern Flowers," which appeared in 1832. But
these must be considered as the results rather of his play-moments, than
as the serious occupation of his time. His mornings were generally
passed among the records preserved in the various departments of the
government, from whence, after the labours and researches of the day, he
usually returned on foot to his late dinner. He was an active and
indefatigable walker, prizing highly, and endeavouring to preserve by
constant exercise, the vigorous frame of body with which he was blessed
by nature. Even in summer he was accustomed to return on foot from his
country residence to his labours in the city, and was in the habit of
taking violent corporeal exercise in gymnastics, which he would continue
with the patience and enduring vigour of an athlete. These walks (it
should be remarked that a taste for walking is much more rare among the
Russians than in England, from the severity and extreme changes in the
climate of the North, the heat in summer rendering such exercise much
more laborious than with us, and the cold in winter necessitating the
use of the heavy shuba of fur)--these walks were Pushkin's principal
amusement, if we except bathing, an exercise which the poet would
frequently continue far into autumn--a season when the weather in Russia
is frequently very severe.

In the prosecution of his great historical labour, it was evidently
difficult for the lively imagination of Pushkin to escape the temptation
of being drawn aside from his chief aim, by the attractive and romantic
character of many episodes in Russian history--to wander for a moment
from the somewhat formal and arid high-road of history, into some of the
"shady spaces," peopled with romantic adventure and picturesque
incident. It was under the influence of some such attraction, that he
conceived the idea of working out in a separate production, the detached
epoch rendered so remarkable by the rebellion of Pugatcheff. Finding
that he had already performed the most serious portion of the drudgery
of collecting materials for his principal historical enterprise, he
drew, with a wonderfully rapid and lively pencil, the vigorous sketch of
the events of that extraordinary conspiracy, and has left us a work
which, whatever be its imperfections and slightness, viewed as a work of
history, cannot be denied to be a most admirable and striking outline of
the picturesque and singular events which form its subject. Convinced of
the importance, to an author of history, of a personal knowledge of the
scenes in which his events took place, Pushkin, when the history of
Pugatcheff's rebellion was already on the verge of completion,
determined (before his work was published) to examine with his own eyes
that eastern region of European Russia, which had been the theatre of
the strange drama of that singular pretender's life, and to enable
himself to infuse into a narration founded upon dry records, the life
and reality which was to be obtained from questioning the old
inhabitants of that country, many of whom might remember the wild
adventures of which, in their youth, they had been witnesses or actors.
In 1833, Pushkin was enabled to gratify this natural curiosity; and the
result of his visit to the scene of the rebellion enabled him to
communicate to his already plain, vigorous, and concise narration, a
tone of reality, a warmth of colouring, and a liveliness of language,
which renders it impossible to leave the book unfinished when once
opened, and which no elaborateness of research, and no minuteness of
detail, could otherwise have communicated.

During the first two years of its existence, the periodical entitled
"The Reading Library" was honoured by the appearance in its pages of
that division of Pushkin's smaller poems, afterwards published
separately as the fourth volume of his collected works, in the year
1835. In this journal, too, were printed his two prose tales "The Queen
of Spades" and "Kirdjali," the former of which has, we believe, appeared
in English, and of the latter a translation has been attempted, together
with several others of his smaller prose works, by the author of the
present notice. A journey which he made to Orenburg gave him the
materials for fresh prose tales. The most remarkable of these, the
beautiful and well-known story, "The Captain's Daughter," first appeared
in the periodical entitled "The Contemporary," which is justly
considered as the chief miscellaneous journal that appears in Russia,
and which partakes of the nature of what we in England call the review
and magazine. In all his writing, prose or verse, Pushkin is most
astonishingly unaffected, rational, and straightforward; but in the
last-named story he has attained the highest degree of perfection--it is
the simplicity of nature herself.

This period must be considered as that in which Pushkin had arrived at
the summit of his glory. He was now enjoying the universal respect and
admiration of his countrymen, a respect and admiration shared by the
sovereign himself, who distinguished the great poet by naming him
"gentilhomme de la chambre;" he was in the very flower of health, life,
and genius; he had completed the laborious part of his great task, in
collecting materials for the history of Peter the Great--all seemed to
prophesy a future filled with bright certainties of happiness and glory.

But the end was not far off; the dark and melancholy event which was to
put a sudden and a fatal conclusion to this glorious and useful career
was near at hand. The storm which was to quench this bright and shining
light was already rising dimly above the horizon; and the poet's
prophetic eye foresaw--like that of the seer in the Scripture--the
"little cloud like a man's hand," that was rising heavily over the calm
sky; he seems to have had an obscure presentiment of the near approach
of death, little suspecting, perhaps, that that death was to be one of
violence, of suffering, and of blood. He had, a few months before, lost
his mother, and had himself accompanied her last remains to the
monastery of Sviatogorsk, and had fixed upon a spot where he wished to
be buried by her side; leaving for this purpose a sum of money in the
treasury of the monastery.

It is, we believe, generally known, even in England, that Pushkin was
mortally wounded in a duel, on Wednesday 27th January, and that he died,
after lingering in excruciating[2] torment during two days and nights,
at half-past two in the afternoon of the 29th of January 1837.

Respecting the causes which led to this melancholy conclusion of a great
man's life, and the details which accompanied that sad and deplorable
event, it is not our intention to speak. Under any circumstances, to
dwell upon so lamentable an affair would serve no good purpose; and
would rather minister to a morbid curiosity in our readers, than in any
respect illustrate the life and character of Pushkin; but the propriety
of avoiding more than an allusion to this sad story will be evident,
when we reflect that the poet's dying wish was, that the whole
circumstance should if possible be buried in oblivion. Respect, then, to
the last desire of a dying man! Respect to the prayer of great genius,
whose lips, when quivering in the last agony, murmured the generous
words, "Pardon, and Forget!"

The foregoing brief notice is presented to the English reader less in
the character of a complete biography of Pushkin, (a character to which
it has evidently no pretensions,) than as a kind of necessary
introduction to the translated specimens of his poetry, which it is
intended to accompany. For a perfect biography, indeed, of the poet, the
materials, even in Russia, are not yet assembled; nor, perhaps, has a
sufficient period of time been suffered to elapse since his death, to
render it possible to attempt a life of Pushkin, with any hope of
preserving that _distance_ and _proportion_, which is necessary for the
successful execution of a portrait, whether traced with the pencil or
the pen. The artist may be too near to his original in _time_ as well as
in _space_.

The general accuracy of the preceding pages may be depended on; the
materials were obtained from various sources, but principally from two
persons who were both acquainted--one intimately so--with Pushkin. We
should be indeed ungrateful, were we to let pass the present opportunity
afforded us, of expressing our deep obligations to both those gentlemen
for the assistance they have given us; and we cannot deny ourselves the
gratification of publicly and particularly thanking M. Pletnieff, rector
of the Imperial University of St Petersburg, not only for the kind
manner in which he facilitated the composition of these pages, by
supplying us with a copy of his own elegant and spirited critical sketch
of Pushkin's works and character (a short but masterly article,
reprinted from the "Sovremennik," or Contemporary, a literary journal of
which M. Pletnieff is the editor,) but for the many delightful and
intellectual hours which we have passed in his society.

                              THOMAS B. SHAW.

    St Petersburg, February 5th/17th, 1845.


THE LAST HOURS OF PUSHKIN.

LETTER FROM JUKOVSKII TO SERGEI PUSHKIN, THE POET'S FATHER.

                              _February 15th/27th, 1837._

I have not till now succeeded in mustering up the courage to write to
you, my poor friend, Sergei Lvovitch. What could I say to you,
overwhelmed as I am by the national calamity which has just fallen upon
us all, like an avalanche, and crushed us beneath its ruin? Our Pushkin
is no more! This terrible fact is unhappily true, but nevertheless it
still appears almost incredible. The thought, that he is gone, cannot
yet enter into the order of common, evident, every-day ideas; one still
continues, by mechanical habit as it were, to seek him; it still seems
so natural to expect to see him at certain hours; still amid our
conversations seems to resound his voice, still seems to ring his lively
childlike laugh of gaiety; and there, where he was wont to be seen in
daily life, there nothing is changed, there are hardly even any marks of
the melancholy loss we have undergone--all is in its common order, every
thing is in its place; but he is gone from us, and for ever. It is
hardly conceivable! In one moment has perished that strong and mighty
life, full of genius, and glowing with hope. I will not speak of you,
his feeble and unhappy father; I will not speak of us, his mourning
friends. Russia has lost her beloved, her national poet. She has lost
him at the very moment when his powers had reached their maturity, lost
him when he had reached that climacteric--that point at which our
intellect, bidding farewell to the fervid, and sometimes irregular force
of youth agitated by genius, devotes itself to more tranquil, more
orderly powers of riper manhood, fresh as the first period, and if less
tempestuous, yet certainly more creative. What Russian is there who does
not feel as if the death of Pushkin had torn away one of his very
heart-strings? The glory of the present reign has lost its poet--a poet
who belonged to it, as Derjavin belonged to the glory of Catharine, or
Karamzin to that of Alexander.

The first terrible moments of agony and bereavement are over for you;
you can now listen to me and weep. I will describe to you every detail
of your son's last hours--details which I either saw myself, or which
were related to me by other eyewitnesses. On Wednesday the 27th
January/8th February, at ten o'clock in the evening, I called at the
house of the Prince Viazemskii, where I was told that both he and the
princess were at Pushkin's, and Valueff, to whom I afterwards went,
addressed me on my entrance with the words:--"Have you not received the
Princess's note? They have sent for you long ago; hurry off to
Pushkin's: he is dying." Thunderstruck with this news, I rushed
down-stairs. I galloped off to Pushkin's. In his antechamber, before the
door of his study, I found Drs Arendt and Spasskii, Prince Viazemskii
and Prince Mestcherskii. To the question, "_How is he?_"--Arendt
answered me, "He is very bad; he will infallibly die." The following was
the account they gave me of what had happened: At six o'clock, after
dinner, Pushkin had been brought home in the same desperate condition by
Lieutenant-Colonel Danzas, his schoolfellow at the Lyceum. A footman had
taken him out of the carriage, and carried him in his arms up-stairs.
"_Does it hurt you to carry me?_" asked Pushkin of the man. They carried
him into his study; he himself told them to give him clean linen; he
changed his dress, and lay down on a sofa. At the moment when they were
helping him to lie down, his wife, who knew nothing of what had
happened, was about to come into the room; but he cried out in a loud
tone--"_N'entrez pas; il y a du monde chez moi._" He was afraid of
frightening her. His wife, however, had already entered by the time that
he was laid down completely dressed. They sent for the doctors. Arendt
was not at home, but Scholtz and Zadler came. Pushkin ordered everybody
to leave the room, (at this moment Danzas and Pletnieff were with him.)
"_I am very bad_," he said, as he shook hands with Scholtz. They
examined his wound, and Zadler went away to fetch the needful
instruments. Left alone with Scholtz, Pushkin enquired, "_What do you
think of my state--speak plainly?_" "I cannot conceal from you the fact,
that you are in danger." "_Say rather, I am dying._" "I hold it my duty
not to conceal from you that such is the case. But we will hear the
opinion of Arendt and Salomon, who are sent for." "_Je vous remercie,
vous avez agi en honnete homme envers moi_," said Pushkin. Then, after a
moment's silence, he rubbed his forehead with his hand, and added, "_Il
faut que j'arrange ma maison._" "Would you not like to see any of your
relations?" asked Scholtz. "_Farewell, my friends!_" cried Pushkin,
turning his eyes towards his library. To whom he bade adieu in these
words, whether it was to his living or his dead friends, I know not.
After waiting a few moments, he asked, "_Then do you think that I shall
not live through the hour?_" "Oh no! I merely supposed that it might be
agreeable to you to see some of your friends--M. Pletnieff is here."
"_Yes, but I should like to see Jukovskii too. Give me some water, I
feel sick._" Scholtz felt his pulse, and found that the hand was cold,
and the pulse weak and quick; he left the room for some drink, and they
sent for me. I was not at home at this moment, and I know not how it
happened, but none of their messengers ever reached me. In the meanwhile
Zadler and Salomon arrived. Scholtz left the patient, who affectionately
shook hands with him, but without speaking a single word. Soon after
Arendt made his appearance. He was convinced at the first glance that
there was not the slightest hope. They began to apply cold fomentations
with ice to the patient's stomach, and to give cooling drinks; a
treatment which soon produced the desired effect; he grew more tranquil.
Before Arendt's departure, he said to him, "_Beg the Emperor to pardon
me._" Arendt now departed, leaving him to the care of Spasskii, the
family physician, who, during that whole night, never quitted the
bedside. "_I am very bad_," said Pushkin, when Spasskii came into the
room. Spasskii endeavoured to tranquillize him; but Pushkin waved his
hand in a negative manner. From this moment he seemed to have ceased to
entertain any anxiety about himself; and all his thoughts were now
turned towards his wife. "_Do not give my wife any useless hope_;" he
said to Spasskii; "_do not conceal from her what is the matter, she is
no pretender to sentiment; you know her well. As for me, do as you
please with me; I consent to every thing, and I am ready for every
thing._" At this moment were already assembled the Princess Viazemskii,
the Prince, Turgenieff, the Count Vielhorskii, and myself. The princess
was with the poor wife, whose condition it is impossible to describe.
She from time to time stole, like a ghost, into the room where lay her
dying husband; he could not see her, (he was lying on a sofa, with his
face turned from the window and the door;) but every time that she
entered, or even stopped at the door, he felt her presence. "_My wife is
here--is she not?_" he said. "_Take her away._" He was afraid to admit
her, because he did not wish her to perceive the sufferings which he
overmastered with astonishing courage. "_What is my wife doing?_" he
once enquired of Spasskii. "_Poor thing! she suffers innocently. The
world will tear her to pieces._" In general, from the beginning to the
end of his sufferings, (except during two or three hours of the first
night, when they exceeded all measure of human endurance,) he was
astonishingly firm. "I have been in thirty battles," said Dr Arendt; "I
have seen numbers of dying men; but I have very seldom seen any thing
like this." And it is peculiarly remarkable that, during these last
hours of his life, he seemed, as it were, to have become another person;
the tempest, which a few hours back had agitated his soul with
uncontrollable passion, was gone, and left not a trace behind; not a
word, not a recollection of what had happened. On the previous day he
had received an invitation to the funeral of Gretch's son. He remembered
this amid his own sufferings. "_If you see Gretch_," said he to
Spasskii, "_give him my compliments, and say that I feel a heartfelt
sympathy in his loss._" He was asked, whether he did not desire to
confess and take the sacrament. He willingly consented, and it was
determined that the priest should be sent for in the morning. At
midnight Dr Arendt returned. Whatever was the subject of the
conversation, it was evident that what the dying man had heard from the
physician tranquillized, consoled, and fortified him. Fulfilling a
desire (of which he was already, aware) on the part of those who had
expressed a touching anxiety respecting his eternal welfare, he
confessed and took the holy sacrament. Down to five o'clock in the
morning, there had not taken place the slightest change in his
condition. But about five o'clock the pain in the abdomen became
intolerable, and its force mastered the strength of his soul: he began
to groan; they again sent for Arendt. At his arrival it was found
necessary to administer a clyster; but it did no good, and only seemed
to increase the patient's sufferings, which at length reached the
highest pitch, and continued till seven o'clock in the morning. What
would have been the feelings of his unhappy wife, if she had been able,
during the space of these two eternal hours, to hear his groans? I am
confident that her reason could not have borne this agonizing trial. But
this is what happened: she was lying, in a state of complete exhaustion,
in the drawing-room, close to the doors which were all that separated
her from her husband's bed. At the first dreadful cry he uttered, the
Princess Viazemskii, who was in the drawing-room with her, darted to her
side, dreading that something might happen. But she still lay immovable,
(although she had been speaking a moment before,) a heavy lethargic
slumber had overcome her, and this slumber, as if purposely sent down in
mercy from above, lasted till the very minute when the last groan rang
on the other side of the door. But in this moment of most cruel agony,
according to the account of Spasskii and Arendt, the dying man's
firmness of soul was shown in all its force: when on the point of
screaming out, he with violent effort merely groaned, fearing, as he
said himself, that his wife might hear it, and that she might be
frightened. At seven o'clock the pain grew milder. It is necessary to
remark, that during all this time, and even to the end of his
sufferings, his thoughts were perfectly rational, and his memory clear.
Even at the beginning of the terrible attack of pain, he had called
Spasskii to his bedside, ordered him to hand him a paper written with
his own hand, and made him burn it. He then called in Danzas, and
dictated to him a statement respecting a few debts which he had
incurred. This task, however, only exhausted him, and afterwards he was
unable to make any other dispositions. When, at the arrival of morning,
his intolerable suffering ceased, he said to Spasskii, "_My wife! call
my wife!_" This farewell moment I dare not attempt to describe to you.
He then asked for his children; they were asleep; but they went for
them, and brought them half asleep as they were. He bent his eyes in
silence upon each of them, laid his hand on their heads, made a sign of
the cross over them, and then, with a gesture of the hand, sent them
away. "_Who is there?_" he enquired of Spasskii and Danzas. They named
me and Viazemskii. "_Call them in!_" said he in a feeble voice. I
entered, took the cold hand which he held out to me, kissed it. I could
not speak; he waved his hand, I retired; but he called me back. "_Tell
the Emperor_," he said, "_that I am sorry to die; I would have been
wholly his. Tell him that I wish him a long, long reign; that I wish him
happiness in his son, happiness in his Russia._" These words he spoke
feebly, interruptedly, but distinctly. He then bade farewell to
Viazemskii. At this moment arrived the Count Vielhorskii, and went into
his room; and he was thus the last person who pressed his hand in life.
It was evident that he was hastening to his last earthly account, and
listening, as it were, for the footstep of approaching death. Feeling
his own pulse, he said to Spasskii, "_Death is coming._" When Turgenieff
went up to him, he looked at him twice very earnestly, squeezed his
hand, seemed as though he desired to say something, but waved his hand,
and uttered the word "_Karamzin!_" Mademoiselle Karamzin was not in the
house; but they instantly sent for her, and she arrived almost
immediately. Their interview only lasted a moment; but when Katerina
Andreevna was about to leave the bedside, he called her and said, "_Sign
me with the cross_," and then kissed her hand. In the mean time, a dose
of opium which had been given eased him a little; and they began to
apply to his stomach emollient fomentations instead of the cold
effusions. This was a relief to the sufferer; and he began, without a
word of resistance, to perform the prescriptions of the doctors, which
he had previously refused obstinately to do, being terrified by the idea
of prolonging his tortures, and ardently desiring death to terminate
them. But he now became as obedient as a child; he himself applied the
compresses to his stomach, and assisted those who were busied around
him. In short, he was now apparently a great deal better. In this state
he was found by Dr Dahl, who came to him at two o'clock. "_I am in a bad
way, my dear fellow_," said Pushkin, with a smile, to Dahl. But Dahl,
who actually entertained more hopes than the other physicians, answered
him, "We all hope; so you must not despair either." "_No_," he cried;
"_I cannot live; I shall die. It seems that it must be so._" At this
moment, his pulse was fuller and steadier. A slight general fever began
to show itself. They put on some leeches: the pulse grew more even,
slower, and considerably lighter. "I caught," says Dahl, "like a
drowning man at a straw. With a firm voice, I pronounced the word
_hope_; and was about to deceive both myself and others." Pushkin,
observing that Dahl was growing more sanguine, took him by the hand, and
said--"_There is nobody there?_" "No one." "_Dahl, tell me the truth,
shall I die soon?_" "We have hopes of you, Pushkin--really, we have
hopes." "_Well, thank you!_" he replied. As far as it appears, he had
only once flattered himself with the consolation of hope: neither before
nor after this moment did he feel any trust in it. Almost the whole
night (that is, of the 29th, during the whole of which Dahl sate by the
bedside, and I, Viazemskii, and Vielhorskii, in the next room,) he held
Dahl's hand. He often would take a spoonful of water, or little lump of
ice, into his mouth, doing every thing himself: taking the tumbler from
a shelf within reach, rubbing his temples with ice, applying himself the
fomentations to his stomach, changing them himself, &c. He suffered
less from pain than from an excessive feeling of depression. "_Ah! what
depression_!" he several times exclaimed, throwing his hands backward
above his head; "_it makes my heart die within me_!" He then begged them
to lift him up, or to turn him on his side, or to arrange his pillow;
and, without letting them finish to do so, would stop them generally
with the words--"_There! so, so--very well; so it is very well; well
enough; now it is quite right_;" or, "_Stop--never mind--only pull my
arm a little--so! now it is very well--excellent_!"--(these are all his
exact expressions.) "In general," says Dahl, "with respect to my
treatment, he was as manageable and obedient as a child, and did every
thing I wished." Once he inquired of Dahl, "_Who is with my wife?_" Dahl
answered, "Many good people feel a sympathy with you; the drawing-room
and the antechamber are full from morning to night." "_Oh, thank you_,"
he replied; "_only go and tell my wife that all is going on well, thank
God! or else they will talk all sorts of nonsense to her there, I
suppose._" Dahl did not deceive him. From the morning of the 28th, when
the news that Pushkin was dying had flown through the whole town, his
antechamber had been incessantly crowded with visitors; some enquiring
after him by messengers, others--and people of all conditions, whether
acquainted with him or not--coming themselves. The feeling of a
national, an universal affliction, was never more touchingly expressed
than by this proceeding. The number of visitors became at last so
immense, that the entrance-door (which was close to the study where the
dying man lay) was incessantly opening and shutting; this disturbed the
sufferer, and we imagined the expedient of closing that door, by placing
against it a chest from the hall, and instead of it opening another
little door which led from the stair-case into the pantry, and
partitioning off with screens the dining-room from the drawing-room,
where his wife was. From this moment, the pantry was unceasingly
thronged with people; none but acquaintances were admitted into the
dining-room. On the faces of all these visitors was expressed a most
heartfelt sympathy; very many of them wept. So strong a testimony of
general affliction touched me deeply. In Russians, to whom is so dear
their national glory, it was not to be wondered at; but the sympathy of
foreigners was to me as gratifying as it was unlooked for. We were
losing something of our own; was it wonderful that _we_ should grieve?
But what was it that could touch _them_ so sensibly? It is not difficult
to answer this. Genius is the property of all. In bowing down before
genius all nations are brethren; and when it vanishes untimely from the
earth, all will follow its departure with one brotherly lamentation.
Pushkin, with respect to his genius, belonged not to Russia alone, but
to all Europe; and it was therefore that many foreigners approached his
door with feelings of _personal_ sorrow, and mourned for _our_ Pushkin
as if he had been _their own_. But let me return to my recital. Though
he sent Dahl to console his wife with hope, Pushkin himself did not
entertain the slightest. Once he enquired, "_What o'clock is it?_" and
on Dahl's informing him, he continued, in an interrupted voice, "_Have I
... long ... to ... be tortured thus?... Pray ... haste!_" This he
repeated several times afterwards, "_Will the end be soon?_" and he
always added, "_Pray ... make haste!_" In general, however, (after the
torments of the first night, which lasted two hours,) he was
astonishingly patient. When the pain and anguish overcame him, he made
movements with his hands, or uttered at intervals a kind of stifled
groan, but so that it was hardly audible "You must bear it, my dear
fellow; there is nothing to be done," said Dahl to him; "but don't be
ashamed of your pain; groan, it will ease you." "_No_," he replied,
interruptedly; "_no,... it is of no ... use to ... groan;... my wife ...
will ... hear;... 'tis absurd ... that such a trifle ... should ...
master me,... I will not_."--I left him at five o'clock in the morning,
and returned in a couple of hours. Having observed, that the night had
been tolerably quiet, I went home with an impression almost of hope; but
on my return I found I had deceived myself. Arendt assured me
confidently that all was over, and that he could not live out the day.
As he predicted, the pulse now grew weaker, and began to sink
perceptibly; the hands began to be cold. He was lying with his eyes
closed; it was only from time to time he raised his hand to take a piece
of ice and rub his forehead with it. It had struck two o'clock in the
afternoon, and Pushkin had only three quarters of an hour left to live.
He opened his eyes, and asked for some cloud-berry water. When they
brought it, he said in a distinct voice,--"_Call my wife; let her feed
me._" She came, sank down on her knees by the head of the bed, and
carried to his lips one, and afterwards another spoonful of the
cloud-berries, and then pressed her cheek against his; Pushkin stroked
her on the head, and said, "_There, there, never mind; thank God, all is
well; go._" The tranquil expression of his face, and the firmness of his
voice, deceived the poor wife; she left the room almost radiant with
joy. "You see," she said to Dr Spasskii, "he will live; he will not
die." But at this moment the last process of vitality had already begun.
I stood together with Count Vielhorskii at the head of the bed; by the
side stood Turgenieff. Dahl whispered to me, "He is going." But his
thoughts were clear. It was only at intervals that a half-dosing
forgetfulness overshadowed them; once he gave his hand to Dahl, and
pressing it, said: "_Now, lift me up--come--but higher, higher ... now,
come along!_" But awaking, he said, "_I was dreaming, and I fancied that
I was climbing with you up along these books and shelves! so high ...
and my head began to turn._" After pausing a little, he again, without
unclosing his eyes, began to feel for Dahl's hand, and pulling it, said:
"_Now, let us go then, if you wish; but together._" Dahl, at his
request, took him under the arms, and raised him higher; and suddenly,
as if awaking, he quickly opened his eyes, his face lighted up, and he
said, "_Life is finished!_" Dahl, who had not distinctly heard the
words, answered, "Yes, it is finished; we have turned you round." "_Life
is finished!_" he repeated, distinctly and positively. "_I can't
breathe, I am stifling!_" were his last words. I never once removed my
eyes from him, and I remarked at this moment, that the movement of the
breast, hitherto calm, became interrupted. It soon ceased altogether. I
looked attentively; I waited for the last sigh, but I could not remark
it. The stillness which reigned over his whole appearance appeared to me
to be tranquillity; but he was now no more. We all kept silence around
him. In a couple of minutes I asked, "How is he?" "He is dead!" answered
Dahl. So calmly, so tranquilly had his soul departed. We long stood
around him in silence, without stirring, not daring to disturb the
mysteries of death, which were completed before us in all their touching
holiness. When all had left the room, I sate down before him, and long
alone I gazed upon his face. Never had I beheld upon that countenance
any thing like that which was upon it in this first moment of death. His
head was somewhat bent forward; the hands, which a few moments ago had
exhibited a kind of convulsive movement, were calmly stretched, as if
they had just fallen into an attitude of repose after some heavy labour.
But that which was expressed in the face, I am not able to tell in
words. It was to me something so new, and at the same time so familiar.
This was not either sleep or repose; it was not the expression of
intellect which was before so peculiar to the face; nor was it the
poetic expression; no! some mighty, some wondrous thought was unfolded
in it: something resembling vision, some full, complete,
deeply-satisfying knowledge. Gazing upon it, I felt an irresistible
desire to ask him, "What do you see, my friend?" And what would he have
answered if he had been able for a moment to arise? There are moments in
our life which fully deserve the epithet of great. At this moment, I may
say, I beheld the face of death itself, divinely-mysterious; the face of
death without a veil between. And what a seal was that she had stamped
upon him, and how wondrously did she tell her secret and his own! I most
solemnly assure you that I never beheld upon his face an expression of
such deep, majestic, such triumphant _thought_. The expression had
undoubtedly been latent in the face before; but it was only displayed
in all its purity then, when all earthly things had vanished from his
sight at the approach of death. Such was the end of our Pushkin. I will
describe in a few words what followed. Most fortunately, I remembered,
before it was too late, that it was necessary to take a cast of the
mask; this was executed without loss of time. His features had not yet
entirely changed. It cannot be denied that the first expression which
death had given them, was not preserved in them; but we now all possess
an attractive portrait, a fac-simile of the features, and which
images--not death, but a deep, majestic slumber. I will not relate to
you the state in which was the poor wife--many good friends remained
inseparably with her, the Princess Viazemskii, Elizabeth Zaguajskii, the
Count and Countess Stroganoff. The Count took upon himself all the
arrangements for the funeral. After remaining some time longer in the
house, I went away to Vielhorskii's to dinner; there were assembled all
the other persons who, like myself, had seen Pushkin's last moments; and
he himself had been invited, three days before, to this dinner ... it
was to celebrate my birth-day. On the following morning we, his friends,
with our own hands, laid Pushkin in the coffin; and on the evening of
the succeeding day, we transported him to the Koninshennaia (the
Imperial Stables) Church. And during the whole of these two days, the
drawing-room where he lay in his coffin was incessantly full of people.
It nay be safely asserted that more than ten thousand persons visited
it, in order to obtain one look at him: many were in tears, others stood
long immoveable, and seemed as though they wished to behold his face;
there was something inexpressibly striking in his immobility amid all
this movement, and something mysteriously touching in the prayer which
was heard so gently and so uniformly murmured amid that confused murmur
of whispered conversation. The funeral service was performed on the 1st
of February. Many of our greatest nobles, and many of the foreign
ministers, were in the church. We carried the coffin with our own hands
to the vault, where it was to remain until the moment of its being taken
out of the city. On the 3d of February, at ten o'clock in the evening,
we assembled for the last time around all that remained to us of
Pushkin; the last requiem was sung; the case which contained the coffin
was placed upon a sledge; at midnight the sledge set off; by the light
of the moon I followed it for some moments with my eyes; it soon turned
the corner of a house; and all that once was Pushkin was lost for ever
from my sight.

                              V. JUKOVSKII.


The body was accompanied by Turgenieff. Pushkin had more than once said
to his wife, that he desired to be buried in the monastery of the
Assumption at Sviatogorsk, where his mother had recently been interred.
This monastery is situated in the government (province) of Pskoff; and
in the riding of Opotchkoff, at about four versts from the country-house
and hamlet of _Mikhailovskoe_, where Pushkin passed several years of his
poetic life. On the 4th, at nine o'clock in the evening, the corpse
arrived at Pskoff, from whence, conformably to the excellent
arrangements made by the provincial government, it was forwarded on the
same night, and the morning of the 5th, through the town of Ostroff to
the Sviatogorsk monastery, where it arrived as early as seven o'clock in
the evening. The dead man glided to his last abode, past his own
deserted cottage, past the three beloved firs which he had planted not
long before. The body was placed upon the _holy hill_ (_sviataia gora_,
from which the monastery takes its name,) in the cathedral church of the
Assumption, and a requiem was performed in the evening. All night long
workmen were employed in digging a grave beside the spot where his
mother reposes. On the following day, as soon as it was light, at the
conclusion of divine service, the last requiem was chanted, and the
coffin was lowered into the grave, in the presence of Turgenieff and the
peasants of Pushkin's estate, who had come from the village of
Mikhailovskoe to pay the last honour to their kind landlord. Very
strangely to the ears of the bystanders sounded the words of the Bible,
accompanying the handful of earth as it was cast upon Pushkin--"_earth
thou art!_"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: His fondness for books was absolutely insatiable; he was
supplied with all the new publications as fast as they appeared; and he
would devote the last money in his purse to this purpose. His
extravagance in this article of expense he excused by comparing himself
to the glazier, whose trade renders it necessary for him to purchase a
diamond, an article which a rich man will frequently abstain from
buying.]

[Footnote 2: The last hours of Pushkin have been minutely and eloquently
described by the most distinguished of his friends and brother poets,
Jukovskii, in a letter addressed to Pushkin's father. As this letter
contains one of the most touching and beautiful pictures of a great
man's death-bed, and as it does equal honour to the author and its
subject, we append a translation of it. It is undoubtedly one of the
most singular documents in the whole range of literature.--T. B. S.]




THE NOVEL AND THE DRAMA.

(SOME ADVICE TO AN AUTHOR.)


You tell me, my dear Eugenius, that you are hesitating between the novel
and the drama: you know not which to attack; and you wish me to give you
some suggestions on the subject. You are candid enough to say that it is
not point-blank advice that you ask, which you would probably heed just
as much as good counsel is generally heeded by those who apply for it;
but you would have me lay before you such ideas as may occur to me, in
order that you may have the picking and choosing amongst them, with the
chance of finding something to your mind--something which may assist you
to a decision. Artists in arabesque get an idea by watching the shifting
forms of the kaleidoscope; in the same manner you hope--if I will but
turn my mind about a little--that some lucky adjustment of its fragments
of observation may help you to a serviceable thought or two. At all
events, you shall not have to complain of too much method in what
follows.

If I could only, my dear Eugenius, persuade you to leave them both
alone!--drama and novel both! But this is hopeless. The love one bears
to a woman may be conquered--not indeed by good counsel, but by speedy
flight; but the passion that draws us to poetry and romance can only die
out, it cannot be expelled; for in this passion, go where we will, we
carry our Helen with us. She steals upon us at each unguarded moment,
and renews in secret her kisses upon our lip. Well, if I cannot persuade
you to leave both alone, my next advice is that you attack both; for if
you endeavour to express in either of these forms of composition all
that is probably fermenting in your mind, the chance is that you spoil
your work.

And by all means lay your hands first upon the drama. True, it is the
higher aim of the two, and I will not pretend to augur any very
brilliant success. But still it is the more appropriate to the first
ebullitions of genius, and the spasmodic efforts of youth. The heart is
at this time full of poetry, which, be its value what it may, must be
got rid of before the stream of prose will run clear. Besides, the very
effort of verse seems necessary to this age, which disdains a facile
task, and seeks to expend its utmost vigour on its chosen labour.
Moreover, to write a good novel one should have passed through the
spring-time and enthusiasm of youth--one should be able to survey life
with some degree of tranquillity; neither wrapped in its illusions, nor
full of indignation at its discovered hollowness. At two-and-twenty,
even if the heart is not burning with fever heat of some kind--some
enthusiastic passion or misanthropical disgust--the head at least is
preoccupied with some engrossing idea, which so besets the man, that he
can see nothing clearly in the world around him. At this age he has a
philosophy, a metaphysical system, which he really believes in, (a
species of delusion the first to quit us,) and he persists in seeing his
dogma reflected to him from all sides. This is supportable, or may be
disguised in poetry; it becomes intolerable in prose. Add to all which,
that the writer of a novel should have had some _experience_ in the
realities of life, a certain empirical knowledge of the manner in which
the passions develop themselves in men and women. The high ideal forms
of good and evil he may learn from his own heart; but there is in actual
life, so to speak, a vulgar monstrosity which must be seen to be
credited. I can figure to myself the writer of a drama musing out his
subject in solitude, whether the solitude of the seashore or of a garret
in London; but the successful novelist must have mingled with the world,
and should know whatever the club, the drawing-room, and, above all, the
boudoir can reveal to him.

Of course it is understood between us, that in speaking of the drama we
make no reference to the stage. Indeed, you can hardly contemplate
writing for the stage, as there is no stage to write for. We speak of
the drama solely as a form of composition, presented, like any other, to
the reader. I have heard the opinion expressed that the drama, viewed as
a composition designed only to be read, is destined to be entirely
superseded by the novel, which admits of so great a variety of material
being worked into its structure, and affords an unrivalled scope for the
development both of story and of character. To me it seems that the
drama, especially in its more classic form, apart from its application
to the stage, has a vitality of its own, and will stand its ground in
literature, let the novel advance as it may.

All the passions of man represent themselves in his speech, the great
prerogative of the human being; almost every thing he does is transacted
through the medium of speech, or accompanied by it; even in solitude his
thoughts are thrown into words, which are frequently uttered aloud, and
the soliloquy is wellnigh as natural as the dialogue. Give, therefore, a
fair representation of the speech of men throughout every great
transaction, and you give the best and truest representations of their
actions and their passions, and this in the briefest form possible. You
have all that is essential to the most faithful portrait, without the
distraction of detail and circumstance. With a reader of the drama the
eye is little exercised; he seems to be brought into immediate contact
with the minds of those imaginary persons who are rather thinking and
feeling, than acting before him. To this select representation of
humanity is added the charm of verse, the strange power of harmonizing
diction. If the drama rarely captivates the eye, it takes possession of
the ear. May it never lose its appropriate language of verse--that
language which so well comports with its high ideal character, being one
which, as a French poet has happily expressed it, the world understands,
but does not speak--

             "Elle a cela pour elle--
    Que le monde l'entend, et ne la parle pas!"

The drama is peculiarly appropriate to the ideal; and it seems to me
that the very fact, that whatever appertains to the middle region of
art, or requires the aid of much circumstance and detail, has found in
the novel a far more perfect development, ought to induce us to purify
the drama, and retain amongst us its most exalted type. It is in vain
that it strives to compete with the novel in the intricacy of its plot,
in the number of its _dramatis personae_, in the representation of the
peculiarities, or as they used to be called, the _humours_ of men. These
have now a better scene for their exhibition than the old five-act play,
or tragi-comedy, could afford them; but the high passions of mankind,
whatever is most elevated or most tender, whatever naturally leads the
mind, be it good or evil, to profound contemplation--this will still
find its most complete, and powerful, and graceful development in the
poetic form of the drama.

The novel and the drama have thus their several characteristics. Do you
wish to hurry on your reader with a untiring curiosity? you will, of
course, select the novel. Do you wish to hold him lingering, meditative,
to your pages--pages which he shall turn backwards as well as forwards?
you were wise to choose the drama. Both should have character, and
passion, and incident; but in the first the interest of the _story_
should pervade the whole, in the second the interest of the _passion_
should predominate. If you write a novel, do not expect your readers
very often to stand still and meditate profoundly; if you write a drama,
forego entirely the charm of curiosity. Do not hope, by any contrivance
of your plot, to entrap or allure the attention of your readers, who
must come to you--there is no help for it--with something of the spirit,
and something of the unwillingness, of the student. What some man of
genius may one day perform, or not perform, it were presumptuous to
assert; for it is the privilege of genius to prove to the critic what is
possible; but, speaking according to our _present lights_, we should say
that the sustaining of the main characteristic interest of the novel, is
incompatible with the more intense efforts of reflection or of poetry.
One cannot be dragged on and chained to the spot at the same time. Some
one _may_ arise who shall combine the genius of Lord Byron and of Sir
Walter Scott; but till the prodigy makes his appearance, I shall
continue to think that no intellectual chymistry could present to us, in
one compound, the charms of _Ivanhoe_ and of _Sardanapalus_.

I should be very ungrateful--I who have been an idle man--if I
underrated the novel. It is hardly possible to imagine a form of
composition more fit to display the varied powers of an author; for wit
and pathos, the tragic and the comic, descriptions, reflections,
dialogue, narrative, each takes its turn; but I cannot consent that it
carry off all our regard from its elder sister, the drama. In the novel
every thing passes by in dizzy rapidity; we are whirled along over hill
and valley, through the grandeur and the filth of cities, and a thousand
noble and a thousand grotesque objects flit over our field of vision. In
the drama, it is true, we often toil on, slow as a tired pedestrian; but
then how often do we sit down, as at the foot of some mountain, and fill
our eyes and our hearts with the prospect before us? How gay is the
first!--even when terrible, she has still her own vivacity; but then she
exhausts at once all the artillery of her charms. How severe is the
second!--even when gayest, she is still thoughtful, still maintains her
intricate movement, and her habit of involved allusions; but then at
each visit some fresh beauty discloses itself. It was once my good
fortune--I who am now old, may prattle of these things--to be something
a favourite with a fair lady who, with the world at large, had little
reputation for beauty. Her sparkling sister, with her sunny locks and
still more sunny countenance, carried away all hearts; she, pale and
silent, sat often unregarded. But, oh, Eugenius! when she turned upon
you her eyes lit with the light of love and genius, that pale and
dark-browed girl grew suddenly more beautiful than I have any words to
express. You must make the application yourself; for having once
conjured up her image to my mind, I cannot consent to compare her even
to the most eloquent poetry that was ever penned.

Undoubtedly the first dramatic writer amongst our contemporaries is
Henry Taylor, and the most admirable dramatic poem which these times
have witnessed is _Philip van Artevelde_. How well he uses the language
of the _old masters_! how completely has he made it his own! and how
replete is the poem with that sagacious observation which penetrates the
very core of human life, and which is so appropriate to the drama! Yet
the author of _Philip van Artevelde_, I shall be told, has evidently
taken a very different view of the powers and functions of the drama at
this day than what I have been expressing. In his poem we have the whole
lifetime of a man described, and a considerable portion of the history
of a people sketched out; we have a canvass so ample, and so well
filled, that all the materials for a long novel might be found there.
But the example of _Philip van Artevelde_ rather confirms than shakes my
opinion. I am persuaded that that drama, good as it is, would have been
fifty times better, had it been framed on a more restricted plan. You,
of course, have read and admired this poem. Now recall to mind those
parts which you probably marked with your pencil as you proceeded, and
which you afterwards read a second and a third and a fourth time; bring
them together, and you will at once perceive how little the poem would
have lost, how much it would have gained, if it had been curtailed, or
rather constructed on a simpler plan. What care we for his Sir Simon
Bette and his Guisebert Grutt? And of what avail is it to attempt,
within the limits of a drama, and under the trammels of verse, what can
be much better done in the freedom and amplitude of prose? Under what
disadvantages does the historical play appear after the historical
novels of the Author of Waverley!

The author of _Philip van Artevelde_, and _Edwin the Fair_, seems to
shrink from idealizing character, lest he should depart from historic
truth. But historic truth is not the sort of truth most essential to the
drama. We are pleased when we meet with it; but its presence will never
justify the author for neglecting the higher resources of his art. Do
not think, however, that in making this observation I intend to impeach
the character of Philip van Artevelde himself. Artevelde I admire
without stint, and without exception. Compare this character with the
Wallenstein of Schiller, and you will see at once its excellence. They
are both leaders of armies, and both men of reflection. But in
Wallenstein the habit of self-examination has led to an irresolution
which we feel at once, in such a man, to be a degrading weakness, and
altogether inconsistent with the part he is playing in life. It is an
indecision which, in spite of the philosophical tone it assumes,
pronounces him to be unfit for the command of men, or to sway the
destinies of a people. Artevelde, too, reflects, examines himself,
pauses, considers, and his will is the servant of his thought; but
reflection with him comes in aid of resolution, matures it, establishes
it. He can discuss with himself, whether he shall pursue a life of
peaceful retirement, or plunge into one of stormy action; but having
once made his election, he proceeds along his devoted path with perfect
self-confidence, and without a look that speaks of retreat. A world of
thought is still around him; he carries with him, at each step, his old
habit of reflection--for this, no man who has once possessed, can ever
relinquish--but nothing of all this disturbs or impedes him.

Do not you, Eugenius, be led by the cant of criticism to sacrifice the
real interest of your _dramatis personae_. Some dry censor will tell you
that your Greeks are by no means Greek, nor your Romans Roman. See you
first that they are real men, and be not afraid to throw your own heart
into them. Little will it console either you or your readers, if, after
you have repelled us by some frigid formal figure, a complimentary
critic of this school should propose to place it as a frontispiece to a
new edition of Potter or of Adam--applauding you the while for having
faithfully preserved the classic costume. I tell you that the classic
costume must ruffle and stir with passions kindred to our own, or it had
better be left hanging against the wall. And what a deception it is that
the scholastic imagination is perpetually imposing on itself in this
matter! Accustomed to dwell on the points of difference between the men
of one age and of another, it revolts from admitting the many mere
points of resemblance which must have existed between them; it hardly
takes into account the great fund of humanity common to them both. The
politics of Cicero, it is true, would be unintelligible to one unversed
in the constitution and history of Rome; but the ambition of Cicero, the
embarrassment of the politician, the meditated treachery, the boasted
independence, the doubt, the fear, the hesitation,--all this will be
better studied in a living House of Commons, than in all the manuscripts
of the Vatican. Sacrifice nothing of what you know to be the substantial
interest of your piece, to what these critics call the _colour_ of the
age, which, after all, is nothing better than one guess amongst many at
historic truth. Schiller fell a victim, in one or two instances, to this
sort of criticism, and, in obedience to it, contradicted the natural
bias of his genius. In his _Wilhelm Tell_, instead of the hero of
liberty and of Switzerland, he has given us little more than a sturdy
peasant, who, in destroying Gessler, follows only a personal revenge,
and feels the remorse of a common assassin. If this were historic truth,
it was not the part of the poet to be the first to discover and proclaim
it. Was he to degrade the character below the rank which ordinary
historians assigned to it? We do not want a drama to frame the portrait
of a Lincolnshire farmer; it is the place, if place there is, for the
representation of the higher forms of humanity.

After taking note of the distinctive qualities of the drama and the
novel, it were well--O author that will be!--to take note of thyself,
and observe what manner of talent is strongest within thee. There are
two descriptions of men of genius. The one are men of genius in virtue
of their own quick feelings and intense reflection; they have
imagination, but it is chiefly kindled by their own personal emotions:
they write from the inspiration of their own hearts; they see the world
in the height of their own joys and afflictions. These amiable egotists
fill all nature with the voice of their own plaints, and they have ever
a tangled skein of their own peculiar thoughts to unravel and to ravel
again. The second order of men of genius, albeit they are not deficient
in keen susceptibility or profound reflection, see the world
outstretched before them, as it lies beneath the impartial light of
heaven; they understand, they master it; they turn the great globe round
under the sun; they make their own mimic variations after its strange
and varied pattern. Now you must take rank, high or low, amongst this
second order of men of genius, if you are to prosper in the land of
fiction and romance. Pray, do you--as I half suspect--do you, when
sitting down to sketch out some budding romance, find that you have
filled your paper with the analysis of a character or a sentiment, and
that you have risen from your desk without relating a single incident,
or advancing your story beyond the first attitude, the first _pose_ of
your hero? If so, I doubt of your aptitude for the novel. I know that
you have some noble ideas of elevating the standard of the romance, and,
by retarding and subduing the interest of the narrative, to make this
combine with more elaborate beauties, and more subtle thought, that has
been hitherto considered as legitimately appertaining to the novel. I
like the idea--I should rejoice to see it executed; but pardon me, if
the very circumstance of you being possessed with this idea, leads me to
augur ill of you as a writer of fiction. You have not love enough for
your story, nor sufficient confidence in it. You are afraid of every
sentence which has in it no peculiar beauty of diction or of sentiment.
A novelist must be liberal of letter-press, must feel no remorse at
leading us down, page after page, destitute of all other merit than that
of conducting us to his _denouement_: he writes not by sentences; takes
no account of paragraphs; he strides from chapter to chapter, from
volume to volume.

"Verily," I think I hear you say, "you are the most consolatory of
counsellors; you advise me to commence with the drama--but with no
prospect of success--in order to prepare myself for a failure in the
novel!"

My dear Eugenius, you shall not fail. You shall write a very powerful,
exciting, affecting romance. Pray, do not be too severe upon our
sensibilities, do not put us on the rack more than is absolutely
necessary. It has always seemed to me--and I am glad to have this
opportunity of unburdening my heart upon the point--it has always seemed
to me, that there was something _barbarous_ in that torture of the
sympathies in which the novelist delights, and which his reader, it must
be supposed, finds peculiarly grateful. It really reminds me of that
pleasure which certain savages are said to take in cutting themselves
with knives, and inflicting other wounds upon themselves when in a state
of great excitement. I have myself often flung away the work of fiction,
when it seemed bent upon raising my sympathies only to torture them.
Pray, spare us when you, in your time, shall have become a potent
magician. Follow the example of the poets, who, when they bear the
sword, yet hide it in such a clustre of laurels that its sharpness is
not seen.

To take very common instance--All the world knows that the catastrophe
of a romance must be inevitably postponed, that suspense must be
prolonged, and that the two lovers whose fate we have become interested
in, cannot possibly be made happy in the first or even in the second
volume. But the expedients employed to delay this term of felicity, are
sometimes such as the laws of a civilized society ought really to
proscribe. I will mention the first example that occurs to me, though
your better memory will directly suggest many more striking and more
flagrant. It is taken from the work of no mean artist; indeed, none but
a writer of more or less talent could inflict this gratuitous anguish
upon us. In the novel of _Rienzi_, a young nobleman, Adrian, goes to
Florence, at that time visited by the plague, to seek his betrothed
Irene, sister of the Tribune. Fatigue, the extreme heat, and his own
dreadful anxiety, have thrown him into a fever, and he sinks down in the
public thoroughfare. It is Irene herself who rushes to his assistance.
Every one else avoids him, thinking him struck by the plague. She and a
benevolent friar convey him, still in a state of unconsciousness, into
an empty and deserted palace which stood by, and of which there were
many at that time in Florence. She tends him, nurses him day and night,
aided only by the same pious and charitable friar. In his delirium he
raves of that Irene who is standing by his head, and who thus learns
that it is to seek her he has exposed himself to the horrors of the
plague. At the end of this time the friar, who had administered to the
patient some healing draught, tells her, on leaving, that Adrian will
shortly fall into a sound slumber--that this will be the crisis of his
fever--that he will either wake from this sleep restored to
consciousness and health, or will sink under his malady. Adrian falls
accordingly into a sound sleep, Irene watching by his side. Now we know
that the patient is doing well, and our hearts have been sedulously
prepared for the happy interview that is promised us, when, on awaking,
he will see beside him the loved Irene whom he has been seeking, and
recognise in her the saviour of his life. But this sleep lasts longer
than Irene had anticipated; she becomes alarmed, and goes away to seek
the friar. The moment she has left the room, Adrian wakes!--finds
himself well and alone--there is no one to tell him who it is that has
preserved his life; nor has Irene, it seems, left any trace of her
presence. He sallies forth again into the city of the plague to seek
her, and she is destined to return to the empty chamber! Taken to a
hideous sort of charnel-house, Adrian is shown the body of a female clad
in a mantle that had once been Irene's, and concludes that it is the
corpse of her who, for the last three days and nights, has been tending
on him. I recollect that, when I came to this part of the novel, I threw
the book down, and stalked for five minutes indignantly about the room,
exclaiming that it was cruel--barbarous--savage, to be sporting thus
with human sympathies. To be sure, I ought to add, in justice to the
author, that, after exhaling my rage in this manner, I again took up the
novel, and read on to the end.

I do beseech you, Eugenius, do not give us a _philosophical_ novel.
Every work of art of a high order will, in one sense of the word, be
philosophical; there will be philosophy there for those who can
penetrate it, and sometimes the reader will gather a profounder and
juster meaning, than the author himself detected in his fiction. I mean,
of course, those works where some theory or some dogma is expressly
taught, where a vein of scholastic, or political, or ethical matter
alternates with a vein of narrative and fictitious matter. I dislike the
whole genus. Either one is interested in your story, and then your
philosophy is a bore; or one is not interested in it, and then your
philosophy can gain no currency by being tacked to it. Suppose the
narrative and didactic portions of such a book equally good, it is still
essentially two books in one, and should be read once for the story, and
once without. We are repeatedly told that people are induced to peruse,
in the shape of a novel, what they would have avoided as dry and
uninteresting in the shape of an essay. Pray, can you get people to take
knowledge, as you get children to take physic, without knowing what it
is they swallow? So that the powder was in the jelly, and the jelly goes
down the throat, the business, in the one case, is done. But I rather
think, in gaining knowledge, one must _taste the powder;_ there is no
help for it. Really, the manner in which these good nurses of the public
talk of passing off their wisdom upon us, reminds us of the old and
approved fashion in which Paddy passes his bad shilling, by slipping it
between two sound penny pieces. To be sure it is but twopence after all,
and he gets neither more nor less than his twopenny-worth of
intoxication, but he has succeeded in putting his shilling into
circulation. Just such a circulation of wisdom may we expect from novels
which are to teach philosophy, and politics, and political economy, and
I know not what else. But such works have succeeded, you will tell me.
What shall I say to _Tremaine?_--what to _Coningsby?_ In _Tremaine_, so
far as I remember, the didactic portion had sunk like a sort of
sediment, and being collected into a dense mass in the third volume,
could easily be avoided. As to _Coningsby_, I deny that it any where
calls upon the reader for much exercise of his reflective powers. The
novel has some sparkling scenes written in the vivacious manner of our
neighbours, the French, and these we read. Some Eton boys talk politics,
and as they talk just as boys should talk, their prattle is easily
tolerated. Besides, I am not responsible for the caprice of fashion, nor
for those adventitious circumstances which give currency to books, and
which may sometimes compel us all to read what none of us heartily
admires.

Certainly, if I were admitted to the counsels of a novelist, I should
never have finished with my list of grievances, my entreaties, and
deprecations. I will not inflict it upon you. But there is one little
request I cannot help making even to a novelist in embryo. I have been
annoyed beyond measure at the habit our writers of fiction have fallen
into, of throwing their heroes perpetually into a sort of swoon or
delirium, or state of half consciousness. That a heroine should
occasionally faint, and so permit the author to carry her quietly off
the stage--this is an old expedient, natural and allowable. What I
complain of is, that whenever the passions of the hero himself rise to a
certain pitch; or whenever the necessities of the plot require him to do
one thing, whilst both his reason and his feelings would plainly lead
him to do another--he is immediately thrown into a state of half frenzy,
has a "vague consciousness" of something or other, makes a complete
nightmare of the business; is cast, in short, into a state of _coma_, in
which the author can carry him hither and thither, and communicate to
him whatever impulse he pleases. In this sort of dream he raves and
resolves, he fights or he flies, and then wakes to confused memory of
just what the author thinks fit to call to his recollection. It is very
interesting and edifying, truly, to watch the movements of an irrational
puppet! I do beg of you, when you take up the functions of the novelist,
not to distribute this species of intoxication amongst your _dramatis
personae_, more largely than is absolutely necessary. Keep them in a
rational state as long as you can. Depend upon it they will not grow
more interesting in proportion as they approximate to madmen or idiots.

And so, dear Eugenius, you are resolved, at all events, in some form or
other, to be the author! This is decided. What was that desperate phrase
I once heard you utter--you would strike one blow, though you put your
whole life into the stroke, and died upon the broken sword!

Ah! but one does not die upon the broken sword; one has to live on.
Would that I could dissuade you from this inky pestilence! This
poetizing spirit, which gives all life so much significance _to the
imagination_, strikes it with sterility in every thing which should
beget or prosper a personal career. It opens the heart--true, but keeps
it open; it closes in on nothing--shuts in nothing for itself. It is an
open heart, and the sunshine enters there, and the bird alights there;
but nothing retains them, and the light and the song depart as freely as
they came. You lose the spring of action, and forfeit the easy
intercourse with the world; for, believe me, however you struggle
against it, so long as you live a poet, will you feel yourself a
stranger or a child amongst men. And all for what? I have that
confidence in your talent, that I am sure you will make no ridiculous
failures. What you write for fame, will be far superior to what others
write for popularity. But these will attain their end, and you, with far
more merit, will be only known as having failed. And know you not that
men revenge on mediocrity the praise extorted from them by indisputable
celebrity? It is a crime to be above the vulgar, and yet not overawe the
vulgar. There are a few great names they cannot refuse to extol; men of
genuine merit, of a larger merit than they can measure, who yet cannot
confessedly approach to these select few, they treat with derision and
contempt.

But suppose the most complete success that you can rationally
expect--what have you done? You have added one work of art the more to a
literature already so rich, that the life of a man can hardly exhaust
it; so rich, that it is compelled to drop by the way, as booty it cannot
preserve, what in another literature, or at an earlier period of its own
career, would have been considered invaluable treasure.

But the question of success or failure is not, after all, the first or
most important to your happiness. Could the hope of literary fame, could
the passion for it, could the esteem even of its possession, keep a
steady place in your mind, there were but little danger in admitting
this species of ambition as the ruling spirit of your house. But, alas!
whilst it is the most tenacious, it is also the most fluctuating of
passions. It rises all radiant with the morning, and before the sun is
in the zenith, it forsakes you, and the bright world at your feet is as
a glittering desert. But if you should make good resolutions to reform
and eject your tyrant, it will not fail to return before the night
descends to dash and confound them.

I remember meeting somewhere with the complaint of a young poet who had
made trial of his muse and failed; the style was perhaps somewhat
quaint, but it spoke the language of truth, and I copied it out. I will
transcribe it for your edification, and so conclude this wandering
epistle. You must not ask me for the title of the book, for I am not
sure that I could give it you correctly. Besides, it would be of no use,
as the work I know is out of print.

     "I could do better," says the poet in reply to his friend, who
     had been suggesting the usual consolations and lenitives
     applicable to the case, "but I could not so far excel what I
     have written, as to make all the difference between obscurity
     and fame. It is not a brief and tolerated existence in the
     world of letters that can be a sanction and motive to my
     endeavours; and since a noble immortality is denied me, I am
     willing to sink at once into oblivion. The sentence has been
     passed. I have not that obstinacy of hope which can make an
     appeal to the decision of posterity. My labours have been
     futile--my whole being has been an error--my life is without
     aim or meaning."

     "I sought it not," continued the disappointed bard, "I sought
     not this gift of poesy--I despised not the ruder toils of
     existence--I strove to pursue them, but I strove in vain. I
     could not walk along this earth with the busy forward tread of
     other men. The fair wonder detained and withheld me. Flowers on
     their slender stalks could prove an hindrance in my path; the
     light acacia would fling the barrier of its beauty across my
     way; the slow-thoughted stream would bend me to its winding
     current. Was it fault of mine that all nature was replete with
     feeling that compassed and enthralled me? On the surface of the
     lake at eventide, there lay how sweet a sadness! Hope visited
     me from the blue hills. There was perpetual revelry of thought
     amidst the clouds, and in the wide cope of heaven. This passion
     of the poet came to me, not knowing what it was. It came the
     gift of tranquil skies, and was breathed by playful zephyrs,
     and fell on me, with many a serene influence from the bright
     and silent stars.

     "I saw others pursuing and enjoying the varied prosperity of
     life--I felt no envy at their success, and no participation in
     their desires. I could not call in and limit my mind to the
     concerns of a personal welfare. I had leaned my ear unto the
     earth, and heard the beating of her mighty heart, and the
     murmur of her mysteries, and my spirit lost its fitness for any
     selfish aim or narrow purpose. I stood forth to be the
     interpreter of his own word to man. Alas! I myself am but
     one--the poorest--of the restless and craving multitude.

     "Gone! gone for ever! is the pleasant hope that danced before
     me on my path, with feet that never wearied, and timbrel that
     never paused! Oh, gay illusion! whither hast thou led me? and
     to what desolation has the music of thy course conducted? I am
     laden, as it were, with the fruitage of cultivated affections,
     but I myself am forlorn and disregarded. I kindle with
     innumerable sympathies, but am shut out for ever from social
     endearments--from the sweet relationships that make happy the
     homes of other men. I am faint with love of the beautiful, and
     my heart pants with an unclaimed devotion--but who may love the
     poet in his poverty?"

The disappointed bard, who, I should mention, was an Italian, resolves
to quit Rome, and books, and meditations; he goes to a seaport town,
becomes a mariner, and is soon advanced to the rank of captain of a
small trading vessel. The same friend to whom he had poured out the
lamentation I have already transcribed, encounters him in this new
character, and he then gives the following account of himself:--

     "I worked hard with the men, and studied diligently with the
     captain. One voyage to the Levant was speedily followed by a
     second; I gained experience; I have earned promotion--go to--I
     have earned money! Here I am, master of this vessel, which
     shall carry you to the mouth of the Tiber, or the port of
     Genoa."

     "Then you have quite merged the poet in the sailor?" said his
     companion.

     "Quite! quite! These hands are hard," replied the poet, gaily
     exhibiting his swarthy palms; "they have tugged at other than
     the cordage of a lyre. I, who used to burden the passing clouds
     with many a pensive sentiment, now ask of them what weather
     they predict. I, who was wont to give a thousand utterances to
     the winds of heaven, enquire from what point of the compass
     they are blowing. I, who could never behold the ocean without
     lapsing into dreamy emotions or endless speculations, now study
     its tides, and sound its shallows, and know it as the high-road
     I travel on. Yes," he continued, pacing the deck with
     animation, "I am no longer that commiserated mortal, whose
     musing gait marks him out for the mingled ridicule and,
     compassion of all observers; who burns with a passion for fame
     which renders him at once the most solitary and the most
     dependent of men. Me--I belong to the multitude--I am one of
     themselves. They cannot point the finger at me. I am released
     from that needless necessity to distinguish myself from
     others--from that pledge, given unsought to a heedless world,
     to leave behind an enduring memento of my existence. I can be
     filled with daily life, as with daily bread. Life is indeed a
     freedom--I can give _all_ to death."

     "I think," said his friend with a smile, "I trace something of
     the leaven of poetry even in this description of your
     unpoetized condition. Fear you not that the old fever will
     return?"

     "No; I resist--I fly from all temptation. If leaning,
     perchance, over the side of the vessel, and looking down on the
     troubled water, my mind grows troubled also with agitated
     thoughts, I start from the insidious posture. I find something
     to tug--to haul. A rope is thrown to me, and I am saved! Or I
     seize the rudder--I grasp its handle, grown smooth by its
     frequent intercourse with the human palm--and, believe me,
     there is a magic in its touch that brings me back instantly to
     the actual world of man's wants and of man's energies. I feel
     my feet press firm upon the boarded deck; I look out and around
     me; and my eye surveys, and my ear listens to the plain and
     serviceable realities of this our habitable globe."

This seems like a case of cure. But the symptoms were deceptive. The
next time we meet the poet-sailor he has embarked all he possessed in an
expedition of discovery in the new world which had recently been laid
open by Columbus; and this, not from love of gain, nor love of science,
nor even the ardour of enterprise, but purely from the restlessness of a
spirit which, ejected from its home in the world of thought, could never
find another amongst those "serviceable realities" of life, which he
knew so well how to applaud. He set sail from the port of Genoa, and was
never heard of afterwards. The moral of which is, that you take timely
warning, Eugenius, lest your poetic culture end in a voyage of discovery
to New South Wales!




MARSTON; OR, THE MEMOIRS OF A STATESMAN.

PART XVII.

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

                              SHAKSPEARE.


The speech of the Opposition leader decided the question. No man on his
side would venture beyond the line which he had drawn; and the
resolutions of Government were triumphantly carried, after a brief
appeal from me to the loyalty and manliness of the House. I placed
before them the undeniable intention of the cabinet to promote the
public prosperity, the immeasurable value of unanimity in the parliament
to produce confidence in the people, and the magnitude of the stake for
which England and Ireland were contending with the enemy of Europe.
Those sentiments were received with loud approval--my language was
continually echoed during the debate, I was congratulated on all sides;
and this night of expectancy and alarm closed in a success which
relieved me from all future anxiety for the fate of the Government.

The House broke up earlier than usual; and, to cool the fever which the
events of the night had produced in my veins, I rambled into one of the
spacious squares which add so much to the ornament of that fine city.
The night was serene, the air blew fresh and flower-breathing from the
walks, the stars shone in their lustre, and I felt all the power of
nature to soothe the troubled spirit. Some of the fashionable
inhabitants of the surrounding houses had been induced by the fineness
of the night to prolong their promenade; and the light laugh, and the
sound of pleasant voices, added to the touching and simple charm of the
scene. A group had stopped round a player on the guitar, with which we
made a tolerable accompaniment to some foreign songs. My ear was caught
by a chorus which I had often heard among the French peasantry, and I
joined in the applause. The minstrel was ragged and pale, and had
evidently met with no small share of the buffets of fortune; but,
cheered by our approval, he volunteered to sing the masterpiece of his
collection--"The Rising of the Vendee"--the rallying-song of the
insurrection, a performance chanted by the Vendean army in the field, by
the Vendean peasant in his cottage, and which he now gave us with all
the enthusiasm of one who had fought and suffered in the cause.


THE RISING OF THE VENDEE.

    It was a Sabbath morning, and sweet the summer air,
    And brightly shone the summer sun upon the day of prayer;
    And silver-sweet the village bells o'er mount and valley toll'd,
    And in the church of St Florent were gather'd young and old.
    When rushing down the woodland hill, in fiery haste was seen,
    With panting steed and bloody spur, a noble Angevin.
    And bounding on the sacred floor, he gave his fearful cry,--
    "Up, up for France! the time is come, for France to live or die.

    "Your Queen is in the dungeon; your King is in his gore;
    On Paris waves the flag of death, the fiery Tricolor;
    Your nobles in their ancient halls are hunted down and slain,
    In convent cells and holy shrines the blood is pour'd like rain.
    The peasant's vine is rooted up, his cottage given to flame,
    His son is to the scaffold sent, his daughter sent to shame;
    With torch in hand, and hate in heart, the rebel host is nigh.
    Up, up for France! the time is come, for France to live or die."

    That livelong night the horn was heard, from Orleans to Anjou,
    And pour'd from all their quiet fields our shepherds bold and true;
    Along the pleasant banks of Loire shot up the beacon-fires,
    And many a torch was blazing bright on Lucon's stately spires;
    The midnight cloud was flush'd with flame that hung o'er Parthenaye,
    The blaze that shone o'er proud Brissac was like the breaking day;
    Till east and west, and north and south, the loyal beacons shone,
    Like shooting-stars, from haughty Nantz to sea-begirt Olonne.

    And through the night, on foot and horse, the sleepless summons flew,
    And morning saw the Lily-flag wide waving o'er Poitou;
    And many an ancient musketoon was taken from the wall,
    And many a jovial hunter's steed was harness'd in the stall;
    And many a noble's armoury gave up the sword and spear,
    And many a bride, and many a babe, was left with kiss and tear;
    And many a homely peasant bade "farewell" to his old "dame;"
    As in the days, when France's king unfurl'd the Oriflame.

    There, leading his bold marksmen, rode the eagle-eyed Lescure,
    And dark Stofflet, who flies to fight as falcon to the lure;
    And fearless as the lion roused, but gentle as the lamb,
    Came, marching at his people's head, the brave and good Bonchamps.
    Charette, where honour was the prize, the hero sure to win;
    And there, with Henri Quatre's plume, the young Rochejaquelin.
    And there, in peasant speech and garb--the terror of the foe,
    A noble made by Heaven's own hand, the great Cathelineau.

    We march'd by tens of thousands, we march'd through day and night,
    The Lily standard in our front, like Israel's holy light.
    Around us rush'd the rebels, as the wolf upon the sheep,
    We burst upon their columns, as the lion roused from sleep;
    We tore the bayonets from their hands, we slew them at their guns,
    Their boasted horsemen flew like chaff before our forest-sons;
    That eve we heap'd their baggage high their lines of dead between,
    And in the centre blazed to heaven their blood-dyed Guillotine!

    In vain they hid their heads in walls; we rush'd on stout Thouar,--
    What cared we for its shot or shell, for battlement or bar?
    We burst its gates; then, like the wind, we rush'd on Fontenaye--
    We saw its flag at morning's light, 'twas ours by setting day.
    We crush'd, like ripen'd grapes, Montreuil, we tore down old Vetier--
    We charged them with our naked breasts, and took them with a cheer.
    We'll hunt the robbers through the land, from Seine to sparkling Rhone.
    Now, "Here's a health to all we love. Our King shall have his own."

This song had an interest for me, independent of the spirit of the
performer. It revived recollections of the noblest scene of popular
attachment and faithful fortitude since the days of chivalry. I heard in
it the names of all the great leaders of the Royalist army--names which
nothing but the deepest national ingratitude will ever suffer France to
forget; and it gave a glance at the succession of those gallant exploits
by which the heroic peasantry and gentlemen of Anjou and Poitou had
gained their imperishable distinction.

But the streets of a capital, itself almost in a state of siege, were
not the scene for indulging in romance by starlight; and one of the
patrols of soldiery, then going its rounds, suddenly ordered the group
to disperse. The Frenchman, unluckily, attempted to apologise for his
own appearance on the spot; and the attempt perplexed the matter still
more. The times were suspicious, and a foreigner, and of all foreigners
a Gaul, caught under cover of night singing songs of which the sergeant
could not comprehend a syllable, was a personage in every way formed for
the guard-house. The startled Frenchman's exclamations and wrath at
discovering this purpose, only made the sergeant more positive; and he
was marched off as a traitor convicted of guitar-playing and other
traitorous qualities.

I interposed, but my interposition was in vain. My person was unknown to
the man in authority; and I was evidently, from the frown of the
sergeant, regarded as little better than an accomplice. My only resource
was to follow the party to the guard-house, and see the officer of the
night. But he was absent; and half-laughing at the singular effect of
the report in the morning, that I had been arrested as the
fellow-conspirator of a French mendicant, I called for pen, ink, and
paper, to explain my position by a message to the next magistrate. But
this request only thickened the perplexity. As I approached the desk to
write, the prisoner bounded towards me with a wild outcry, flung his
arms round my neck, and plunging his hand into the deepest recesses of
his very wayworn costume, at length drew out a large letter, which he
held forth to me with a gesture of triumph. The sergeant looked graver
still; his responsibility was more heavily involved by the despatch,
which he intercepted on the spot, and proceeded to examine, at least so
far as the envelope was concerned. He and his guard pored over it in
succession. Still it was unintelligible. It was a mysterious affair
altogether. The Frenchman and I begged equally in vain to be allowed to
interpret. Impossible. At length the subaltern on duty was found; and on
his arrival I was released, with all due apologies, and carried off the
captive and his despatch together.

The letter was addressed to me, in French, and in a hand with which I
was unacquainted. To obtain any knowledge of its contents on my way
home, and from its bearer, was out of the question, until, with a
hundred circumlocutions, I had heard the full and entire hair-breadth
'scapes of Monsieur Hannibal Auguste Dindon. He had been the domestic of
Madame la Marechale de Tourville, and had attended her and the countess
to England in the emigration; in England he had seen me. On the
reduction of the Marechale's household he had returned to his own
country, and taken service with the Royalist army in the Vendee. There,
too, he had suffered that "fortune de la guerre", which is ill-luck with
every body but the elastic Frenchman. He had been taken prisoner, and
was on the point of being shot, when he saw the countess, a prisoner
also in the Republican hands, who interceded for his safety, and gave
him this letter, to be delivered to me if he should escape. After
following the march of the armies, a defeat scattered the Republican
division along with which they were carried; he procured a conveyance to
the coast of Britanny, and they embarked in one of the fishing vessels
for England. Again ill-luck came; a storm caught them in the Channel,
swept them the crew knew not where, and finally threw them on the
iron-bound shore of the west of Ireland. Clotilde was now actually in
the capital, on her way to England!

If ever there was wild joy in the heart of man, it was in mine at that
intelligence. It was a flash, bright, bewildering, overwhelming!

I longed to be alone, to hear no sound of the human tongue, to indulge
in the deep and silent delight of the overladen heart. But M. Hannibal
was not a personage to be disappointed of his share of interest; and, to
avoid throwing the honest prattler into absolute despair, I was forced
to listen to his adventures, until the blaze of the lamps in the
vice-royal residence, and the challenge of the sentries, reminded him,
and me too, that there were other things in the world than a
Frenchman's wanderings. The substance of his tale, however, was--that
his resources having fallen short on the road, and resolving not to
burden the finances of the countess, which he believed to be scarcely
less exhausted than his own, he had made use of his voice and guitar to
recruit his purse--a chance which he now designated as a miracle,
devised by the saint who presided over his birthday, to finish his
perils in all imaginable felicity.

Giving him into the care of my servants, I was at length alone. The
letter was in my hand. Yet still I dreaded to break the seal. What might
not be the painful sentiments and sorrowful remonstrances within that
seal? But Clotilde was living; was near me; was still the same
confiding, generous, and high-souled being.--Sorrow and terror were now
passed away. I opened the letter. It was a detail of her thoughts,
written in the moments which she could snatch from the insulting
surveillance round her; and was evidently intended less as a letter than
a legacy of her last feelings, written to relieve an overburdened heart,
with but slight hope of its ever reaching my hand. It was written on
various fragments of paper, and often blotted with tears. It began
abruptly. I shuddered at the misery which spoke in every word.

"I am, at this hour, in the lowest depth of wretchedness. I have but one
consolation, that no life can endure this agony long. After being
carried from garrison to garrison, with my eyes shocked and my feelings
tortured by the sights and sufferings of war, I am at last consigned to
the hands of the being whom on earth I most dread and abhor. Montrecour
has arrived to take the command of Saumur. I have not yet seen him; but
he has had the cruelty to announce that I am his prisoner, and shall be
his wife. But the wife of Montrecour I never will be; rather a thousand
times would I wed the grave!----

"This letter may never reach your hands, or, if it does, it may only be
when the great barrier is raised between us, and this heart shall be
dust. Marston, shall I then be remembered? Shall my faith, my feelings,
and my sufferings, ever come across your mind?--Let not Clotilde be
forgotten. I revered, honoured, loved you. I feel my heart beat, and my
cheek burn at the words--but I shall not recall them. On the verge of
the future world, I speak with the truth of a spirit, and oh, with the
sincerity of a woman!----

"From that eventful day when I first met your glance, I determined that
no power on earth should ever make me the wife of another. To me you
remained almost a total stranger. Yet the die was cast. I finally
resolved to abandon the world, to hide my unhappy head in a convent, and
there, in loneliness and silence, endure, for I never could hope to
extinguish, those struggles of heart which forced me to leave all the
charms of existence behind for ever.

"The loss of my beloved parent gave me the power of putting my
resolution into effect. I returned to France, though in the midst of its
distractions, and took refuge under the protection of my venerable
relative, the superior of the convent at Valenciennes. My narrative is
now brief, but most melancholy. On the evening of the day when I heard
your love--a day which I shall remember with pride and gratitude to the
closing hour of my existence--we were suffered to pass the gates, and
take the route for Italy. But, on the third day of our journey, we were
stopped by a division of the Republican forces on their march to the
Vendee. We were arrested as aristocrats, and moved from garrison to
garrison, until we reached the Republican headquarters at Saumur; where,
to my infinite terror, I found Montrecour governor of the fortress. He
was a traitor to his unhappy king. The republic had offered him higher
distinctions than he could hope to obtain from the emigrant princes, and
he had embraced the offer. Betrothed to him in my childhood, according
to the foolish and fatal custom of our country, I was still in some
degree pledged to him. But now no human bond shall ever unite me to one
whom I doubly disdain as a traitor. Still, I am in his power. What is
there now to save me? I am at this moment in a prison!

"I hear the sounds of music and dancing on every side. The town is
illuminated for a victory which is said to have been gained this morning
over the troops of Poitou, advancing to the Loire. The stars are
glittering through my casement with all the brilliancy of a summer sky;
the breath of the fields flows sweetly in; laughing crowds are passing
through the streets; and here am I, alone, friendless, broken-hearted,
and dreading the dawn.----

"I spent the livelong night on my knees. Tears and prayers were my sole
comfort during those melancholy hours. But time rolls on. Montrecour has
just sent to tell me that my choice must be made by noon--the altar or
the guillotine. An escort is now preparing to convey prisoners to
Nantes, where the horrible Revolutionary Tribunal holds a perpetual
sitting; and I must follow them, or be his bride!--Never! I have given
my answer, and gladly I welcome my fate. I have solemnly bade farewell
to this world.----

"No! My tyrant is not so merciful. He has this moment sent to 'command'
(that is the word)--to command my presence in the church; as he is about
to march against the enemy, and he must be master of my hand before he
takes the field. The troops are already preparing for the march. I hear
the drums beating. But one short hour is given me to prepare. Would I
were dead!

"There are times when the soul longs to quit her tenement; when the
brain sees visions; when the heart feels bursting; when a thousand
weapons seem ready for the hand, and a voice of temptation urges to acts
of woe.--Marston, Marston, where are you at this hour?"

The letter fell from my hands. I had the whole scene before my eyes. And
where was I, while the one to whom every affection of my nature was
indissolubly bound, this creature of beauty, fondness, and magnanimity,
was wasting her life in sorrow, in captivity, in the bitterness of the
broken heart? If I could not reproach myself with having increased her
calamities, yet had I assuaged them; had I flown to her rescue; had I
protected her against the cruelties of fortune; had I defied, sword in
hand, the heartless and arrogant villain who had brought her into such
hopeless peril? Those thoughts rushed through my brain in torture, and
it was some time before I could resume the reading of the blotted lines
upon my table. I dreaded their next announcement. I shrank from the pang
of certainty. The next sentence might announce to me that Clotilde had
been compelled by force to a detested marriage;--I dared not hazard the
knowledge.

Yet the recollection, that I was blameless in her trials, at length
calmed me. I felt, that to protect her had been wholly out of my power,
from the day when she left Valenciennes; and, while I honoured the
decision and loftiness of spirit which had led to that self-denying
step, I could lay nothing to my charge but the misfortune of being
unable to convince her mind of the wisdom of disdaining the opinion of
the world. I took up the letter again.

"Another day has passed, of terror and anguish unspeakable. Yet it has
closed in thanksgiving. I have been respited.--I was forced from my
chamber. I was forced to the altar. I was forced to endure the sight of
Montrecour at my side. A revolutionary priest stood prepared to perform
the hateful ceremony. I resisted, I protested, I wept in vain. The
chapel was thronged with revolutionary soldiers, who, regarding me as an
aristocrat, were probably incapable of feeling any sympathy with my
sufferings. I was hopeless. But, during the delay produced by my
determination to die rather than yield, I could see confusion growing
among the spectators. I heard the hurried trampling of cavalry through
the streets. Drums and trumpets began to sound in all quarters. The
tumult evidently increased. I could perceive even in the stony features
of Montrecour, his perplexity at being detained from showing himself at
the head of the troops; and with senses wound to their utmost pitch by
the anxiety of the moment, I thought that I could perceive the distant
shouts of an immense multitude advancing to the walls. Aide-de-camp
after aide-de-camp now came hurrying in--each with a fresh summons to
the general. He alternately threatened, insulted, and implored me. But
no measure or entreaty on earth could make me consent. At length I heard
a heavy fire of cannon, followed by the shattering of houses and the
outcries of the people. The batteries of the town soon returned the
fire, and all was uproar. Montrecour, gnashing his teeth, and with the
look and fury of a fiend, now rushed towards me, and bore me to the feet
of the priest. I felt the light leaving my eyes, and hoped that I was
dying. At that moment a cannon-shot struck the roof, and dashed down a
large portion of its fragments on the floor. The priest and his
attendants, thinking that the whole fabric was falling, made their
escape. Montrecour, with an exclamation full of the bitterness of his
soul, flung me from him, and swearing that my respite should be brief,
darted from the chapel, followed by the soldiers. What words ever
uttered by human lips can tell the gratitude with which I saw myself
left alone, and knelt before the altar covered with ruins!----

"I am now on my way once more, I know not whither. The battle continued
during the day; and the sights and sounds were almost too much for the
human senses to bear. At night the Royalists stormed the outworks of the
fortress; and, to prevent our release on the capitulation, the prisoners
were sent away in the darkness. As our carriage passed the gates, I saw
Montrecour borne in, wounded. The spirit of the insulter was in him
still. He ordered the soldiers to bring his litter near me, and in a
voice faint through pain, but bitter with baffled revenge, he
murmured--'Countess, you shall not have long to indulge in your
caprices. My hurts are trifling. You are still in my power.'

"What a hideous desolation is war! We have just passed through one of
the forest villages, which, but a few days since, must have been
loveliness itself.--Vineyards, gardens, a bright stream, a rustic chapel
on a hill--every thing shaped for the delight of the eye! But a
desperate skirmish had occurred there between the retreating Republicans
and their pursuers, and all that man could ruin was ruined. The cottages
were all in ashes, the gardens trampled, the vineyards cut down for the
fires of the bivouac, the chapel was even smouldering still, and the
river exhibited some frightful remnants of what were once human beings.
Not a living soul was to be seen. A dog was stretched upon the ground,
tearing up with his paws what was probably the grave of his master. At
the sight of the escort, he howled and showed his teeth, in evident fury
at their approach; a dragoon fired his pistol at him--fortunately missed
him; and the dog bounded into the thicket. But when I looked back, I saw
him creep out again, and stretch himself howling upon the grave.

"I write these lines at long intervals, in fear, and only when the
escort are sleeping on their horses' necks, or eating their hurried
meals upon the grass.

"Last night the Royalist army crossed the Loire; and the firing was
continued until morning. The heights all seemed crowned with flame. The
forest in which we had stopped for the night was set on fire in the
conflict, and a large body of the Royalist cavalry skirmished with the
retreating Republicans till morning. It was a night of indescribable
terror; but my personal fears were forgotten in the sorrow for my
honoured and aged companion. She often fainted in my arms; and in this
wilderness, where every cottage is deserted, and where all is flight and
consternation even among the soldiery, what is to become of her? I gazed
upon her feeble frame and sinking countenance, with the certainty that
in a few hours all would be over. How rejoicingly would I share the
quiet of her tomb!"

My eyes filled, and my heart heaved, at a reality of wretchedness so
deep, that I could scarcely conceive it to have passed away. The paper
fell from my hands. My mind was in the forest. I saw the pursuit. The
firing rang in my ears; and in the midst of this shock of flying and
fighting men, I saw Clotilde wiping the dews of death from the brow of
her helpless relative.

The illusion was almost strengthened at this moment, by the flashing of
a strong and sudden light across the ceiling of the chamber, and the
trampling of a body of troops by torchlight, entering the Castle gates.
A squadron of dragoons had arrived, escorting a carriage. Even my glance
at the buildings of the Castle-square could scarcely recall me to the
truth of the locality; until an aide-de-camp knocked at my door, with a
request from the viceroy that I should see him as soon as possible.
Safely locking up my precious record, I followed him.

There was a ball on that night in the Castle, and our way to the private
apartments of his excellency leading through the state saloon, the whole
brilliant display struck upon my eyes at once. By what strange love of
contrast is it, that the human mind is never more open to the dazzling
effects of beauty, splendour, and gaiety than when it has been wrapt in
the profoundest sorrow? Are the confines of joy and anguish so close? Is
there but a hair's-breadth intervention of some invisible nerve, some
slender web of imagination, between mirth and melancholy? The Irish are
a handsome race, and none more enjoy, or are more fitted by nature or
temper, for all the ornamental displays of society; a Castle ball was
always a glittering exhilaration of lustre and beauty. But I had seen
all this before. To-night they mingled with the tenderness which the
perusal of Clotilde's letter had shed over all my feelings. As the dance
moved before my eye, as the music echoed round me, as I glanced on the
walls, filled with the memories of all the gallant and the great, whose
names lived in the native history of hundreds of years, I imagined the
woman with whom I had now connected all my hopes of happiness, moving in
the midst of that charmed circle, brilliant in all the distinctions of
her birth, admired for her accomplished loveliness, and yet giving me
the whole tribute of a noble heart, grateful for the devotion of all its
thoughts to her happiness. I involuntarily paused, and, leaning against
one of the gilded pillars of that stately hall, gave unrestrained way to
this waking dream.

My conference with the viceroy was soon concluded. The prisoner had
commanded a body of insurgents, who, after some partial successes, had
been broken and dispersed. The leader, in his desperate attempts to
rally them, had been severely wounded, and taken on the field. From the
papers found on his person, an important clue to the principal
personages and objects of the revolt was promised; and I proceeded to
the place of temporary detention to examine the prisoner. What an utter
breaking up of the vision which had so lately absorbed all my faculties!
What a contrast; was now before me to the pomps and pleasures of the
fete! On a table, in the guard-house, lay a human form, scarcely visible
by the single dim light which flickered over it from the roof. Some of
the dragoons, covered with the marks of long travel, and weary, were
lounging on the benches, or gazing on the unhappy countenance which lay,
as if in sleep or death, before them. A sabre wound had covered his
forehead with gore, which, almost concealing all his features, rendered
him a hideous spectacle. Even the troopers, though sufficiently
indignant at the very name of rebel, either respected the singular
boldness of his defence, or stood silenced by the appalling nature of
the sight. All hope of obtaining any information from him was given up;
he was evidently insensible, and all that I could do was done, in
placing him in the care of the medical practitioner in attendance on the
Household, and ordering that he should have every accommodation
consistent with his safe-keeping for the time.

I returned to my chamber, and was again lost in the outpourings of a pen
which had all the candour of a dying confession. Clotilde was again
murmuring in my ear those solemn thoughts, which she believed that she
was writing only to be trampled in the mazes of a French forest. Her
last words were--

"Marston, Marston, we shall never meet again! In my days of
wretchedness, I have sometimes wept over the resolution by which I tore
myself away from you. But every calmer thought has strengthened me in
the consciousness, that I could give no higher proof of the honour, the
homage, the fond and fervent affection, of my soul. I dared not be a
burden on your tenderness, or an obstacle to your natural distinction.
What could I, helpless, houseless, fortuneless, be but a weight upon
that buoyancy and ambition of eminence which marks superior natures for
the superior honours of life. I relinquished the first object of my
heart, and in that act I still take a melancholy pride. I showed you of
what sacrifices I am capable for your sake. But what sacrifice is too
vast for the heart of woman? Farewell! you will never see me more.

                              "CLOTILDE DE TOURVILLE."


During that night I found it impossible to rest; I continued alternately
reading those fragments, walking up and down my chamber, and gazing on
the skies. The cavalry torches still illumined the Castle-square; the
blaze from the windows of the ball-room still poured its steady radiance
on the gardens; and the pure serenity of a rising moon shone over all.
Captivity, luxury, and the calm glory of the heavens, were at once
before me. Feverish with pain and pleasure, pressed with the anxieties
of state, and filled with solemn and spiritualized contemplation, I
continued gazing from my casement until the torches and the lights of
the fete had decayed, and the moonbeams had grown pale before the first
flush of dawn. The sounds of life now came upon the cool air, and I was
again in the world.

The eventful day was come--the day which I had longed for with such
ceaseless impatience through years of trial--the day of which, among
scenes the most disturbing, the most perilous, and the most glittering,
I had never lost sight for a moment--the day which I had followed with a
fond and fixed eye, as the pilgrim gazes on the remote horizon where
stands the shrine he loves--it was come at last; and yet, such are the
strange varieties and trembling sensibilities of human feelings, I now
felt awed, uncertain, and almost alarmed, at its arrival. Before its
close, I was to see the being in whom my existence was involved. When I
had met Clotilde last, her sentiments for me were as devoted as were
those expressed in her letter; yet she had repelled my declarations,
sacrificed my happiness to a high-toned enthusiasm, and rejected all the
supplications of an honourable heart, under the promptings of a spirit
too noble to be called pride, yet with all the effect of the haughtiest
disdain.

Still the hour advanced, and I sent a note by her attendant, soliciting
an interview. Her hotel was within a short distance; yet no answer came.
I grew more and more reluctant to approach her without her direct
permission. There are thousands who will not comprehend this
nervousness, but they are still ignorant of the power of real passion.
True affection is the most timid thing in the world. At length, unable
to endure this fever of the soul, I determined to make the trial at
once, enter her presence, make a final declaration of all my hopes and
fears, and hear my fate once for all.

I was on the point of leaving my chamber for the purpose, when a message
from the viceroy stopped me. The prisoner whom I had seen brought in
during the night was to be examined before the privy council, and my
presence was essential. Fate, or fortune, seemed always to thwart me,
and I followed the messenger. The prisoner was led into the council-room
just as I entered; and at the first glance I recognised him as the
unhappy being whom I had so strangely met in the North, and whose
romance of rebellion had so deeply excited my interest. His features,
which, in the night, disfigured with dust and blood, I had been unable
to distinguish, now exhibited their original aspect, that cast of
mingled melancholy and daring which marked him at once as conscious of
the perils of his career, and resolved to encounter them to the
uttermost. His tribunal was formed of the first men of the country, and
they treated him with the dignity of justice. His conduct was suitable
to this treatment--calm, decided, and with more the manner of a
philosopher delivering deliberate opinions on the theory of government,
than of a desperate contemner of authority, and the head of a stern and
fierce conspiracy against the settled state of things. He cast his deep
and powerful glance round the council-board; as if to measure the
capacities of the men with whom he had once prepared himself to contend
for national supremacy; but I could not discover that he had any
recollection of me. I knew him well; and if ever painter or sculptor had
desired to fix in canvass or marble the ideal grandeur of magnificent
conspiracy, there stood its model. He spoke without the slightest
appearance of alarm, and spoke long and ably, in explanation of his
views; for he disdained all justification of them. He acknowledged their
total failure, but still contended for their original probability of
success, and for their natural necessity as the restoratives of Ireland.
He was listened to with the forbearance alike arising from compassion
for the fate he had thus chosen, and respect for the singular talent
which he displayed in this crisis of his fate. Man honours fortitude in
all its shapes. The criminal was almost forgotten in the eloquent
enthusiast; and while, with his deep and touching voice, and eager but
most expressive gesture, he poured out his glowing dreams, revelled in
brilliant impossibilities, and created scenes of national regeneration,
as high-coloured as the glories of a tropical sunset; they suffered him
to take his full range, and develop the whole force of that vivid
imagination, whose flame alike lured him into the most dangerous paths
of political casualty, and blinded him to their palpable dangers. He
concluded by declaring a total contempt for life; pronouncing, that with
the loss of his political hopes it had lost its value, and making but
one request to the council, that, "since fortune had flung him into the
hands of their law, its vengeance might be done upon him with the least
possible delay."

He was now removed; and a feeling of regret and admiration followed his
removal. But his crime was undeniable, the disturbance of the public
mind was too serious to allow of any relaxation in the rigour of
justice; and I gave my unwilling signature to his final consignment to
the state prison.

I was now once again disengaged from the fetters of office; and,
resolved not to spend another day of suspense, I drove to the hotel. I
found it crowded with families which had fled from their houses in the
country in the first alarm of the insurrection; and in the midst of the
good-humoured but unmanageable tumults of a great household of Irish
strangers, was forced to make my own way at last. In passing along the
gallery, my eye was caught by a valise laid outside one of the parlours,
and corded, as for an immediate departure. It was marked with "La
Comtesse de Tourville." I knocked gently at the door. I was unanswered.
I touched it--it gave way, and I stood on the threshold. Before me, at a
table, sat a female figure writing, with her face turned from me, and
apparently so deeply engaged as not to have heard my entrance. But I
should have known her among a million. I pronounced her name. She
started up, in evident alarm at the intrusion. But in the next moment,
her pale countenance was flushed by nature's loveliest rose, and she
held forth her hand to me. All my fears vanished with that look and the
touch of that hand. All the language of earth would not have told me
half what they told at that moment. Of this I say no more. It was the
golden moment of my life; I make no attempt to describe our interview,
to describe the indescribable.

I returned to the Castle a new being. The burden which had weighed so
long upon my spirits was removed. The root of bitterness, which
continually sent up its noxious vegetation in the midst of the most
flattering hopes of my public existence, was now extirpated; I was
secure in the full confidence of one of the loveliest and the
noblest-hearted of human beings. And yet how narrowly had I escaped the
loss of all? Clotilde, hopeless of ever hearing of me more, had formed
the determination to leave Ireland on that day; and weary of
disappointed affections, and alienated from the world, to change her
name, abjure her rank, and take the veil in one of the Italian convents
connected with her family. I should thus have lost her for ever. She had
waited on this eventful day only for the return of her domestic. His
arrest on the night before had deranged her plans; and when he had
returned, his mixture of French verbiage and Irish raptures, his
guard-house terrors and his Castle feasting, formed a melange so
unintelligible, that she was compelled to believe him under the
influence of a spell--that spell which is supposed to inspire so much of
the wit and wisdom of one of the cleverest and most _bizarre_ regions of
a moonstruck world. Even my note only added to her perplexity. It was
given by Monsieur Hannibal with such a magniloquent description of the
palace in which he found me, and which he fully believed to be my
own--of the royal retinue surrounding my steps--of my staff of
glittering officers, and the battalions and brigades of my body-guard;
that while she smiled at his narrative, she was perfectly convinced of
his derangement. But all this had luckily produced delay; and the hour
came when her past anxieties were to be exchanged for the faith and
fondness of one who knew her infinite value, and was determined to
devote his life to embellishing and cheering every hour of her
existence.

We were married; and I had the delight and honour of introducing
Clotilde into a circle of rank and lustre equal to the highest of her
native country. The monarchy of France was long since in the tomb; its
nobility were wanderers over the face of the earth. The fortunes, the
hopes, the honours, all but the name of her distinguished family, had
gone down in the general wreck. But now was given to me the joyous duty
of replacing, by the purest and fondest of all rights, all that the
chances of the world had taken away. I thought her countenance lovelier
than ever. It exhibited some slight evidence of the deep and exhausting
trials which she had so long endured; it was pale, yet the paleness
reminded me of the exquisite hue of some of those fine sculptures which
the Italian chisel has given for the admiration of mankind. Its
expression, too, had assumed a loftier character than even when its
first glance struck my young imagination. It had shared something of the
elevation of a mind noble by nature, but rendered still loftier and more
intellectual by being thrown on its own resources. Yet all this was for
society. Her courtly air, inherited from an ancestry of princes; her
manners, which retained the piquant animation of her own country,
combined with the graver elegance of high life in ours; that
incomparable taste in dress, which seems the inheritance of French
beauty; and the sparkling happiness of language, scarcely less the gift
of her native soil, made her conspicuous from the first moment of her
introduction to the circle of the Castle.

But it was in our quiet and lonely hours that I saw the still more
captivating aspects of her nature; when neither the splendid Countess de
Tourville, nor the woman of brilliant conversation was before me, but an
innocent and loving girl--no Armida, no dazzling mistress of the spells
which intoxicate the heart by bewildering the mind; but a sweet and
guileless creature in the first bloom of being, full of nature, full of
simplicity, full of truth. How often, in those days of calm delight,
have I seen her fine eyes suddenly fill with tears of thankful joy, her
cheek glow with fond gratitude, her heart labour with the unutterable
language of secure and sacred love! What hours can be placed in
comparison with such hours of wedded confidence! It was then that I
first became acquainted with the nature of the female heart. I then
first knew the treasures which the spirit of woman may contain--the hope
against hope, the generous faith, the unfailing constancy, the deep
affection. How often, when glancing round our superb apartments, crowded
with all the glittering and costly equipment of almost royal life, she
would clasp my hand, and touchingly contrast them with the solitude of
the cell, or the anxieties of the life of trial "from which I alone had
rescued her!" How often, when we sat together, uninterrupted by the
world, at our sumptuous table, would she, half sportively and half in
melancholy, contrast it with the life of flight and fear which she had
so lately led, with the rude repast snatched in forests and swamps, in
the midst of civil war, with desolation round her and despair in
prospect, imprisoned, in the power of a tyrant, and, at every step,
approaching nearer to the place of a cruel death! Then a look would
thank me more than all the eloquence in the world. Then I saw her eyes
brighten, and her cheek bloom with new lustre and beauty unknown before,
until I could have almost fallen at her feet and worshipped. I felt the
whole supremacy of woman, with the whole homage of the heart of man.

A change in the British cabinet, by the death of one of its leading
members, now produced a change in the viceroyalty; and the charge of the
government, during the interregnum, necessarily devolved on the
secretary. I never felt business more irksome than at this juncture, and
I had, more than once, grave thoughts of casting aside the staff of
office in spite of all its gilding, withdrawing from the disturbances of
public life, and, with Clotilde at my side, finding some quiet corner of
England, or the earth, where we might sit under our own vine and our own
fig-tree, and forget revolutions and court-days for the rest of our
lives.

But against this my young and lovely partner protested, with all the
spirit of her ancestry; declaring that, though nothing would give her
more unfeigned delight than to quit courts and cities, and fashion and
fetes, for ever, if I quitted them along with her--she could not endure
the thought of my allowing "the talents which nature had given to me,
and the opportunities which had been so liberally offered by fortune,"
to perish useless to the world. I had no answer to offer but that I had
made her the arbitress of my fate, and she was welcome to do with me as
was her sovereign will. Accordingly I left her, looking like Hebe in her
bower, to plunge into a chaos of undecipherable papers, to be deafened
with a thousand impossible applications, to marshal lazy departments, to
reform antiquated abuses, and, after spending twelve hours a-day in the
dust and gloom of official duty, to spend nearly as many hours of the
night battling with arrogant and angry faction in the House of Commons.

But this toil, like most other toils, had its fruits; it gave me an
extraordinary increase of public influence, and that influence produced,
in the natural course of such things, an extraordinary crop of
adherents. If I could have drunk adulation, no man was in more imminent
hazard of mystifying his own brains. I began to be spoken of as one
equal to the highest affairs of the state, and to whom the viceroyalty
itself lay naturally open. But I still longed for a return to England.
Delighted as I was with the grace of the higher ranks, amused with the
perpetual whim and eccentricity of the lower, and feeling that general
attachment to Ireland which every man not disqualified by loss of
character must feel, my proper position was in that country where my
connexions, my companionships, and my habits, had been formed. A new
viceroy was announced; and I solicited my recall. But I had still one
remarkable duty to undergo.

The northern insurrection had sunk, and sunk with a rapidity still more
unexpected than the suddenness of its rise. The capture of its leader
was a blow at the heart, and it lost all power at the instant. In the
Castle all was self-congratulation, and the officials talked of the
revolt with as much scorn as if there existed no elements of discord in
the land. But I was not quite so easily inclined to regard all things
through the skirts of the rainbow which had succeeded the storm; however
unwilling to check the national exultation among a people who are as
fond of painting the world _couleur de rose_ as the French; laugh as
much, and enjoy their laugh much more--my communications with England
constantly warned ministers of the hazard of new insurrections, on a
broader, deeper, and more desolating scale. Even my brief tour of the
island had shown me, that there were materials of wilder inflammability
in the bosom of the south than in the north. The northern revolt was
like the burning of a house--the whole was before the eye, the danger
might be measured at a glance, the means of extinction might operate
upon it in their full power, and when the materials of the house were in
ashes, the conflagration died. But the southern insurrection was the
burning of a coalmine--a fire ravaging where human skill could scarcely
gain access, kindled among stores of combustion scarcely to be
calculated by human experience, growing fiercer the deeper it
descended, and at every new burst undermining the land, and threatening
to carry down into its gulfs all that was stately or venerable on the
surface of the soil.

I continued to represent that the north had revolted only on theories of
government, metaphysical reveries, pamphleteering abstractions--food too
thin to nurture the fierce firmness by which conspiracy is to be carried
forward into triumph; while the south pondered on real or fancied
injuries, which wounded the pride of every peasant within its
borders.--That the one took up arms for republicanism, the feeblest of
all temptations to national resistance; while the other brooded over a
sense of wrong, in visions of revenge for hereditary rights, and the
hopes of restoring the fallen supremacy of its religion--motives, in
every age, the most absorbing among the wild impulses of man. I
repeatedly warned the Irish cabinet against an outbreak, which, if it
succeeded, must convulse the empire; and which, even if it failed, must
cost the heaviest sacrifices to the country. My advice was answered by
professions of perfect security, and magnanimous declarations of the
wisdom of extinguishing peril by exhibiting the absence of fear! My part
was now done, and I was thenceforth to be only a spectator. But the
course of things was not to be controlled by the confidence of cabinets.
The sun went down, notwithstanding the government conviction that it
would shine through the whole twenty-four hours; the political night
came, as regularly as the night of nature, and with it came the march of
tens of thousands of political lunatics, as brave as lions, though as
incapable of discipline. My prediction was formidably fulfilled: the
firebrand and the pike ravaged the land; blood flowed in torrents; and
when the country returned to its senses, and the light of common sense
once more dawned, ministers and people alike had only the melancholy
office of burying the common offences in that great resting-place where
the faults of the past generation are marked by tombs, and where the
wisdom of the future is to be learned only from inscriptions recording
the frailty of all that lived before.

The conspiracy which it had fallen to my lot to extinguish had been
brief and local. The half-Scottish population among whom it broke out,
were among the most sharp-witted and well-informed subjects of the
empire; and they had no sooner made the discovery, that government was
awake, than they felt the folly of attempting to encounter the gigantic
strength of the monarchy, and postponed their republican dreams to a
"fitter season." The time now approached when the leader of the Northern
insurrection was to be brought to trial; and hostile as I was to the
effects of his enthusiasm, I took no trivial interest in the individual.
Still, to set him at liberty was palpably impossible; and my only
resource was, to give him such aid in this extremity of his career as
could be given by lightening the severities of his prison, and providing
him with the means of securing able counsel. I had now an opportunity of
seeing, for the first time, the genius of this singular people displayed
under a new and brilliant form--the eloquence of the bar.

In England the Bar holds a high rank; from its essential value to the
maintenance of public right in a country, where every possession,
property, and principle of man comes continually in the shape of a
question of right, and where the true supremacy is in the law. But in
Ireland, the spirit of the nation compensated for the deficiency of
power in the law; and the bar was, _par excellence_, the profession of
the gentleman. This gave it the highest tone of personal manners. But it
had another incentive, still more characteristic. The House of Commons
was in the closest connexion with the bar. It was scarcely more than a
higher bar. All the principal men of that House had either been educated
for the profession, or were actually practising barristers; and as the
distinctions of the senate were more dazzling, as well as more rapidly
attainable, than those of the law, the force of the profession was
thrown into parliamentary life. The result was, a reflected influence on
both; the learning of the bar invigorating the logic of the debates, the
eloquence of the debates enriching and elevating the eloquence of the
courts of law. At this period the Courts abounded with eloquent men, who
would have been distinguished at any tribunal on earth; but, while some
might exhibit keener argument, and others more profound learning, the
palm of forensic eloquence was universally conceded to one. Need I
pronounce the name of Curran? Take him for all in all, he was the most
extraordinary example of natural faculties that I have ever known. All
the chief orators of that proud day of oratory had owed much to study,
much to circumstances, and much to the stimulus of great topics, a great
cause, and a great theatre for their display. When Burke spoke, he had
the world for his hearers.--He stood balancing the fates of empires; his
voice reached to the bosom of all the cabinets of civilized nations; and
with the office of a prophet, he almost inevitably adopted the majestic
language, and seized the awful and magnificent views of the prophet.
This is no depreciation of the powers of that immortal mind; for what
can be a higher praise than that, with the largest sphere of duty before
him perhaps ever opened to man, he was found equal to the fullness of
his glorious task? Sheridan, too, was awakened to a consciousness of his
own powers by the national voice raised against Indian delinquencies. He
had a subject teeming with the loftiest materials of oratory--the
sufferings of princes, the mysteries of Oriental superstition, the wild
horrors of barbaric tyranny, the fall of thrones, once dazzling the eye
and the mind with all the splendours of Oriental empire; himself the
chosen pleader for India, in the presence of the assembled rank,
dignity, and authority of England. There can be no question of the
genius which showed itself competent to so illustrious a labour. But the
materials were boundless; the occasion was a summons to all the energies
of the human intellect; never was the draught of human praise, the spell
of that enchantress which holds the spirit of men in most undisputed
sway, presented to the lip in a more jewelled goblet.

But Curran spoke almost wholly deprived of those resistless stimulants;
his topics were comparatively trivial--the guilt of provincial
conspiracy, incurred by men chiefly in the humbler ranks of life, and in
all instances obscure. No great principles of national right were to
live or die upon the success of his pleading; no distressed nation held
him as its advocate; no impregnable barrier against oppression in Europe
or Asia was to be inscribed with his name. He was simply the advocate in
the narrow courts of a dependent kingdom--humiliated by the hopeless
effort to rescue a succession of unfortunate beings whose lives were in
the grasp of justice--compressed on every side by localities of time,
habit, and opinion; and thwarted alike by the clamour of prejudice and
the frowns of authority. Yet his speeches at the bar are matchless, to
this hour. His creative powers seemed to rejoice in the very emptiness
of the space which they were to fill with life, lustre, and beauty. Of
all the great speakers, his images arose from the simplest conceptions;
while they rapidly wrought themselves into magnitude and splendour. They
reminded me of the vapours rising from the morning field--thin, vague,
and colourless, but suddenly seized by the wind, swelling into volume,
and ascending till they caught the sunbeams, and shone with the purple
and gold of the summer cloud. This trial of the unfortunate rebel leader
gave him a signal opportunity for the exertion of his extraordinary
faculties. It had excited the deepest interest throughout the country.
Thousands had flocked from all parts of the land to be present at a
crisis which involved the national feelings in the highest degree; which
involved the personal safety of individuals, perhaps of a much superior
rank to the accused; and, above all, which seemed to fix the stamp of
public justice on the guilt or impunity of opinions long cherished by
the mind of Ireland. As the day of the trial approached, physiognomies
were seen in the streets, which showed that individuals were brought
together by the event who had never been seen in the metropolis before.
The stern, hard, but sagacious countenances of the north contrasted with
the broad, open, and bold features of the south; and those again
contrasted with the long, dark, and expressive visages of the west,
which still give indelible evidence of their Spanish origin. Many of
those men who now filled the busy thoroughfares of the capital, had come
from the remotest corners of Ireland, as if to stand their own trial.
The prisoner at the bar was their representative; his cause was their
cause; his judgment the decision of the tribunal on their principles;
his fate an anticipation of their own.

As I pressed on to the noble building where the trial was to take
place--one of the stateliest examples of architectural grace and dignity
in a city distinguished for the beauty of its public buildings--it was
impossible to avoid being struck with the general look of popular
restlessness. The precaution of government had called in a large
military force to protect the general tranquillity, and the patrols of
cavalry and the frequent passing of troops to their posts, created a
perpetual movement in the streets. The populace gathered in groups,
which, rapidly dissolving at the approach of the soldiery, as rapidly
assembled again, when they had passed by; street minstrels of the most
humble description were plying their trade with a remorseless exertion
of lungs; I heard the names of the Parliamentary leaders and the
government frequently transpiring in those rough specimens of the
popular taste; and from the alternate roars of fierce laughter and
bursts of wild indignation which arose from the groups, it was evident
that "men and measures" were not spared. The aspect of the multitude in
the vicinity of the Law Courts was still more disturbed. Rebellion has a
physiognomy of its own, and I had by this time learned to read it with
tolerable fidelity to nature. It always struck me as of a wholly
different character from that of the vice or the violence of the people.
It wears a thoughtful air; the lips seem to have a secret enclosed, the
eye is lowering, the step unsteady, the man exhibits a consciousness of
danger from the glance or tread of every passer-by. His visage is
sullen, stern, and meditative--I can scarcely allow this conception to
be a work of fancy, for I have never been deceived in my readings of
that most expressive of all betrayers of the inner man. And on this day,
I could have predicted the preparation for some general and reckless
rising against government, on the first opportunity when it should be
found slumbering on its post: and my prediction would have been true.

The court was crowded, and it was with no small difficulty that I was
enabled to reach the seat beside the judge, which had been provided for
me. The arraignment and preparatory routine of the trial gave time for
the court to subside into order; and the address of the principal
law-officer for the prosecution, though exciting the deepest anxiety,
was listened to in the most respectful silence. The case was strong, and
was ably dealt with by the attorney-general. The evidence was clear and
complete, and the hope of an acquittal seemed to be gradually abandoned
in the expressive gloom of the spectators. The prisoner at the bar, too,
seemed more dejected than I had presumed from his former intrepidity;
and the few glances which I could suffer myself to give to a being in
his calamitous condition, showed me a frequent writhing of the lip, a
clenching of the teeth, and a nervous contraction of the features, which
looked like despair. At length the counsel for the defence rose. It was
the first instance of my seeing the memorable Curran engaged in his
profession. I had met him from time to time in general society, and felt
the delight which all experienced in his unfailing spirits and brilliant
pleasantry. I had hitherto enjoyed him as the wit. I was now to be
dazzled, delighted, and overwhelmed by him as the orator.

Curran was the last man to be judged of by appearances. Nature had been
singularly unkind to his exterior, as if the more to astonish us by the
powers of the man within. His figure was undersized, his visage brown,
hard, and peasantlike, his gesture was a gesticulation, and his voice
was alternately feeble and shrill. His whole effect was to be derived
from means, with which that little meagre frame and sharp treble had
nothing to do. But he had a singularly vivid eye. It was of the deepest
black, and such was the intensity of its expression in his more
impassioned moments, that it was scarcely an exaggeration to say that it
shot fire. Still, a stranger would have regarded him chiefly as a
humorist, from the glances of sly sarcasm, and even of open ridicule
which he cast round the court during the pleadings of some of his
"learned brethren." But, in that court his true faculties were known;
and the moment of his rising, careless as was his attitude, and listless
the look which he gave as he turned from his brief to the jury, was the
signal for universal silence, and the fixing of every eye upon the great
pleader.

He began by sweeping away the heap of useless facts and forensic
prolixities with which his predecessors had encumbered the case; and
nothing could be more admirable than the dexterity with which he seized
on the most casual circumstances tending to clear the character of the
accused. But it was when he arrived at higher topics that he displayed
his genius.

"_Nunc in ovilia, mox in reluctantes dracones._" It was when, from
developing the ignorance and contradictions of the informer by whom the
charge of conspiracy was sustained, he rushed to the attack on the
general system of the Irish government, that I saw him in full vigour.
He denounced it as the source of all the tumults which had of late years
shaken the "isle from its propriety." "Here was the fount," said he,
"from which flowed the waters of bitterness, not the less bitter that I
can trace its wanderings through centuries of national desolation,
through fields of blood, through the graves of generations." After
giving the most daring outline of what he termed the evils of the local
sovereignty of Ireland, he surprised me into sudden acquiescence and
involuntary admiration, by a panegyric on the principles of British
government in the more favoured island--on "the majestic supremacy of
the law, extending over all things, sustaining all things, administering
life and health and purity to all; a moral atmosphere, and though
invisible, like the physical, yet irresistible in its strength,
penetrating through the whole national existence, and carrying on
undisturbed and perpetual, in the day and night of empire, all the great
processes of national animation and prosperity." Then, suddenly darting
away from this lofty and solemn view, he indulged in some wild story of
native humour, which convulsed the whole audience with laughter. Yet,
before the burst had subsided, he touched another string of that harp
which so magically responded to the master's hand. He described the long
career of calamity through which an individual born with a glowing
heart, brilliant faculties, and an aspiring spirit, must struggle, in a
country filled with the pride of independence, and yet for ages in the
condition of a province. Some part of his pathos in this sketch was
probably borrowed from his own early difficulties; and I heard, poured
out with the touching vehemence of painful reality, probably the very
meditations which had preyed upon the heart of the student in his
chamber, or darkened his melancholy walks in the cloisters of the
Temple. But he suddenly started on a new train of thought; and
reprobated with the loftiest rebuke, that state of the law which, while
it required two witnesses for the proof of treason in England, was
content with one in Ireland. This he branded with every name of
indignant vituperation, frequently adopted, according to his habit, from
the most familiar conceptions; yet, by their familiarity, striking the
mind with astonishing force. He called it "playing at pushpin with the
lives of men"--"the reading-made-easy of judicial murder"--"the 'rule of
three' of forensic assassination;--given, a villain, multiplied by a
false oath, the product, an execution!" He now revelled in the boldest
extravagances of imagery and language, expressions which, written, might
resemble the burlesque of a public jester, or the wildness of a
disturbed mind, but which were followed by the audience, whom he had
heated up to the point of passion, with all but acclamation. Still he
revelled on. His contrasts and comparisons continued to roll out upon
each other. Some noble, some grotesque, but all effective. After one
dazzling excursion into the native history, in which he contrasted the
aboriginal hospitality and rude magnificence of the old Irish chieftain,
the Tir-Owen or O'Nial, with the chilling halls of the modern absentee;
he suddenly changed his tone, and wandered away into a round of
fantastic, and almost frolicsome pleasantries, which shook even the
gravity of the bench. Then, suddenly checking himself, and drawing his
hand across his brow to wipe away a tear--for even the hard-headed
lawyer was not always on his guard against the feeling of the moment--he
upbraided himself, and the bystanders, for the weakness of being
attracted by any lighter conception, while the calamities of Ireland
were demanding all their sympathies. And even this he did in his
characteristic manner. "Alas!" said he, in a voice which seemed sinking
with a sense of misfortune, "why do _I_ jest? and why do _you_ smile?
Or, are we for ever to be the victims of our national propensity, to be
led away by trivialties? We tickle ourselves with straws, when we should
be arming for the great contests of national minds. We are ready to be
amused with the twang of the Jew's harp, when we should be yearning for
the blast of the trumpet. You remind me, and I remind myself, of the
scene at one of our country-wakes. It is the true portrait of our
fruitless mixture of levity and sorrow. We come to mourn, and we are
turned to merriment by the first jest. We sit under the roof of death,
yet we are as ready to laugh as ever. The corpse of Ireland is before
our eyes: we fling a few flowers over its shroud, and then we eat,
drink, and are merry. Must it be for ever pronounced--that we are a
frivolous and fickle race--that the Irishman remains a voluntary beggar,
with all the bounties of nature round him; unknown to fame, with genius
flashing from his eyes; humiliated, with all the armoury of law and
liberty open to his hands; and laughing, laughing on, when the only echo
is from the chambers of the grave?"

The orator dropped his head on his clasped hands as he spoke the words;
and there was an universal silence for a while. It was interrupted by a
groan of agony from the prisoner. All eyes were instantly turned to the
dock, and the spectacle there was startling. He seemed writhing under
intolerable torture. His hands clung eagerly to the front of the dock,
as if to sustain him; his lips were as colourless clay, but his features
and forehead were of the most feverish crimson. At first the general
impression was, that he had been overcome by a sense of his perilous
state; but it was soon evident that his pangs were more physical than
moral. Curran now flung his brief upon the table, and hurried to his
side. A few words passed between them, inaudible to the court; but they
had the unexpected effect of apparently restoring the sufferer to
complete tranquillity. He again stood erect; his brow, and it was a
noble one, resumed its marble smoothness; his features grew calm, and
his whole aspect returned to the stern and moveless melancholy of an
antique statue.

The advocate went back to his place, and commenced a singularly
dexterous attempt to avert the sentence, by an appeal to the national
feelings. "If," said he, "my client had been charged with any of those
crimes which effect their object by individual injury, I should disdain
to offer a defence, which could be accomplished only by confounding the
princ

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